Weekend Trek “Harbinger”

See, I did get an extra one in this weekend to make up for the one I skipped last week.

There is literally no reason to be particularly proud of that fact.

Actually, this episode does some interesting character stuff, in that it advances one plot–Trip and T’Pol–while settling another one–Malcolm’s distaste for the military guys on the ship as embodied by Major Hayes–that I was barely aware was a thing.  And then, there is…the Spheres!

Yes, those mysterious spheres, the ones that look like metal and create anomalies.  One of the race that built the things may have showed up, and he causes problems, starting with the fact that Archer has a pod of some kind pulled out of a mess of anomalies.  The alien inside, he’s falling apart on a molecular level or something, and he insists to be put back even as Archer has Phlox try to save him.

By the by, I thought this guy was a Sulliban when I first saw him, but he obviously wasn’t one the more I looked at him.  Please, no more Sulliban…

OK, but who is this guy?  No clue.

Archer eventually decides the guy is the canary in the coal mine, a line of thinking the alien agrees with until he phases through some restraints and knocks out Phlox, then makes a bee-line for Engineering in an effort to destroy the ship.  He’s only stopped by Malcolm and Hayes working together, and they only did that after locking horns for the entire episode over extra-training, training that largely consisted of Hayes’s people and the name characters that aren’t Archer or Phlox.  So, there’s this woman played by an actress that has since gone on to be an advocate for the Israeli government, one that is part of a love triangle with Trip and T’Pol, and…well, Israel sure has made the news a lot lately, and that is all I am going to say about that.

Yes, Trip and T’Pol have sex in this one.

No, T’Pol does not seem interested in doing any more of it.

Yes, Trip says he is fine with that.

No, I will not say more about it than that.

See, the sparring matches where Hayes made Malcolm look bad, mostly after Malcolm objected to how Travis got tossed in one match despite the fact Travis himself was fine with it, that led to a fistfight and facial injuries and a chewing out from Archer, but Malcolm and Hayes (which sounds like a law firm) did stop the intangible alien before he blew up the warp core.  Oh, and that alien said his people want the Xindi to blow up the Earth so that his people will have the real triumph in the end.

Well, that stinks.  The crew has enough problems without…wait, how did this guy know…

Aw crap, more Temporal Cold War shenanigans.

OK, I rather liked this episode, and if this is the Temporal Cold War, well…the Xindi are operating off the assumption the Earth will kill them all in 400 years, so it only makes sense, and they seem to have kept everything to a minimum anyway.  I’ll deal.  Maybe they’ll make it work in the end.