Weekend Trek “Affliction”

Seth MacFarlane returns for the second of his brief cameos as Ensign Rivers, but he seems to have transferred to a different ship between seasons.  However, he still has Trip yelling at him.  Meanwhile, the late James “Uncle Phil” Avery is a Klingon captain.  I didn’t see that one coming.

Actually, I didn’t see a couple things coming.  I knew from the previous episode that Trip was transferring to the Columbia was going to happen.  I knew there was an upcoming storyarc that decided, for whatever reason, to explain why Original Series Klingons looked like humans with a good tan and some unconventional facial hair.  Did we need that?  Of course not.  DS9 covered this during a very famous episode, and all Worf said of the look was it wasn’t discussed with outsiders.  That was enough.  I know what the real reason was.  It was the same reason the Romulans didn’t become the original series’s big bads:  good make-up was expensive.  The look that became the Klingons came from the movies.  But someone, somewhere, thought we needed an explanation for human-looking Klingons.

And…it came from a  virus.  The Klingons, after some Augments took down one of their ships, decided the humans had a bunch of those all over the place, so they fiddled with a virus or a virus was fiddled with on their behalf.  One of those.  It doesn’t matter.  The virus starts killing Klingons, and it does seem to give survivors smooth foreheads, to the point where Archer doesn’t realize a prisoner of his is a Klingon.  Dr. Soong is too-well-protected inside an Earth prison, so they kidnap Phlox to cure the virus instead.  Granted, they have some Rigelians do it for them, but it still happens.

Honestly, this is an episode were a lot of stuff happens and, while not bad or anything, it’s a lot of stuff happening all at once.  Hoshi got to try a little combat while trying and failing to stop Phlox’s kidnapping, but that meant a mindmeld with T’Pol later to get what the escaping kidnappers said in a language that was basically just not English.  Hoshi then doesn’t have much else to do for the rest of the episode.

Malcolm, it turns out, is part of some secretive organization that is probably Section 31, forced to hide that fact while doing some quiet sabotage on Archer’s rescue mission.  Archer figures it out and locks him in the brig.  Malcolm’s look of genuine regret, the way he looks like he might tell Archer the truth, those moments really work.

Trip is settling in on his new ship, and Captain Hernandez is telling him he may be a little too demanding for his new crew, but she isn’t overtly concerned about him at present.  It he wasn’t appearing in T’Pol’s mind during her meditation, I wouldn’t really know what Trip’s whole plotline has to do with the rest of the story.

And then there’s Phlox trying to cure a disease that Klingons would just assume cure by bombing the infected.

All that is quite a lot for a single hour of network television, even if it wasn’t continuing over to a Part 2.  Now, I expect that episode to end with Malcolm redeemed, Trip probably back on Enterprise, more smooth-headed Klingons, and a sense that time is running out for me for this series.  Right now, I’m looking at seven episodes remaining, one of which is the famously awful finale.  That’s a shame.  This show was maybe starting to find its legs.