“Impulse”
Written by Jonathan Fernandez & Terry Matalas
Directed by David Livingston
Season 3, Episode 5
Production episode 0567
Original air date: October 8, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open with T’Pol going batshit on one of Phlox’s biobeds. It takes both Archer and Phlox to restrain her enough to sedate her.
Then we jump back a day. Archer and Tucker are going over the Xindi database during the overnight shift, as neither can sleep. T’Pol joins them, surprised that they didn’t invite her to the party, but they thought it would be rude to wake her.
Sato—who is also awake for no reason the script bothers to explain—reports a distress call from a Vulcan ship, the Seleya. According to T’Pol—who served on the Seleya before being assigned to the consulate on Earth—the ship was investigating the border of the Expanse before they were sucked in. The Vaankara, the ship whose crew went binky bonkers that Soval showed them the footage of to try to convince Archer and Forrest not to go in there, was sent in to find them, and obviously failed.
They change course. Seleya is in the midst of an unusually dense asteroid field. The local anomalies are causing them to gad about and crash into each other. No way Enterprise can safely navigate it, but a shuttle can. The asteroids are also made out of trellium, so this is a chance to mine some. Archer charges Tucker and Mayweather with gathering up some trellium while the captain leads a boarding party that includes T’Pol, Reed, and Hawkins.
The boarding party investigates the ship, noting that they lined a good portion of their forward hull with trellium. They soon come across the crew, but the Vulcans they encounter are completely feral, and also covered in icky sores. It also takes more than one shot on a phase pistol on stun to take them down. Yes, they’ve come across VULCAN SPACE ZOMBIES! Archer and Hawkins are both wounded, the latter pretty badly, and they’ve been cut off from the docking port. They can’t contact Enterprise on their communicators for no reason that the script bothers to provide, so they need to find a comm terminal on the ship.
But their first priority is sickbay to treat Hawkins. They head there, with T’Pol warning Archer that she is losing her own emotional control—whatever turned the Seleya crew into Vulcan Space Zombies seems to be affecting her, too.
On Enterprise, Tucker and Mayweather try to beam some trellium on board, but the anomalies that are making the asteroids act weird also affect the transporter. Instead, they take the other shuttlepod into the field to mine some trellium, which they do, albeit not without the shuttlepod taking damage.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
On Seleya, the bridge is too far away for the boarding party to reach it, but they can reach auxiliary control. After downloading bioscan data on the crew from sickbay computers, they head there, and have to effect repairs. This is a difficult process, made more complicated by T’Pol’s shortened temper. She accuses Archer and Tucker of deliberately leaving her out of the examination of the Xindi database, and throws Archer’s history of Vulcan bigotry in his face.
They eventually make contact with Enterprise, transferring the medical data. Unfortunately, the shuttlepod needs to be repaired, so an immediate rescue ain’t gonna happen.
Phlox scans the biodata, and regretfully reports that the refined trellium gives off a neurotoxin that badly affects Vulcans. Tucker is shocked, since he and T’Pol have been working with trellium for ages, but they haven’t succeeded in refining it, which is the problem. T’Pol can still be treated if they get her back soon, but it’s been months for the Seleya crew, and Phlox declares that they’re beyond help.
T’Pol is seriously losing it, and she pulls a phase pistol on the others. A distraction by the Vulcan Space Zombies trying to get into auxiliary control allows Archer to disarm her. The Vulcan Space Zombies start to flood auxiliary control with gas, a level of control over their actions that they hadn’t demonstrated prior to this, and won’t demonstrate after this. Reed figures out a way to overload the ship’s systems so everything shuts down, which will release the bulkheads that are cutting them off from the docking port.
They move through crawlspaces and try to find their way to the docking port, at one point needing to cross a massive chasm. T’Pol’s paranoid lunacy gets to the point where Archer has to stun her. He only didn’t do it sooner because now he has to carry her…
They make it to the port, but the docking clamps won’t release. Tucker and Mayweather show up in the nick of time to blast the clamps and allow them to be free. The Seleya goes boom and the two shuttlepods make it back to Enterprise.
T’Pol, however, is still not in the best of shape. She has a nightmare about still being attacked by the Vulcan Space Zombies…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Reed fails his first saving throw vs. technobabble, causing T’Pol to scream and throw things at him. But his second idea works just fine…
The gazelle speech. When queried by Tucker about the possibility of reviving Movie Night, Archer completely rejects the notion, saying there’ll be time for movies after they stop the Xindi. Tucker has to remind him that the crew are not automatons, and that even he—who has more gung in his ho about the Xindi than anyone—recognizes that they need some R&R, stat.
Archer also refuses to leave T’Pol behind, saying that there’s no point in fighting for humanity if he stops being human, which is a level of self-awareness I wish he had when he was going around torturing prisoners…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. At one point, Hawkins expresses confusion as to how the Vulcan Space Zombies can be all binky bonkers when Vulcans don’t have emotions. T’Pol patiently corrects the misapprehension, that in fact Vulcans have massively turbulent emotions that they keep in check. As T’Pol herself demonstrates over the rest of the episode…
Florida Man. Florida Man Revives Movie Night Despite PTSD Concerns.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox learns that trellium is fatal to the ship’s science officer, which is kind of a problem…
Better get MACO. Hawkins accompanies the mission and comes well armed and with water and supplies and stuff, and generally does what he’s supposed to do, and does it well, which is a first for the MACOs so far…
I’ve got faith…
“Listen to me! This is a rescue mission—we’re here to save these people.”
“You’re lying! You want to kill them!”
“If that’s true, then why would I keep our weapons on stun? It’s not logical.”
–Archer trying to talk T’Pol down.
Welcome aboard. The only guest is recurring regular Sean Nelson, returning as Hawkins from “Anomaly.” He’ll be back in “Hatchery.”
Trivial matters: The story for this episode was by story editor Jonathan Fernandez and production associate Terry Matalas. Matalas, who primarily served as Brannon Braga’s assistant, will go on to work with Braga on both Threshold and Terra Nova, work on the remakes of Nikita and MacGyver, co-develop the TV spinoff of 12 Monkeys, and most recently took over as the show-runner of Picard for its second and third seasons.
Soval showed footage of the Vaankara crew to Archer and Forrest in “The Expanse.” This episode reveals what that ship’s mission to the Expanse was.
Seleya is, presumably, named after the mountain on Vulcan, seen in The Search for Spock as the location of the Hall of Ancient Thought.
The teaser in this episode is only eighteen seconds, which is the shortest in Trek history, supplanting the twenty-one-second teaser for Voyager’s “Scorpion.”
It’s been a long road… “I can’t try to save humanity without holding onto what makes me human.” Star Trek and horror have rarely been a good mix. From the original series’ “Catspaw” to TNG’s “Conspiracy” and “Sub Rosa” to DS9’s “Empok Nor” to Voyager’s “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” to Enterprise’s “Strange New World” to SNW’s “All Those Who Wander,” Trek’s attempts at horror have mostly failed.
So it’s rather a pleasant surprise to find that the Vulcan Space Zombies episode is better than most.
Hiring David Livingston was very much the right move, as he’s one of the stronger action directors in the Trek stable of the era. And the episode looks great, from the very effective visual of the asteroids crashing into each other to the spiffy-looking Seleya to Mayweather’s less-than-perfect landing on one of the asteroids to Livingston’s effective use of lighting, camera angles, and the icky makeup on the Vulcan Space Zombies.
And the story more or less holds together. It’s nice to see a reason why the Vaankara was in the Expanse in the first place, and now we have a good reason why they went all cluck-cluck-gibber-gibber-my-old-man’s-a-mushroom, etc. Having said that, the episode does have one major flaw. Throughout, we see the Vulcan Space Zombies screaming and shouting and attacking and generally acting like, well, zombies. There’s no sign of intelligence or rationality. Yet somehow, they can manipulate the equipment to set up the infusion of gas into auxiliary control. I was just staring at the screen wondering how they managed that when they showed no signs of that level of reasoning otherwise.
To my great relief, we’re seeing signs of the crew coming back to themselves. The farther they move away from the tragedy of the Xindi attack, the more they start to remember what they stand for. From Tucker wanting to revive Movie Night to Archer’s refusal to abandon T’Pol. It’s a pleasure to see, though Archer’s initial rejection of reviving Movie Night is yet another piece of evidence (of which there’s been way too much in the first two seasons) that Archer isn’t entirely qualified to be captain of this ship. It’s also telling that a lot of T’Pol’s accusations against Archer while she’s all binky-bonkers actually have some evidence to back them up…
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also reviewing the new episodes of Star Trek: Picard as they are released on Paramount+, and in anticipation of that, he also rewatched the movies Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis on this here site, right before his review of Picard’s “The Next Generation.” His review of Picard’s “Disengage” will go up on Thursday.
Ah, the Vulcan Zombies episode. This one was actually better than I remembered (I could only recall the Vulcan Zombies, and had forgotten about T’Pol losing her shit).
I think in addition to “O’Brien Must Suffer”, there should also be a category for “T’Pol Must Suffer”, as we now have two back-to-back episodes where T’Pol suffers a thing. I didn’t clock on first-run how much T’Pol went through in this series.
Wow, I hated this one. I’m not a fan of zombie stories in general, and this one was unpleasant and made no sense. The inexcusably stupid part was that they didn’t say the trellium-D poisoning drove the Vulcans to incoherent homicidal rage — no, they simply said the trellium impaired their emotional control, and that incoherent homicidal rage is the default state of emotional Vulcans. Which is an utterly nonsensical caricature of how the Vulcan psyche works. Yes, Vulcans without emotional control are prone to aggression, but they’re not mindless savages — they’re more like Romulans. Or at worst, like Spock in “All Our Yesterdays” — quick to anger and passion, but still coherent and high-functioning. Turning them into rage zombies was just inane.
I was not a fan of this episode. It’s become one of the clichés of Trek to have a “let’s make the Vulcan go bonkers” story (along with the R&R goes awry story), and this is a particularly pointless example of it. We don’t get to learn anything interesting about T’Pol from her losing control, we just get zombies in space.
The whole thing is just senselessly bad decisions from the crew from start to finish. Why doesn’t Archer want to have movie night? It’s not like the ship has to stop for it, it’s not delaying their mission at all. Why does the entire senior staff leave the ship to mess around in a dangerous asteroid field? And most frustrating of all, these idiots very recently came across a planet where an airborne virus caused behavioural changes. They find the Vulcan ship that isn’t responding, indicating behavioural changes, and they know from the video they got shown before leaving that something in the expanse causes behavioural changes. They even know life support is minimal, the hull is damaged, and parts of the ship are decompressed, yet they still don’t bother to put their space suits on. GAAAAAAAAAH!
Honestly, I kind of wish the zombie Vulcans had eaten them. Whoever took over couldn’t possibly have made more stupid and asinine decisions.
@2. ChristopherLBennett: That’s not unfair, though I would argue that the pain of their continuing physical degeneration would exacerbate the psychosis of this particular Vulcan crew – and it also bears pointing out that, being tactile telepaths, every member of this crew is not only experiencing their own pain but suffering the pains of their crew-mates as well (almost certainly the exacerbating factor driving them past mere loss of emotional control and right into homicidal fury).
It also bears pointing out that the average Romulan hasn’t been completely isolated from their entire civilisation, cut off from all hope of support and inflicted with a brutally degenerative disease that affects their mind AND their body, which makes it somewhat risky to draw hard-and-fast conclusions.
Now, when it comes to the actual episode, I tend to agree with @krad – Vulcan Rage Zombies just work on a primal level and episode does a rather good job of using them to their fullest: I do feel that the ‘B’ plot with Tucker & Mayweather didn’t really ‘click’ for me, though it does contribute enough to the rest of the episode that it would be difficult to excise.
All in all, I rather enjoyed this one anyway (Especially that very charming ‘Movie Night’ scene).
Okay, “Impulse” is actually one of my favorite episodes of Enterprise even though it basically just relies on the gimmick of doing zombies in space. But it’s the fact that that concept is executed so deftly that I enjoy this episode so much. The direction and editing is excellent. I believe it’s the change in the frame rate that gave the particular scenes on the Vulcan ship that extra eerie edge. This just a fun episode to watch with the lights off. I thought the stuff with Tucker and Mayweather on the asteroid disrupted the flow and tension with the A-story so I wish those scenes could have been jettisoned. Aside from Krad’s observation on how the zombie Vulcans could all of a sudden display the aptitude to work the ship’s controls, something else occurred to me. On the footage that Soval showed Archer of the other Vulcan ship’s crew that went all crazy in the Expanse, that crew were definitely being violent and nasty to each other. But now with the Seleya that crew of zombies are not ripping each other apart, but instead collectively working together to kill Archer’s away team? It just doesn’t track. But it’s an overall minor quibble for me.
@4/ED: Sure, maybe you can rationalize the premise if you bend over backward far enough, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bad premise to begin with. If they wanted to do a story about Vulcans losing emotional control, there are much better ways they could’ve done it than by turning them into zombies. Ways that could’ve actually explored the Vulcan psyche and their struggle with their passions in a meaningful way, rather than degrading them by reducing them to snarling subhuman monsters. So I’m not asking for a way to make sense of the episode we got. I’m saying I wanted a different episode altogether.
When I was hired to take over writing the post-finale Enterprise novels, I watched through the entire series once, then rewatched most of it a second time. This is one of the episodes I didn’t bother with the second time, because it offered nothing of value.
This one did nothing for me. I find horror pretty boring and zombies pretty boring, so it’s obvious that this one just wasn’t made with me in mind. I did like a few of the character moments, but that’s about it.It does amuse me every time you type “Binky-Bonkers” though.
And now I want to use Vulcan Space Zombies as the name of my next band.
I remember thinking that zombie stories were already pretty tired as a genre when this one came out, so you can just imagine what the last 20 years of popular culture have been like for me.
The SF Debris Review has a chuckle-worthy bit when Archer’s climbing the ladder, only for the Vulcans to grab onto his leg and try to drag him down:
Chuck: Oh yeah, he’s going to bring that one up later. Another instance of “the Vulcans holding him back.”
Anyway, I barely remember this one. I was also kinda sick of Zombie stories at this time (thanks to the Resident Evil films).
Mr. Magic: Hey, I novelized the first three of those films!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“You heard what the doctor said. They can’t be saved, but you can.”
In plot terms, this is little more than a horror movie with characters being assaulted by an infinite army of zombies. It’s a bit convenient that Phlox is able to provide a last minute determination that the Vulcan crew are past saving, thus evading any moral ambiguity over Archer and co causing (or at least hastening) their deaths. (It would result in a huge format change if they stuck around as allies, and it’s not like Enterprise can give them a lift home or anything, so them dying is pretty much a foregone conclusion.) And Tucker and Mayweather’s sojourn to an asteroid, which could have been an interesting B-plot, mainly serves to keep them out of the way until a last minute rescue is needed. Plus, seeing Jolene Blalock having to get sweaty and snarly in a tight costume again feels like someone living out their fantasies.
Where this does hit a home run though is, as krad said, it’s the first sign of the show backpedalling on the harsher characterisation of Tucker and especially Archer. When Tucker suggests reinstating recreational activities for the crew early on, I was fully expecting Archer to stick to his “We’re not here to have fun, this is wahr” attitude, so pleasantly surprised when he accepted the point. He’s still trying to save the Vulcans right up until Phlox convinces him there’s no hope, and he’s determined not to let T’Pol suffer the same fate: We finally get some hints of the close friendship they developed during the first two seasons here, especially in his refusal to put the usefulness of trellium over her needs.
We’re also backpedalling a bit from the dire warnings about this area of space, but at least they actually came up with a reason why this area that’s so deadly to Vulcans is reasonably safe for humans: There’s an irony in the fact that the substance that keeps everyone else safe is so toxic to them. I guess we’re still leaning into the idea of the Expanse being harder to get into and even harder to get out of, because otherwise why didn’t the Selaya just turn round and head back the way it came? Was it too damaged?
T’Pol’s nightmare is an odd note to end on, and the scene between her and Archer might have been a better last scene. To be fair, later episodes do show T’Pol’s not fully over this experience, so I guess it’s foreshadowing. We find the reason for Archer’s scratched cheek in the initial throw forward surprisingly early on and it turns out it’s nothing to do with T’Pol going feral.
T’Pol wears a purple catsuit in her nightmare which I don’t think we’ve seen in reality!
@12,
Yes, and I ironically liked your novelizations more than the actual films; you did good work picking up where S.D. Perry had left off with her game novelizations.
Hell, your Extinction novelization did so much to clear up that film’s dropped threads from Apocalypse
Honestly, of all the novelizations I’ve done, the one for Extinction is my favorite, because they gave me so much freedom to expand the story, both in terms of linking it more directly to Apocalypse and to create a side plot for Jill.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I actually think this episode was my first real exposure to anything involving zombies (not counting the Borg or Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video). I wouldn’t see the remake of Dawn of the Dead until over a year later when it was out on video and 2003 was still years before zombies really hit the mainstream on cable TV. So this could be another reason why this episode caught my attention at the time – it was a relatively novel thing for me to see zombies in any form.
Just a tiny little note: the pocket communicators of the away team do not have the same range as a shuttle-mounted set, and you want a detailed explanation? For me that sounds perfectly logical. Well, they could have had Hawkins pull a bigger communicator out of his pack, and also fail, but would that have added all that much?
(I enjoyed this one, too, but perhaps not 7-ish compared to some others …)
very much enjoy your writeups but three ‘binky-bonkers’ is two too many
I was glad to see Hawkins come out of this episode more or less in one piece. I was convinced he was destined to receive the Redshirt treatment and I was somewhat flabbergasted that he was alive when the end credits rolled.
@6. ChristopherLBennett: “Different strokes for different folks” as ever – personally I find it an interesting change for the Vulcans to be MORE vulnerable than puny humans (and must confess to being cheerfully philistine when an episode is sufficiently entertaining).
@19/ED: I have nothing against Vulcans being vulnerable. This wasn’t vulnerability, this was out-and-out dehumanization (so to speak), reducing the Vulcans to a horde of brainless monsters and killing them all off at the end.
What might have been more interesting would have been to see a whole crew of Vulcans acting like Spock in “All Our Yesterdays” — hopped up on adrenaline and libido, confrontational and paranoid, worn down after being stranded for months, but still with keen, devious intellects. Given how little respect Vulcans have for humans to begin with, it would’ve been extremely difficult for Archer or Reed to get through to them, and T’Pol would’ve been subject to the trellium influence and starting to act like them, so it would still have been a dangerous situation, but one where the Vulcans were actual characters rather than a pack of animals.
I used to hold a grudge against zombie stories way back then. I’ve warmed up to the genre over the years. In my experience, zombie stories work as long as they function in either of two formats: they serve as a mirror for the decay of humanity (I’ve never played the game, but HBO’s The Last of Us is very much delivering a poignant tale of survivors trying to hold on to their humanity). The other format would be the pure survival aspect in a horror setting. That’s the road taken by ENT’s Impulse. Very much Brannon Braga material.
It isn’t a particularly deep episode. You’d think a universe like Trek, one that’s always prided itself on telling thoughtful stories about the human condition, would choose to do the same in a horror zombie setting. But Impulse still works as a pure survival horror piece. If anything, this is David Livingston getting to play with the camera, VFX, SFX and cinematography in a way he hasn’t done since VOY’s The Haunting of Deck Twelve, over three years before. Plus, it sets up T’Pol’s most significant arc for the rest of the show’s run. One of ENT’s biggest long-term consequences.
While it stands to reason that Vulcans wouldn’t just turn into violent bloodthirsty zombies in a vacuum, I’d argue that being trapped inside a failing ship in the midst of a volatile, hostile and unpredictable region like the Delphic Expanse would very much push them towards that state of being.
Even though it isn’t a deep episode, I like it how Impulse would be the jumpstart to Terry Matalas’ career. A career that would lead him back to Trek almost 20 years later, running Picard of all things. Similar to Bryan Fuller when he co-created Discovery. Trek has always been a good springboard for successful writer/producers, whether it’s Braga, Moore, Wolfe, Echevarria and many others.
@21/Eduardo: Sure, zombie stories can be a metaphor for challenging philosophical questions and all that, but on the other hand, they’re icky and gross.
“While it stands to reason that Vulcans wouldn’t just turn into violent bloodthirsty zombies in a vacuum, I’d argue that being trapped inside a failing ship in the midst of a volatile, hostile and unpredictable region like the Delphic Expanse would very much push them towards that state of being.”
I still don’t buy that. They might become violent and feral in a Lord of the Flies kind of way, fighting over what scraps of food they have left or whatever, but it’s a leap from there to mindless rage zombies.
I also stand by my position that a different story would have been preferable to this approach, regardless of whether this approach can be rationalized or not.
“Trek has always been a good springboard for successful writer/producers, whether it’s Braga, Moore, Wolfe, Echevarria and many others.”
Also directors, like Jonathan Frakes and Roxann Dawson. I think a lot of that is owed to Michael Piller, who cared a lot about cultivating new talent, and who was responsible for the open submissions program that let new writers like Moore break into the business.
@22/Christopher: It occurs to me that as far as directors go, the only ones with prolific careers post-Trek have been the actors turned directors like Frakes/Dawson, and also Robert Duncan McNeill and Tim Russ. But the more traditional TV directors? Most of them were experienced veterans before the TNG era, and are either mostly retired or dead.
Livingston hasn’t done anything since Threshold. Bole pretty much retired after X-Files. Kolbe and Landau seemingly had stopped directing by 2003. Vejar would retire at the end of Enterprise. The only ones who would keep directing for another 15 years or so were Allan Kroeker and James L. Conway.
@23/Eduardo: Well, yes, that’s exactly my point — that the Berman/Piller-era Trek shows were an effective training ground for new directorial talent, just as they were for new writer/producers.
When I initially watched the series as a hormonally charged adolescent I recognized that part of Jolene Blalock’s role was to function as eye candy and I just took that for what it was worth and didn’t really pay much attention to her acting. But rewatching this I really enjoy her work. There is a scene a little over halfway in when Archer asks T’Pol if there’s any chance of repairing the transceiver damage and she’s obviously struggling with maintaining her lucidity, and he tries to get her attention by yelling at her, and she responds with a surly guttural “what?!?” that reminded me of my ex-wife in a deliciously bone chilling way lol.
And not that I’m typically a stickler for this kind of thing but am I wrong in thinking it was strange that Mayweather wasn’t chosen to pilot the shuttle to the Vulcan ship knowing they were going through the asteroid pinball machine field?
As for the space zombie theme, I don’t watch a lot of zombie movies/shows anyway so this wasn’t as hackneyed to me as it might otherwise have been. I’ll say this though, I was getting tired of the regular electroshock and shower of sparks effect that they used endlessly to remind us that the Vulcan ship and/or the shuttlecraft were in distress. We get it already.
fullyfunctional: My first thought on watching this was that Mayweather should’ve been the one to pilot Shuttlepod 1 to the Seleya, but then he turned out to be needed even more for his and Tucker’s mining mission….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The explanations are kind of glossed over but Phlox does say the Vulcans have irreversible brain damage, so I think the situation’s meant to be more than “Loss of emotional control turns Vulcans into homicidal zombies.” (Of course, as has been pointed out, they suddenly develop the ability to reason and co-operate when the story calls for it.)
@27/cap-mjb: “The explanations are kind of glossed over but Phlox does say the Vulcans have irreversible brain damage, so I think the situation’s meant to be more than “Loss of emotional control turns Vulcans into homicidal zombies.””
Then the dialogue should have been better written to convey that.
HAWKINS: How is it possible that this crew could turn so violent, when Vulcans aren’t supposed to have emotions.
T’POL: A common misconception. We have emotions. We simply keep them suppressed, under control. Something has obviously caused them to lose that control.
HAWKINS: Why would they want to kill us?
T’POL: There was a time in the past when we were an extremely violent race. We nearly destroyed ourselves. Paranoia and homicidal rage were common.
T’Pol herself is equating the Vulcans’ behavior she’s observed with how Vulcans acted in the past, implying that she believes they’re the same. She doesn’t suggest that it’s due to brain damage, merely loss of control. The fact that she assumes that is unbelievable, regardless of what Phlox later determines.
And Phlox’s later dialogue supports that. He says the trellium-D is a neurotoxin to Vulcans, but he says “It disrupts the synaptic pathways that allow them to control emotions.” He doesn’t say anything about damage to other aspects of their neurology. So again, the script equates emotional Vulcans with mindless rage monsters. It is, at best, an oversimplification. If they meant to convey something different, it was their job to put it into words in the first place, not our job to try to guess what they meant after the fact.
I have a sneaking suspicion there’s a missing pre-credit scene in Star Trek: Enterprise where Archer gets out of bed, goes to his private head, looks in the mirror and says, “Oh, boy.”
Mitchell Craig: quoting my rewatch of “Broken Bow” on this site:
“Okay, I also got to the end of ‘Broken Bow’ the first time in 2001 and kept waiting for Archer to turn to his left and say, ‘Okay, Al, I got the Klingon back to his home planet. Why haven’t I Leaped yet?'”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is the smallest of observations, perhaps, but it drives me nuts that Enterprise NX-01‘s shuttlepods don’t have landing gear—at least skids, if not wheels, and with shock absorbers on the struts. Mayweather’s landing on the asteroid perfectly illustrates how helpful these would be.
@20 100% agree and would prefer a non zombie version. I’d rather see acting (like Jolene’s), not actors staggering about with green goo on their faces. Other than the zombies it was good but I did not like T’Pol being naked in sick bay at the end. Totally unnecessary.