First Time Enterprise: Watching Unexpected

In my ongoing mission to round out my Star Trek knowledge, I’m watching through Enterprise for the first time. Today, we watch “Unexpected”.

I am currently boldly going to fill out my Star Trek: Enterprise knowledge base. I’m endeavoring to watch every episode in the series, live tweeting as many as possible on our @redshirtsdieFS Twitter account, and documenting my thoughts in depth on the pages of this website.

At the four episode mark, we hit “Unexpected”. From the Netflix description, I suspected this wouldn’t be my favorite Star Trek episode. When a kind woman who was following along with the live tweet broke the news that this was the episode in which Trip Tucker gets pregnant, I knew for a fact it wasn’t going to be my favorite episode in the Star Trek franchise.

However, it was funny. It was a pretty bad episode, but I laughed more than a couple of times. I’ll remember those laughs fondly, because I’m not likely to revisit “The One Where Trip Gets Pregnant” (this episode’s Friends title) any time soon.

So, I sat through this one, and I’m going to make you relive the whole experience with me.

You’re welcome.

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First impressions:

The gravity malfunction in the opening scene was impressive. Captain Archer is showering and the gravity goes off. The water beads up and floats upwards. Before long, the gravity comes back on and the shift from 0 gravity to roughly one G brings Archer and all the water crashing to the ground. Cool scene.

Enterprise gets to make first contact with another alien species: the Xyrillians. These aliens are found draining energy from Enterprise due to their own malfunctioning systems. They find them cleverly and go about helping the Xyrillians repair their systems. In order to do so, they send Trip Tucker to the alien craft in a shuttle.

The decompression process takes a toll on Trip. He’s tired and struggles to adapt to the alien environment aboard ship. He is good for very little in his current state so Archer orders him via communicator to take a nap. When he wakes up, the Xyrillian female Ah’len takes care of him and feeds him some lightly-electrified water packets, apparently.

So now Trip has napped and eaten and he feels like a million bucks. They get the ship fixed and then retreat to a holodeck of sorts, which totally blows his mind. Trip and Ah’Len sit in a boat and they put their hands in “a box of pebbles that makes you telepathic”.

It also makes Trip pregnant.

They discover this when he returns to Enterprise. T’Pol’s disgust is palpable and hilarious. “Three days. You were gone for three days and you couldn’t restrain yourself.” Of course, Trip had no idea he was being intimate with Ah’len, but sure enough, he was.

To make a fairly long story short, Trip eats a lot and has mood swings, virtually ripping the head off a junior engineer.

They track down the Xyrillians, as they must in order to safely remove the embryonic alien growing within Trip’s body. The catch is that they find them leaching off the warp trail of a Klingon battle cruiser, which looks fantastic.

The Klingons want to destroy Enterprise, the Xyrillians, and basically everything. They aren’t interested in Archer’s explanation, and they kind of shame Trip for being so careless as to get impregnated by an alien.

They’re not wrong.

In the end, the Klingons cut a deal. They’ll stand by and allow Enterprise to conduct its business with the Xyrillians in exchange for their holodeck technology. Once inside the holodeck, the Klingons are looking at a simulation of Qo’Nos and the lead Klingon exclaims, “I can see my house from here!”

It was a genuinely funny episode, but it was a pretty rough one as well.

The crew:

T’Pol likes carbonated water and doesn’t like engineers who get impregnated on away missions.

Trip… well, he probably won’t make that mistake again.

The Xyrillians are a genuinely friendly species.

Most valuable player:

The kind woman on Twitter who warned me what was coming.

Next: First Time Enterprise: Watching Strange New World

Final observations:

We won’t speak of this again.