“Unexpected”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 1, Episode 5
Production episode 005
Original air date: October 17, 2001
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is suffering several malfunctions, including the artificial gravity going out and the drinks dispenser not providing what is asked for. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s an issue with their plasma exhaust. Archer orders Reed to ignite the plasma exhaust, and they find the silhouette of a cloaked ship in the flashpoint of the exhaust’s being ignited.
They make contact—with the translator magically picking up their language in about half a minute—and discover that the Xyrillians are using the plasma exhaust to charge up their malfunctioning warp engines. The Xyrillians apologize for inadvertently causing those malfunctions, and Tucker offers to go over and help them with repairs. The Xyrillians’ atmosphere is one of very high pressure, so Tucker needs to go through a three-hour adjustment period to transition between the two environments. His initial response to being on the Xyrillian ship is to be sick and feverish, but he wants to get to work, and so declines the Xyrillians’ offer of a short nap before he gets started.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
This proves a bad idea, as he starts hallucinating and losing his marbles. Archer has to order him to take a nap, after which he feels much better. He befriends Ah’len, a Xyrillian engineer, who shows him around the ship. They grow plants and vegetables right there on the ship, and have eels living on board.
Ah’len also introduces him to a holodeck, and shows him a game in which the two participants put their hands in a bowl of crystals and then can read each others’ minds.
Once the repairs are done, Tucker again goes through decompression to readjust to Earth-normal pressure. He thoroughly enjoyed himself and is very grateful to have had the experience.
Then Tucker finds a weird growth on his arm. Thinking it’s an allergic reaction to something, Phlox explains that it’s a nipple, and also that Tucker is pregnant. There is a child gestating in his chest, very close to his heart. Apparently Xyrillians reproduce by women placing their genetic material in a male, though the male contributes nothing genetically to the process, they just incubate the embryos. T’Pol is appalled that Tucker couldn’t keep it in his pants, but Tucker insists that he was a perfect gentleman, and had no sexual relations with anyone on the Xyrillian ship that he was aware of. Phlox’s hypothesis is that the telepathic game might have been the source of the transfer of genetic material from Ah’len to Tucker.
Enterprise searches for the Xyrillian ship, and finally find it eight days later, trailing a Klingon ship, doing the same thing it was doing to Enterprise—apparently, Tucker’s repairs didn’t take. Tucker—who at this point is wearing loose-fitting shirts to hide his bulge—wants to get in touch with them, but upon discovering that there’s a cloaked ship messing with them, the Klingon captain, Vorok, wants to destroy them. Archer tries and fails to talk them out of that, as they need something from the Xyrillians, but the only thing that gives Vorok pause is T’Pol pointing out that Archer’s the captain who brought Klaang home and kept a civil war from erupting in the Klingon Empire. That at least gets Vorok to hesitate and listen to Archer. Tucker says that the Xyrillians have holographic technology that’s awesome, and also says he has a family issue to bring up. When he shows his pregnancy bulge, the Klingons all laugh their asses off.
Tucker has to sit in decompression for hours with the Klingons, then the Xyrillians show off their holographic tech, and agree to give the Klingons this technology in exchange for not killing them all. Vorok agrees, and later tells Archer that as far as he’s concerned, the debt is paid, and Archer had better not cross paths with him again.
Ah’len apologizes for impregnating Tucker—it was completely accidental—and they’re able to transfer the fetus to another person. They once again repair the ship, and everyone goes off happy.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Xyrillians can suck power into their ships via the plasma exhaust, apparently.
The gazelle speech. Archer actually does a very good job of putting the Xyrillians at ease when he contacts them, going out of his way to make it clear that he’s not pissed at them and wants peaceful contact.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol spends a large chunk of the episode giving Tucker all kinds of shit about the fact that he was irresponsible enough to get himself pregnant, which is at once completely unfair and also absolutely hilarious.
She also saves the Xyrillians’ lives by bullshitting the Klingons with regard to Archer’s status with the Klingon chancellor.
Florida Man. Florida Man Knocked Up By Scaly Alien Seductress!
Optimism, Captain! Phlox at one point encourages T’Pol to try something other than Vulcan food, a notion that T’Pol firmly declines, as apparently smelling it is bad enough.
Good boy, Porthos! Porthos appears briefly in Archer’s quarters being all cute and stuff.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The gravity goes out while Archer is showering, thus giving viewers several lingering looks at Scott Bakula’s wet, naked body.
More on this later… This episode has the first exposure to humans, Vulcans, and Klingons of sophisticated holographic technology, implying that later holographic tech that we see in the various Trek spinoffs that take place after this was based on that of the Xyrillians.
I’ve got faith…
“I’m the chief engineer! I spent years earning that position! I never had any intention of becoming a working mother!”
–Tucker bemoaning his pregnancy.
Welcome aboard. Three Trek veterans in this one: Julianne Christie plays Ah’len; she was Dexa in Voyager’s “Homestead.” Christopher Darga plays Vorok; he was Kaybok in DS9’s “The Way of the Warrior” and Y’Sek in Voyager’s “Think Tank.” And Randy Oglesby plays Trena’L; he was one of Riva’s chorus in TNG’s “Loud as a Whisper,” both Ah-Kel and Ro-Kel in DS9’s “Vortex,” Pran in DS9’s “The Darkness and the Light,” and Kir in Voyager’s “Counterpoint.” Oglesby will be back with the recurring role of Degra in Enterprise’s third season.
Trivial matters: T’Pol references the events of “Broken Bow” when convincing Vorok to listen to Archer, though she exaggerates the Klingon chancellor’s response to Archer’s delivery of Klaang—which she later says is in keeping with Klingon mores.
Ah’len reads in Tucker’s mind that Archer saved his life once, which was established in the previous episode, “Strange New World.”
Archer says that he’s known Tucker for eight years; that first meeting in 2143 will be dramatized in “First Flight.”
It’s been a long road… “I’m not sure if congratulations are in order, Commander, but you’re pregnant.” Ha ha ha! A man gets pregnant! That’s funny!
Sigh.
When I gave up on Enterprise two decades ago, and was asked why, one of my go-to answers was that every time I watched the show, I felt like it was made as if the previous thirty years of television never happened. I think that particular complaint was mainly prompted by this episode, which feels like a plot from one of the many dopey sci-fi shows that littered the television landscape in the years between the original Star Trek and TNG.
It’s bad enough that no thought is given to how this should affect Tucker. I mean, the fetus is gestating in an alien body not designed for it, right near the heart, even, he’s somehow grown nipples on his arm, a part of the body that doesn’t generate milk—I mean, this should probably kill him. But there’s no thought going into the fact that this is an alien species beyond “the men get pregnant,” so writers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga fall back on tired old pregnancy clichés about hormones and morning sickness and stuff.
But the absolute worst thing about this dopey episode is that it’s boring. They could have done some fun body horror things with Tucker’s body trying to do what the Xyrillian fetus wants it to do and failing. They could have gone full goofy with it and had Tucker go through all the crazy-ass changes that pregnancy tends to bring about. Instead, they settle for a bland approach that results in a big who-cares. It’s not treated with the gravitas it deserves, nor is it really played for laughs. It’s just there.
The misdirects don’t even work. The Xyrillians’ insistence that Tucker just needs a nap is hammered home so thoroughly that you figure that they were planning to do something to him while he was asleep. But that expectation is dashed when we find out that the pregnancy is accidental, and one that is easily reversed. So there’s no real conflict, no real struggle, except to convince the Klingons not to kill the Xyrillians, but all that’s good for is for Vorok to go onto the Xyrillian holodeck and say, “I can see my house from here.” I have no idea why that’s so funny, but it totally is…
Connor Trinneer deserves a ton of credit for doing the best he can with this dreadful script. Though I will give the script credit for the part of the episode involving Tucker’s first trip to the Xyrillian ship. His difficulty handling the pressure changes initially and his later enthusiasm for visiting an alien ship and helping them fix their broken engine is beautifully played. And I love the scenes between him and Julianne Christie’s Ah’len when she shows him around the ship.
It’s not enough to save this episode that, ironically for an episode about a pregnancy, is completely lifeless.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest work of fiction is the short story “Unguarded” in the anthology Devilish and Divine, edited by John L. French & Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which just recently went on sale from eSpec Books. The anthology has stories of angels and demons; Keith’s story is an urban fantasy set in New York City about guardian angels of both the Muslim and Christian faiths. More information can be found here.
In addition to this being the seed of the holodeck, don’t you think the Klingons were introducted to cloaking technology at this point?
Also strange that the alien ‘female’ would be so clearly mammalian if the ‘host’ supports the baby. But then this is human-made television.
I was quite curious to see where this one landed. Oddly, it’s the only early first season episode I remember enjoying at all in the original run,and was surprised to find it among the most hated episodes of Trek. That said, I think I mostly enjoyed it for Connor Trineer’s acting and characterization. Trip was easily my favorite character in the show and I think it started here. Sure the plot made no real sense but at least it was amusing, tucked as it was in the middle of a giant pile of meh.
I could never understand why, exactly, Trip would grow a nipple on his wrist when he already has two of them on his chest to start with… it’s not even like a weird alien nipple or anything, it looks like the same ones humans have.
This reminds me that I wasn’t impressed with Enterprise’s first season. I hate MPREG (male pregnancy) in fanfic because it’s stupid and I’m willing to bet that at least half of the MPREG is less dumb than this. I’m guessing, though, since I don’t read it. Enterprise took a bad fanfic trope and made a bad episode and was sexist about it to boot.
* “I’m the chief engineer! I spent years earning that position! I never had any intention of becoming a working mother“
Sexist and weirdly outdated for the year it aired much less when the series is set. The male parent is the father no matter who gives birth as the female parent is the mother no matter who gives birth. What’s different between a working mother than a working father anyway, Trip? And what’s wrong with being a working parent? Should all parents stay home with the kids?
so sexist!
“Every time I watched the show, I felt like it was made as if the previous thirty years of television never happened.”
A similar complaint was made by Donna Minkowitz, in an essay for The Nation in 2002. Contrasting “Enterprise” with TNG/DS9/VOY’s explorations of “the astonishing diversity of the galaxy” and “potential to harm people who are different,” Minkowitz decries the then-new offering as a “frank vehicle for “white male suprematism and resentment.” The essay can be read here:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/beam-us-back-scotty/
To say the least, I have mixed feelings about this essay, but it is striking when taken in consideration with KRAD’s comments.
On Twitter KRAD joked that he re-watched this episode so we wouldn’t have to. Too late; I saw a rerun over Thanksgiving weekend. It’s rather as dismal as KRAD says, but I do have to give the episode credit for there being consequences to relations between a human (male) member of the crew and a member of an alien species, after seeing Kirk and Riker get away with so many dalliances.
I managed to remember this episode for the holodeck but completely forgot about the mpreg.
@@.-@ many mpreg fics are smarter than this but they’re are hobbled by the need to have the pregnancy go away by the end of the episode. Not to mention possibly (probably?) written by people who have experienced a pregnancy
@@.-@
Clumsily put on his part, but I think he’s just saying he doesn’t want the added responsibility of being a parent. Warp engines are the only babies he wanted to care for.
I’d like to imagine that, should Trip mention that he grew a nipple on his arm, his alien baby-mamma may well reply “What’s a nipple?” and be absolutely fascinated by the reply.
Also, one can only wonder if Trip’s firstborn daughter ever became curious about the human who gave her up – since she’s not really a hybrid, hopefully she’ll have problem living to a ripe old age.
Dear @krad, please allow me to compliment you on that latest ‘Florida Man’ entry; it is so very perfect that one simply can’t imagine anything beating it out for the Season One round-up! (My own best effort was “Florida man gets pregnant, friendly aliens take a trip”).
I should now confess that this episode absolutely made me laugh out loud (sometimes you want High Art, sometimes you just enjoy seeing Captain Archer do his best to be a Good Friend even in the face of Trip being such a flake … also getting knocked up … not to mention seeing T’Pol play Team Granny for her own well-concealed amusement).
For the record, I suspect that “I can see my house from here!” is so hilarious because it’s a humanising moment that makes the Klingon Captain an infinitely relatable Big Scary Alien.
Finally, it’s hard to dislike this episode because (as First Contacts go) this one rates quite highly on the Bozeman Scale (Where 1.0 is FIRST CONTACT and 0.0 is ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’); nobody dies, nobody gets brutalised and almost everyone parts friends, after a free and fair exchange of ideas.
That ‘almost’ being the Klingons, who of course have a REPUTATION to keep up.
@@.-@: Unfortunately it doesn’t look like this book came out until ten years later. Eric Carle wrote a book for children, “Mister Seahorse” (which I read to my kids when they were younger) about “fish fathers caring for their eggs and babies.” Had it been available a decade earlier, perhaps it would have given the “Enterprise” writers a blueprint for how to write about this concept vis a vis an alien species.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/631931.Mister_Seahorse
So it turns out that one of my Facebook friends is friends with Julianne Christie, who played Ah’len, and he tagged her in a reply to my posting about this article on the Book of Face.
Ms. Christie’s hilarious response:
“I only invited him to a play a game in my space boat. It happens all the time!
“
Reader, I LOL’d…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@1
Non-canonical sources (including Worlds of the Federation and the ST:TNG Technical Journal), state that the Klingons got their cloaking tech during the period they were allied with the Romulans. Not that that binds the canon TV shows, but in fandom and licensed materials that was always the assumption.
One thing that always clearly stuck with me about this episode is the scene where we’re clearly meant to laugh at Trip becoming a ‘typical pregnant woman’, worrying needlessly about parts of the ship being unsafe.
But he’s totally right! One of the things he focuses on is the lift in Engineering, which has a bar that comes down to stop the user falling out – but then is ideally placed to slice your fingers off if you keep your fingers on the bar (which you naturally would, to hold on) when it goes up or down. That thing is lethal.
I rather liked this one, actually. I wasn’t crazy about the male-pregnancy stuff, which was a sci-fi cliche, but I loved the way the episode made a real attempt to imbue alien contact with a sense of wonder — to make the aliens actually alien in their environment, their culture, their understanding, etc., and to depict even a benevolent interspecies contact as a fraught, difficult thing because of the physiological, technological, cultural, and other gulfs that have to be crossed. True, the specific differences they established weren’t all that plausible, and it was hard to reconcile the difficulty of this contact with the routineness of most Trek interspecies contacts, but this was the way it really should have been done more often.
For all its weak writing and characterization, this is what I love best about season 1 — the way it actually made exploration feel like an adventure, with even the most routine aspects of it being new and challenging problems to solve. In that respect, it captured the pioneer spirit of Star Trek better than any other series.
By the way, I established in my Rise of the Federation novels that the Xyrillians eventually stopped selling/licensing their holotechnology to other worlds once they learned that the Klingons were using it for combat training. I wanted to explain why Federation holotech wasn’t more advanced in the 23rd century. (Although that was before DSC established that holograms were in common use then — and before I rediscovered that 1968’s The Making of Star Trek established that the TOS Enterprise had a holographic recreation center all along, used for immersive 3D movies and lifelike “letters” from home.)
Odd- if asked before we revisited Voyager for that rewatch, I would have sworn that ‘alien M-Preg,” was something that happened to Ensign Harry Kim.
@3. wildfyrewarning: I wonder if this is a function of the … genetic exchange? … having presumably occurred through that arm in particular, leaving that part of the body even more scrambled than the rest of poor Trip’s anatomy (with this tertiary nipple being a visible side-effect of Commander Tucker’s biology going haywire, rather than anything with a practical function – one imagine that Doctor Phlox would have had to take precautions against the eruption of further such oddities, amongst other things).
@@.-@. SF_Fangirl: For my money it should require a heck of a lot more than just making a baby to win a a man the title of ‘Father’ – It’s not enough to just provide genetic material, you have to take responsibility for a child and really honour the Duty of Care.
Also @@.-@. SF_Fangirl & 7. AbbyNormal: I honestly tend to imagine that, in this case, Trip is trying freak out in a reasonably good-humoured way (I’d bet money that, if Trip were to ever breathe a word of this to any mortal soul after the fact, he’d probably signal his siblings with something like “Congratulations! You’re an auntie/uncle and I’m a mommy” just to see the look on her face before she demanded an explanation … but probably not if Momma Tucker was in the room, because some conversations you need to have face to face).
. . .
Oh good grief, now I’m imagining the Tucker Family getting wind of the whole business because T’Pol keeps impeccable record of scientific anomalies encountered by NX-01 and Trip definitely counts (Good old Doctor Phlox would, at least, change names to protect the innocent when he publishes a write-up of the whole peculiar business in an article for some learned medical journal).
@11. grenadier: My assumption is that this Xyrillian crew is a fairly unremarkable assembly, presumably used to relying on a network of repair stations, rather than their own technical expertise (hence their need to accept help from an engineer so unfamiliar with their technology that his running repairs go limp rather quickly).
With that in mind, there’s no guarantee that the Klingons were able to acquire especially detailed technical specifics from this trade; there’s also no guarantee that their present level of technology/knowledge base/political stability could reverse-engineer anything workable from quite literally alien designs.
So while the Empire might well have been introduced to the notion of a cloaking device in this encounter, it’s perfectly possible that this ‘technical exchange’ would result in nothing more concrete than an ambition to acquire such a device for their very own (especially if the Romulans make a point of sabotaging efforts by foreign powers to acquire cloaking technologies of their very own, which seems a thoroughly Romulan precaution to take).
I do remember on first watch, like Christopher, finding it interesting that they showed the adjustment to an alien environment. It made perfect sense given we didn’t have the transport bio filter treknobabble that it wouldn’t be so straightforward to simply dock and waltz on to a brand new alien ship. Not something we saw again I don’t think
The pregnancy storyline was bleh. I’d agree with KRAD it ends up being boring, especially on rewatch. The revelation that the male is just a host / carrier so there would be no lasting consequences post episode just feels like a particular cop out on this one.
I guess it’s time for my obligatory spiel that cloaking wouldn’t be a single technology, but a succession of different technologies that each become obsolete once a countermeasure is devised, with an ongoing arms race between stealth and detection. That’s why cloaking keeps seeming to get reinvented over and over, and why detection methods invented in one production aren’t still in use later in the timeline. Note that T’Pol figured out a way to penetrate the Xyrillians’ stealth tech in this very episode, which would’ve made it pretty useless to the Klingons.
Setting aside the clumsy story, I am interestedin how Xyrillian biology works. The males don’t contribute anything to the genetics. They serve only as the carrier of the infant. I can accept that. But if the females reproduce asexually, they should only carry the mother’s DNA (or equivalent, but Star Trek seems to use DNA for all humanoid species), how do males arise. And if their is another contributor to allow some various sexes, how was the pregnancy accidental? Was she pregnant, or pre-pregnant already and just transferred the baby prematurely to the wrong host?
I always imagined that as soon as Enterprise warped away, the Klingons made a beeline straight for the Xyrillian home world, where they wiped out the Xyrillians to acquire their stealth technology. This explains why the Xyrillians never appeared or were referenced on later series: First Contact was also Last Contact.
@19.bgsu98: You have a deeply, deeply callous imagination and I hope that you’re wrong! (-;
If nothing else, given the Xyrillian aptitude for stealth tactics (and holo-tech) how could the Klingons be guaranteed to FIND that homeworld in the first place? (On the other hand, is it not equally possible the Klingon Empire might prefer to subjugate the Xyrillians, rather than eliminate them, even if the former did track down their Homeworld?).
@19/bgsu98: I always figured that part of the reason the writers made the Xyrillians’ environment so hostile to humans was to explain why they didn’t show up later on — because it just wasn’t convenient for the species to have much direct interaction with humans or other species from Minshara-class environments.
@18. costumer: One aspect of ENTERPRISE that really deserved more attention than it actually received was the role of Ensign Sato as filter/last word on the translation of various newly-encountered languages and the role her decisions played in influencing Starfleet’s view of (and by extension their personal attitude & official policy towards) the associated species.
This remark may seem apropos of nothing, but given the apparent existence of two Xyrillian genders and the fact that only one of those genders passes on its genetic information to the next generation, it’s not impossible that Ensign Sato took care to translate the non-breeding gender’s name as ‘male’ rather than a more literal ‘drone’ in the name of avoiding the dehumanising aspect of the latter title.
I’m fairly sure this sort of thing was never shown, but it strikes me as at least possible that Hoshi Sato went out of her way to make such Humanitarian translations the norm (and given the well known cunning of her Mirror Universe counterpart, we might even call it plausible).
@18- Komodo dragon females reproducing via parthenogenesis are capable of producing male offspring. Of course if all reproduction is, as it were, self-serve, ‘male’ might be a misnomer for the other gender.
But surely our heroes would never project human divisions onto a new alien species rather than learn the nuances of their culture and biology.
“Three days. You were only over there for three days and you couldn’t restrain yourself.”
This feels a bit like several episodes shoved into one. The first half of the episode is taken up with the first contact with the Xyrillians. It’s actually done quite well, although a meeting between two parties who just want to get to know each other isn’t exactly full of dramatic potential so we get a fake ad-break cliffhanger of Tucker coughing in decontamination. But it’s all very Star Trek, and the episode does a good job of showing Tucker’s difficulties acclimatising to a different environment, while also showing him geeking out at all the alien stuff.
Then, nearly half an hour into the episode, we finally get to the reason why it exists: Tucker getting pregnant. The idea is played for laughs, but that’s mainly a result of the performances, with Tucker’s embarassment, T’Pol’s stony “Why am I with these people?” attitude, and Archer struggling to keep a straight face. When they do go for out and out comedy, such as the scene of Tucker doing a health and safety check in Engineering, it doesn’t really work, not least because Tucker’s making good points! (If you’re not meant to hold the handrail while the lift’s in motion, there should really be a sign.) I don’t really have a problem with this: I’ve heard what happens to Tucker compared to sexual assault, but it’s made clear the reproduction is asexual, so if you are going to take it seriously, it’s more akin to being implanted with a fertilised embryo.
Oh, and then we get a return appearance by the Klingons shoehorned in at the end. To be fair, this sequence provides some of the best lines and best moments of the episode (“You can see my house from here” among them!. The humans still aren’t as familiar with the Klingons as we are, so we get moments like Archer having to have Sto-Vo-Kor explained to him. It’s slightly worrying though that the show has to fall back on appearances by familiar aliens this early in its run. It seems a bit early to introduce a holodeck as well, although as was pointed out on another episode, at least it shows other races had these things before humans.
There seem to be some huge time scale problems here. Tucker spends three days on the Xyrillian ship, then Enterprise spends eight days searching for them again, yet Archer says they met them “a few days” ago. In the same scene, T’Pol says the events of “Broken Bow” were “less than a month” ago. Given that “Fight or Flight” opened after two weeks of uneventful travelling (the log entries in the two episodes are about three weeks apart but maybe that can be covered by travel time in the latter part of the opener), and this episode seems to cover a week and a half, that doesn’t leave much opportunity for off-screen exploration or even for “Strange New Worlds” to have happened!
First time we see Phlox dining at the captain’s table. There’s a nice scene between T’Pol and Phlox of the kind that would be quite common, especially in the early seasons: They’re the two non-humans on board, but their attitude to their crewmates is very different. Tucker says he’s been in Starfleet for twelve years.
It’s notable again just how much of a unit Archer and T’Pol are, for all the personality clashes. At the top of the episode, when Archer is giving the orders to flush out the cloaked Xyrillian ship, T’Pol seems to be the only one to realise what he’s doing and give direction accordingly.
Given that we’re dealing with a completely alien biology, I have no problem with assuming that a “female” has a recessive “male” gene or whatever to pass on to a single-genetic-parent offspring.
I’ve always liked the idea that the Xyrillians’ gaudy aesthetics ultimately sparked the in-universe fashion for interior decorating with brightly coloured flood lights that was popular during the TOS era.
As others, I also loved the first part of this episode: the strangeness of the aliens, Trip’s enthusiasm in helping and in exploring their ship.
Regarding the pregnancy, I was annoyed by how clichéd it was represented: the mood swings, the morning sickness… It’s like the writers had a “pregnancy” checklist stolen from a sitcom. It was also annoying for me that Trip suddenly had a strong parental instinct just because he is pregnant. Someone mentioned mpreg fanfics, but this reminds me more of an anti-abortion fanfic: the girl in trouble considers terminating the unwanted pregnancy, but is suddenly struck with a strong maternal feeling. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen in real life, but it just seemed to cliché and was played for cheap laughs.
@24. cap-mjb: Given that Trip’s Xyrillian contact is just as surprised as he is that there’s a baby on the way, the impression I got was more of two teenagers enjoying a little light experimentation, then experiencing some heavy consequences for their own blissful ignorance (For a given value of ‘heavy’ at least).
…
You know I would dearly like to imagine that Starfleet Medical produced it’s very first “Close Encounters have CONSEQUENCES!” video after learning of Trip’s little experience (and now I’m imagining LOWER DECKS showing it in all it’s cringe-inducing glory; a ‘Names have been changed to protect the innocent’ public service announcement of the most painfully-earnest sort, which somehow fails to disguise the probable identity of the unlucky Mr Seahorse despite taking some pains to do so).
Bonus points if there’s a booming, Sitcom Dad voiceover (actually, this being the 2150s and not the 1950s, it should probably be a booming Sitcom Mom voice*). Oh Good Grief, imagine if they could only afford an el cheapo makeup job to embody the Sexy Sex-has-Consequences Aliens!
*Bonus points if the voiceover is a recognisable STAR TREK actor; I’m not sure who the most hilarious possible choice would be and am open to suggestions.
@26. salix_caprea: I’d argue that a strong paternal instinct would be something the Starfleet selection board would be looking for in the senior officers of a crew headed a long, long way out from Home Base – all the better to keep that crew from becoming much, much smaller very quickly. (-:
@28 ED
Yes, I agree with this in general, but here it was presented as “Haha, Trip is suddenly concerned about the safety on the ship because he’s all hormonal and maternal”.
@24/cap-mjb: “I’ve heard what happens to Tucker compared to sexual assault, but it’s made clear the reproduction is asexual, so if you are going to take it seriously, it’s more akin to being implanted with a fertilised embryo.”
That would still be assault, if it’s done without the consent of the implantee. Part of the legal definition of assault is that it’s done intentionally, with the knowledge that it could cause bodily harm or offensive contact (which would include being implanted with something against one’s will). So you’re looking at the wrong half of the phrase. It’s not about whether it’s sexual or asexual reproduction, it’s about whether it’s assault or not. In this case, Ah’len had no idea it would happen, so there was no intention to violate Trip’s bodily integrity or consent. It was negligent at worst, so it doesn’t rise to the standard of assault.
Having worked in and around the business, this feels like an episode that was “suggested” by a grey-haired Network Suit who hasn’t actually watched TV since the 70s, and so the writers figured they should get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
With that in mind, it’s impressive that there are a few bright spots; the glimpse of an interesting alien culture, the funny Klingon line, the hints of worldbuilding…
@27. For recognizable voices, I feel like George Takei would have the most scenery-chewing fun with it, though it might also be fun to have Karl Urban reprise his DeForest Kelley impression.
Enterprise best of Trek spinoffs…T’Pol character quite engaging…
Enterprise my favorite Trek spinoff
I remember liking this episode quite a bit. The Trip Ah’len chemistry was quite nice and she was rather adorable. It would’ve been nice if T’Pol’s annoyance here was the first rearing of the head of her jealousy with Trip. Once it was clear that they liked each other she was obviously territorial.
I also like the Xyrillian design and aesthetic, they were very cool looking, especially for such a benign people, where their scaliness could easily give an aggressive alien vibe, they were quite delightful.
I think I found this episode pretty funny because all the characters did. Archer clearly was delighting in ribbing his best friend, T’Pol’s smh attitude was always gold (in fact I think they put a lot of her funniest scenes in sickbay throughout the series) and Connor Trineer did a great job being “hormonal”. The fact that he was right may be the writers subtly saying “Mom is always right“. The Klingons at the end…well being the resident ultra macho species they were clearly there to laugh at the pregnant Earth-man. I think it would’ve been more interesting for this to be a female Klingon captain…and still laugh at Trip.
My one gripe is why didn’t they try to send out a broad communications signal to the Xyrillians rather than tell the Klingons what was going on? I mean they should know by now that Klingons react aggressively to everything. It’s one thing to try a direct hail, but sending out a distress call directed at the Xyrillians so they could break off might’ve worked.
I have to admit I really liked this one, mostly for the performances of the cast. I guess I saw humor in it where krad did not. And I love the chemistry between Trip and Ah’len, which is exponentially more convincing that anything he had with T’pol later on in my opinion.
Speaking of T’pol,, that line about “you were there for three days” was just beautifully done. That steely-eyed look of contempt in her eyes was absolutely perfect- I was rolling.
Also agree with CLB about the attention that was paid here to the process of acclimating to the environs of another species. This is something Trek did far too little of in my opinion. It reminded me of the episode in TNG where Riker served as first officer on the Klingon ship. Also one of my favorites.
Whereas the criticisms of the cliched “man gets pregnant” plotline are valid, I still enjoyed the hell out of this and would at least double Krad’s rating.
And as a Florida man myself, let me reiterate the comments of a few other people: that section of these reviews is becoming my favorite. Although the scary thing is the headlines he’s composing are barely more outrageous than what really happens around this godforsaken place. :)
@35/fullyfunctional
The Florida Man headlines are *Chef’s Kiss* perfection, and the fact that they so plausibly fit into the meme just takes it to another level. This episode’s headline was National Enquirer worthy.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around “resequenced photons”.
@37 “They sent us second-hand photons!”
@30: Is “I didn’t think it would hurt him” really an accepted defence for assault though? I agree that Ah’len had no malicious intent, but given the lack of a “You can get pregnant doing this but I doubt that’ll happen with you” warning, there’s a strong argument that Tucker didn’t give informed consent to something she knew all the (known) facts about.
@39 cap-mjb
I think the episode doesn’t make explicit what Ah’len really knew or believed. Maybe all alien races that they met so far are not genetically compatible with them and for her it is a “fact” that fooling around with alien males will not have any consequences. You can compare this with teenagers who think that if there is no penetration you cannot get pregnant. Or maybe she didn’t realize that this is something so foreign for Trip, to the point that he didn’t recognize it as a sexual act. Does Riker lecture every alien that he smooches that this is the human equivalent of foreplay? So there is not enough evidence to say whether it qualifies as assault, in any way I think the episode tried to show it as an unintentional accident on her end.
@39/cap-mjb: “Is “I didn’t think it would hurt him” really an accepted defence for assault though?”
Yes, that is literally what I already said — legally, the charge of assault requires intent. Per Wikipedia:
It’s like, say, the difference between knowingly serving someone poisoned food and unknowingly doing so. The former is attempted murder, the latter is a tragic accident, or at worst negligence. The mens rea, the intention to commit a crime, is an important element in many criminal charges.
@31. Cybersnark: You had me at “George Takei” (Who really would bring the perfect old-school paternal authority while clearly having far, far too much fun with The Speech). (-;
@34. Mr. D: I completely forgot to mention this, but the Xyrillain aesthetic really does have a lovely “What the heck?” effect; I’m especially fond of that tank of technically-not-eels, for having at least two completely logical uses (fresh food and/or a soothing aesthetic element) while still contributing something convincingly ‘alien’ by contrast with the much less organic Enterprise (I’m also quite impressed that the episode doesn’t feel the need to point this detail out, which is rather cool).
I definitely agree that the reactions of Captain Archer and T’Pol are what helped make this episode’s core joke delightfully cheesy rather than rotten (and I most definitely agree that making the Klingon captain a female would have been the last little grace note needed to make the whole thing Perfect).
Concerning your suggestion of communicating with the Xyrillians on the quiet, while Captain Archer was certainly taking a calculated risk by communicating with the Klingons and pointing out the Xyrillians to the former, trying to communicate with the latter ‘on the sly’ would almost certainly make things infinitely worse (given there’s absolutely no way to guarantee that the Klingons would be unable to pick up that signal and every reason to believe that, after the sudden appearance of a ship of the line in their vicinity, the crew would be actively LOOKING for an ambush).
T’Pol had a hard enough time convincing the Klingon Captain to play nice even after Archer had been completely above board; if Enterprise had been caught collaborating with a hidden starship, it’s impossible to believe that the Klingons would have failed to come out shooting (Given the activities of the Suliban and the presence of marauders that quite literally drain their victims dry, I’m not sure one can blame the warbird for it’s hyperactive threat response).
@35. fullyfunctional: Much as I enjoy seeing the crew of NX-01 prove that Starfleet picked them for a reason, there’s also a delight worth savouring in T’Pol being just done with all the humanity – it’s nicely different from Mr Spock’s seen-it-all aplomb, while still being very Vulcan.
@40. salix_caprea: Given we have no idea if ‘The Process’ always results in a pregnancy, even amongst Xyrillians, there may be still stronger grounds to believe that Ah’len meant the two of them to enjoy nothing more than an unusually exotic exchange of ideas – I would like to go further and state my agreement with Mr Bennett that there’s simply no grounds to infer Sexual Assault, given that at no point was Mr Tucker subjected to violence, coercion or coercive violence (still less malevolent intent).
It may be possible to charge Ah’len for neglect, in this case, but you could not indict her on charges of assault (much less sexual assault, given that ‘sexual’ is almost certainly a term so inherently foreign to Xyrillian experience as to be completely meaningless).
@41: It’s a bit more of a grey area than you’re suggesting though, I think. It’s less doing something that you think can’t hurt someone and more doing something that you know can hurt someone but think won’t. Ah’len presumably knows that people can get pregnant by performing this act, yet all she tells Tucker is “It takes four hands.” (She doesn’t even tell him that it will let her read his thoughts, which is a violation in itself since he didn’t consent to it. Cf Janeway’s reaction to innocently being probed in “Prime Factors”.)
The closest comparison I can think of is someone thinks a friend is wearing body armour and playfully hits him with a weapon, thinking he’s protected, only to find he’s not wearing body armour. There was no intent to cause injury but no consent for the act either, and if they’d told them in advance they were going to do it, they’d have pointed out what the consequences could be.
@43/cap-mjb: For the third time, what you’re describing there would be legally defined as negligence rather than assault, because the intent to do harm is not there. I don’t know how to make it any clearer.
I think it’s time to move on, since we seem to be getting stuck in the weeds here, and there doesn’t seem much benefit in continuing to argue the point back and forth…
Interestingly enough, I despised this one the first time I saw it almost 20 years ago. But when I rewatched the first season prior to the pandemic, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered.
Of course, Unexpected isn’t going to win any awards for either originality or particularly good execution. But this sure isn’t a disaster like DS9’s Profit and Lace either. And while it isn’t exciting, it’s still more watchable than something like Let he Who is Without Sin.
Obviously, it’s beyond lazy to just do the pregnancy cliché episode. There’s really no arc in this – either plot or character. But a couple of things salvage this one somewhat. One was T’Pol’s almost sassy attitude, putting Trip in his place. Yeah, it wasn’t his fault he got pregnant, but I’ll gladly watch any scene where she gets to be this sarcastic. And I do like a story climax that consists of Klingons laughing at Trip’s misfortune. That’s a good way to relieve the tension over a potential deadly battle that could cost lives.
The other plus it’s that they made it a male pregnancy, and did it with of Trip of all people. While it’s predictably played for laughs, at least they’re making fun of the bland white (and often borderline racist) character. It would have been problematic if they’d made it with someone like Travis Mayweather instead. And let’s not even open up the can of worms if they’d made this a female pregnancy story with Hoshi.
And as I said on the previous episode, I expect characters to stumble and make stupid mistakes the first time they’re out in a deep space mission like this one, especially someone as inexperienced as Trip. So overall, I would rate this one somewhere in the middle.
And I like the idea that holodeck technology could have originated from a non-Federation member species.
The interspecies pregnancy thing was dumb, and clumsily handled. That being said, devoting an early episode to a first contact situation made perfect sense.
I’ve been trying to remember if I actually enjoyed this series, because I’m not enjoying it now. These dated cliches were dated in 2001.
Yeah, I got nothing. First half of this was at least interesting with first contact with an alien species, which Archer I agree does actually handle petty well, and a truly alien environment on the Xyrellian ship. The second half… I guess as a dude I’m supposed to laugh. Haha, he pregnant! Pregnancy is for weak, hormonal women! *Face palm*
Comments have been very generous on the…mpreg (this is why I stay on the Internet, to learn new lingo like this). It could have been interesting, but it was handled very cringe and boring.
I have no memory of this episode and I know I’ve seen it once from my initial aborted attempt to watch this series in airdate order. You’d think a cis human male getting pregnant would be more memorable! Sounds like I’m doing myself a favor by skipping over this one this time around and continuing to enjoy the 3rd season.
“I felt like it was made as if the previous thirty years of television never happened.”
I’ve kind of wondered about this, because it’s obviously a deliberate choice being made, in many cases, by people who have been a part of that evolution of TV prior to working on Enterprise.
I think it’s an artifact of being a prequel to TOS. It seems like one big implication is that the show needs to eventually end in a place where we get Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the gang acting in the way they were shown to in the late ‘60s.
For all that TOS was ahead of its time in many respects (with the mere existence of Uhura being exhibit A), in others it’s very much a product of its time, especially with regard to sexism and a seeming American (or perhaps I should say Earthican) domination of Star Fleet.
I interpret the above problem as the writers walking a tightrope between what we understood the Federation to be in the early 2000s (and let’s not forget how much things have changed just in the last twenty years!) and how the Federation was understood by people in the late 1960s. I think the writers were right in that you can’t just ignore that history. Perhaps they overdid it. But I think presenting an Enterprise that ignored that history and hewed to the philosophy of the three 24th century series would also have sounded a false note as well.
The issue I have with this one, besides the obvious, is that every story about an alien parasite (and that’s essentially what it is in this case) both overlooks the fact that being able to parasitize something without common ancestry or coevolution is very unlikely, and also acts like immune systems aren’t a thing. I get that they wanted to tell this story, but I would have appreciated a throwaway line or something.
@52/Vulpes: Yeah, but you could raise the same objection about Spock, Deanna Troi, B’Elanna Torres, and every other interspecies hybrid in Trek. Like we talked about in the other thread, any kind of biological plausibility went out the window the moment they introduced humanoid aliens that could interbreed. Trek aliens are just metaphors for humans anyway.
Although some later episodes will give you the “throwaway line” you asked for, when Phlox talks about the medical obstacles of interspecies hybridization. I think it was raised as an issue for Jadzia and Worf in DS9 as well.
I’m not totally clear on why interspecies breeding ever really needed to be introduced. I get the desire to include romance, so I wonder if it’s a vestige of an attitude along the lines of “well, romance means makin’ babies, right?” I guess it was a central component of Spock’s character, so there’s that. But it’s a science fiction trope that is way overused.
There are major science fiction franchises that don’t include it, though. As far as I know, there’s no interspecies mating in the Halo series, either between the species in the Covenant or involving humans. I’ve never played the Mass Effect games, but apparently there’s no interspecies mating despite lots of romance.
@54/Vulpes: “I’m not totally clear on why interspecies breeding ever really needed to be introduced.”
I guess Roddenberry figured an alien regular would be more identifiable to the audience if he were part-human. It certainly enriched Spock as a character to have him torn between his heritages.
Also, I get the impression that Roddenberry may have originally intended Spock to look less alien than full-blooded members of his father’s species. In “Mudd’s Women,” Harry Mudd recognized him as “part-Vulcanian” on sight, implying that there was an obvious visual difference between a part-Vulcanian and a full one. So maybe the original thinking was that others of his species that occasionally showed up as guest stars would have a more elaborate makeup, but as a hybrid, Spock would have a simpler makeup that would be easier to apply to a series regular every week. Though if so, they obviously dropped that idea by the time “Balance of Terror” was made.
Although the idea of human-alien interbreeding was around in fiction long before Trek, of course, along with the fantasy/mythological concept of humans interbreeding with elves, faerie folk, gods, or the like.
I’m okay with interbreeding with elves, because taxonomically they would obviously be some sort of species of human—Homo sylvanus, perhaps.
Sure, it’s not as weird or as funny as it could have been, but I thought this one was fine, and for the same reasons some others enjoyed or at least tolerated it. I especially liked how alien the aliens were and the design of their ship. The only real problem I had was with Trip protesting that he didn’t want to be a “working mother”, as if there was something wrong with that. It’s fine to say you don’t want to be a parent because you’re concerned about how it might affect your career, but the verbage here seemed a little dated and sexist, especially for a show airing in the 21st century, albeit barely.
@56/Vulpes: “I’m okay with interbreeding with elves, because taxonomically they would obviously be some sort of species of human—Homo sylvanus, perhaps.”
J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with you: “Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring – even as a rare event…” (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, #153 to Peter Hastings [draft])
I hated T’Pol’s reaction to Trip’s predicament in this episode. It was the most sitcommy behavior in this thoroughly sitcommy episode. I don’t want to believe a Vulcan would be that snarky, especially when she didn’t know any of the facts of the matter and barely knows Trip besides.
This is at least the third time Berman and Braga have given us an alien species that reproduces in a strange, impractical, and unbelievable way, after “Favorite Son” and “Ashes to Ashes,” both on Voyager. I’m beginning to wonder if they both skipped out on health class in high school.
@60/terracinque: Writers of fiction are under no obligation to be scientifically accurate. For instance, Naren Shankar has an actual Ph.D. in physics, but he’s still been a showrunner on fantasy series like Farscape and Grimm. Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, is a skeptic about UFOs and the supernatural. And let’s not forget Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two Jewish guys who wrote comic books about the Norse gods being real. Fiction is not meant to assert the actual beliefs or real-world knowledge of its creators. It’s meant to tell a story.
Besides, Star Trek has had implausible alien biology ever since it introduced the half-human, half-“Vulcanian” Mr. Spock. Or had humanoid aliens at all, or incorporeal superbeings. How can life forms “evolve” to become incorporeal? Evolution is driven by reproductive success, and a glowing cloud of energy has no genes to propagate. So it’s disingenuous to claim that implausible Trek biology was somehow a late invention.
Also, you’re making the common but strange mistake of giving “Berman and Braga” credit for things that happened before they became a writing-producing team, which they only were on Enterprise. “Favorite Son” was written while Jeri Taylor was the showrunner of Voyager; Braga was still only a supervising producer at the time.
Krad I’m gutted you didn’t continue to give all the episodes a warp factor of 5 especially given its the least important part of the review but the Florida man is bloody hilarious!
Trip mentioned the personal odor of Klingons, which was a callback (or forward) to DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations.”
The H&I broadcast stripping of Enterprise just landed this episode, ironically, on Father’s Day.
Again, I didn’t hate this one. While a lot of the humor is cliched and unfunny, I also don’t think it’s played for big laughs. Admittedly, I like the first half better, when it was just getting to know this alien species. I feel like Trek should have done more episodes where they meet other aliens and just learn stuff. Even if it is — I won’t use the word “boring — slow paced.
Of course there had to be tension, and we got the pregnancy. I wish Trip had had consensual sex with her, because it would have been a nice turnaround on things. Well, he didn’t. And we got what we got, which to me wasn’t so terrible. I thought their relationship was rather sweet and quite believable.