2.08: The Communicator

[Dave]

via SCIFI WIRE -- Rick Berman: "We have a show called 'The Communicator.' Right after a disguised mission to a pre-Warp culture, Archer and Reed come back and suddenly realize they've left a communicator on the surface. This is the adventures and misadventures of going back down and trying to find it and being captured by soldiers and accused of being spies of an enemy force on the same planet. It ends up being a Prime Directive type of episode. Archer has to decide how much he's willing to let a pre-warp culture learn and whether he is, in fact, willing to give his life to keep the fact that he's from another world a secret. That's a terrific episode."

According to the official site, the episode draws on the McCoy/Kirk exchange in 'A Piece of the Action,' in which the doctor confesses he left his communicator behind on Sigma Iotia II. While in that episode Kirk only joked that the lost piece of technology "upsets the whole percentage," Reed's loss of his communicator is shown to have serious consequences for the planet's population.

According to www.treknation.com, filming finished on Friday, September 20 after a seven-day shoot on standing sets and new alien locations. Features cast members Scott Bakula, Dominic Keating, and Linda Park in alien prosthetics.

 

[Neo]

a good epsiode which us ethe prime directive and draws on archers strengths as a captain...

one o f my favs

 

[Dave]

Yes, a good episode. More like this would be fine by me, but we've probably had too many directly concerning the Prime Directive.

The end shows that even though the crew reclaimed all the missing and stolen items, x-rays and photographs, they have still contaminated the culture anyway. They have still left the impression that a rival power has genetically altered super-soldiers, radar invisible aircraft and particle weapons.