4.13: United

[Dave]

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All I know about this one is that Commander Shran guest stars in it.

If I go out on a limb: from the title, the appearance of Shran, and the previous comments from Manny Coto that this season would see multipul mini-arcs, then if it were to continue on from the last episode, I might hazard a guess that it has something to do with Federation founding. Pure speculation of course!

 

[Dave]

from Trek Today

Archer tries to unify the Andorians, Tellarites and Vulcans in a plan to capture a marauder ship threatening to destabilize the region.

That's all the rumours there are!

 

[Mariel]

Archer does unite the Tellerite, Andorians and Vulcans to find the marauder ship. Trip and Reed are traped on the ship and try to disable it. They succeed in disableing the warp drive but the Romulans still control most of the systems. The Romulans force Reed and Trip to turn on the warp drive by traping them in a room where the radiation is high. They escape the marauder and it returns to Romulus. The show the 'Pilot' of the marauder and it's a very pale and sickly looking Andorian.
:blpaw:

 

[Dave]

Trapped aboard the mysterious drone ship that's been terrorizing the region, Trip and Malcolm work to outwit the Romulans, who are piloting the vessel via remote control, in order to save their own lives and stop the feuding Andorians and Tellarites from going to war.

While working to save his crewmen, Archers attempt to forge an alliance between Andorian Commander Shran and Tellarite leader Gral to face their common enemy, is set back when Talas dies of her injuries after being shot last week by the Tellerites. Archer finds himself in the middle of a duel to the death, when he attempts to uphold Andorian customs.

Ray mentioned last week that the Romulan drone was a 'Q-ship'. I've been thinking that it is actually similar to a pirate vessel. Deception is one of the ancient methods used by pirates and is still practised today in the South China Seas. In earlier centuries deception meant disguising as a friendly vessel by keeping pirates out of view and flying a flag of another country. Today they more often dress up and disguise the boat as a police vessel, but the holo-emitter is just a more sophisticated version of the same idea.

The Archer-Shran fight was very derivitive. Doesn't this just happen too often, but it is most especially like the Kirk-Spock fight in 'Amok Time'. However, everything that happened did all contibute to a spirit of co-operation between the species, and a good explanation of why the Federation finally forms.

I liked the Trip-Malcolm exchanges. They seemed like a continuation of the episode where they were stuck on a shuttle together. It was good to see Hoshi and Travis working together too.

The ending was again unexpected. Even though I've read about next weeks episode I didn't expect that to happen. As the last five minutes came, I began to wonder why this was a three-part story, as it seemed to have been concluded. So, I have to give them a thumbs-up for that.