3 – Fight or Flight

Grade: C+

Summary

After being in space for over two weeks, the Enterprise finally comes across some evidence of intelligent life. In fact, the crew finds a drifting spaceship, and after receiving no response to their hails, the crew decides to board the ship and investigate. What they find has a very deep impact on Ensign Sato.

Commentary

One of the best things about this episode is the focus on the linguistic expert, Ensign Hoshi Sato. For this reason alone, this will be one of the most memorable episodes of the first season of the series. With that said, however, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the heavy-handed metaphor of the slug that Hoshi has somehow befriended. I think they could have toned that down a lot and it would have been a better episode.

So far, I like Archer as a captain. He seemed to know exactly what to say and how to lead his team to help get the best performance out of each of them. That’s something that all good leaders have in common – they know how to get their people to do their best work, and it’s a different answer for each person.

It’s nice to see that Archer is doing what he feels is right and not just going along with whatever T’Pol is telling him. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll like the Vulcans in this series.

Of Note

I think it was weird that they would just leave the slug on some random planet. They shouldn’t have taken it with them from the other planet in the first place, but introducing it to another planet without knowing what effect it would have on that environment sure seems irresponsible. Well, this was the first time humans were out around the stars, so maybe they hadn’t thought of that yet.