The Enterprise finds a colony of people less advanced and decides to make contact in disguise. However, they soon discover there's a lot more going on than they first thought.

It seems like a fresh story, this, because it's the first time a starship crew has done this kind of quiet infiltration to observe. In actual fact, we've been lulled into a false sense of security on the basis that this kind of story has been done multiple times by other Trek series, the closest approximation coming with TNG's Who Watches the Watchers. This is almost a carbon copy, with the slight alteration that it turns out someone else is messing around with the fabric of local society as well as the Enterprise crew, and their attempts to find him run the risk of alerting the locals to alien incursion.

Now, this is a good twist in the story, when Archer says 'But it looks like you don't belong here either', but that's about the only twist there is. And from here on in, it's basically a matter of outwitting the bad guy and a lot of shooting of energy weapons until the goodies win. It's all fair enough, but you feel that by the end of the story the whole cultural contamination issue has gone right out of the window, and with Archer doing his best Kirk impression and snogging a local woman, there's nothing of much surprise or relevance going on. It's a shame as much more could have been done with the premise, especially Hoshi, who is taken along to provide translation assistance yet at no point is required to translate anything at all. So why bother making such a big deal out of it? It's pleasant enough and entertaining, but there's simply no depth to this tale beyond the obvious.

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