The Enterprise encounters a silent ship that opens fire on them after their peaceful overtures, leading Archer to decide to turn tail and head back to Earth for weaponry upgrades. Meanwhile, Hoshi attempts to find out what Reed's favourite food is for his birthday celebration.

After some hit and miss episodes, this one is actually pretty good. It's good to see the problem of the underpowered Enterprise being addressed at this point as it's already been mentioned that they've been lucky so far in taking on races not as advanced as they are, or maybe only a little more. The introduction of phasers is good, with the 'phase cannons' looking neat and showing their effectiveness pretty well. The mystery ship is an interesting puzzle and one that will hopefully be picked up on further down the line. The tension is kept up throughout as Archer attempts every way he can think of to contact this other vessel, before having to come up with amore violent solution to save his ship.

I like the way Reed and Tucker are beginning to have a kind of friendly rivalry now which works well with their characters and brings Reed into things more, but the birthday stuff is a little too sickly in places, especially at the end with Reed's cake and Archer clapping him on the back in a manly way. Yes, it's mildly amusing to watch Hoshi desperately trying to find out what kind of food the lieutenant would like, but it's a subplot where a little goes a long way. And what would have happened if she'd found out his favourite food was snails? Would she have got chef to bake a snail cake?

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