Landing on a planet, a pathogen in the atmosphere mutates Archer, Malcolm and Hoshi into strange alien creatures that are on the ‘hunted’ list of another race.

Maybe I’m too harsh on Enterprise, but it’s episodes like these that make me hope as hard as I can that it gets cancelled this season. While I don’t expect the whole Expanse plotline to take over at the expense of standalone stories, there’s no excuse for this kind of half-assed over-tired dreadful episode, especially so early in the season. Like some kind of crappier version of TNG’sGenesis, or maybe even Identity Crisis, something LeVar Burton should have spotted when he was signed up to direct this one, changing crew members into another form is never a particularly good idea. Here it’s just painful, with Bakula, Keating and Park doing their best ‘alien acting’, which naturally consists of putting on silly voices and capering about as if they’re in panto. It’s embarrassing for them, it’s embarrassing for the audience (unless kids under five are the only ones still watching the show), and it does nothing to advance the plot.

Most annoying, though, is that you can take this kind of messing around in later years set countless centuries hence; here, the solution is just horrifically unlikely. The transporter is untested, yet Dr Phlox can easily do a spot of gene resequencing and everyone’s back to normal? What??? The affected crew members do at least have the decency to show some after-effects of their ordeal, but this was a major transformation. You’d think they’d have a lot more issues about it than they seem to. And this is not to mention the way Phlox just whips up an anti-virus within 10 minutes of getting a sample of T’Pol’s DNA which, let’s face it, should be all over the damn ship by now. The other aliens have been working on a cure for 60 years! Just because they didn’t have a Vulcan, you’d expect them to have got somewhere other than ‘set fire to the infected’ by now.

It looks like something interesting is actually going to happen at the end of the episode when Archer tells Phlox not to destroy the virus that mutated him and the others. But rather than his thinking being that they could one day use the virus as some kind of plague on the Xindi or another race, instead he just says he doesn’t want the race to die with the mutating virus. How does this make any sense? The race has died through natural selection. The only reason the line’s been artificially extended is through the virus, which takes any old species and mutates them. None of the originals are left, so what use does it serve to keep the vestiges of a dead race in sickbay? At worst it could result in a plague throughout the Enterprise, and at best Archer has to pick a race to infect with the virus, thereby destroying another culture for the sake of the false continuation of another. Since when did he become god of the universe?

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