A message from the Vulcan High Command sets T'Pol on a security mission, which she cannot share with her shipmates. She needs a shuttle, a pilot, and four to five days to complete her task, rendezvous with a Vulcan ship, and return to Enterprise. To this list of needs, she adds one personal request: that Archer accompany her.
Archer learns that, 17 years earlier, T'Pol had been sent to bring back six Vulcan agents who had been surgically altered in order to infiltrate criminal societies. She successfully apprehended five, but the sixth - a man named Menos (Bruce Davison) - escaped. Now Menos has resurfaced, and T'Pol is assigned to finish the job.
Menos is located and apprehended quite easily. But once he is in custody, the real challenge begins. Menos stirs repressed memories and emotions in T'Pol. Has she really been sent to pursue an innocent man? And what exactly happened when they last faced each other, nearly two full decades before?
CHARACTERS
Capt. Archer: His Vulcan prejudices remain. He is far from pleased to have his ship diverted by the Vulcan High Command, acting rather stiffly around T'Pol up until the moment she makes her personal request. Still, his mistrust of the Vulcans is not at the levels of near-clinical paranoia seen in the earliest episodes. When even T'Pol begins questioning herself, face-to-face with Menos, Archer is the one who stays focused on the mission. He may not trust the Vulcans, but he no longer despises them enough to believe that they truly sent T'Pol on a pointless mission.
T'Pol: This episode sees her Vulcan reserve shaken badly. As repressed memories come flooding back, so do feelings of guilt and self-doubt, emotions that she simply is not equipped to deal with. As a result, her judgment becomes much less reliable. She takes impulsive actions. When she searches her prisoner's ship, she does so hurriedly, rather than conducting a thorough investigation. This episode sees her making her trust in Archer explicit, however, and she has sufficient faith in him to allow him to make a final choice that she isn't able to.
Trip: Put in the position of acting captain, and discovers that he doesn't really enjoy the role. Phlox asks him to make what would certainly be an unpopular decision; Reed asks him to make a decision that runs counter to his own interests, but would benefit the ship. He becomes indecisive in both instances. Clearly, he likes things better when Archer is around to make the tough choices for him.
Villain(?) of the Week: Veteran character actor Bruce Davison is a fine choice for T'Pol's quarry. Always an intelligent actor, Davison makes it easy to believe that this fairly unassuming figure is also cunning enough to have evaded capture when all those with him failed to. He is very good at playing with shades of gray, keeping the viewer initially uncertain as to Menos' guilt or innocence. He plays right on the line between the pure sincerity of an innocent, pleading for his freedom and his family, and the string-tugging of a master manipulator. You can't be quite sure which he is. By turns he seems sinister, then pathetic, often sliding between one and the other within the same line reading. A very strong guest performance.
THOUGHTS
After one bad episode and one extremely pedestrian one, Enterprise gets back on form. We get a bit more development of the Vulcans of this series, more hints that they are perhaps not quite as purely honorable as they would like other races to believe. We know, at the very least, that they have the capability to surgically alter agents, and that they are quite willing to dispatch these agents into other societies to further their interests. If this is not disquieting to Archer, then it certainly should be.
We also see that T'Pol's faith in her own people is not what it once was. Discovering that the sanctuary on P'Jem was being used as a cover for a treaty-violating listening post clearly rattled her more than she was willing to show. I doubt very much that early Season One T'Pol would have seriously entertained doubts about Menos' guilt, once the High Command had sent her after him. When Menos pleads his innocence to Season Two T'Pol, she is already more than half-willing to believe him.
The episode does an enjoyable role-reversal with T'Pol and Archer. With her repressed emotions yanked abruptly to the surface, T'Pol becomes the impulsive one, and Archer becomes the voice of reason. Both Bakula and Blalock play this reversal very well. However, T'Pol's emotions come a little too easily to the surface, with too little resistance, for me to fully believe that the emotion-hating Vulcan would truly allow such a display - not without a bit more of a fight.
The story is well-told, and the primary actors all do excellent jobs. The plot itself isn't exactly galaxy-shattering stuff, but there's at least a sense that events of this episode might lay foundation for later material.
Rating: 7/10.
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