Enterprise is on its way to investigate a black hole in a trinary star system. A safe little routine mission, that will allow them to study some scientific data and "get some pretty pictures," with no real danger attached.
But as they travel toward the black hole, the crew's behavior begins to strain. People become obsessed with routine tasks, be it Trip's adjustments to Archer's chair, Reed's work on a new alert system, or Archer's work on a foreword to a biography of his father. As the obsessions grow to maniacal levels, only T'Pol is left unaffected. As the ship draws closer and closer to the black hole, she must take a desperate gamble to save the crew - if she doesn't destroy the ship in the process!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Archer: As early as the pilot episode, we've seen Archer guided by (sometimes haunted by) memories of his father. Being asked to write a brief preface encapsulating his thoughts about his father is already stressful for him. It's little surprise that he becomes fixated on this task once the radiation begins to affect him.
To his credit, he is able to draw himself out of his state sufficiently to help T'Pol save the ship at the show's climax. A bit like Kirk, once it is spelled out to him that his ship and crew are in imminent danger, he is able to wrest himself away from altered states enough to fight the danger.
T'Pol: She notices how uncharacteristic the behavior of the crew members is, her concerns beginning when Trip gives her an uncharacteristic telling-off for interrupting him while he's working on the captain's chair. In early episodes, T'Pol would likely have dismissed his behavior as human irrationality. By this point, she knows Trip, and knows that he would not behave in such a way normally. When she realizes everyone is affected, she comes up with a plan to not only preserve the ship and data (which again, may have been the priority for early Season One T'Pol), but also to save the crew - even though doing so risks the ship itself.
THOUGHTS
The script makes good use of an in media res opening, with the crew unconscious and T'Pol recording what may be the ship's final hours into her log. This dramatic start is probably in part designed to keep viewers hooked through a story that has a fairly slow build-up. It isn't until near the first commercial break that it becomes clear that the crew's behavior is being affected, because at first it simply seems that the crew's quirks are being brought out by the extra down-time of the trip. It is only in the second act that the obsessions become outright maniacal, so a strong "hook" was probably needed to keep viewers from becoming restless.
Even so, that points to a major way in which the structure is effective. All of the characters' obsessions arise naturally out of their core characterizations. An unaffected Phlox would still want to give Mayweather a once-over, particularly in light of the events of Dead Stop. An unaffected Hoshi would still be concerned that she get her family recipe right; Reed would still be insistent on creating an alert protocol; Trip would still be unable to resist doing a bit of extra tinkering on top of his basic chair adjustments.
As the ship draws closer to the black hole, those traits become more and more exaggerated, until they begin to seem downright dangerous. It's not quite an episode of characters behaving out of character - more an episode that, in reflection of T'Pol's advice to Archer for his foreword, takes a single trait of each character and makes that trait into a reflection of the entire character. That each character ends up monstrously distorted is a logical result of taking just one trait of any human being and extending it to ridiculous proportions.
Well-directed and smartly paced, the episode is a solid one. It benefits from some eye-catching CGI in the debris field climax. It does feel as if Archer and T'Pol get the ship out of danger a bit too easily, and other than introducing a primitive version of TOS' "Red Alert" system, it doesn't seem that anything here will have any lingering effects. Still, it's another solid entertainment. Even if the average quality remains about on the level of this episode and The Communicator, I doubt I'll have any strong complaints, even if the series isn't quite raising its game for Year Two the way it really needed to.
Rating: 7/10.
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Next Episode: Vanishing Point
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