The Enterprise responds to a distress call by a cargo freighter, which is transporting its passenger in a cryogenic stasis in order to conserve resources during its 5-month voyage. The stasis pod is developing a malfunction, and Archer volunteers Trip to help repair it.
When the beautiful young passenger wakes up, Trip discovers that she is actually Kaitamma (Padma Lakshmi), an insterstellar monarch who has been kidnapped for ransom by the freighter's crew. The freigher's captain knocks Trip unconscious and takes off, with Trip and his hostage still aboard. Now Trip must hatch a desperate escape plan with the not-entirely-cooperative Kaitamma, while Archer attempts to use his quarry's co-conspirator to find the escaped captain.
CHARACTERS
Capt. Archer: Very much in the background this week. We do get to see him play both "bad cop" and "good cop" with the criminal captured by Enterprise. He doesn't get very far being the "bad cop," but manages quite a bit of success when he conspires with T'Pol to deceive the criminal.
Trip: Trip gets to take the lead, and Connor Trinneer seems to enjoy the expanded role he receives. Trip's engineering skills are again shown to good effect, as he uses his knowledge of basic ship systems and how they interact to stage an escape, then steer an unfamiliar escape pod in for a successful landing on a habitable world. We yet again see his faith in Archer, as he insists that Archer will find them on the planet.
Hot Alien Space Babe of the week: Padma Lakshmi is Kaitamma, the royal hostage of the space criminals. Lakshmi is very pretty, fulfilling most of her function in the episode. Unfortunately, her performance dips considerably once Trip manages to get the Universal Translator working, with her line deliveries reflecting the skill and nuance normally restricted to a high school drama production. Her lack of acting skills make the scenes between her and Trip the least enjoyable of the episode, and the attempts to create sexual tension between them fail miserably.
SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT...
Prior to Kaitamma actually waking up and being revealed as a prisoner, not one single person aboard Enterprise considers for even one second that it's possible that these two strangers ferrying a beautiful woman as cargo might have some nasty, ulterior motive? Particularly when the freighter captain resists Archer's quite reasonable offer to get them to the planet faster? Surely, asking to wake her up briefly simply to confirm that she is what the freigher crew say she is, and not - as turns out to be the case - a prisoner would be a logical, reasonable step to take? Yet not one single person even thinks to suggest this. Not Archer, with his hotheaded streak. Not Hoshi, who would probably empathize with the fear of being kidnapped. Not T'Pol, who would see the logic of the possibility. Not Reed, with his suspicious mind. All of them, apparently, have had a collective lobotomy for the purposes of this episode.
THOUGHTS
The first half of Precious Cargo is actually fairly entertaining. The story zips through the set-up in a briskly-paced 10 minutes, and goes to its first commercial break with Trip already a prisoner of the unscrupulous freighter captain. By the midpoint, Trip has made his escape. It's clearly a throwaway episode. But with a strong performance by Trinneer and a script boosted by a fair amount of humor, it seems on-track to be a highly watchable one.
Then it all becomes so very, very bad. Once Trip and the girl are on the planet, the episode has nowhere to go except to wait for the freighter captain and the Enterprise crew to arrive - which they conveniently manage to do at pretty much the same time. As a result, we get a couple of interminable scenes of Trip and the girl bickering, in a way that's supposed to make us think of sexual tension. It doesn't, even with the girl showing a lot of thigh and Trip stripped to his waist. The scene that ends with them kissing is the worst-scripted and worst-acted of the episode.
If great drama lies in making things as difficult for the heroes as possible, this episode does the exact opposite. Imagine if Trip and the girl were under constant video surveillance, or if the freighter captain had restrained Trip with some kind of harness that would allow him enough freedom to work, but not so much as to be able to just walk out when he opens the convenient hatchway, forcing Trip to work for his escape. Imagine if there was no Class M planet around, leaving Trip and the girl with a very limited oxygen supply, dependent on the Enterprise finding them quickly. Or if the planet they landed on was genuinely perilous, leaving Trip and the girl in constant imminent danger from the moment they arrived. Everything happens just a bit too easily, and so there is no real feeling that the characters have great obstacles to overcome.
With no sense of tension, a weak guest actress, and a final stretch that bogs down with poor scripting and weak acting, this initially promising episode ends up being a disappointingly poor...
Rating: 3/10.
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