Episode 59: The Shipment

Archer's on-again off-again humanity is on-again in this episode written by Chris Black and Brent V. Friedman. Not long ago, our enterprising captain was torturing an alien soldier just to find out where some of his ship's supplies have been taken but in this little yarn he finally succeeds in finding a Xindi outpost, confirms that the outpost is producing a substance used in the Xindi weapon, yet still decides to go all sympathetic on us and decide against blowing up the production facility or killing any of the Xindi.

Huh?

Archer decides to trust his instincts and believe that the local group of arboreal Xindi did not know that the substance they were refining was to be used in a weapon of mass destruction. And the leader of the arboreal Xindi group decides he will trust the human captain he's just met and sabotage his own production to help him.

Huh?

It's interesting that Archer decides his instincts are trustworthy when he is attempting to "read" a member of an alien race that is completely foreign to him and that is part of his mortal enemy. The man is xenophobic most of the time but a master in alien behaviours when it really counts.

"The Shipment" is also remarkable in that it features an all-male cast: other than a few brief appearances by T'Pol, every character who receives on-screen time (be they human, arboreal Xindi, reptilian Xindi or humanoid Xindi) is male. It's a man's man's man's man's man's Delphic Expanse, let me tell you.

We do learn some important stuff, though. We find out that Enterprise has been inside the Expanse for more than three months at this point, far outlasting any ship staffed by those weak-kneed Vulcans.

And we learn that the Xindi were once six species but that avian Xindi were exterminated in the final battle of the century-long civil war that ended when the reptilians and insectizoids blew up their home planet.

What I can't figure out is why, if Kemocite is integral to every component of Xindi technology (as Tucker and T'Pol establish), Archer decides against destroying a key Kemocite production facility when he could do so with apparent ease.

And why, when he, Tucker and the Army Major have two of the key Xindi leaders in their sites (literally), they don't take advantage of the situation and knock them off.

"The Shipment" is not a great episode. But it's certainly not the worst of the bunch.