Episode Report Card Sara M: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Degra Dearest
By Sara M | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.27.2004
Somewhere else on the ship, some guy is holding his fairly damaged arm while another guy uses a future fire extinguisher to douse the fire. Trip and T'Pol run in and deal with things. Well, Trip deals with things. T'Pol kind of sits there. Trip summons Phlox to see to the injured guy, then says that it's a good thing he wasn't sleeping.
Meanwhile, there's a small hull breach.
Archer and his Xindi friends are in the space morgue. Archer pulls open some drawers to reveal three funky-looking aliens. Degra and the Other Guy recognize them; Archer says he found them on Earth in the past, about to release a bio-weapon. Degra seems to believe Archer, but Other Guy is slightly more dubious. He needs more evidence.
Archer leads the small group to a room full of security devices. Eventually, he extracts a small canister. Degra holds it while Archer explains that it contains the bio-weapon toxin. Degra's like, "Uh, then I'd rather not be holding this, thanks." Archer says that Degra's engineers can check it out all they want. Other Guy says that all this proves is that the "Reptilians" disobeyed The Council. It doesn't prove Archer's assertions that the Xindi have been misled by "trans-dimensional" aliens. Archer grabs the canister from Degra and puts it back in its chamber, apparently deciding that he's going to take his toys and go home.
Trip screams at Seth MacFarlane for inserting himself into a television show when he has no discernible acting ability. Phlox runs up and says that T'Pol told on Trip, and now Phlox is ordering him to get six hours of sleep. Trip says he'll give him two. Phlox says six. Trip says three. Phlox says four and that's final. Trip agrees, saying that he'll never buy a car from Phlox. Which shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish, since I was under the impression that cars no longer existed in the future. So this is roughly comparable to me telling Sars to never sell me a butter-churner. Trip and Phlox have a brief standoff, and then Trip leaves to go to bed. And, hopefully, to take a shower.
The hull breach gets worse. How has no one noticed this yet?
Phlox shows the Xindi a collage of pictures of a guy who looks like he's been out in the sun too long. Degra asks how the guy died; Archer says he had "some kind of cellular degeneration." In that case, he may want to consider switching to Verizon, which purports to offer the best coverage of any provider in America. Phlox says the alien died because he was from a different dimension with completely different physical laws, and so he could not exist in our universe. Archer says that the aliens were building "spheres" that would transform our universe into one that was hospitable to them, and the dead alien must have been a test subject. In which case, I think those spheres need some improvements. And the complete and total implausibility of this little storyline may have already been covered, but…no. I'm no Stephen Hawking, but I did take one quantum physics class, and I managed to pay enough attention in it to know that this is impossible. Something from another dimension cannot conceive of our dimension, let alone be able to build a device that would change it. Anyway, Degra and the Other Guy realize that if the trans-dimensional aliens get their way, everyone in this dimension will die. So the humans and the Xindi have to work together. But if the Xindi destroy all humans, then they'll all be killed too.