Review

Like Ent: Fight or Flight, this is another well thought out episode that uses the prequel premise well. We are shown a few annoying things though. For one, the Xyrillians are a new, made up race. Again, I'm wondering why it was necessary to introduce a new race rather than use one shown before. I am willing to cut a lot of slack in this case though seeing as how I'm at a loss to come up with a race anything like the Xyrillians previously featured that would have been appropriate for use here. I was also pleased at how alien the Xyrillians were. It was a most credible rare treat to show Trip having such a hard time adapting to the Xyrillian atmosphere. Unfortunately though, the episode is clouded a bit because we're shown a fully functional holodeck, sans interactive characters. We've seen technology this advanced as early as TAS, but that's still a very long way off. Granted, Enterprise did not acquire this technology. But the Klingons did. This episode, as well as the use of a holodeck on TAS both seem to contradict TNG, in which all the characters were amazed at the holodeck. This is only a minor inconsistency though. It's possible creating landscapes was nothing new by the 24th century, but creating people and interactive settings was. Then again, in Voy: Once Upon a Time, Janeway mentioned having played the Flotter program when she was a child. Given that she's middle aged, this connotes interactive holodeck technology being in widespread use at least twenty or thirty years before the first episode of TNG. It would seem TNG has been contradicted on three fronts now. We'll just have to accept that on TNG, holographic technology was "new to them," or that it made significant advances, warranting a renewed "wow" reaction. That said, this episode's story was quite amusing without becoming too silly. I love how Trip was forced to admit to Klingons that he was pregnant. It much reminded me of Spock's line in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: "Please, Captain. Not in front of the Klingons." (Which was a relatively nice scene in an otherwise abysmal movie.) The crew handles the situation as professionally as they can; I rather liked how arrogant and presumptuous T'Pol was in the beginning regarding Trip's alleged behavior. I also liked how she made up for it by using her superior knowledge of Klingon culture to assist in the diplomatic negotiations. She damn near cracked a joke at the end too with her little history book statistic. Suffice it to say, I liked T'Pol more in this episode than in previous ones. She's starting to show that, yeah, she's a stuffy annoying killjoy, but she can be cool at times.