The earth-saving trip to Azati Prime takes a detour to explore a crashed Xindi vessel on a dirt-dead world. While crawling through the ship they find dead Bugs, Hoshi gets some chitters to translate, and Travis gets an assault shuttlecraft with Bug-butt chairs. Behind a sealed door is a hatchery containing Bug eggs, one of which squirts Archer (what, they've never watched "Alien" on movie night?). Phlox cleans him up but he's been "reverse-imprinted" and spends the episode doing his absolute best to protect the babies. (Like Trip in "Unexpected" only much much worse.) All kiss-kiss now, Hayes asks Reed for more target practice. (In "Catwalk" movie night was Tuesday. Now it's Monday. Is every night movie night?)

Archer's rationalizations work for awhile, particularly with Trip, but soon delays mount up and he asks to deplete the ship's antimatter reserves. After T'Pol refuses he relieves her. (She insists they discuss the decision with Forrest- can they just call back and forth from the Expanse now?) Using an Activision shout out Hayes shows Reed how to disable Bug engines but when an actual ship shows up he interprets "disable" as "destroy" and Archer fires him too. With everyone fired Archer puts Hayes in the command chair then goes back to his babies. Phlox and Trip threaten Archer with Starfleet order 104 Section C (yea! I love "Doomsday Machine") but they back down.

Trip decides to throw the rulebook out the window, and using "neuropressure" as an excuse he waltzes right by dopey Chang and instigates mutiny. (T'Pol joins so she can resume wearing her Starfleet uniform and shoot sharks.) They confront Hayes on the bridge where Travis slaps the Major down in revenge for the bloody lip. Meanwhile Trip beams down and stuns a Bug-covered Archer, bringing him back to the ship. Phlox explains the Bug juice while Archer gets some rest, so acting captain T'Pol and Trip avoid the death penalty since they were just "protecting this mission."

Not all this episode was so great, as finding a crash "just in time" is too lucky, and taking a spacesuit off for a facial is too stupid. And it's sadly funny how when Archer is decisive he's also not command-worthy. But what did work was how well the script included everybody- even Porthos- and I really liked the creepy score. The Great Nursemaid mentioned that Xindi consider humans ruthless and that this is a chance to prove their Bug-brains wrong. I do hope this observation comes back later to redeem him.


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