A Targ reaches up and snatches something off a table. That's not a bad beginning for any episode. Some deathly serious-looking Klingons (is there any other kind?) stand around as another Klingon is hauled in and strapped to a chair. He protests about a commuted death sentence and gets an injection of green nasty instead that makes his forehead smooth out. (Klingons and medical experiments go together like compassionate conservatives and nation-building.) Back on Earth, Hoshi and Phlox stagger away contented from their long promised dinner of egg drop soup. (Wait, that stagger is just Phlox's phunny walk. Nice touch!) Dark figures creep forward and ambush them; though Hoshi respectably demonstrates her black belt she is unable to keep the doctor from being abducted.

Trip transfers to Columbia and starts whipping his new engineering crew (when not daydreaming about T'Pol). Captain Hernandez conveys their hatred to him over dinner but at last NX-02 can move. Searching for Phlox, Archer gets no help from Starfleet except noting a transporter trace around the abduction. He assks T'Pol to mindmeld with Hoshi for more details. (This scene was excellent, placing the melder inside the memories of the meldee, as was also seen in the Vulcan arc). They determine the creeps were Rigellian, and that they left Earth after nabbing Phlox. Inside the impossibly high armory Reed dials Starfleet to investigate the trace and instead connects with some idiot wearing a trash bag wishing he was Bester. They meet at night and talk cryptic nonsense.

That little meaningless section aside, Enterprise sets off in pursuit. They find the Rigellian craft blasted and lifeless; Malcolm conceals the attacker from Archer and, after being outed, gets thrown in the brig like the traitor he is. Phlox learns from a Klingon doctor (John Schuck? Always rules!) that Soong's Augments so alarmed the High Council that they attempted to make their own Klingon Augments (an ingenious answer to the "ridges" riddle). One of the Targments (is this the guy in the chair at the beginning?) caught a sniffle and mutated the virus into a lethal pathogen; Phlox has been invited to work on the problem (with the help of a hastily slaughtered dissection victim). Meanwhile the Targments invade Enterprise and sufficiently muck up Earth's most advanced technology such that the technobabble pressure builds up. The only quick answer is to speed up to Warp 5.2.

An intriguing and consistent episode that fires on all cylinders but one (Reed). I had no idea this episode would be so good.