Continuing on from "Broken Bow", I looked at some popular episodes suggested and figured this one would be okay. = Fade in. We're in the Armoury. The camera pans up to the upper level where Captain Archer is addressing a formal assembly of Enterprise crewmembers. We briefly glimpse a downcast senior staff on the lower level - all facing inwards, surrounding an object at the center of the room. The place is crowded out, so personnel are even occupying a rung each on the ladders. There's a Earth Starfleet flag in the corner... maybe at half mast. Archer: "The most difficult task facing any Captain, any crew, is the loss of a shipmate. We've come here to honour one of our own. In the time we knew him, he showed us just how much one life can truly matter." Phlox glances across to T'Pol, a look of sorrow on their faces. Reed too stares ahead, listening intently to his Captain's voice. "We will never forget what he did for us, and for the ship he loved so much." Archer continues his speech, while Hoshi and Mayweather look down to the space between. "We will go forward with renewed determination to complete this mission, so that his sacrifice won't just have been for the people on this ship, but for all the citizens of Earth." On the level below, we pan across a photonic torpedo with the top half of the casing removed. Inside is the laid-out form of Charles Tucker III. Fade Out. = After the titles, we rejoin the story with the NX-01 moving away from camera. An onscreen caption reads: Two Weeks Earlier We're inside the quarters of Sub-Commander T'Pol. Vulcan ceremonial candles at the side of her bunk bed. On it are Trip and T'Pol. Continuing his neuro-pressure therapy, although they seem to have progressed onto massaging each other's feet.
^This one is cool by me. Tucker: We just reroute the system taps, compress the antimatter stream before it reaches the injectors.
Cool! One of my absolute favorite episodes. As he massages the lovely T'Pol's foot, Trip waxes rhapsodic about...his engines. Trip: "Every simulation I run comes back with the same result. We'll be able to cruise at warp 5.0 with no field fluctuation. I'm talking about a ride so smooth you could build a house of cards on the warp reactor."
Trip: (pressing T'Pol's foot) "Which boosts our chances of finding the Xindi weapon in time." He touches the wrong nerver cluster, which causes her to react.
Trip: "Oh, sorry. You get me talking about the engines and I forget where I am. Don't know what it is about fine-tuning a piece of machinery."
T'Pol: "Lie on your back." Trip lies down, and T'Pol kneels behind him, with his head between her knees. (Did it suddenly get hot in here?...)
^ Actually it's beginning to read like a library book that's on loan all the time... Trip: "You know, you made this sound a whole lot worse than it is." Whose idea was it do this episode again? Like Malcolm on Movie Night, I'm only here to see stuff blow up... honest!
T'Pol: "We haven't gotten to the more challenging postures." She leans over him, positioning her hands on his ribcage...giving him a peek at the spectacular view underneath her tunic.
Woohoo! A new shot of the Enterprise seen from above! Beautiful but too short. Trip is now in Engineering looking at a large Plasma screen display of the matter stream. He moves to a Com panel, just as another crewmember hands him a padd to look at. Trip: "Tucker to the bridge." On the Bridge, Archer leans over Mayweather's station to press a button.
Trip: "We're all set down here. I'll need at least four point nine... ...to get the plasma hot enough to compress the stream."