A singularly uninspiring episode, given that it’s three days later and we still haven’t gotten the thread onto the second page. 
The sudden-time-travel thing (walk through the door, and poof) was kinda cool, but for some reason it made me suspicious. So over the next few minutes, I watched to see if I was right, and I think I am. And it ruined the show for me.
The storyline is a throwaway. Nothing really accomplished; we go back to the previous stalemate. No forward movement. Blah blah blah.
So what really was the point of this episode?
Saving money.
It obviously wasn’t Detroit; it was just an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. Shot at night, no less, to hide the distant palm trees. No money on building complicated sets; just dress a warehouse a little bit. No fancy special effect for the time-travel leap. A couple of Xindi costumes. A couple of phaser shots. Two guest actors, a couple of stunt guys, and a handful of extras.
Translation: Cheap.
Seriously. Look at it. The street scenes were obviously shot guerrilla style: camera in the back seat, actors in the front, and they drive around in regular traffic. No tow rig, no special lighting, nothing like that. They had generic prop-closet beer in the guy’s fridge. They made up a clunky and obviously fake menu at the fast-food board. The most expensive prop in the show was the big “bio-reactor” device, and that was just a big silver box on a cement-mixer stand with a large parabolic reflector from an oversized heater in the middle.
Then the actual plot, such as it is, winds up with a rooftop chase, jumping over an alleyway, and a quick fistfight by a fan. What is this, Kolchak: The Night Stalker?
The moments of cute comedy, with T’Pol considering fast food or Archer jumping away from a dog in a car, are totally negated by a calorie-free plot and sloppy, sloppy writing. Example: They get in a shootout on the roof. Do they stop to think for a moment what might happen if one of their phaser rays misses both the Xindi and that little brick shack he’s hiding behind? Wouldn’t it go zipping off into the Los Angeles — er, I mean, Detroit — sky? And maybe hit something or somebody else? Aren’t they concerned about that at all? They should be, considering what a big deal they made out of setting their phasers to “kill” because “stun” has no effect on a Xindi warrior.
Or another example: They steal a car with basically no effort, checking only for alarms and animals. That car starts to run out of gas. They then worry about obtaining fuel, which means obtaining currency, which means stealing from a bank (and how does Archer know what an ATM is, anyway?) and introducing possible timeline complications. Seems a whole lot simpler just to use the fancy computer gizmo to slip a digital mickey to a fuel pump, or, even better, pull over and steal another car. If you have to buy your fuel with cash, you have to interact with a local, which seems like it should be kept to a minimum. But the writers just aren’t thinking about what they’re doing, and as a result the characters behave like morons.
Sorry. Stupid plot and an overall vibe that screams “budget conscious.” Total waste of an hour.
