Now I’m imagining T’Pol’s ass singing “Mac Tonight.”
An even more fascinating question is “How do we know that 40 Eridani is, in fact, 16 light-years away, when we haven’t invented warp drive yet?”
I’m glad you asked.
We measure the distances to nearby stars using a trick called trigonometric parallax. The Earth orbits the sun at a distance of 1 A.U. (about 150 million km), riight? So, we measure the star’s position in the sky in January, then we measure its position again in July. Because our telescopes aren’t standing in the same place at those two different times, thanks to the Earth’s orbital motion, the star will appear to move slightly, relative to the more distant background stars and galaxies. The less it appears to move, the farther away it is.
And when I say it moves “slightly”, I mean really really slightly. Even the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is seen to move by less than one arc-second of angle when viewed by this method. (There are 60 arc-seconds in an arc-minute, and 60 arc-minutes in a degree, so one arc-second is 1/3600 of one degree – way too small an angle to be seen by the naked eye.)
Incidentally, this is where the term “parsec” comes from. One parsec is the distance a star would have to be from the Earth in order for its perceived movement from January to July – its parallax angle – to be one arc-second. If a star is two parsecs away, its parallax angle will be half and arc-second. If it’s three parsecs away, its parallax angle will be one-third of an arc-second. Et cetera. One arc-second works out to 3.262 light-years, or about 30.9 trillion km.
Dude. We’re Trekkers, not Star Wars geeks. We already know that!
Which are, for this experiment, infinitely far away?
A normal butt-moon would look more like a globular cluster or puzzling star clump.
I rather prefer it over a crescent sliver-butt.
Oh, and Shatner’s booked a flight on that expensive space shuttle quickie trip.
So, who thought T’Pol’s mother was hot?
I hate to point at another inconsistency, but weren’t T’Pau’s first words to Spock on Vulcan inculded “are our ceremonies for outworlders now?” Why didn’t anyone oppose Trip’s presence at the ceremony, without challenge?
All they had to do was to have the Vulcans ask, and T’Pol could have spoken for him, and a little continuity is born. Is that too much for a fan to ask?
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Hoshi is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious T’Pol, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious! Her vestal livery is but sick and green and none but fools do wear it! Cast it off! It is my lady; oh, it is my love! Oh, that she knew she were!
I was hoping Phlox was going to spit poison or something when he puffed up! That would have been cool!
Oh, but didn’t you know that it already happened and we just didn’t witness it?
Good point.
Given Mama T’Pol’s personality, I’m sure she called the neighborhood and told all her cronies how the smelly emotional monkey her daughter brought home fixed her refrigerator.
I’ve thought so ever since Blade Runner. Mmm, snakes and boobies. 
(Still liked Captain Hernandez better in this ep, though.)
Okay, I watched it again. That would make it the first Enterprise I’ve watched twice since… well, since I don’t remember when. Certainly not since season one.
And I liked it again, though it still has a few nagging flaws, little things that can be chalked up to the “Star Trek style” which I wish they’d get past. Still, on the whole, I thought this was one of the strongest episodes they’ve had in the entire run of the show so far, certainly in the top ten.
For example: When Hernandez suddenly appeared and invited herself onto Archer’s rock-climbing trip, the first thing she says is, “You know better than to do this without a partner.” She has sort of a wry tone, playing on the word partner, making it somewhat chiding, somewhat flirty. But at the same time she has an excellent point: going climbing alone is fairly dangerous. I liked that moment a lot, because it was played fairly casually. We get the relationship between them, but they aren’t hammering on the idea that Archer maybe isn’t thinking too clearly. (Then later they come back to it, and spoil the subtlety a bit, when Archer asks her directly, “You think I have a death wish or something?” which is too bad. That’s what I mean about the “Star Trek style” — the dialogue is frequently on-the-nose and lacks subtlety and subtext. The first line was great, but they couldn’t leave it alone.)
I also like a lot that they’re starting to pay off previous developments in the series: Archer being challenged about letting the Vulcan ship being destroyed; T’Pol’s mother paying a price for the incident at P’Jem. Partly, I feel like we’re being rewarded for our faithful viewing by these looks back, so we can recall the incidents and see how the threads are being picked back up instead of, as is so often the case, being dropped and forgotten. (Will Trip ever refer to his cogenitor fuckup again? Sort of a pivotal moment for the character.) And partly, it appears that Coto is going back through the series and going to great lengths to make it seem that they actually had a plan all along.
I also really liked Soval’s concession to Archer. See, I hate the way Enterprise portrays its Vulcans: not just arrogant, but snooty and snippy as well. This is just plain wrong. A completely logical, rational culture would not put down its debate opponents; it would focus entirely on the strength of the argument and the real-world evidence supporting the various contradictory assertions. To a human, this would certainly seem detached, aloof, arrogant: the Vulcan refuses to be drawn into emotional appeals, and stays perfectly calm no matter how worked up the human gets. And yet, if at some point the human manages to put together a convincing argument that the Vulcan is unable to refute, or if the human presents actual empirical data or at least a compelling anecdote to support his position, then logically, the Vulcan must immediately admit the human’s superior viewpoint and change his own. In Soval’s first scene, they got it wrong: his wording and tone of voice in saying, “So we have no idea what really happened,” is uncharacteristic of a Vulcan. Rather, it should have been, “So we have no means of independently verifying the accuracy of his narrative.” It’s a matter-of-fact observation, not an attack on Archer’s character. (And in fact it’s more devastating because it’s completely factual and cannot be refuted.) Contrast this with the later moment, when Soval says, “I was wrong.” This was on the money, in my opinion. When a Vulcan realizes he is wrong, the logical thing to do is admit it, adjust, and move on, rather than twist around to justify a no-longer-tenable argument. Soval did this, and further displayed no shame at the admission. I liked this. The inconsistency is annoying, but at least they’re starting to get the idea.
(Another nice Vulcan moment: When T’Pol says to her mom, “You’re home,” and mom says, “Obviously.” Heh.)
More I liked: Archer telling Hernandez he should have been armed to the teeth, that she should request an entire squad of brake repairmen, and that she’ll feel differently after “a few dozen eulogies.” He didn’t overemphasize the bitterness; he laid it out plainly. Very nice. Bakula is sort of an erratic actor, but I thought he made the right choice there. The boy scout is gone, and he sort of misses the innocence, but he knows it couldn’t be any other way.
I don’t expect this level of character attention in every single episode, but if they can do it every, oh, third or fourth week, I’ll be happy. This one show bought another few weeks of loyalty from me.
I saw the episode today (along with the 10/15 Joan, viva. Seems it’s a week behind ENT on the tapes) and really enjoyed it although now that I’ve seen how comfortable Trip seemed, I too have a problem with his ease. If nothing else, the higher gravity of the planet should make him exert more energy just to move and he should be sweating but in the lava flow scene, his shirt was completely dry.
And I didn’t get the impression that T’Pol’s mother was any worse than most other Vulcans we’ve been exposed to, even in the other series. She seemed pretty normal to me. And quite cute.
Also, was it just me or was Hoshi not in the opening scene where Archer was giving his speech? I kept looking for her but didn’t notice her until the very end when she was in Sickbay with Phlox.
Screw Travis, Hoshi’s the one who never gets any screen time.
Coto better fix that too while he’s at it.
See??? I told you that ep. was there! Often I have to switch tapes since I am now filling two at a time due to the Joan/ENT conflicting times, so the dates are not necessarily consecutive. I also sent another tape this morning.
I am pretty sure Hoshi is in the opening scene. She looked really lovely in that Sickbay scene with her hair left down to frame her face.