I wasn’t looking for anything long or complicated. Consider this ending instead:
They open the big and small boxes and let the smaller web-things crawl back to the main body. Everyone watches them merge.
After a couple of seconds, people look to Archer for the order to leave. Instead, with a wry smile, he says to Hoshi, “You brought the translator, I assume?”
Hoshi: “Yes.” She pulls it out. “What do you want me to say?”
Archer, after a pause: “Pleased to meet you.”
Cut to long shot, the group standing in the clearing, tiny figures amid the sea of alien intelligence. After a moment, we hear, faintly, the chirping of their communicator. Another second, then a ripple of color or something, like a gentle blue, expands outward through the whiteness.
This might be a hijack, but I think that no Enterprise or Star Trek writer ever learned a foreign language - how the hell Hoshi is supposed to learn all these non-terrestrial (let alone non- Indo European) languages? TNG had an interesting episode where they met aliens whom no one could understand and the UT didn’t work. Picard of course eventually figured it out, but at least someone thought of an intelligent problem. Of course, my complaints would all disappear if we could get Hoshi and T’Pol back in their underwear in the decontamination room more often.
After a couple of seconds, people look to Archer for the order to leave. Instead, with a wry smile, he says to Hoshi, “You brought the translator, I assume?”
Hoshi: “Yes.” She pulls it out. “What do you want me to say?”
Archer: Die!!!
Archer pulls out some cool new gun he got from good aliens and blows the evil aliens the smitherines. Then Hoshi goes into Decon for the remander of the series.
Meanwhile, Archer and Trip find that their nervous systems and minds are inextricably linked–a permanent side effect of having been gooed together for so long.
