Archer has a flashback to the days of the NX Warp Project testing.
Not great, but not terrible either. It’s nice to see the ‘what they were like back then’ type stories, but this one is limited in scope (just Archer and Trip), and it seems that basically everyone is just the same. There was a glimmer of an idea in ‘this is how Archer became who he was’, but the episode doesn’t clearly establish anything in the way of difference from his character today. Perhaps some of the framing story’s time could have been used for that instead?
The other problem I had was that the story just didn’t seem to fit. They’re trying to tell a ‘dawn of warp flight’ story that just doesn’t fit into the chronology at this point. There are hand-waving explanations about this being the new engine/etc, but at the time of these tests there were plenty of Earth ships doing Warp 2 – it shouldn’t have been as big deal as it was made.
Callbacks: Not so much to previous Trek, but to the many images of NASA missions, and to *The Right Stuff*.
688 down, 49 to go.