USSBurritoTruck

Trip: A poop question, sir? Can't I talk about the warp reactor or the transporter?
Archer: It's a perfectly valid question.

In season one of ENT's "Breaking the Ice", the crew of the NX-01 records a video for Ms. Malvin's class of fourth graders back on Earth, and one of the questions is what happens when someone aboard the ship flushes the toilet, which Archer throws to Trip, and Trip is concerned the kids are going to think he's the ship's sanitation engineer.

Now, because Archer is an awkward goober in this episode, it seems like he's reading the questions off the cuff, with no one other than the possible exception of Ms. Malvin herself, having first vetted them. However, at the start of the recording, Archer announces that he's the one who selected the questions so he knew going in that the, as Trip puts it, "poop question," would be in there. Also before the recording Archer told Trip that he needed to there to participate as opposed to dealing with the large amount of work that was on his plate. What's more, we know from the start of the episode that Trip's nephew is one of the fourth grade students in Ms. Malvin's class.

So, my theory is that Archer made the intentional choice to have Trip answer a question he knew the engineer would find to be embarrassing, specifically to diminish him in the eyes of his nephew. Why would he do this extremely petty thing to someone who is ostensibly his friend and most loyal officer? Probably because he sucks and wanted to put Trip in his place for some imagined slight, just like he later has an outburst with the Vulcan captain whom he invited to dinner.

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Not my original content, but something I stand by

• This episode was directed by Johnathan Frakes, who starred in the ENT episode, “These Are the Voyages...”

• Captain Burnham informs Rayner that the Breen Primarch Tahal is going to be arriving at their location in the next episode. We learned in “Erigah” that Tahal occupied Rayner’s homeworld, Kelerun, and used it as a staging point.

• The tool Book is using to help effect repairs on the spore drive looks to be the same one he used as a weapon against Burnham in their fight when the characters first met in “That Hope Is You, Part 1”.

• The Progenitor’s technology is contained within a structure carefully balanced at the point where the gravity wells of two black holes intersect, i.e. the Lagrange point. Hey, that’s the title of the episode! Which makes sense, because the rest of the episode must surely be about figuring out how to retrieve the structure from such a precarious position without being crushed, torn apart, or spaghettified by the intense gravimetric interactions. It would be silly if, say, the Breen dreadnought was to show up and simply yoink away the structure with a tractor beam while we’re still in the cold open, and the Lagrange point did not matter for the rest of the episode.

    • The structure containing the Progenitor technology looks like a large barrel. Somewhere in Sto’vo’kor, a warrior punches a wall and doesn’t understand why.

• Moll stores L’ak’s body in a portable transport buffer. Trek has been using the transport buffer to store people since Scotty did so in “Relics”, though the other engineer aboard the USS Jenolan, Franklin, a good lad, pattern degraded too far for him to also be retrieved. Presumably no one would notice if L’ak’s pattern degraded over time.

• Adira mentions having been part of the Earth Defense Force, which is what they were doing when introduced in “People of Earth”.

• Burnham’s plan for infiltrating the Breen dreadnought is to transport through a gap in the shield coverage near an exhaust port. In “Preemptive Strike”, Ro and a team of Maquis exploited a weak point in the USS Enterprise D’s shields created by the ship’s impulse engines to steal medical supplies.

• Rayner asks Tilly to be his acting first officer while Burnham and Rhys are on the Breen ship. Saru also promoted Tilly to be his acting first officer while she was still an ensign.

• The away team plans to move around the Breen dreadnought in replicated Breen suits. In “Indiscretion”, Kira and Dukat disguised themselves in stolen Breen suits to infiltrate a work camp.

    • When Burnham activates her helmet, it forms around her head, but her braids are still visible hanging down her back before the transport. Upon arriving on the Breen ship, Burnham’s braids are no longer exposed. Later, when Burnham deactivates the helmet, her braids are already hanging down her back before it starts to dematerialize.

    • Despite being Federation technology, the fake Breen suits still have Breen script in their HUD.

• Burnham uses the term “achworm” during her bluff, something Primark Ruhn called called the Federation representatives in “Erigah” before it became apparent that T’Rina speaks the language.

• Assembled at Federation Headquarters we see:

    • Two Eisenberg-class starships

    • A Saturn-class starship

    • A Merian-class starship

    • Two Mars-class starships

    • One starship of the same class as the USS Dresselhaus

    • One 32nd century Constitution-class starship

    • One 32nd century Intrepid-class starship

• T’Rina suggests sending the USS Mitchell to intercept Tahal’s fleet. The Mitchell first appeared in “Rubicon”.

    • ”A shuttle wouldn’t be remotely capable of engaging her entire fleet.” President Rillak seems to imply that the Mitchell could conceivably be a match for a Breen fleet, which I would argue is very appropriate for a ship named for Kenneth Mitchell, who played Kol, Kol-Sha, Tenavik, and Aurellio on DIS, and voiced the Tweerk captain, one of Ransom’s Starfleet black ops buddies, and a Romulan guard on LDS before his passing.

• Burnham uses her xenoanthropology specialization to understand that joining a Breen feast day would be considered a good thing to do. Xenoanthropology was established as Burnham’s scientific focus in the series premiere, “The Vulcan Hello”.

• Burnham relates the results of her self introspection in “Labyrinths” to Book.

• ”Grum of osikod,” is a reference to the Kellerun epic, The Ballad of Krul. Burnham quoted the passage in which it’s mentioned to Rayner in “Mirrors”.

• ”Oh, holy schnoodle.” In “Choose Your Pain”, Tilly was the first person to say ”fuck” in Trek.

• Before sitting in the captain’s chair, Rayner does a one handed variation on the Picard maneuver.

• The episode opens on L’ak’s funeral. Because he stabbed himself in “Mirrors”, and then intentionally overdosed on the drugs meant to cure him in “Erigah”.

• The…bridge(?) of the Breen dreadnought appears to have the floating wickets seen in this season’s credit sequence.

• We’ve seen Efrosians before in “Star Trek: The Voyage Home”, and “Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country”, but Hy’Rell is the first Efrosian woman we’ve been introduced to. She has more forehead ridges than the two previous Efrosians, though it's not clear if that's a redesign, or intended to be an example of sexual dimorphism.

• Burnham is very curt with Hy’Rell, cutting the archivist off multiple times as she explains the history of the Eternal Gallery and Archive. As all the lues leading to the Progenitor technology have thus far involved a lesson of some sort, no doubt the lesson being set up here is one about patience, and surely not just a bunch of faffing about before ultimately deciding the real lesson is the importance of self reflection.

• Cherenkov radiation was previously mentioned in “Choose to Live”.

    • In “Choose to Live”, Cherenkov radiation was said result from Tachyons interacting with an atmosphere, while here Tilly claims it is a byproduct of plasma activity.

    • In both cases, the Cherenkov radiation produced a blue glow.

• When Rhys claims the USS Discovery A won’t be able to cloak while in the pocket of the Badlands the Eternal Gallery occupies, Burnham claims that will also be true for the Breen, implying that the Breen’s cloaking device functions similarly to the Federation iteration of the technology.

• Hy’Rell is interested in having Book provide some information about one of the few remaining Kwejian artifacts stored at the Eternal Gallery. Kwejian was destroyed in “Kobayashi Maru”.

• Hy’Rell has the Eternal Gallery lower its shields so Burnham and Book can transport over. We’ve seen that in the 32nd century, transporters are not limited by shields, such as in the episodes “People of Earth” and “There is a Tide…”. Apparently the Eternal Gallery’s shields still block transporters.

    • The artifact is cutting from the a World Root, a system of tree roots that extended around the entirety of Kwejian before it’s destruction, first mentioned in “Kobayashi Maru”.

    • Hy’Rell only says the cutting came in to the possession of the Eternal Gallery, ”long ago,” without being any more specific. Kwejian was a pre-warp society when it was destroyed, though clearly some Kwejian, like Book, made it off world.

• The interior of the Eternal Gallery and Archive was filmed at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

    • The Eternal Gallery’s collection we see appears to be mostly hardbound, paper books. No doubt all the various alien methods of recording information are kept in other wings.

• Hy’Rell claims that the Eternal Gallery has an oubliette. In “Star Trek Nemesis” Riker the Reman Viceroy into a bottomless pit on the lowest deck of the USS Enterprise E.

• The script used in the book, “Labyrinths of the Mind” is the same as what was on the library card that led the Discovery A to the Eternal Gallery, confirming that is the Betazoid language, meaning the first time it was seen was in “Erigah”.

• Burnham’s consciousness is transported into an artificial reality.

    • Captain Picard experienced the end of the planet Kataan from the perspective of a member of that species in “The Inner Light”.

       • Doctor Culber says of the device affecting Burnham, ”It looks like some kind of nucleonic emitter,” and that he doesn’t want to risk severing the beam as it could be fatal. In “The Inner Light” it was a nucleonic beam from the Kataan probe which subjected Picard to his experience.

    • Captain Sisko, Jadzia Dax, Kira, and Doctor Bashir were transported into a Wadi game, Chula, in “Move Along Home”.

    • Rutherford was also trapped inside a Chula game in “In the Cradle of Vexilon”.

    • Harry Kim’s mind was trapped inside a shared consciousness ruled over by an evil clown in “The Thaw”.

• ”Jinaal would have let an itronok eat us,” Burnham recounts the test from “Jinaal”.

• The books accessed by Doctor Derex when she was an archivist include

    • “Comprehensive List of Talaxian Hairstyles”; a multi-volume set

    • “Huypirian Folk Tales”; several Huypirians have been seen severing as personal valets to various Nagi of the Ferengi Alliance

    • “Euclidean Geometry”; this is the first mention of a species called the Euclideans.

• ”Hysperians really know how to party, by the way.” Hesperia is a human colony of, as Rutherford puts it, “ren faire types.”

• ”Someone once told me never turn my back on a Breen.” Rayner shared the Romulan saying first spoken in “In Purgatory’s Shadow” in the previous episode, “Erigah”.

    • The Breen also have a saying; “Never turn your back on the wife of the Scion.”

The 2024 Eisner awards for the comics industry announced the nominees a couple days ago, and the Day of Blood tie-in issue, Shaxs' Best Day by Ryan North and Derek Charm is among the nominees for Best Single Issue/One-shot.

The colourist for the current ongoing Star Trek comic, Lee Loughridge, was also nominated for Best Colouring.