Enterprise: Strange New World

Yesterday, my husband and I woke up at 6am at his parents house. We got in the car and drove two hours back to Louisville and dropped off our rental car then got ready to go. We went through security and waited around, boarded our flight. It would take five hours to get to Vegas and I was sick and exhausted and already way too peopled-out and, even though I'd already taken a full dose of dramamine, I still got motion sickness. All this made me think about the season one episode, Strange New World.

In this one, the crew come upon an Earth-like planet and can't wait to go down and investigate. They pack their bags and head down for a little camping trip. They pick flowers, Porthos runs around in a field, Travis tells ghost stories. They're having a great time. And then the winds pick up and everyone starts going insane. Tucker thinks he's seeing rock people everyone's freaking the hell out and screaming at T'Pol about being a Vulcan conspirator etc etc. In the midst of all this, one of the crewmen runs outside, all jacked up on pollen, and Archer has no choice but risk it and use the still-experimental transporter. When the crewman gets up to the ship, he looks like this:

Yep. The Enterprise transporter is so crappy that it couldn't tell the difference between a guy and some leaves. This is the kind of thing I love about Enterprise. All the technology that made Star Trek iconic is still in its infancy. Grapplers instead of tractor beams, replicator technology that only makes beverages, the Universal Translator can only barely speak Klingon and the transporter brings back a guy full of leaves.

Yesterday, during my two plane rides and two-hour layover, I had a lot of time to think about this stuff and I realized that if it meant that I could get from place to place without having to deal with other people or motion sickness, I'd risk beaming back with a shrubbery in my face. Give me a transporter any day.