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EXTINCTION

SYNOPSIS

The third episode of Season 3 titled 'Extinction' starts off with a containment team wearing EV suits exterminates a humanoid alien lifeform, by setting him alight with their flame throwers on a jungle planet. In T'Pol's quarters, it is time for Trip's Vulcan relaxation period, he gave her a case of peaches to try to make up for the two sessions that he missed, but it didn't work. T'Pol told him to lie on his front while she massages his back, suddenly, Archer orders her to the command center. Soon after, Enterprise visits the same planet that Archer discovers from the Xindi database that the ship attacked by the Osaarians had visited it weeks before. They find that the planet has a prolific ecosystem and there is evidence of a downed Xindi ship, but the pilot has been killed, and as soon as the Enterprise away team consisting of Captain Jonathan Archer, T'Pol, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed and Ensign Hoshi Sato arrive at the location of the crashed Xindi ship, they all begin to transform an alien lifeform. The transformation to T'Pol does not change her much, it left her with purple marks on her arms and two bone shapes making an 'X' on the sides of her face. Unfortunately Archer, Sato and Reed aren't so lucky as T'Pol, they have transformed completely into the humanoid alien life form, they begin to speak in an alien language and all of them are driven to find a place called Urquat. T'Pol uses Ensign Sato's translator to communicate with them, but they do not trust her, since she is not one of them.

In the Situation Room onboard the Enterprise NX-01, Phlox tries to convince Tucker that it is a bad idea to send a search party down, since anyone of them could contaminate the entire ship. Phlox and Tucker cannot find the three humans on any of their scans, but Phlox did detect Vulcan DNA on the planet and he believes they have been altered, due to what T'Pol had told Ensign Mayweather. Tucker sends a team in EV-suits, consisting of him, Chang and Kemper, both of them are members of MACO. They manage to recover a transformed Reed and put him in a decontamination chamber, where he won't contaminate the rest of the ship. But the Enterprise is contacted by a containment team of a different species, who reveal that the mutations on the planet surface have been caused by an untreatable mutagenic virus developed by extinct aliens called the Lokek, who had become sterile a long time ago and had no other way to reproduce. Their only option was to create a mutagenic virus that would transform other alien species who came into contact with the virus to be transformed into members of the Lokak in order to repopulate their population. The containment ships plan to exterminate everyone infected, including Archer, Sato and Reed, though they are willing to let Tucker and Phlox try to find T'Pol, whose Vulcan K-cells give her resistance.

T'Pol follows Archer and Sato to the ruins of Urquat, a city of architectural splendor now uninhabited and in ruins. There are recently-dead bodies, killed by containment teams like the one that comes down to try to eradicate Archer and Sato and which ends up destroying one of its own members when his skin makes contact with the air. Forced to use the transporter to escape detection by the containment vessels, Tucker beams down to rescue his crewmembers and flees at warp once he has retrieved them and the shuttlepod. Archer does not want to leave, but T'Pol convinces him that he'll be safe on Enterprise.

When the containment ships catch up, Tucker reveals that Phlox has created an anti-virus and has restored Archer, Sato and Reed to their previous forms. He promises to share the formula if the aliens forego destroying Enterprise. Phlox reduces the mutagenic virus to a laboratory sample which he plans to destroy, but Archer orders him to keep it in stasis instead, for it is all that is left of an entire species. Since they came to the Expanse to stop the Xindi from destroying humanity, he refuses to help destroy another race in the process.

SCREENCAPS

FACTS

• Tucker is very ticklish, especially his feet.
• There are a lot of neuro-nodes in the feet
• Two new species are introduced, the Lokek being one of them.
• The Lokek being unable to reproduce created a virus to transform others into themselves.
• The city in which the Lokek used to live in is Urquat.
• Urquat is an underground city
• T’Pol is immune to the virus, but the virus does a bit of transformation to her..
• Dr. Phlox creates an antidote for it from T'Pol's DNA that Tucker got from a peach that she took a bite out of in her quarters.
• Archer keeps the virus in stasis, unwilling to wipe out the species by destroying it.

QUOTES

Tucker: “Sorry. It wasn’t very well marked.”

Tucker: “You want to come over to discuss the situation, fine. But if you try to force your way onto this ship you’re going to have one hell of a fight on your hands.”

T'Pol: "The risk of paralysis is minimal."

Altered Reed: "We don't have time for this. We have to find Urquat. It's all that matters now."

T'Pol: "No, thank you. I'm not hungry."

Tucker: "No one's coming aboard unless I say so."

Tucker: "Look, we've only been dealing with this virus for one day, so forgive me if I don't take your word for it that the only option is to neutralize our tactical officer."

Altered Archer: "It was filled with thousands of Lokek, waiting for us."

T'Pol: "Your home is a planet called Earth. The people there are waiting for you. Your mission is to save them."

Archer: "We came out here to stop the Xindi from destroying humanity. I'll be damned if I'm going to have a hand in destroying another race in the process."