Tonight's Enterprise (in which the crew finally get to take their long-delayed shore leave on Risa) was a surprising amount of fun. Lots of moments (such as Trip and Malcolm's ill-fated attempt at picking up alien chicks) were downright laugh-out-loud funny, and I'd venture to say that there were probably more great lines of dialog in this one than in the rest of the series so far put together. Once again, doing away with the usual predictable attempt at a plot in favor of letting the characters carry the episode has yielded extremely good results.

Speaking of characters, I found Archer -- or rather, Bakula -- kind of interesting in this one. I've complained before that Bakula's acting in this show feels a little off to me, somehow, a little... unnatural. That's not very much in evidence in this one at all, though, which causes me to wonder. Is it just that the uniform makes him uncomfortable, or what? Bakula as off-duty, trying-to-relax Archer is much more, well, relaxed. I like it.

I do have a couple of nitpicks, however. Like, if they're the first humans ever to make it out this far, why does Archer's neighbor have a perfectly ordinary Terran dog? What, their FX budget didn't extend to a costume for the animal? They couldn't at least have stuck a horn on its head and called it by some weird alien name? That's what TOS would have done! And, OK, I can just about buy Hoshi as a supergenius who can learn a completely alien language to near-fluency in one day. It's a bit of a stretch, but, hey, we know she's good; it's why she was picked for this job in the first place. But having her run into a random guy in a restuarant who can do exactly the same thing does make my suspension of disbelief start to stretch. Although, in fairness, there was an attempt to make this more plausible by suggesting that most languages are much simpler than his own native tongue, and thus comparatively easy for him to learn. I'm just not sure I buy that, is all. But never mind. It's a minor point, I suppose.

Next week is the season finale. Hard to believe we've had a whole year of this show, already. Even harder to believe that, in that amount of time, I still haven't been able to make up my mind about it...