Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More
The Enterprise responds to a call for help from a cargo freighter. The freighter is having some engineering issues with a life support system, so Trip is sent over to assist. While Archer serves spaghetti and meatballs to the freighters captain, Trip discovers that there is some “Precious Cargo” on the freighter: the kidnapped princess of an alien world. The freighter crew have kidnapped her for ransom. Trip and the princess are swept away by the alien crew and eventually manage to escape, marooning themselves on a Daygobah-esque world. Back on the Enterprise, Archer and T’Pol dust off their improv comedy skills to get some information from a captured freighter crew member. “Precious Cargo” is frequently derided as one of Star Trek’s worst hours: does it deserve the mantle?
The Wikipedia plot summary for “Precious Cargo”:
Firek Goff, the captain of a Retellian cargo vessel, docks and asks Captain Archer for help; a passenger-carrying stasis pod is malfunctioning. Archer then offers Trip’s services, while also extending an offer of Enterprise hospitality to both the captain and his brother, Plinn. When Tucker enters the cargo hold inside Goff’s ship, he notices a beautiful female alien beneath the stasis canopy. Goff tells him that she is a passenger traveling home from a planet where she was studying medicine. He explains that because his ship can’t travel over warp 2.2, she has to be kept in stasis because there is not enough food to support them all.
As Tucker starts working on the stasis pod, it begins to fail, and fearing that the occupant will suffocate, he releases her. Tucker is then knocked unconscious by Goff, who then flees from the faster Enterprise by disabling her engines and ionizing its warp trail, but Plinn is left behind. The female passenger, Kaitaama, is initially hostile. However, Tucker uses the translator Ensign Sato left with him, and he learns she is a high-ranking soon-to-be First Monarch being held for ransom. Tucker has a plan for escape, and though she believes that her status will keep her safe, she joins Tucker in an escape pod.
Meanwhile, Archer and Sub-Commander T’Pol use a ruse similar to “good cop/bad cop” to persuade Plinn to tell them how to locate Goff’s ship. The plan works and Plinn reveals the warp core’s signature frequency. After finding an island on the planet, Tucker and Kaitaama soon set up camp in a swamp, and their mutual antipathy eventually gives way to burgeoning sexual tension. But Goff soon locates them using the homing beacon on the escape pod. Tucker and Goff fight until the latter is subdued by Kaitaama, just as an Enterprise rescue team also arrives. Kaitaama is later collected by a battle cruiser from her home world of Krios Prime, and suggests she will invite Tucker to visit her in the future when she is in power.
In this episode of the podcast, Wes and Clay discuss “Precious Cargo” and the troubles that many seem to have with writing a Star Trek script. Plus! The guys talk about Archer talking T’Pol into his tribunal charade, getting into an escape pod ass first, and the Brannon Braga method of breaking a story.