Don't forget to give your grade as well, with 10 being excellent, 5 average and 1 awful.
My review is also viewable at my website.
3-05 Impulse
Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley
So, we have arrived at the attack of the mutant killer Vulcan zombies, also known as Impulse. As a matter of fact, despite the premise, I quite enjoyed the episode. Sure you can roll your eyes at the very sight of the living dead Vulcans, who look like they're straight out of a Michael Jackson video, but I think that Impulse managed to stay on the right side from being camp. The editing and directing kept it suspenseful and scary enough. Maybe the darkened sets and strobe lights helped to get the right "feel". Also, the acting was top notch, especially from Jolene Blalock as T'Pol struggled with her gradual decent into paranoia and madness.
One can of course argue that a substance that strips away Vulcans emotional control shouldn't make them like zombies, but more like their more aggressive cousins the Romulans. That might in itself have made for an interesting story. However, I find it plausible enough. We don't know how they behaved prior to becoming zombies. Maybe they were more Romulan-like before the Trellium-induced madness took over completely. We should also remember that Romulans manage to keep themselves from killing each other by a rigid dictatorship that focuses their aggressiveness in the service of their Empire. Romulans have had hundreds of years to learn how to tame their violent tendencies. The poor Vulcans on the Seleya haven't. I can also buy that their skin starts to rot. That could be a physical side-effect of the Trellium-D exposure.
The story is straight forward enough. Lots of action as Archer, T'Pol, Reed and a MACO sergeant called Hawkins must escape from the Vulcan zombies while on the derelict Vulcan ship the Seleya (where T'Pol previously has served onboard). There really isn't more than that besides a subplot where Trip and Travis try to harvest some Trellium rocks from an odd asteroid field. The most compelling thing in Impulse was to watch T'Pol as she tries to fight the effects of the Trellium. You could really feel how hard she tries to remain in control, but ultimately she fails. While necessary for the story I had problems with Archer again becoming the figure that a weakened T'Pol has to lean on to manage through. Sigh! That has been used all too much on Enterprise.
While indeed interesting to watch, the problem is that we again see T'Pol forced into displaying emotions. We've seen it before (in Fusion, The Seventh and in Bounty for instance) and we'll see it again. I don't mind T'Pol as a character with emotions closer to the surface than other Vulcans (all Vulcans aren't cut from the same cloth) but why constantly force it on her? Why not let her experience and discover it herself in a more natural fashion? Why did the writers and producers feel it necessary to create artificial means, whether they were mind-rapes, pa'nar syndrome or Trellium-D, for her?
And of course the Trellium-D thing will unfortunately turn out to be a big part in her season three character arc, but that's for a later review. Suffice to say that they had a possibility to show how T'Pol struggled to restore her emotional balance after the exposure on the Seleya. That could've tied into her helping Trip to restore his mental balance while grieving his dead sister. Alas, they went into a different route.
But isolated in Impulse, the Trellium-D story turned out as a nice twist. It wasn't the spatial anomalies that made the Vulcans crazy - as was suspected from the recordings (The Expanse) made on the Vaankara, the Vulcan ship that is now revealed to have travelled into the Expanse to find the Seleya. It turns out that the Trellium-D normally used to insulate vessels from the effects of the anomalies, is a potent neuro-toxin on Vulcans, destroying their neural pathways.
After this discovery they can't use it to insulate the Enterprise. Well, they can, but that would kill T'Pol, so they don't. She offers to get left behind but Archer declines the offer, saying "I can't try to save humanity without holding on to what makes me human." That's nice of him but it flies in the face of the Airlock Archer we've seen before and will see again. One might argue that it wouldn't be good for morale if a Captain just left crewmembers behind like that. But on the other hand one can picture resentment towards T'Pol building up as they encounter more destructive anomalies ahead. However, that wasn't something they delved further into as the episodes progressed. In fact, most of the time they managed to avoid a lot of the anomalies anyway.
The scenes with Trip and Travis mining rocks were nice and the visuals of the asteroid field were awesome - perhaps an unintended homage to The Emprise Strikes Back. But, like in that movie, the behaviour of the asteroids really defied the laws of physics. There's no way that they'd tumble around like that in such close proximity to each other. Gravitational forces would see to that. At least it was "explained" by T'Pol here that their erratic movements could be caused by the anomalies. Wonder if that also explains why Trip and Travis could walk on them, despite the extremely low gravity?
It also made no sense for them to leave the Enterprise while the Captain, the Executive Officer and the head of Security were already away on a boarding party. That meant that the entire command crew was away. Who was in command of the Enterprise? Ensign Hoshi Sato? And since there is an entire contingent of MACOs onboard, why didn't they send them to the Seleya instead of just the lonely sergeant Hawkins? And of course Super Archer had to shine as well, by constantly taking up the front or the rear. From a military standpoint, those positions should be filled by Hawkins and Reed since their trained for it and it's their damn job to protect their superiors.
If T'Pol's nightmare at the end of the episode seems tacked on it's because it is. The tight directing of the episode resulted in them having some minutes to spare so they had to find something to fill them with, hence the nightmare. I kind of liked it, especially the first part before the zombies came back. That movie night sequence was hilarious (T'Pol's line "Then use logic more quietly" and the face Trip gives), and one has to wonder how and why T'Pol's mind conjured up that?
I also really liked the beginning when Trip more or less asked T'Pol on a date, and how she has no problem to pick up on the fact that movie night is on again. Excellent chemistry and a very cute semi-teasing moment between them. Love the looks they give each other in that scene. Wonder if Archer picked up any of it or if he was oblivious due to being in angry weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders mode?
The MACO sergeant, Hawkins, also had a nice moment with T'Pol when he tried to help her out on the Seleya, giving her water and talking to her. I couldn't help but to think that T'Pol's comment to him about "a common misconception" regarding Vulcans' apparent lack of emotions was directed at some fans who don't like it when Vulcans exhibit emotions. But T'Pol made it quite clear that they do have them, they just suppress and control them.
All in all, I give Impulse a grade of 7 on my 10-graded scale. It was a somewhat scary and enjoyable episode even with some faults. It also benefits from being a season three episode and part of the Expanse arc.
Reading these reviews about season 3 make me remember how much i liked season 3 and how much trouble we went through to actually see it (like installing a satelite dish twice because of the snowy wheather). The acting of TPol was nicely done and i liked the scene with Hawkins where she explains the history of Vulcans and their emotions, because it give some insight how TPol really is and thinks. (She mostly keeps that to her self). (TPol is by the way almost the only one that encourgages other crewmembers, like we saw in Borderland).
Anyway, the technique I mentioned was actually taught to me in high school (can’t remember what year), but keep in mind that the textbooks we went out of were rather outdated, as is this style of writing, which for me at least has been done so many times just in Star Trek that it has lost any dramatic effect and is simply an annoyance now. Having viewed the episodes up to 
) Anyway, as is the zombie flick cliché, as soon as you shoot one of them, the rest of them come swarming, and our would-be rescuers find themselves shooting the hell out of the Vulcans they’ve come to help, and as it turns out, stun doesn’t last for very long on the zombiefied Vulans. For the lameness of the plot, we actually get some good drama in that, for once, the member of the crew that’s usually the only one immune to whatever disaster happens, is now the only one affected while the humans remain immune. We even got an early indication of its effect on her when she snapped at the MACO for setting his weapon to kill, and later we see her horror as the thought occurs to her that she’ll end up just like her former colleagues.
I guess that’s just because I used to be a maintenance guy though. 
