So weird, we just watched this episode the other night. The episode is a bit of a stretch in the sense that they’ve had space travel for a thousand years and something like this has never come up? In our society, we have laws that cover pretty much everything, surely there would be established precedence and nobody (except for Trip) would be confused about the consequences.

I imagine, in reality, ‘euthanizing’ them would be an option. In the context of the story, I doubt they’d call Archer to add a lie to the pile, they could just have easily have not mentioned it. And also, from the alien’s perspectives they did nothing wrong, so it makes little sense to lie.

A final thought I had on the episode is that I thought it was pretty rich, coming from Archer, telling Trip how immature and wrong he was for his little escapade. I understand the notion that Archer always approaches it with the full support of command staff, and Trip was acting alone, but pretending that Archer wouldn’t have satisfied his curiosity is a bit of a stretch. The only difference between that incident and every other time is that Archer was gone, and therefore he and Trip didn’t hold hands while ruining that poor family’s lives together.