It's a shame that this episode was so intent on mocking the character of Tucker when he was unknowingly and accidentally impregnated while on a mission to an alien space ship. The "male pregnancy" jokes were off-colour even in 2001 but by 2022, when trans women are leading the search for the Holy Grail of a freshly transplanted uterus, absolutely nothing is off the table (so to speak). And no-one, least of all a mere Birthing Person like myself, would dare to joke about it.
I didn't think I'd be able to watch Unexpected all the way through this time but I wanted to check out the alien environment again. Sure enough, it felt like so much more than the usual Earth type atmosphere/gravity/vegetation plus forehead-of-the-week. We were treated to some truly original thinking with the strange environment aboard the alien ship. With its vegetable walls, iridescent, scaled inhabitants and organic-looking controls it reminded me of some of the earliest Science Fiction Classics like Perelandra and the Martian Way. Such a pity that all that creativity was put to the service of such an embarrassingly stupid plot.
Lovely actress Julianne Christie manages to telegraph a certain allure despite being covered from head to toe in a reptilian skin. I think this is because of her sinuous, almost balletic, movements which throw into an unfortunate contrast the wooden deportment of our resident Vulcan Science Officer. Poor Ms Blalock was still unsure of her role at this stage and appears to have misinterpreted her instruction to look aloof as necessitating the posture of a dress shop mannequin being rolled around on the warehouse trolley. The Klingons got into the story somewhere but I'd long since lost interest by then.
Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5.