BOOM the ship shakes, and a shirtless Archer awakens with a start.  He attempts to exit his quarters but a security officer informs him that he is confined to his quarters.  "On who's orders?" "The Captain's"  This of course not only shocks but angers Archer who socks him in the face and runs to the bridge, demanding to know what's going on.  On the bridge "Captain T'Pol" demanded someone take care of Archer so they can get back to the battle.

The Battle by the way was Enterprise's last ditch effort to stop a humongous sphere before it fired on Earth, and it did fire, the Earth exploded in a tremendous special effect.  And all this before the first commercial break.

Next, we find Archer awaken considerably older and enters on a much more laid-back T'Pol who is making him breakfast.  She then begins to explain something that she has explained just about every day for 12 years.

Apparently 12 years earlier... FLASHBACK SEQUENCE!!!!

Enterprise was flying through yet another Expanse anomaly field and Archer and T'Pol were in a corridor, Archer desperately trying to convince T'Pol to come to movie night to watch Rosemary's Baby (I hate horror movies, why can't they watch a good comedy at these movie nights once and a while?) when an anomaly shakes the ship and T'Pol is trapped.

T'Pol tells Archer to save himself but always the hero Archer saves T'Pol but is injured himself.

Archer awoke in sickbay where Phlox asks him when the last time he talked to Trip was, when Archer tells Phlox an event that he thought was simply hours ago but is actually 3 days ago and that in the anomalies a weird transdimensional organism made its way into Archer's brain.  These little buggers are actually kind of interesting.

They basically make up a kind of weird temporal brain tumor, their result is that Archer has become incapable of storing long-term memories.  He can remember everything that happened before the infection, and he can remember stretches of time of about 6 to 12 hours or so but afterward, he is completely lost on what time and day it is.

Ok, so Admiral Forrest relieves Archer of command and gives T'Pol a field commission to Captain (where the uniform came from).

Away Captain T'Pol goes trying to find the Xindi weapon, well the Xindi find out that they are getting close and attack, now here is probably one of the best episodic ship battles I've ever seen in Trek (note I said episodic, i.e. doesn't include the battle of The Enterprise-E with the Scimitar or any other of the amazing trek movie battles).  There are 2 Xindi warships, and one of them is docked with Enterprise, well Mayweather dies and T'Pol controls the helm and does one of the coolest things I've ever seen done in Trek, she flies Enterprise so that she rams the flying ship WITH the docked ship, thus ripping the docked ship off of Enterprise, destroying both attackers and devastating one of Enterprise's warp nacelles, all at the same time.

While this won the battle it cost the Enterprise a lot, with only one nacelle the ship cannot reach more than warp 1.5 anymore and they start slacking on the trail of the Xindi weapon, by the time they find the place where the weapon was being constructed, the weapon had already been deployed.  Enterprise zooms off to find the probe and tries in a last-ditch effort (along with the rest of the fleet) to destroy the probe.

Ok so now where are up to the point that Earth is destroyed, but sadly we don't see that really cool effect a 2nd time, instead T'Pol simply describes the fact that the Xindi didn't stop at Earth, they also destroyed Mars, Alpha Centauri, and each and every other human colony.  And then told Archer that there were only about 6,000 humans left, in total.

Enterprise led one of 2 caravans of refugees to Ceti Alpha Five to create a last human colony.  On the way they run into Ambassador Soval who practically begs T'Pol to return to Vulcan, but she refuses.  They make it to Ceti Alpha 5 but the other caravan did not make it.  T'Pol then resigns as Captain of the Enterprise and instead moves in with Archer on the planet's surface where they live for the next several years basically doing the same thing over and over and over again.  He wakes up, completely confused, she explains everything that has happened.

But today is different, why?  Because it's the return of Phlox!  After years of research on his homeworld, Phlox is confident that he can use energy from Enterprise's warp reactor to create a "Subspace implosion" inside Archer's brain that will result in healing Archer of this incredibly annoying ailment.  So off to Enterprise, they fly where they have a touching reunion with the other members of the crew.

The first phase of the procedure is a success but then comes a snag, Enterprise detects a small vessel trying to hide around the system's sun (which results in yet another cool battle scene although short and simple but with stunning visuals of the sun.  I should note that this is the 3rd amazing space battle of the episode).

They find out from the captured alien that the Xindi now know where they are and so Captain Tucker (yes I did say Captain Tucker for who else would take command when T'Pol left) ordered that the treatments of Captain Archer had to stop to preserve energy for the upcoming battle (yes a 4th space battle).

T'Pol and Phlox beg Trip to reconsider saying that completing the treatments is the only way to save Earth, to which Trip answers "Earth has already been destroyed, accept it!" but then they explain the temporal conundrum of the episode (yes of course there would be a temporal conundrum, after all they can't destroy Earth and get away with it).

It seems that the treatment was working, and part of the infection was gone, but here's the weird part, not only was the infection gone from the current brain scan, but every record Phlox had taken over 12 years of all the different brain scans he had done, in every single one of them that area of the brain no longer had any infection.

See these little buggers exist outside of the normal space-time continuum and, like the anomaly in All Good Things [TNG], if you destroy them in the future they vanish in the past, so Phlox and T'Pol believe that if they destroy the infection then Archer would never have been relieved of command and perhaps, just perhaps, Earth could be saved.

Tucker unfortunately doesn't see it that way and insists.  So here comes the battle, 6 Xindi warships come up against 2 starships, The Enterprise and the Intrepid (captained by Malcolm).

I know I've said it 3 other times in this plot synopsis but this battle was incredible, They were not doing too bad, thanks to some weapons and shield upgrades courtesy of General Shran (I'm just assuming that Shran is our Andorian friend from the first 2 seasons).

The Intrepid bites the dust in an amazing way and then the battle is focused entirely on Enterprise.  The Xindi are ruthless, they slice the Bridge right off of the top of the saucer section (presumably killing everyone on the bridge) and continue with boarding parties shooting everyone they can find.  T'Pol, Phlox, and Archer go to Engineering to try and finish the procedure (to erase the whole thing) but the pod that Archer lay in earlier was damaged in the attack.

Archer figures out that all they need is a Subspace Implosion but they don't have to survive it, they only have to destroy the infection so that the infection would have been destroyed in the past, so Archer comes up to the warp core and starts working on trying to cause the subspace implosion to destroy the ship. T'Pol and Phlox help, but Xindi come in, they kill Phlox and T'Pol and they shoot Archer like 2 times yet he still manages to fight through the pain to throw the last series of levers to cause the ship to have a cascade explosion, and the destruction of Enterprise in an amazing dramatic flare where huge chunks of the Enterprise start to separate from the rest before exploding......

....And we find ourselves in Sickbay with a mirror of the same scene where Phlox had told Archer that he was infected, with a lot of the same wording, only this time Archer has only suffered a mild concussion.  T'Pol, feeling guilty that Archer got hurt saving her and brought him the movie that they were going to watch that evening since he would not be able to make it as Phlox had requested that he stay in sickbay overnight.

Archer asks T'Pol if she could hand him a pillow and turn down the lights and when she asks him if he needed anything else he answers "No thank you... T'Pol" "Yes?" "You'd make an excellent nurse."

End Credits Roll.....