were the Protestants. In doing so, Administrator V'Las is therefore linked to the Antichrist in much the same way that the Protestant Reformation saw the Pope as the Antichrist. In this role, the Romulans in the story take the place of the subversive devils to form an unholy alliance. It was also suggested that the Kir'Shara itself was similar in context to the Nag Hammadi library, which was a collection of thirteen codices found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 that date back to between the 2nd to 5th centuries. Unlike those codices, the Vulcan High Council attempts to suppress the revelation of the Kir'Shara in a similar manner to the Catholic Church's suppression seen in other fictional works such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code or James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy. Reception "Kir'Shara" was first aired in the United States on UPN on December 3, 2004. The broadcast saw the episode come in fourth place during the timeslot, with a Nielsen rating of 2.1/4 percent. This means that it was seen by 2.1 percent of all households, and 4 percent of all those watching television at the time of broadcast. It gained higher ratings than The WB, who aired What I Like About You and Grounded for Life. The ratings equalled the highest ratings of the season so far, which were previously achieved by "Borderland", "Cold Station 12" and "The Augments". TV Guide listed "Kir'Shara" on its Hot List for the day. IGN gave the episode 4.5 out of 5 and said that the show "finally grows up and becomes a Star Trek series this week". It described "Kir'Shara" as "far from a perfectly executed Trek story but they get enough right to make it a lot easier to overlook the few things they miss." It said that there had been an overall improvement in the fourth season, and that "this could become some of the best Star Trek ever made". In Matthew Kappell's book Star Trek As Myth, he said that he felt that the revelation that the previous Vulcan administration was working with the Romulans all along "suddenly makes sense of years of previously incomprehensible Vulcan policy" and linked to The Next Generation episode "Unification". Herc, in his review for Ain't It Cool News, praised the reliability of Jeffrey Combs as Shran, but thought that there were no major surprises. Herc did say that the biggest