Friedman credited for "Rajiin". Black has several credits to his name on the show, including "First Flight" and "Carbon Creek". The episode saw the return of John Cothran Jr., who had previously played two Klingons in previously Star Trek series. These were Nu'Daq in The Next Generation episode "The Chase" and Telok in the Deep Space Nine episode "Crossover". Other cast returning from earlier in the season were Steven Culp as Major Hayes and Randy Oglesby as the Xindi Degra. Executive producer Rick Berman later announced that Gralik would be returning to Enterprise, however "The Shipment" was the only on screen appearance of the character. Reception "The Shipment" was first aired in the United States on the UPN network on October 29, 2003. It received a 3.9/6 share among all adults, with 6 percent of all adults watching television at the time of the broadcast. It was in sixth place for the night, one place behind Smallville on The WB which had a 4.2/7 rating. It was an increase from the 2.6 rating in the previous week for a re-run episode aired up against a Major League Baseball World Series game on the Fox Network. The following week was sweeps week, and saw an increase in viewers for the episode "Twilight" up to a rating of 4.07, an increase of nearly 400,000 viewers compared to "The Shipment". Michelle Erica Green, reviewing the episode for TrekNation, described the episode as "very classic Trek". She was pleased to see that some character depth was being introduced into the new Xindi characters, and compared Gralik to Captain Dathon from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" but thought that Gralik didn't get developed quite enough to be on the same level. Overall, she described the episode as "a very solid hour of entertainment, with very few nitpicks... a slick package with the values I consider to be real Trek". Jamahl Epsicokhan at his website Jammer's Reviews wasn't enthusiastic about a particularly "lackluster" action scene which he felt was a bad cross between Star Trek: Insurrection and Andromeda. However, he was pleased with the other aspects of the plot and praised the clever scripting. He gave the episode a score of three out of four. In 2021, The Digital Fix said this one of the interesting episodes that are part of the Xindi story arc, and noted it for having a moral dilemma.