quiet place only to have a slightly confused, but still amused, Tucker show up there and start arguing with her. The moment of the shared vision (despite being on different ships) is broken when a disoriented Tucker appears to come out of a momentary daydream on Columbia. Enterprise locates a destroyed Rigelian ship, and while investigating, they are suddenly attacked and boarded. MACOs repel the attack and a captured alien is taken to Sickbay, where scanners show that despite his human appearance, he is in fact Klingon. Archer then discovers Reed's complicity in evidence tampering and confines him to the brig. Archer also learns that the boarders sabotaged the ship, and he orders maximum speed in order to prevent the warp core from overloading. The ship increases speed to warp 5.2, the fastest it has ever been. Phlox is taken to Qu'Vat, a Klingon colony where General K'Vagh and Doctor Antaak seek his help to cure a Klingon plague. To Phlox's horror, K'Vagh kills an infected Klingon so that an autopsy can be performed. Phlox determines that the victim's DNA has been supplemented with that of a genetically augmented human. Phlox also learns from Antaak that they experimented with augmented DNA after the events seen in "Borderland", but it self-mutated and escaped. Antaak and Phlox are told that they have five days to cure the outbreak before it is too late. Antaak suggests that the only course of action is to create stable augmented Klingons, but Phlox refuses to assist further. Production The storyline in "Affliction" answers an ongoing question which had begun with the pilot episode of Enterprise, "Broken Bow". In The Original Series, Klingons appeared mostly human, with no applied prosthetics. However, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, they first appeared with forehead ridges and continued to appear this way through the remaining movies as well as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" references the change, with Chief O'Brien suggesting that Klingons had been genetically modified and Doctor Bashir assuming a viral mutation had taken place. Theories created by fans included the idea that the ridgeless Klingons were from a specific part of the home world, but this was discounted when three ridgeless Klingons from The Original Series appeared with ridges in the Deep Space Nine episode "Blood Oath". The Original Series had a restricted budget, and there was no