The problem is that's not really the premise of the episode. The episode doesn't deal with gender roles or pregnancy or parenthood. Trip doesn't deal with any of those things in a serious way. The situation isn't an allegory for much of anything, since the way Trip ends up pregnant is a cultural misunderstanding, not analogous to either rape or consensual sex, and the the alien inside him is never treated particularly like a baby or a living thing, more like an inconvenient growth.
So even though "Trip gets pregnant" is the tagline (and it was certainly the trailer line) it's not what the episode is about. So what IS the episode about?
The Enterprise is experiencing some weird malfunctions and power fluctuations -- mud instead of seltzer water, no gravity in the showers, things randomly catching fire in engineering, the kind of stuff that can really screw up your Monday morning.
Somehow they figure out that the problems are being caused by a tiny cloaked parasite ship that's eating their ... um ... subspace wake, or something? So they do the Starfleet boy scout thing and offer assistance. Trip travels to the ship, which has grass and fish and different air and is pretty much a world of pure imagination. But after a nap he comes to love it there and he hangs out with a young alien woman in a holodeck and they put their hands in a bowl of pebbles that lets them read each others' thoughts.
And then he fixes the ship and goes home, and everything is fine for the rest of the episode. Except that Trip's pregnant, and rather than deal critically with questions about abortion they hop into hot pursuit of the tiny invisible ship, which is not the easiest thing to do.
But they do track the ship down, and it's back at its old parasitic ways, eating the subspace wake of a Klingon ship. I think this is the first time we've seen the Klingons since the pilot. They're not very smart or honorable Klingons, and the scene where our heroes talk them into sparing the ship (and letting Trip go along when they decide to board it and steal its technology) is ... it feels like watching a nerd talk a dumb bully out of beating him up in a high school movie. It sort of weakens the image of the Klingons for me; they're both too dumb and too easily talked down.
So Trip goes over to the alien ship, fixes it for real, and it turns out that the baby is really easy to transfer to another host, and has none of Trip's DNA, so there'll be actually no consequences for him. Guess he learned a lot about pregnancy and what it's like for women, huh?
I may have to adjust my mindset for these reviews and stop expecting Enterprise to behave like Star Trek, with a message and a moral at the heart of every story. I know there are some people who find that a relief, who consider the moralizing of Star Trek pedantic and grating. But I think, without that, Star Trek has a bad tendency to just become Star Wars done badly.
Random Observations:
-- It's always a bit of a suspension of disbelief how easily Starfleet engineers in all the shows can fix other people's ships. But here it's especially implausible. What is so special about Trip that he can fix these people's ship better than anyone on board it, despite the technology being thoroughly alien? Trip is not, as far as we know it, a savant.
-- Enterprise has a tech creep problem. Ok, the timeline of the invention of the holodeck is problematic in and of itself: in "Encounter at Farpoint" and "10010010101" it's implied that holodeck technology is fairly new at the start of that show, but Jack Crusher was able to make Wesley holo-recordings when he was a baby. But, all that aside, holodeck technology is way too widespread during Enterprise for it to have taken another 200 years for the Federation to adopt/develop it. It's like the creators wanted to have their cake and eat it to, from a prequel-making perspective.
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