First Contact took place in the 21st century, not the 20th. 
Yeah yeah, the thought did cross my mind that that was what you meant, but I missed a lot of Voyager, so I didn’t know.
Expected to air in May, eh? The next sweeps period. Figures.
At least if that site is correct then a Borg appearance fits in with the establisched continuity. As the plant pointed out, they invade Earth in the 20th Century, which is reportedly when that vessel became part of the landscape.
Sorry, 21st Century. Anyway, Enterprise takes place a century after First Contact, which is approximately how long the Borgsicles have been there according to the site.
They’ve been giving the ep. titles since “Stigma” and I assume it’s just because this is February, which is traditionally a Nielsen ratings “sweeps” month. They’re trying to draw a little extra attention and possibly a few more viewers.
they should name an episode “Naked women fighting in Jello, while buff dudes rub oil on their chests, and panda shower scenes” if they want to get viewers based on that!
I’d watch it!
This was a good episode but there are two strikes against it.
- It dealt with time travel
- The Tholians didn’t kill everyone on the Vulcan ship, they just disabled it
My heart skipped a beat when that battered vessel appeared onscreen and I thought “They’re actually going out on a limb and show something vicious” but that soon stopped when I heard T’Pol say everyone’s alive and life support is nominal.
Must they ruin everything? Babylon 5 had death. The original series had death even though it was just redshirts. TNG had death that went beyond redshirts and Tasha Yar’s death. Yes I’m nitpicking. Yes this episode is almost as good as the Andorian episode where they find the Vulcan base under the monastery which is saying a lot considering the 90210-esque crap they’ve been doing when they weren’t getting Trip laid or having Merriweather say his contract mandated two lines for the episode.
I can only hope that this is a harbinger for better episodes down the line but if the best the production and writing team of Enterprise can do is bang out one good episode a year then I will remain sorely disappointed in the show.
Yes, i want blood!!! They can show green blood splattering everywhere, cuz it’s green! The network suits are too stupid to realize what is going on! We can get away with it! That’s why Klingon blood was pink in ST6, so they could get away with PG!
Oh yeah another nitpick.
English from 900 years in their future is still COMPLETELY READABLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE???
Wouldn’t there be idioms and terminology that would be completely incomprehensible to them? My friend said that English hasn’t changed much since the invention of the printing press and moveable type in the west so that’s why English wouldn’t change so much. With all that interspecies breeding I’m certain that alien words would permeate Terran languages to the point that it’d become a hodgepodge or mosaic or whatever’s more politically correct of languages rather than remaining something strictly Terran.
Of course they could be speaking some intergalactic Esperanto which is why they all understand each other and have questionable accents.
It was the universal translator. It made Ingwish into English, snorkier than a Borg into doesn’t work, and Boop-Boop-Ba-Doop into Boop-Boop-Ba-Doop-Boop!
See, now that makes sense!
They kilt all the Suliban and some of the Tholians.
Did Seven…er, T’Pol say ALL the Vulcans survived?
Yes we need more blood and gore.
“The plant”? “The plant”?
In his final log entry, Archer said that there were no casualties on either Enterprise or the Vulcan ship.
And really, I think it would have been incongruous for the Tholians to kill the Vulcan crew if it was easier just to disable the ship. They only wanted that vessel, and they did the minimum necessary to get it.
Also, the future technology could easily be advanced enough that everyone could understand it. Archer could have been reading 22nd-century English and T’Pol reading Vulcan.
Just funnin’ ya, Mr. meat-eatingvegetation.
Why whack all the Suliban and none of the Vulcans?
Enterprise needs some red shirts.
Because the Suliban would have fought for the ship until they died.
I fully understood every word of this. Is that good or bad?
In an upcoming episode called “The Breach,” there’s gonna be some mountain climbing and rappelling. I just hope to God there isn’t gonna be any campfire singing or marshmelons!
I liked it okay. After last week, I feared I was becoming too critical of the show: I wondered whether or not I could actually enjoy a really good episode if they managed to pull one out of their panda’s ass, or if I had in fact lost all patience and would be unnecessarily snarky and rude even if the episode didn’t deserve it.
Well, this one was pretty good. I had some problems, but if the rest of season two is this decent, I’ll hang on into season three. So I haven’t totally lost my objectivity.
Things I didn’t like:
As mentioned by others, the lack of deaths for anyone involved. What the heck is this, Captain Planet?
The “temporal cold war” throughline is just impenetrably stupid. But more on this below under “stuff I liked.”
Crewman Daniels’ Cabinet of Wonder is annoying. I wish they’d figure out what Archer & Co. really think about using the goodies, and stick to it.
A continuity problem, as is usual with time-travel stories: If the Future Cops (do we get to see Delroy Lindo?) could “go back to any time” to retrieve the ship once they got the beacon, why wouldn’t they go back to whenever this ship fell back to the past in the first place? Yes, that would cause a big end-of-episode reset, but… more on this in a moment.
My biggest problem with the show was during the first half, the sloppy containment and investigation procedures. It’s summed up by the moment where they crank open the future ship’s hatch, and Archer, with his face right by the opening, wrinkles his nose at the bad smell. Me, yelling at the TV: “Are you people retarded? You don’t know what’s in there!” I don’t ask for a lot; they could have handled this without adding any time at all to the show. Works like this: Have the investigating crew enter wearing those nifty spacesuits. Throwaway bit of dialogue: “We’ve sealed the bay.” Do everything else exactly as shown up to the point of opening the hatch. Another throwaway line: “No toxins detected.” Then take off the helmets so we can see Our Rugged and Sexy Crew unobstructed.
It’s the procedural details like this (not to mention the total lack of documentation or anything while Trip and Reed were traipsing around the Tardis hole and happily opening every bulkhead they could find: if they get killed, how will those who follow know what happened?) that keep pushing me out of the show’s reality. If a starship crew were really this sloppy, they wouldn’t last seven days on their voyage, let alone seven years. I’m not asking for NASA-level triple-redundancy checklists, as that would be boring television — just some passing acknowledgement of how complicated and dangerous this endeavor really is, and what the crew has to do to make sure they stay alive, even while performing what seem to be routine tasks. Especially while performing what seem to be routine tasks.
Whew.
Okay, on to what I liked:
As dumb as the temporal cold war throughline is, I appreciated they didn’t try to do too much with it. I thought the season-ending cliffhanger was unbelievably idiotic; they painted themselves into a corner deliberately and needed a literal deus ex machina to get out. This time, it was just a tiny little wrinkle, rather than a universe-shaking change, but even a tiny thing can have major consequences. That being said, though, if they’re going to play with time travel, they can do more with it. Did I just contradict myself? Yes and no. Keep reading.
I actually liked the sexual-tension dialogue between Archer and T’Pol. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’ll be a horrifically stupid choice if they actually let those characters get together for real, but I liked the way the mixed genome lent itself to conversation with subtext. “Vulcans and humans, I mean,” sez T’Pol, clarifying an ambiguous statement. Heh.
I loved the moment where they drop out of warp and see the Vulcan rescuers disabled. Fantastic. I can say without exaggeration that this is the first time in weeks that this show has legitimately surprised me, and I had no idea what was going to happen next. I love that feeling. I hate that I usually don’t get it from this show. It’s one of the many things I liked about Firefly — those moments where you’re genuinely surprised by a plot development, and you don’t know where the story is going. Firefly had two or three per episode. If I can get one per episode in Enterprise, I’ll be happy. This episode had a really good one.
And I thought the show generated some real tension in the last fifteen minutes, after that point. Seeing the Tholian ships was very, very cool. The Tholian voice was suitably nerve-jangling. This may be the first time Enterprise has actually convinced me we’re dealing with a truly alien species, instead of some half-baked surrogate for some aspect of humanity. Yeah, yeah, I know, the very nature of storytelling, and our hard-wired self-absorption, means that we have to have humanity reflected to some degree in the aliens, or the stories won’t work. But they could do better at exploring the outer reaches of the field. Remember how amazingly frickin’ cool the Borg were when they first showed up, when Q flicked Picard & Co. way out into left field and we were suddenly confronted by something Really Different? That’s what I’m talking about. It’s what Enterprise has seriously lacked, so far.
And the tension continued: Repeating the warhead extraction was a nice touch, even if it was borrowed a bit from that one episode of Next Gen. They didn’t try to do too much with it, and I loved how it didn’t pay off, that the Tholians detected it and disabled it. Fabulous.
I also liked that we didn’t see the Tholians. So when they were carving their way through the hatch, it was truly suspenseful: We didn’t know what to expect. We had no idea what would be coming through that door, and that uncertainty draws us in. More of this, please.
Okay. So. Back to the time-travel issue I mentioned above.
I hate — hate — how Brannon Braga is obsessed with time travel, because his take on it is invariably short-sighted and juvenile. The current generation of Trek writers simply cannot handle the subject with any intelligence; without fail, they wind up introducing more questions and inconsistencies than they are able to resolve. And they don’t do it ambiguously, either; they just brush them under the rug and hope we don’t notice. “Don’t be so linear,” says Q in a great moment, but that’s exactly what we keep getting from Braga and his team.
But, that being said, I think it’s telling that one of the greatest hours in Trek history was a time travel story: Yesterday’s Enterprise. Why, if I hate how time travel is handled in Trek, was that such a great show?
First: They were willing to throw out the comfortable and familiar. They turned the understood universe upside down. “No children on a warship!” howls Picard at one point. They threw us into the deep end and trusted we could handle it. We could.
Second: There was something legitimately at stake. Yes, it was basically just “restoring the timeline,” but they didn’t have anything to go on. All they had was Guinan’s intuition, which may seem like a weak rationale, but it worked, dammit. It was real human conflict as Picard wrestled with his perception of reality and his trust in a very important person in his life. His choice was agonizing. That is true drama.
Plus, they actually killed people, and they made it count. The episode already had us off-balance, and then they waxed the captain. Now what do we do?
So given all of that, if in some parallel universe I were handed the assignment of writing Future Tense, here’s what I’d do.
I’d bust the door wide open.
Introduce the future ship. It’s a mystery at first, but then there’s actual information on it, explosive revelations that shake the crew. They try to report to Starfleet. The competition — Suliban etc. — blocks their effort. They make a run for it, trying to make a rendezvous with a stronger ally who can protect them, while continuing to investigate, and learning shocking facts about the temporal cold war.
Note that all of this is pretty much the way the actual episode plays out, with one important exception: It doesn’t play coy with the mystery. That shit bugs the hell out of me. They did it for years on The X-Files, stringing the audience along with hints and clues and red herrings, until finally people started to figure out that the show’s writers didn’t know what was actually going on any more than the audience did. I get the overwhelming sense that the Enterprise writers are making it up as they go, also, and it’s driving me nuts. They can’t keep their eye on the ball because there’s no ball for them to keep their eye on.
So I would lay it out on the table. Here’s what’s going on. Here are the main players. Here’s who you can trust, and who you can’t. Here’s what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they plan to go about it. Here’s what you need to do in the future to survive. Here’s what you should avoid.
Then they get to the rendezvous, the Tholians are there, the Vulcans are dead, and all hell breaks loose.
Enterprise is pounded hard while the Tholians and the Suliban fight each other. They take a direct hit; Archer is badly injured and T’Pol is killed. Trip’s in the engine room fighting a warp breach. Travis takes command. (Hey, gotta give him something.) Reed wants to be in the fight, but he’s the only one other than Trip who knows anything about the future ship’s components, and Trip is busy keeping Enterprise from blowing up, so Reed has to work out of his element, trying to get the future beacon working. (He’d be doing it using found pieces off the future ship, like a jigsaw puzzle, rather than trying to power incomprehensible technology with existing materials.)
The Tholians carve up the Suliban and turn their full attention to Enterprise. It’s a rout: We see their welder carving through the airlock. Cut to the bridge, and on the intercom, we hear: “They’re through— AAIIEEE! <chirp squeak alien voice>” — bzzt as the line is terminated. Future ship yanked from the belly of Enterprise. The Tholians surround them and open fire. Reed slams the final component home, and we get a momentary glimpse of blinking confirmation that it worked, but then he looks up as a wall of plasma fire tears through the bay and Enterprise disappears into a shattering cloud of death and
then Archer frowns as the small ship on the viewscreen fuzzes and flickers out. “Sorry,” says Hoshi, “it was there a minute ago.” T’Pol confirms: nothing on sensors any more. “Well, leave a probe,” says Archer, “and let’s go.” End of episode.
Now the audience knows everything, but Archer & Co. don’t. We know more than the characters. It’s Hitchcock’s old suspense trick: Show the audience the bomb under the table at the beginning of the scene, and the scene takes on a new urgency. Don’t tell us there’s a bomb until it goes off, and we’ll be surprised, but we have no emotional investment so the payoff is drastically reduced. The way I’ve got it above, we should be on pins and needles every time we meet some new alien species, wondering if this is going to be the folks we were warned about, but that Archer & Co. now have no idea are actually bad guys. Or vice versa: “They’re on your side, dummy! Aaagh!”
But like I said, I don’t think Braga and his writing team could pull this off, because I don’t think they really know what’s going on. Because they don’t know where they’re ultimately going, we vaguely get a feeling of directionlessness from the show, which saps its energy. I wish it were otherwise, because the premise has huge potential. I just don’t think the writers are up to it.
I’ll keep watching, though, for the time being. Flaws (and wasted promise) aside, this was a reasonably entertaining episode, so I can stick with it for a while.
My main worry was that Captain Braxton was going to show up in his time ship. If that happened, I was going to quit…
Wow, Cervaise, that was some post! Wow!