OK, some background. I’ve never really liked the original Star Trek, but I was a decent fan of the Next Generation and DS9. I watched maybe a season of Voyager before I lost interest and I’d never seen Enterprise up until about a month ago when I happened to catch an episode. I saw one again last night, which I assume was a rerun. It was an episode where the Captain and the Vulcan (I can’t remember their names) went back in time to fight some members of an alien race that were up to no good in present day Detriot. The race was called the Xindi (I’m guessing on the spelling). This race was also mentioned in the one earlier episode I saw, and seems like they are big theme in the current show.
I’m kind of curious about these guys. I don’t remember any mention of them in previous series. I assume they’ve been invented just for Enterprise, a new enemy to fight, yadda yadda. But it seems weird that if these guys are such a big deal now that Earth (or has the Federation already formed?) is fighting a war against them, that they’re completely absent from later times. From the time travel episode last night, I learned that Enterpise takes place around 2150. I don’t remember how long it is from 2150 to the time of the original series or Next Generation, but surely it wasn’t enough time for a space-faring race to die out, barring something like genocide.
So, has there been any sort of meta-explanation about why these guys don’t show up in the future (assuming that they don’t, and I haven’t just forgotten about them)? Or is that something the show will (hopefully) address as the story line plays out? I did notice in the time traveling episode, when the Captain talked to some guy from the 30th century, that he mentioned that this war wasn’t supposed to happen and there wasn’t any record of it. But even if the conflict has all been caused by “temporal anomalies” or something, the Xindi would still be present in the future of the other series, right?
That is correct. They were newly created for the third season of Enterprise.
First season of Enterprise = 2150.
Federation Formed = 2161.
First Season of ST:TOS = 2267
Well, that’s an inherent problem when one writes a prequel. Shortly after the show was announced (but well before the first episode), I told my wife “I already know the mission is an utter failure. If it were a success, then Kirk, Picard, Data, Sisko, et al would have mentioned them…”
Have you ever heard of the Barbary pirates? They were the very first peoples that the United States declared war on and except for living on in the Marine fight song (From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli…) most people have no idea who they are or that they even existed. That was two hundred years ago and took place on the same world as the one we are living on still. Why should we have heard of every alien species that the proto-Federation interacted with?
And although you didn’t ask, the captain is Jonathan Archer, the Vulcan is T’Pol, and the episode you saw was “Carpenter Street”. It was one of the weaker episodes of this season.
Well said. While I acknowledge that ST:ENT hasn’t lived up to my expectations I still watch it because more often that not its still a decent show. And complaints like, “How come we’ve never heard of the Xindi before?” are just pure fanboy whining.
As devastating as the Xindi attack on Earth was even that isn’t something that people would still be talking about 100 (TOS) or 200 (TNG) years later. People today don’t constantly talk about Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the Civil War etc. Hell, I feel too many people have forgotten about 9/11 already!
Thanks for the responses. However, I feel I should clarify, lest I be accused of fanboy whining.
I do know who the Barbary pirates were, but I can see the anology. My initial impression is that Earth’s conflict with the Xindi is more serious than the US’s was with the pirates (who never attacked the US directly), but as I’ve only seen two episodes, I’m fuzzy on the full extent of what the Xindi have done (or did later in the season than the episode I saw). The reasoning “they just never came up in conversation before” seems a bit lame to me, but how many events of this time period do we know about? The only one I can think of offhand (other than the Federation being founded), is Khan and the Eugenics War. I know he got his own movie, but was he (or the war) mentioned in the original series? I never watched it that much, so I really don’t remember.
But nevertheless, I can accept that the war with the Xindi happened and was just never talked about much, or it all gets wiped out by time travel, or whatever. I’m sure they’ll come up with something. That wasn’t what I was asking about. My question was, where are the Xindi in 2267 (or whenever NG takes place)? For such an important race, they seem to disappear pretty fast. The Barbary pirates might be gone, but Libya and Algeria are still there. Obviously, the reason we don’t see the Xindi in the other series is because they hadn’t been created yet, but that’s what I’m curious about, how the writers will resolve that. I don’t think they need to answer why no one talks about the Xindi war in later times (though it might be nice), but they do need to (or should) answer whatever became of the Xindi, because races don’t just go “poof”. I suppose the Xindi may have fallen on seriously hard times in the 150 odd years between Enterpise and the original series, and don’t warrant mentioning, but I think ideally even that would have an explanation.
But I guess my question has been answered, they haven’t dealt with this issue yet. I suppose if they do, it will be whenever they Xindi story line gets resolved.
The Xindi attacked Earth in the 2[sup]nd[/sup] season finale with a prototype energy-beam weapon. It cut a swath from Florida to South America and killed about 7 million people. This was just a test for a true ‘Death Star’ version which can destroy the whole planet. The entire 3[sup]rd[/sup] season was the whole Xindi story arc.
Yes, STII:TWOK was based on a TOS episode, Space Seed.
I’ve heard another explaination speculated as to why the Xindi, Sulliban, and the Enterprise NX-01 never were/will be mentioned in the rest of the ST universe.
Since the whole “temporal war” plot thread was part of the series from the very begginging, the NX-01’s crew might, at the end of the series, be forced to rewrite history so that the events of the series never happen, and that the actual alternate timeline is the regular ST universe as we know it. The Xindi and Sulliban never become more than harmless backwater planets, and the first starfleet ship ends up being the U.S.S. Horizon, or something.
Of course, for that to happen, we’d have to count on Paramount’s desire to sucker-punch the fanbase winning out over their desire not to do anything really clever science-fiction wise. Only time will tell.
That will never happen. They could pull something in this coming’s fourth season which sort of ‘eliminates’ the whole Xindi arc, but I doubt it.
Although fanboys (even moderate ones such as myself) dislike messed up canon, they dislike ‘Voyager-style’ reset button hitting even more! And regular viewers would be like, “What the hell? Pam dreamed the whole thing?!”
And there really hasn’t been anything in ENT so far that screws things up much. Plenty of things happened in the other series which were never mentioned again, the Dyson Sphere in TNG, the fountain of youth planet in ST:INS, the Genesis Device in ST:TWOK, the Guardian of Forever in TOS etc.
Yeah know, ‘For cryin’ out loud, its just a TV show!’
So once the Xindi realize they were duped by the sphere builders (Founders?!) they join the Federation and keep a low profile for a century or two (or three), what with that whole ‘killing 7 million humans by mistake’ unpleasantness, I don’t think they’d be real popular…
IIRC, the first time Archer meets the Federation guy from the way distant future (I don’t remember his name offhand), the Federation guy says that there are Xindi serving on his Enterprise (Enterprise J, was it? Clearly, I wasn’t paying all that much attention at the time). So eventually, if everything works out the way it’s “supposed” to, the Xindi and humans make nicey nicey and the Xindi actually end up joining the Federation.
If it happens quickly enough, there would be no need to mention them in the series set in the future - there are, presumably, tons of races that are members of the Federation that never get mentioned. How often do we hear about Betazed, outside of Troi’s mom’s occasional horny rampage across the galaxy?
There have been quite a few examples of temporal inconsistencies between Enterprise and TOS. These are mostly explained by the fact that Zefram Cochrane went onto the Galaxy-class Enterprise and saw things like viewscreens, padds, touch-screen computers, real food (what? no cubes?) and sets that weren’t made out of plywood and christmas-tree lights.
As a result of that, the generally-accepted canon is that the storyline of Enterprise is taking place in an alternate timeline from the rest of the stories. Due to the effort of Daniels (future guy), this timeline may or may not be merged back into the one we know about from the previous stories.
We also haven’t heard much about WWIII or the Eugenics Wars in the other stories, so saying that people wouldn’t be talking about the attack on Florida isn’t that out of line.
[spoiler]The inconsistancies will be resolved by the conclusion of the Temporal Cold War about midway into Season IV.
The Temporal Cold War was the original conflict for ENT, and somehow even figures in to the Xindi story arc. There is no Suliban or Xindi to deal with in later series or movies because it all be reset, as is Bergama’s wont.
After the Reset Button fixes the timeline, then they concentrate on the founding of the Federation. Archer (Quantum) will play a major role in this, as will Shran and T’Pol somehow.
The Romulan Wars will probably not happen in this series as a movie concerning it is in the works.[/spoiler]
:dubious:
I don’t think you’re whining. It’s something that a lot of people ask about and I just don’t think it’s that big a deal.
I don’t see why they should, honestly. There are innumerable cultures in our past that we have forgotten about or morphed into some culture we now know as a completely different name. If that can happen here, it can surely happen elsewhere as well.
Also, it’s not like the Xindi are the only species to do this in Trek’s history. Every incarnation of the show has a dozen species you never hear about again. Sigma Iotians from TOS; Gomaatu from TNG; Hunters of Tosk from DS9; and the Voth from Voyager are all contained only in the shows that created them.
There’s very little offhand comments in Trek when it comes to history. Unless there’s a plot point to be made, they most often talk about the present and not the past.
And Khan Noonien Singh fought the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, by the way.
Cochrane only saw the ship through his telescope. Lily, his assistant, is the one who saw the E-E’s interior.
