“Cold Front”
Written by Stephen Beck & Tim Finch
Directed by Robert Duncan McNeill
Season 1, Episode 11
Production episode 011
Original air date: November 28, 2001
Date: September 12, 2151
Captain’s star log. The mysterious future dude who is instructing Silik is peeved at how the Suliban botched the mission to destabilize the Klingon Empire. As punishment, he has his enhanced vision removed.
Crewman Daniels brings Archer his breakfast and asks where they’re headed next: it’s to a stellar nursery, one that already has a few ships visiting it. They arrive and hail a transport vessel. Captain Fraddock explains that he’s ferrying some pilgrims to observe the Great Plume of Agosoria. Archer invites folks to visit Enterprise, and while Fraddock declines, several pilgrims take him up on it. Phlox is particularly interested in their religion—they believe that the Plume relates to the Big Bang—and compares it to Hinduism. Tucker gives them a tour of engineering and is shocked to find—in the middle of his incredibly simplistic description of how the warp engines work—to find out that one of the pilgrims is a warp-field specialist. Meanwhile, one of the pilgrims sabotages a junction.
A plasma storm hits Enterprise and almost causes an antimatter cascade, but the sabotaged junction cuts it off before the ship can be destroyed. None of Tucker’s people take credit for the “sabotage” that actually saved everyone’s asses, and the pilgrims likewise decline to take credit. (Fraddock says he’s willing to take responsibility if there’s a reward…) The pilgrims head back to their ship, and accept Phlox’s requests to spend the night with them.
Daniels approaches Archer and brings him to his quarters, revealing that he’s not really with Starfleet, but is in fact from the future, and he believes that the pilgrim who messed with the junction is a Suliban. Daniels explains that the twenty-second century is a front in the Temporal Cold War—a phrase Archer heard Sarin use back in “Broken Bow.” He needs to capture Silik before he does more damage. Archer’s okay with this, given his own experiences with Silik. He reads T’Pol and Tucker in, and they make adjustments to the sensors using Daniels’s super-duper future technology, including a device that allows him to phase through bulkheads.
Some of the pilgrims return to Enterprise to watch the Plume from the mess hall, Phlox also returning. He says that none of the aliens behaved oddly.
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Until the Last of Me
Archer returns to his quarters to find Silik waiting for him. He tries to convince Archer that Daniels is not the good guy, and Silik himself went and saved everyone’s life. Archer refuses to even admit that he knows any Daniels, but when T’Pol contacts him with an update on Daniels’ upgrades, the jig is up. Silik stuns Archer and takes his leave.
Daniels’s fancy-shmancy upgrades detect Suliban life signs in engineering. Tucker evacuates engineering, and Silik confronts Daniels and shoots him, seemingly disintegrating him. Tucker tries to call Archer, but gets no answer—the computer says he’s in his quarters, so he heads there with Reed and Phlox. Archer wakes up and immediately tries to lock things down. Fraddock says nobody has come on board his ship since the pilgrims came over to Enterprise.
The pilgrims watch the Plume, asking Phlox to lead the ceremony, which he enjoys doing.
Silik has stolen all the cool stuff from Daniels’s quarters, but Tucker still has the phase thingie, and Archer uses it to find Silik and confront him. Fisticuffs ensue, leading to the shuttle bay, where Silik opens the hatch and jumps out. Archer manages not to get blown out the hatch, er, somehow, and gets himself back inside the vessel and closes the hatch, though not until he loses the phase thingie.
Archer has Daniels’s quarters sealed after reassigning his roommate.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Daniels has a device that can enable him to become incorporeal and move through bulkheads but somehow not fall through the deck. Also, Archer apparently has magical resist-explosive-decompression powers, as Silik opening the shuttle hatch should blow both of them into space pretty much instantly, but somehow Archer manages to stay in the shuttle bay, even though he’s only holding on with one hand at one point…
The gazelle speech. Archer is a lot faster to believe Daniels is from the future than either T’Pol or Tucker, who are both much more skeptical, though all three are impressed with the gadgets.
Florida Man. Florida Man Explains Warp Field Theory In A Simplistic Manner To A Warp Field Specialist, And Is Suitably Embarrassed.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is completely fascinated by the pilgrims, and joins them in their reindeer games, even being asked to lead the ceremony that accompanies the opening of the Plume. It’s really kind of adorable.
Good boy, Porthos! Porthos detects Silik before he decloaks himself, barking his fool head off (though he might also be barking his fool head off because Archer is very late feeding him…).
The Vulcan Science Directorate has also determined… T’Pol declares that the Vulcan Science Directorate has studied the notion of time travel extensively and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t exist. Given that this comes after (at this point) thirty-five years of Star Trek stories, many of which involve extensive time travel, this is particularly absurd.
More on this later… Several episodes of Voyager, notably “Relativity,” have mentioned the Temporal Prime Directive. Daniels provides some of the backstory on how that was created.
I’ve got faith…
“What’d they show?”
“Night of the Killer Androids.”
“That bad?”
“We’ve got fifty thousand movies in the database. There must be something worth watching.”
“You could read a book…”
–Mayweather and Sato discussing movie night on Enterprise, though I fail to see how any movie with the title Night of the Killer Androids could be anything other than FANTASTIC! (Though Sato is right, if movie night isn’t for you, you should just read a book…)
Welcome aboard. James Horan and John Fleck are back from “Broken Bow” as Future Guy and Silik, respectively, firmly establishing them as recurring, with Matt Winston debuting the recurring role of Daniels as well. All three will return in “Shockwave” at season’s end.
Michael O’Hagan is delightfully crotchety as Fraddock, while Joseph Hindy, Leonard Kelly-Young, and Lamont D. Thompson play various pilgrims.
Trivial matters: This episode follows up on the events of “Broken Bow,” continuing the Temporal Cold War storyline.
This is the first of four episodes directed by Robert Duncan McNeill, who played Paris on Voyager, and who has gone on to be a prolific TV director. It’s also one of two writing credits for the team of Stephen Beck & Tim Finch, who were executive story editors on this first season.
When Archer describes the holographic images Daniels showed him as evidence that he has future technology, Tucker reminds him of the Xyrillian holodeck he experienced in “Unexpected.”
It’s been a long road… “Those were two hours of my life I’d rather have back.” There are bits of this episode that are absolutely delightful, and unfortunately none of them have anything to do with the main plot.
There’s the wonderful conversation about movie night among Sato, Mayweather, and Reed—and yes, I really want to see Night of the Killer Androids, please and thank you—there’s the pilgrims who are checking out the Plume of Agosoria, there’s Phlox’s interest in those pilgrims, leading to the lovely ceremony that he gets the unexpected honor of leading, and there’s Tucker being embarrassed to realize he’s explaining warp-field theory to a warp-field specialist. Also I just adore the laconic, whatever-as-long-as-I-get-paid affect of Fraddock, magnificently played by Michael O’Hagan.
Even the main plot has some lovely bits, like Daniels mentioning that he always gets Archer’s eggs right by way of showing he can trust him, and Porthos outing Silik before he can decloak, and—well, okay, that’s pretty much it, because holy crap the entire Temporal Cold War thing is idiotic.
What’s especially maddening is that nothing actually happens in this episode. We get some mysteries—who is Daniels, really? why did Silik save the ship when he’s the bad guy?—none of which are solved, or even hinted at. It’s a whole lot of “oooooh, there’s something mysterious and weird going on, and we’re going to tease you with tiny bits of it in the hopes that you’ll keep coming back to find out more.” It’s tiresome, it’s not very effective, and it does a poor job of masking the fact that there’s no actual story here.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido has several short stories coming in 2022, including “The Light Shines in the Darkness” in the shared-world superhero anthology Phenomenons: Every Human Creature; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the superhero anthology Tales of Capes and Cowls; “What Do You Want From Me, I’m Old” in The Four ???? of the Apocalypse; the drabble “Portrait of a King Among Puppies” in the charity anthology Life is the Pits (Pit Bulls, That Is); “What You Can Become Tomorrow” about Josh Gibson, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Shelley in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…; “Carpet Bomb: The Carpet’s Tale” in The Fans are Buried Tales; and the Key West-set urban-fantasy short-story collection Ragnarok and a Hard Place: More Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet.
“the entire Temporal Cold War thing is idiotic.”
Which is what turned me off to this series
It’s a whole lot of “oooooh, there’s something mysterious and weird going on, and we’re going to tease you with tiny bits of it in the hopes that you’ll keep coming back to find out more.”
Amazingly, this was a couple of years before LOST, even though I think of the above sentence as the one line explaining J.J. Abrams’s career…
It’s tiresome, it’s not very effective, and it does a poor job of masking the fact that there’s no actual story here.
Sorry, I got a little confused there. Thought this was the Boba Fett review for a second. ;-)
Yes, the Temporal Cold War… sigh… what can you say? No really, what can you say, I watched this series a couple of times and still don’t know what that was all about. I only remember being unimpressed with Daniels, who came across as less like a cool secret agent and more like a visit from the Good Humor Ice Cream man. Exciting stuff.
@1,
I mean, as I’ve said in past Trek Re-watch posts…
While I’m well and truly sick of time travel in Trek, the concept of the Temporal Cold War is ironically not necessarily a bad idea.
With Archer’s era being the founding of the UFP and the repercussions it will have on galactic history, I mean, I can buy future parties screwing around and trying to take advantage of that (or similar pivotal eras).
But the execution of said concept…well, this is what happens when a network demands time travel solely to make a show more ‘futuristic’ and thus you don’t have a road map for an artificial narrative.
The writers never really got a handle on the Temporal Cold War, because they didn’t want to do it in the first place; it was foisted on them by the studio or the network (I forget which) because they feared doing a prequel and felt there had to be some element that moved forward from the TNG era. When I tackled the TCW in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, I had a hard time building anything coherent out of it. But this episode was one of the pieces of evidence that made me realize that, contrary to what people assume, Archer and Starfleet were not Future Guy’s targets. Future Guy was concerned with other parties like the Klingons and Tandarans, and if anything, Archer just sort of got in the way of his plans. The fact that he had Silik save Enterprise here suggests that he didn’t want to disrupt pre-Federation history if he could help it, and WTC offers an explanation why. Although it was never really clear to me who actually did try to blow up the ship.
“Also, Archer apparently has magical resist-explosive-decompression powers, as Silik opening the shuttle hatch should blow both of them into space pretty much instantly, but somehow Archer manages to stay in the shuttle bay, even though he’s only holding on with one hand at one point…”
Sorry, but it’s actually the other way around. Fiction has conditioned people to see decompression as some unstoppable hurricane-force wind continuing for minutes on end, but that’s total nonsense. In reality, the air inside a pressurized compartment would be vented to space in a single split-second burst, like a balloon popping (which is why it’s called explosive). And air is typically about a thousand times less dense than the human body, so unless it’s coming from a really huge interior space, there’s just not going to be enough mass of air to accelerate the mass of an adult human body out into space, certainly not if the person is holding onto something. It’s more like you’re going to feel a single brief shove as the air goes around you, and then it stops because the air’s all gone.
Think of a projectile in an air cannon. Unless the projectile is wide enough to seal the barrel, or has a sabot around it to form a seal, it’s not going to be blasted out, but will just sit there in the barrel or get gently pushed out, because most of the air will go around it rather than pushing it.
The Expanse got this right. There’s an episode in season 1 where a ship jettisons a group of refugees out an airlock, and you just see them nudged a little and then float inside the airlock until the ship uses its thrusters to move past them and leave them behind. The total mass of air inside the small lock is less than the mass of their bodies, so it just doesn’t push them hard at all.
So yes, the scene is unrealistic, but in the opposite of the way you’re saying. It should be easy for Archer and Silik to stay inside the shuttlebay, because the air would mostly go around them, and because it would be over in a split second rather than being a continuous gale. The danger wouldn’t be getting blown into space, but suffocation.
Also, the Vulcan Science Academy’s stance on time travel is not at all absurd or contradictory to Trek canon. Remember, in “The Naked Time” over a hundred years later, Spock treated time travel as a new discovery, something that had never been proven possible before. So it makes perfect sense that people in the ENT era would be unconvinced that it was viable.
Belated correction: The Expanse episode I talked about in the above post was actually episode 8 of season 2.
Thank you very much for this explanation of decompression. I always wondered because of the varying ways I’ve seen it treated in film.
@ChristopherLBennett in 5, didn’t Silik jump out deliberately?
And what they probably missed as decompression effects are bursting blood vessels in the eyes and elsewhere, but that would have complicated the subsequent episode.
@krad: Since that remark about Time Travel being impossible technically comes before every single one of those STAR TREK time travel stories, I’m willing to allow it as a sign that Time Travel is so inherently Mad Science that Vulcans can’t make head nor tail of it …. (Also that 22nd Century technology isn’t quite up to comprehending it on anything more than a “Well that happened”).
On a more serious note, I trust that you were joking when writing of Porthos “barking his fool head off” – isn’t raising the alarm as loudly as possible when confronted by unwelcome company almost the exact reason we domesticated dogs in the first place? (I recently came to the conclusion that Scrappy-doo is rather unjustly hated for doing exactly what you want a great dane – or any Sleuth dog – to do when brought into a haunted house that’s actually a crime scene/hideout; to whit, confronting those attempting to sneak up on on his People as loudly as possible and explaining in some detail what consequences will be inflicted upon them if they try hurting the aforesaid People … something Scooby-doo has conspicuously failed to do for as long as we’ve known him, bless that poor old scaredy-cat*).
*In all fairness Scrappy-doo IS a fairly annoying child (If one looks at him as a child, rather than a puppy), but I still think that there’s a case for his being a better dog than Scooby-doo (At least a MUCH better guard dog; I’d like to think the REAL reason we haven’t seen Scrappy in a while is that Vincent Van Ghoul has been employing the little fellow to guard that chest of ghosts).
Also, I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that just about everything else about this episode is a great deal of fun: I especially enjoyed Mr Mayweather getting a little joyride in the Captain’s chair (egged on by Ensign Hoshi all the while, that rascal!) and Lieutenant Reed’s good natured reaction to same, the extraterrestrial pilgrims being extremely charming modern believers (rather than alarming fundamentalist maniacs), Doctor Phlox being his usual xenophile self and Captain Fraddock being exactly the seen-it-all old tarpaulin you’d expect from a name like that.
Honestly, I’m a little disappointed Fraddock didn’t become a recurring bit character – his “Oh, you again” reactions to the sort of weirdness associated with NX-01 are likely to be worth the price of admission alone.
@3. TinFoilTopHat: In all honesty I rather thought that Daniel’s innocuousness worked perfectly for the character; after all, the best spies are those you never see coming (and who would look at Daniels and think “That guys up to something”?).
Sigh. Time travel, one of the top three overdone Trek plots, the others being the Borg and the Mirror universe. And when it’s handled as badly as Enterprise did, it’s even harder to take seriously. (as seriously as you can make time trace, anyway).
Enterprise got a great big, unknown galaxy to play with and explore and they keep falling back on these dumb stories.
@@@@@ 5 – “in “The Naked Time” over a hundred years later, Spock treated time travel as a new discovery, something that had never been proven possible before.”
Yes, that’s true at this point in Enterprise’s run but there’s lots more tome travel to come, including the entire ship travelling back in time. Spock should not have been surprised unless Starfleet decided that, even though it’s possible and that ships might encounter time travel at some point, they would keep the very concept of time travel a secret. Gotta keep your crews totally unprepared, right?
Yes, Ed, I was joking, but in part because Porthos was probably mostly barking because he was hungry, the little mooch….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I wanted to like all of the Temporal Cold War stuff because super agents traveling through time to correct the timeline seemed like inherently cool stuff and I loved the Voyager episode “Relativity.” But nothing with the concept on this series ever amounted to anything. And Matt Winston as Daniels always took me out of whatever episode he was featured in. He seemed like a dweeb I had seen on some sitcom miscast in this role for whatever reason.
7. ED
Oh, I’m sure Daniels would make an effective spy in the real world, but what this series didn’t need was another scoop of vanilla from Dad Rock Farms.
@6/o.m.: I’ll take your word about Silik. The point is that it’s actually totally realistic that Archer could hold on, because he’s not in a cannon so there’s plenty of room for the air to go around. The unrealistic part is the standard conceit that the airflow lasts for more than a fraction of a second.
The problem is that when fiction depicts something wrongly as a matter of routine, it fools us into assuming that’s how it’s supposed to work. Other than The Expanse, the only other time I can think of that I’ve seen decompression depicted realistically onscreen is The Martian. On the flipside, the stupidest depiction by far was in Ron Moore’s Virtuality pilot, where a character was in a closet-sized airlock but was buffeted by hurricane-force winds from nowhere for well over a minute.
“And what they probably missed as decompression effects are bursting blood vessels in the eyes and elsewhere, but that would have complicated the subsequent episode.”
A minor complication if exposure is brief enough. You can survive exposure to vacuum for maybe half a minute or so, as long as you don’t try to hold your breath like Dr. Crusher wrongly recommended in TNG: “Disaster” (since that will rupture your alveoli).
@10,
Yeah, “Relativity” is exactly what I was thinking of, too.
Not having the Relativity appear in hindsight was a missed opportunity for doing a 24th Century-era crossover (or 29th technically, but whatever).
I see no problem in T’Pol or the Vulcans having a hard time believing in time travel. As mentioned above, everything involving time travel in the Trek universe happened well after Archer’s era. Just because the show came after everything else, we should remember we’re dealing with a prequel.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with the assessment of this episode. Cold Front excels as a collection of interesting character moments, much like Breaking the Ice, while the Temporal Cold War aspect is very much a dud.
In essence, the show was still trying a fresh approach rather than going full plot from the start. It should be noted that both Finch and Beck left before the season was over. Brannon Braga once said Chris Black was the only ‘new’ writer who stuck around. That first season was an exodus of writers, and I believe that happened because they abandoned the original character-centric approach in episodes like this, opting for a more traditional Trek mode of storytelling as the season went on.
I certainly like Daniels as a character and the way he deceives Archer (it was certainly a twist back in 2002), but the Temporal Cold War only serves to remind me of how X-Files lost track of the Alien Conspiracy plot. Whoever decided such a plot should be implemented on Enterprise – and I also assume it was an outside studio/network source – had poor sense of timing, given X-Files at this point was already on its final season, and running on creative fumes. As I understand, Future Guy was supposed to be Archer himself, but I have a hard time believing the writers had any clear idea as to how this was going to be resolved. Season 4’s Storm Front, more than anything, was a deliberate attempt to bury the concept for good, especially given how Shran and the Xindi story threads were far more effective.
@12 I was thinking along your lines. I remember one of those infotainment thingies, “How long would you live…” comparatives. “In Space” is relatively benign, with only Mars and Earth being better. Most of the rest of the solar system planets are worse, except insofar as you die from vacuum (being exposed on the Moon is functionally identical to just stepping out of the craft).
Of all the planets you can “step” on (leaving out gas giants where either you live “space” length of time if you’re in the upper atmosphere, or if you’re in deep, you implode instantly) Venus was the worst: less than a second where dying from pressure, dying from heat, or dying from corrosive atmosphere race each other to claim the credit and XPs from offing you.
I can easily see the Vulcans being resistant to the idea of time travel. I would imagine.it would annoy them that the universe could allow something as disorderly as effect preceding cause and potentially causing paradoxes. Like the aspects of quantum theory that gave Einstein headaches, they would not accept it unless supplied with incontrovertible proof.
My dad would sometimes make something he called “slumgullion;” whatever different ingredients were available thrown into one pot, and stretched into a meal. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. This episode reminds me of that approach, and this time it didn’t work.
@@@@@ 14 – “everything involving time travel in the Trek universe happened well after Archer’s era.”
Untrue. In Carpenter Street, Archer and T’Pol travel to Detroit in 2004. In the Zero Hour/Storm Front, the entire ship and crew end up in World War II. There may be other cases I’ve mercifully forgotten but time travel was well established in the time of Enterprise.
I reckon we got to see Night of the Killer Androids in the first season of Picard.
@18/kkozoriz: Huh? Sure, and Kirk and Spock went to 1930, and Picard and Data went to 1893. But the general public didn’t know about those visits from the future, so they’d have no relevance to what the Vulcan Science Academy is aware of in 2151. The episodes you mention haven’t happened yet from Archer’s perspective, so there’s no way the VSA would know about their time travels. The question isn’t when the earliest time travel happened, the question is when the Vulcan scientific establishment got proof that it could happen. At the time of this series, the existence of time travel is not yet a proven reality as far as Earth or Vulcan is aware.
And really, the VSA isn’t wrong. Science should be skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want science to accept a new idea that conflicts with current findings, it has to meet the burden of proof, to withstand attempts to disprove it or find an alternative explanation. And in real life, current physics says that time travel is theoretically possible but prohibitively difficult, perhaps functionally unattainable. It would require some unknown form of exotic matter (although so would warp drive), and any theoretically viable time travel method would probably lead to a Hawking radiation runaway that would incinerate anyone who attempted to use it. So it’s essentially correct based on current science to say that time travel is effectively impossible. Changing that assessment requires new evidence and new theoretical models.
And at the time of ENT, that evidence isn’t there yet. Because ENT was presumably trying to be consistent with “The Naked Time” where Spock treated time travel as hitherto unproven as of 2266. (Presumably all the Temporal Cold War stuff got classified so Spock didn’t know about it. Although Discovery season 2 blew that out of the water with Spock knowing about the time-traveling Red Angel suit.)
@18/Kkozoriz: Uh, the events of Carpenter Street take place two years after this episode. Same with Zero Hour/Storm Front. Sure, I made a mistake by using the word ‘everything‘ when it comes to time travel in the ENT era, but my point still stands. Until we get to season 3’s Carpenter Street, neither T’Pol, nor any Vulcans in the Science Academy have any reason to believe claims of time travel. As of right now – Cold Front – she has zero reason for believing any of it, and certainly no reason for believing Daniels, Silik or any other Sulliban.
@20 Though the second season of Discovery will establish that Spock himself knows of time travel via the Red Angel suit and Klingon time crystals, so his surprise on TOS is retroactively feigned.
Given the lies the Vulcans have told already in this series, and their overall prickish behavior, I’ve always felt they were lying about time travel not being possible. T’Pol very likely is telling the truth, based on what she knows. She also, IIRC, knew nothing about the fake monastery seen earlier this season.
Why would the Vulcans hide/cover up/lie about time travel? Because its dangerous and any time you tell a human not to do something because its dangerous, what happens? Yep, you know darn well what happens. We’ll do it just to find out for ourselves. So if the Vulcans go “well, tijme travel is theoretically possible but incredibly dangerous and you shouldn’t try it”, humans will say “hold my beer”.
Vulcans, watching out for humans since 2063.
@21 – Yes, removing the “everything from your post does make a huge difference.
@20 – “At the time of this series, the existence of time travel is not yet a proven reality as far as Earth or Vulcan is aware.”
As I said, Carpenter Street and Zero Hour/Storm Front establish without question that time travel is possible. There is no question that in the time of TOS, time travel is known to be possible even if the mechanisms for it are not understood. Galileo may not understand how a jet aircraft can fly but if you show him one from take off to landing, he’d most likely agree that flight was possible.
And is the Vulcan Science Academy a civilian organization or is it part of the government? The (American) National Academy of Sciences is non-governmental but that doesn’t necessarily hold true for the Vulcans. Since Earth Starfleet knows about time travel, even if T’Pol was sworn to secrecy, Earth would know that it’s possible. And since it’s lmpwn to be possible, it would make sense for TOS Starfleet to inform their Captains and Science Officers about that fact just in case they encounter it.
“You’re from 900 years in the future and you need my help?”
Back to the Temporal Cold War. At least the plot’s reasonable straightforward, if needing a lot of thought on the viewer’s behalf since the representatives of the two factions are being frustratingly vague throughout. What we get is basically spies spying on each other, and in a rather confused chicken-and-egg way as well. Daniels is there to catch Silik and Silik is there to get Daniels’ equipment. Silik saving Enterprise confuses the matter more than anything else: My guess is that Enterprise wouldn’t have been in the plasma storm without their temporal tinkering, so Silik’s been told to make sure there isn’t any collateral damage that his superiors don’t know the consequences of. (This will have both changed and not changed when they next appear.) Ultimately, the whole thing ends in a kind of draw.
While Archer and co are caught up in the spy games, the rest of the episode is surprisingly humorous. The abrupt and rude Fraddock, who just wants to get on with his job, leaves Archer utterly bemused. Phlox embracing the pilgrims’ culture is a nice use of his character. And Reed, Mayweather and Sato get most of the episode’s best lines wih their rather detached lower decks scenes. Also Tucker treating the pilgrims like visiting schoolchildren only to find they know more than he thought.
Yes, Silik, Daniels and Future Guy will all be back in the season finale despite Daniels apparently dying here (although I’ll be interested to see that, because I’d have sworn Future Guy wasn’t in that one), along with the contents of Daniels’ cabin. Mayweather gets to sit in the captain’s chair for the first time. It’s implied that they’ve been in space for 4 months 3 weeks and 6 days. Daniels describes himself as “more or less” human, presumably indicating he has some non-human ancestry. (This will be revisited next season.) He responds to Tucker’s query about Earth still being around in the 31st century with “That depends on how you define Earth.” It’s still around and largely unchanged in the 32nd century in Discovery, so presumably he’s talking in political rather than geographical terms (eg Earth isn’t an independent planet in his time).
CLB knows far more about decompression than me, but the sequence didn’t look too unrealistic from a layman’s point of view. And yes, the Vulcans having determined that time travel isn’t possible might seem absurd from the point of view of Star Trek fans who’ve seen the earlier-but-later episodes, but in-universe, it doesn’t seem all that absurd. After all, scientists have determined it’s impossible to travel faster than light, but apparently they’re wrong. And that’s before we get onto inter-species breeding… (Something else the Vulcans seem to think is impossible!)
@23/ragnar: “Given the lies the Vulcans have told already in this series, and their overall prickish behavior, I’ve always felt they were lying about time travel not being possible.”
Except an entire civilization is not a single monolithic “they,” no matter how much fiction often simplifies things by assuming they are. The “they” you’re talking about is the Vulcan High Command, the government/military at the time. The time travel assessment comes from the Vulcan Science Directorate. What you’re saying here is the equivalent of blaming the Smithsonian Institution for a CIA coverup.
Besides, how does one government cover up something that’s true throughout the entire universe? It’s not like lying about a hidden listening post. The laws of physics can be observed by anyone, anywhere. And the whole way science works is that assertions are not merely taken on faith or authority, but are tested and retested. If the VSA were under the control of the High Command and forced to issue false scientific assertions, then everyone else in the whole known galaxy could simply double-check the math and the evidence that the VSA put forth and demonstrate that the results were false. You can’t lie to people when they can just find out for themselves.
Granted, it could be that the VSA is such a respected authority in the known galaxy that scientists who challenge its conclusions have a hard time being taken seriously. But those conclusions would at least have to be plausible, convincing to other scientists. They couldn’t be a blatant lie of the sort you can find on a fringe website, because any competent scientist could see through that. They would have to be, at most, incomplete.
Really, to borrow an argument from David McIntee, time travel should be difficult in the Trek universe. Given how easy it is for Trek time travelers to alter the past, if time travel itself were easy, then people would be screwing up history all the time. Any moron with a warp ship could slingshot around the Sun and try to fix a bad romance or whatever. So logically, time travel must be very hard to do successfully or safely. There ought to be only a very narrow range of parameters under which it’s achievable. So it makes sense that it would seem effectively impossible to those who haven’t yet figured out the rare ways it can be done.
@24: But we’re not talking about TOS. We’re talking about the first season of ENT. Yes, by the end of Enterprise, time travel has been firmly established as being possible. But not in this episode.
(That said, Archer travels in time at the end of the first season but T’Pol remains sceptical until she experiences it for herself in Season 3. So just because one guy or one ship claimed to have travelled in time a bit doesn’t necessarily mean that future generations will just accept it happened without proof, especially if it doesn’t happen again for a century or so.)
@@@@@ 25 – “Given how easy it is for Trek time travelers to alter the past, if time travel itself were easy, then people would be screwing up history all the time. Any moron with a warp ship could slingshot around the Sun and try to fix a bad romance or whatever. So logically, time travel must be very hard to do successfully or safely. There ought to be only a very narrow range of parameters under which it’s achievable.”
Or, as we saw in Parallels and ST09, you travel to the past, you branch off a new universe. And, according to Simon Pegg, this new universe can have a different past as well. Changing the past is easy. Time travel is easy. Getting back to your exact universe should be hard (but isn’t).
@@@@@27 – No, by the 11th episode of season 3 of Enterprise, time travel is an established fact. That would be Carpenter Street. And by the end of the third season, there’s another proof, being Zero Hour and Storm Front. So, a little but past halfway through Enterprise, time travel is known as real. It can be done.
And yet, which is how TOS came up, a hundred years later, it’s treated as totally unknown.
SPOCK: It’s never been tested. It’s a theoretical relationship between time and antimatter.
And
SPOCK: This does open some intriguing prospects, Captain. Since the formula worked, we can go back in time, to any planet, any era.
– The Naked Time
Similarly, Spock says invisibility is theoretical in Balance of Terror and yet Enterprise and Discovery have encountered practical, naked eye invisibility.
And, As Christopher says, Spock knew about time travel in Discovery.
Maybe that’s why so much technology is seen once and never mentioned again, no matter how useful it would be. Perhaps Starfleet classifies pretty much everything.
It was an episode on first run that I found quite fascinating, mistakenly believing that there was a plan in place for TCW and would all make sense in the end. On rewatches, knowing there’s no great payoff or explanation for why Silik saved the ship leaves it flat
@28: How is it an established fact? Because someone had done it? That’s not an “established fact”, that’s anecdotal evidence, unless there was actual physical proof that they’d done it.
And even if the Vulcan Science Directorate and whoever else just took Archer and his crew’s word for it and accepted time travel as possible, I’m not seeing any real contradiction with Spock’s later comments. In Carpenter Street and Storm Front (and Shockwave), Starfleet officers can only time travel under the direction of 31st century Time Agents. After The Naked Time, they have a (different) method of doing it themselves.
So, if Enterprise was supposed to explode and now it hasn’t, I don’t understand how that doesn’t alter history. I’ve always felt that created an alternate timeline right there, about what, 100 years before that whole Kelvin business? Everything we see in Star Trek after this can’t possible exist in the same timeline as everything we’ve seen before this. Pretty much anything to do with the TCW would have had the same effect. (I am especially confused how Picard can take place in the future of the same timeline as we saw on NextGen, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Quoth John Taylor: “(I am especially confused how Picard can take place in the future of the same timeline as we saw on NextGen, but that’s a discussion for another time.)”
Huh? Why are you confused about that? Of course it’s the same timeline……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@31/John Taylor: “Everything we see in Star Trek after this can’t possible exist in the same timeline as everything we’ve seen before this.”
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that Daniels’s future is the same one we saw in the previous series. That’s never explicitly established. Yes, there’s a version of the Federation and Starfleet in his future, but we know there’s more than one possible future in which those things exist. My assumption has always been that Daniels was from a slightly different future, and that it was the events of the Temporal Cold War that changed it into the timeline we saw in TOS, TNG, etc.
“(I am especially confused how Picard can take place in the future of the same timeline as we saw on NextGen, but that’s a discussion for another time.)”
If you mean the “All Good Things…” future, it was established at the end of that episode that Picard telling people about it meant that it probably wouldn’t unfold the same way. Indeed, it was contradicted as soon as Generations destroyed the Enterprise-D.
Personally, I was baffled by Daniels thinking that knowing how Archer likes his eggs would be a convincing argument, and equally baffled by Archer acting like it was. Uh, what? Gonna need way more than “possibly ingratiates himself with the captain using good food” to trust this weird dude.
And of course, yeah, the whole Temporal Cold War plot is DOA. Although it’s a lot worse once you’ve seen the whole thing and know that the writers had absolutely no plan or payoff for any of it — at least before knowing that, there’s still the potential for something cool to come out of it. But knowing what we know kills even that much enjoyability.
@34/SM Rosenberg: The point was that Daniels had been Archer’s valet (essentially) for some time already, even though we hadn’t seen him before. Daniels was reminding Archer that the captain had known and trusted him since the ship left port months before, and he was still that same guy even if he wasn’t who he’d said he was. Although it would’ve played better if we had seen Daniels in the background before now.
Re: Picard, in Yesterday’s Enterprise while Tasha was alive again, Worf was nowhere. If they had not fixed it, I would not expect to see a future where Worf was back again and Tasha was gone. By the same token, until they fix the Kelvin timeline, Picard’s history as we know it should have ended the moment Spock disappeared. Picard should not have the same life that we know anymore than Kirk, as played by Chris Pine, has.
@36/John Taylor: The Kelvin timeline doesn’t need “fixing,” because it didn’t replace the original timeline, but coexists alongside it like the Mirror Universe. It was always intended to be a parallel, since of course the creators of the movies had no desire to eradicate the Prime timeline, nor would they have been allowed to, since the movies were licensed to Paramount Pictures while it was a separate company from CBS, the owners of the Trek franchise. Plus, it’s more scientifically accurate for time travel to create an alternate timeline; the fictional conceit of the original timeline being “erased” is physically impossible and nonsensical. The filmmakers did their research and chose to adopt a more plausible model of time travel, because it suited their goals to create an alternative to the main canon rather than a replacement for it.
@35,
Although it would’ve played better if we had seen Daniels in the background before now.
Agreed. It would’ve been comparable to VOY building up Seska as a recurring character in the early episodes in preparation for the big reveal in “Stare of Flux”
@37
I am not terribly convinced. But I admire your eloquence.
Since I didn’t start watching ENT until after Star Trek 2009 came out, I always thought T’Pol’s comment that the Vulcan Science Directorate has concluded time travel doesn’t exist was darkly hilarious, since in at least one timeline (and, in fact, presumably in an infinite number of parallel timelines) their planet will be destroyed by time travelers 107 years later.
@39/John Taylor: It’s not just my opinion. Discovery: “Terra Firma, Part 1” established onscreen that the Kelvin timeline — “an alternate timeline created by the temporal incursion of a Romulan mining ship” — exists in parallel to the Prime timeline.
At this point I’d just like to add that I HATE time-travel, in fiction or in theory; it always gives me a headache and a vague impulse to burn the author/time-traveller/scientific community at the stake on general principles (More accurately, the general principle that trying to understand History is hard enough when what happened stays happened).
@9. krad: Hee hee, but if we pilloried dogs for being inveterate moochers and eternally hungry then there’s not a one of them would get to run loose (I’m not sure what Mr Bennett and the wider scientific community would agree, but I’m morally certain than the ability to mooch loveably is what separated the ancestors of dogs from wolves in the first place!).
As I’ve worked my way through the first season of this show, there’s a lot that has worked for me, but the Temporal Cold War isn’t one of those things. So this episode was a big meh for me.
@41
It still doesn’t make sense to me. Once the Kelvin timeline was created, nothing in the Prime timeline should be the same after Spock disappeared. And if you guys think that the Mirror Universe is the same as an alternate timeline, then I give up because we clearly do not have the same understanding of these shows.
And my original point was how can history be the same if Enterprise was supposed to blow up and didn’t. Trip said it would have been an accident so is not like some saboteur from the future caused it and Silik prevented it.
@45/John: “Once the Kelvin timeline was created, nothing in the Prime timeline should be the same after Spock disappeared.”
That’s the usual conceit of fiction, but it’s utter nonsense scientifically. Did you see Avengers: Endgame? They also got the science right, with Bruce Banner giving that whole speech about how the Back to the Future model is fantasy and changing history just creates a parallel rather than erasing the original. The Kelvin films chose to use the same, more plausible model, because it’s the prerogative of science fiction to reject old, bad science in favor of a more modern understanding, which is why we don’t see stories about Martian canals and Venusian jungles anymore.
But there is precedent in Trek as far back as “Yesteryear.” When Spock went back through the Guardian to restore his own timeline, and Thelin said “Live long and prosper in your world,” Spock replied “And you in yours,” meaning that he expected Thelin’s alternate timeline to survive even after Spock restored his own. It could be that the apparent “erasures” of timelines in other episodes were just an illusion created by the observers moving from one timeline into a parallel.
“And if you guys think that the Mirror Universe is the same as an alternate timeline, then I give up because we clearly do not have the same understanding of these shows.”
Of course it’s an alternate timeline. It’s got the same planets and species and individuals, but different historical events. That’s literally what an alternate timeline is. I’ll never understand why people think that a timeline created by time travel is somehow fundamentally different in nature from a timeline that branched off spontaneously. Everything in the universe, whether natural or artificial, is governed by the same physics. Fire is fire whether it’s started by lightning or a match. Human creations merely utilize the existing laws and phenomena of nature; they don’t use fundamentally separate ones.
“And my original point was how can history be the same if Enterprise was supposed to blow up and didn’t.”
I already answered that. Daniels’s timeline is probably not quite the same one that TOS through VGR happened in. It’s very similar, but not the same. The events of ENT changed history into the Prime Timeline seen in those shows, not away from it.
Wow. Ok.
@@@@@ 46 – “That’s the usual conceit of fiction, but it’s utter nonsense scientifically.”
You can say the same thing about time travel itself. Sure, you can fiddle with the equations to show that it’s possible but that involves things such as negative mass or infinitely dense and infinitely long cylinders rotating at the speed of light. Fiddling with the math and introducing nonsense terms doesn’t make it plausible. It’s a fun little mental exercise much like faster than light travel.
One thing that is never touched on is where the energy to create an entire universe comes from. It’s like <pop> “Oh, now there’s two universes instead of one and it didn’t take any energy at all.” All that mass has to come from somewhere and E-mc2 means that m in this case would be the mass of the universe. That’s a whole lot of energy.
“It could be that the apparent “erasures” of timelines in other episodes were just an illusion created by the observers moving from one timeline into a parallel.”
So, every other instance of time travel (in a fictional universe) is wrong except for Yesteryear (which changed how the Guardian of Forever worked)? Trek has always had differing ways that time travel worked and none of them can be said to be wrong because it’s all made up. Trek has always contradicted itself.
@48 “Trek has always contradicted itself.”
Thank you.
@John Taylor,
Have you ever considered the great paradox of erasing a future?
If Nero goes back in time and destroys Vulcan, and successfully kills Spock, then how can Spock then a hundred and thirty years later fly the Red matter created on Vulcan by Vulcan scientists to Hobus to create the black hole that sent Nero back in time to destroy Vulcan and kill Spock?
As Bruce Banner said, if you go back in time then the relative future becomes your subjective (personal) past. Going back in time doesn’t allow you to change your own past, otherwise changing your past allows that you would remove the circumstances that caused you to time travel in the first place.
If a man goes back and decides to kill Hitler as a baby, then Hitler doesn’t become the evil dictator everyone knows and hates and he would no longer have a reason to go back in time and kill Hitler.
As always remember the wisdom of Kathryn Janeway, “My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple: Don’t even try“
The screenshot used at the top here is hilarious. Really sums up the episode.
“when was time travel invented” is a very sticky question. let’s say someone in, oh the 26th century invents a time machine, gets it to the 15th century and shows it to Leonardo da Vinci who promptly shows it to Archimedes….
assuming that our science heroes act ethically, maybe the darn thing gets stolen by a Rasmussen type
given that the probability of all events tend to 1 if given enough time, and in this case time is wrapped up in a loop and you suddenly have infinite amounts of it within a finite physical interval …
if time travel is to be invented, it has already been invented. (or as Hawking said: where are all the time travelers?)
I didn’t think much of Enterprise when it aired, and my opinion hasn’t changed much since I began this chronological (re)watch for the sake of completism, but I do love Dr. Phlox’s boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for exploring other cultures. It’s infectious.
If that keeps up for four years, I’ll definitely feel like I got something out of the series.
I get that the Temporal Cold War arc was imposed by executive meddling, but that’s not really an excuse for half-assing the writing of it. This episode could have been so good if the audience had been given any indication of what the stakes were and what the time travellers were fighting over. It was frustrating the first time through, and knowing that there will never be any meaningful payoff just makes it worse.
I also think it would have been more interesting if Daniels had been the “bad guy” in this interaction, but unfortunately Enterprise is prone to equating greater humanness with greater goodness (as we’ll see with the Xindi arc in particular).
Dear Paramount,
Please make a whole series starring a grumpy freighter captain who has to begrudgingly take people from here to there. Sure, it’d be like The Love Boat only with a peevish Captain Stuben, but I think that would be the charm of it.
Signed,
Me
Yeah, the TCW is silly and difficult to understand. So far it seems to exist only to provide a little run and jump. It’s pretty silly, really. I can see why the Vulcans choose to not want it to exist.