“Shockwave”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 1, Episode 26
Production episode 026
Original air date: May 22, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is en route to a Paraagan mining colony. They’re a matriarchal society, which prompts some tiresome, “wow, women in charge, that’s crazy” commentary from Archer and especially Tucker. The mines spit out tetrazine, so the landing protocols for the shuttlepod are very specific to avoid the plasma exhaust igniting the atmosphere.
Reed is careful to shut the exhaust ports ahead of schedule, but somehow the tetrazine ignites anyhow, burning the atmosphere and completely wiping out the colony, crispy-frying all 3600 inhabitants.
The entire crew is devastated. As far as they can determine, the pod’s exhaust ports were closed, but the tetrazine was definitely ignited, and there was nothing else besides the pod in the area. Reed does find some odd EM readings, but they could be anything.
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The City Inside
Archer reports to Forrest, and before too long, the verdict comes down that Enterprise is to return to Earth, its mission scrubbed. The Vulcans are making noise about keeping Earth constrained to their homeplanet for another ten-to-twenty years.
As the crew heads home and contemplates their fate, Archer is spending most of his time moping. T’Pol tries to convince him to fight for Enterprise’s mission to his superiors, as she plans to do to the Vulcan High Command.
Contemplating this, and the fact that his Vulcan science officer just tried to cheer him up, Archer goes to bed—
—and wakes up in his bed in his apartment in San Francisco. Tucker calls him to let him know he can sleep in as the inspection pods are getting an overhaul tonight. Archer realizes that it’s ten months ago, the day before Klaang crash-landed in Broken Bow. After confirming it by calling the Interspecies Medical Exchange to confirm that they have a Denobulan named Phlox there, Daniels shows up in his apartment. Somehow Daniels has brought him to ten months in his own past (almost like he Quantum Leapt into his previous life!), and also apparently was only mostly dead, not all dead, after Silik attacked him.
According to Daniels, the Paraagan colony wasn’t supposed to blow up and Enterprise’s mission wasn’t supposed to end. Daniels then gives Archer very specific instructions on how to build a quantum beacon. Daniels sends Archer back to the present, and he orders Mayweather to turn the ship around and head back to the Paraagan colony and for Tucker to build the beacons. At Archer’s direction, Reed also finds a small device responsible for the EM readings he found earlier. Nobody recognizes the design, but Archer says they’ll get some Suliban data disks to help dope it out.
Upon their arrival at the colony, they then head to a nearby binary star system, using the beacons to detect a cloaked Suliban ship. Reed and Archer unseal Daniels’ quarters and pull out some ship schematics—Archer telling Reed that no, he can’t download all the Klingon ship specs they see—for the Suliban. Armed with that intelligence, a strike team consisting, not of any of the dozen or so qualified security personnel under Reed’s command, but rather of the first three people in the chain of command go over in a pod. Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker steal some data disks and then head back to Enterprise, managing to stop the genetically enhanced Suliban with a bunch of stun grenades and three phase pistols. Because they’re just that awesome.
Using the disks, T’Pol and Sato are able to access the device Reed found on the shuttle. It has evidence that the cloaked Suliban ship attached itself to the pod, placed the device, and used it to ignite the Paraagan colony’s atmosphere. Enterprise is innocent.
Archer reports to Forrest and they set course back for the Vulcan ship they were supposed to rendezvous with.
However, Silik has been sent by the shadowy figure from the future with the cool voice to capture Archer—but to leave Enterprise be to have its rendezvous. Silik isn’t thrilled about letting them keep the disk, but he doesn’t particularly want to piss off his benefactor a second time.
Enterprise is surrounded by cloaked Suliban ships. Silik says he wants Archer, and if he agrees to become his guest, he’ll let Enterprise go. While there’s still a chance he’ll destroy the ship anyhow if Archer goes over, he’ll definitely destroy the ship if he doesn’t, so he puts T’Pol in charge and heads off to turn himself over.
When Silik complains that Archer hasn’t arrived, T’Pol is confused, especially since Archer isn’t on the ship anymore. Silik targets all the Suliban weapons on the Enterprise warp core.
Meanwhile, Archer finds himself in a burned-out building, standing next to a stunned Daniels. The latter had brought the captain here to his home in the thirty-first century before Archer could turn himself over to Silik. But somehow the act of doing that changed Daniels’ own future—when he’d gone to get Archer, the place was thriving, now it’s a burned-out wasteland. And all the time-travel equipment he’d used is destroyed. They’re stuck in this alternate thirty-first century.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Archer throws out a ton of technobabble while telling Tucker how to build the beacons: dispersal curve, sub-assembly tolerances, emitter algorithms, stable flux between the positron conductors, renormalizing the tertiary wave functions, and a whole lot of other nonsense.
Also, when they mentioned quantum beacons, I couldn’t help but flash on the line Scott Lang has in Ant-Man & The Wasp: “Do you guys just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?”
The gazelle speech. Archer does not take the death of 3600 Paraagans well (nor should he). He spends half the episode moping about it, and the other half proving that it wasn’t his fault.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol gives Archer quite the pep talk, convincing him to fight for Enterprise’s mission rather than wallow in self-pity—though truly it’s Daniels’ intelligence that gets him up off his morose ass to do something…
Florida Man. Florida Man Creates Futuristic Device Without Having The First Clue What He’s Doing.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has to remind T’Pol that humans process grief differently than Vulcans (or Denobulans, for that matter). He’s also the most philosophical about Enterprise’s mission coming to an end.
Good boy, Porthos! Porthos tries very hard to comfort Archer by being incredibly cute while the captain is moping about.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Despite Archer having gone back ten months in time and gotten detailed instructions on how to build quantum beacons, as well as the location of the cloaked Suliban ships—a level of detail that obviates it being a dream—T’Pol insists that the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
Ambassador Pointy. Tucker makes some snotty comments about Soval, saying that ending Enterprise’s mission will be his crowning achievement and he’ll get a medal.
Qapla’! Daniels has a lot of Klingon ship specs in his quarters, and Reed salivates over them.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. When Archer contacts the Interspecies Medical Exchange while shirtless (he’s just out of bed), the woman who answers the phone is very obviously checking him out.
I’ve got faith…
“Can’t you ever give a straight answer?”
“Depends on the question.”
–Archer asking an honest question, and Daniels saying, “no.”
Welcome aboard. Back from “Cold Front” are John Fleck as Silik, James Horan as Future Guy, and Matt Winston as the only-mostly-dead-not-all-dead Daniels. All four will be back in Part 2.
Trivial matters: This is a sequel to “Cold Front,” continuing the Temporal Cold War storyline, and will continue in Part 2 to start the next season.
It was in “Cold Front” that Archer sealed Daniels’ quarters. Besides the Klingon ships, they also see some familiar-to-the-viewers ship designs from the twenty-third- and twenty-fourth-century Starfleet.
The scene in Archer’s quarters takes place the night before the first 2151 scene in “Broken Bow.”
This is the second time Trek has gone as far into the future as the thirty-first century, the other being in Voyager’s “Living Witness.” Until Discovery’s second season, this was the farthest in the future Trek had gone, with the exception of the final scene in “Living Witness.”
It’s been a long road… “I thought you were supposed to protect the timeline, not screw with it.” This is the outline of a good episode, but it doesn’t quite come together—at least until the end, with a particularly effective cilffhanger.
Getting there, though, is very hit-and-miss. We start with the Paraagans, who sound like a very interesting culture, though the tee-hee idiocy with which Tucker refers to the notion of a matriarchal society, and the relief on his and Archer’s face when T’Pol tells them that men have been getting more rights lately, is embarrassing and pathetic. And writers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga didn’t give a micron’s thought to this culture in the least, as T’Pol refers to the “foreman” of the mine, a term that is rooted in a male-dominated society assuming that the person in charge would be a man. (It’s “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “Angel One” all over again.)
But the Paraagans are just a means to an end—which is annoying, as I was way more interested in seeing more of them than I was in watching more time-travel shenanigans. I like how Archer handled the death of the colonists, though the fact that we never saw them dilutes the impact quite a bit.
The biggest problem is that it’s just furthering the tired Temporal Cold War storyline, and it’s impossible to be in any way invested in it. I’m even less invested in the tired fakeout of cancelling Enterprise‘s mission, which we know isn’t really going to happen because the show’s called Enterprise, and they’re hardly going to spend the rest of the show with humans staying on Earth being lectured by Vulcans on being doofuses.
Also, the show is still trying to catch that original series vibe without actually understanding it, in this case having Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker do the commando raid. It’s a scene that’s entire people shooting at other people and throwing stun grenades around. There’s nothing in it that requires these three characters, and there isn’t even hardly any dialogue. Why not have Reed and two extras do this, so it actually makes sense?
Then again, making sense doesn’t seem to be a priority here.
It got interesting when Daniels “rescued” Archer only to find his future so completely changed that he no longer had the equipment to time-travel. That’s a wonderful “oops,” and makes for an actual strong cliffhanger. I mean, we know Archer will get home, but maybe the process of getting there will be interesting!
Maybe…
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will have a short story in the upcoming Fantastic Books anthology Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, which has stories taking three people from three different time periods interacting. Keith’s story throws author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson together. There are also stories by Star Trek writers Peter David and David Gerrold, as well as Adam-Troy Castro, Jonathan Maberry, Gail Z. Martin, James A. Moore, Jody Lynn Nye, Allen Steele, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and more! It’s available for preorder from Barnes & Noble and Amazon—check out the full table of contents here.
…or maybe not
This was the last episode of Enterprise that I saw because I just didn’t like the temporal cold war stuff.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen but try to keep an open mind. Especially when it comes to thing the Vulcan Science Directorate says are impossible.”
There’s a big problem with this episode. It starts with a tragedy on a massive scale, with thousands killed. And at first this is given appropriate gravitas. But then the episode becomes about proving Enterprise wasn’t responsible. And while it’s hard to begrudge them that, it’s probably not going to help the families of those 3600 to know they were murdered as pawns in some conflict they don’t understand. (And neither do we, frankly.)
There is at least some decent scenes leading up to this, with the crew wondering what they’ll do if the mission gets cancelled. Archer’s sinking into depression and accepting defeat might not help people see him as a strong lead but it’s believable. We get some more great moments between him and T’Pol, as she convinces him to pick himself up and he tries to convince her of his time travel experience. His encouraging the crew to support her echoes Kirk’s last message in “The Tholian Web”.
This is probably the biggest example of Silik and Future Guy targeting Enterprise…except near the end, Future Guy suddenly switches from wanting to discredit Enterprise to wanting to capture Archer. So was it all for his benefit in the first place? No explanation is given for Daniels being around despite being killed by Silik except for “He did, in a manner of speaking.” (I’m assuming the Temporal Cold War has reset the timeline to an extent that a “new” Daniels who didn’t travel back in time and get killed exists. We’ll see this happen again.) Archer being transported back to the day before “Broken Bow” and somehow replacing/merging with his past self is typical Star Trek nonsensical temporal mechanics (although see Voyager’s “Relativity” for a possible semi-explanation).
This was the last Star Trek episode to be released on VHS (on a tape with “Two Days and Two Nights”). The very last VHS release was Star Trek: Nemesis. DVD releases of Enterprise wouldn’t come until 2005, resulting in a fairly lengthy period when Season 2 onwards wasn’t available on home media.
To an egalitarian society the idea of either sex being disenfranchised would be concerning. Especially when your commanding officer is of that sex.
I have never seen a well done matriarchy on Star Trek, or any other series. Nobody ever seems to ask themselves how such a society might evolve and why they just crudely gender flip the most parodical possible form of patriarchy.
Truth.
Interestingly, I use “Shockwave” to explain away the Confederacy Universe in Picard Season 2 with the concept of a “Bubble” universe. A very temporary created alternate reality that only exists for a short while because people that are vitally important to the past have been removed from it and haven’t yet done what is important to their lives (like Picard saving his ancestor in the 21st century).
However, this is the episode I firmly decided to blame the WRITERS for the problems with the Temporal Cold War. You can say it was forced on them by the executives but the complete lack of developing Sillik, Future Guy, or the purposes of the group is something that just strikes me as lazy. They may have had it pushed on them but that’s no excuse for not actually inserting anything interesting about them or taking an opportunity to tell the best story possible.
One thing that can and does ruin franchises is the “Mystery Box” where you make a bunch of mysteries and don’t actually have answers until later: it’s what ruined the X-Files, Alias, Lost, and did massive damage to the Star Wars sequels. Okay, really just anything by JJ Abrams but, ironically, Star Trek where he didn’t make any mysteries.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have revealed “Oh, it was the Romulans” even if you wanted to do the least amount of effort.
An entire planet is destroyed in this episode too and that is kind of just shoved off. While I understand why we can’t have the Enterprise ACTUALLY responsible for killing an entire race, I would have been intrigued more by the concept of a “less than ready” space race doing it. Illustrating the kind of forces that were being dealt with here.
@2,
Yeah, I remember this was also the point where I lost interest during the original run and would only tune in here and there. Season One just hadn’t been what I’d hoped for and by the time it reignited interest, of course, it was too late.
The sad fact is there’s a very easy storyline they could have done with the Temporal Cold War. As mentioned, the Romulans seemed like the people involved with them. You could do a two parter where the Romulan Future Guy reveals, “We want to tamper with the timeline to erase the Federation and guarantee our power in the future. Except, when we did, Romulus got wiped out by the Borg and Dominion both.”
“The who and the what?”
“It doesn’t matter. Now we must make small adjustments instead.”
Have Archer find out about them in the future, stop them, and then have to keep it to himself that the Vulcans have an “evil side” despite knowing this would impact the future.
Already a better two parter.
I think I stuck with the Temporal Cold War arc a bit longer than most. As has been said, this two-parter doesn’t really expand the mythos beyond “Silik is a bad guy who’s bad, working for another bad guy from the future who’s also bad”, but at least at this point, with the Suliban, Future Guy, Daniels and the Tandarans, there’s a limited amount of players and you can see that it could eventually all make sense. It was in Season 2 when they suddenly started dropping plotlines without resolving them and starting new plotlines that you couldn’t see being resolved that it really became a mess.
C.T.: Yeah, I mean, it sucks when the network forces you into a plotline, but the solution is to write the best story you can out of that directive, not throw nonsense ideas out there without rhyme or reason and hope for the best.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
What I find really unfortunate is that this is by far the best of Enterprise‘s season finales.
I’m assuming Daniels rescued Archer because he thinks Archer needs to pay a penance and it has something do with his mother but really Daniels loves Archer and just wants a hug, and that will fix the bad future.
That’s how these things go, right?
I mean, we know Archer will get home, but maybe the process of getting there will be interesting!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen these episodes, but I’m thinking the resolution was not. But perhaps we’ll save that for the review of “Part 2”…
Wait, how are we at week 26 of the rewatch already? That’s the real temporal mystery here.
@9 KRAD: (Takes hobby horse off shelf and fires it up). I would agree, but with the cavil that, with very rare exceptions when it’s used as a framing device only (STIV), time travel as a plot device NEVER makes sense. It’s far more disruptive than the usual impossible tech, because you’re not just violating laws of physics that never come up in our daily life, you’re shredding the principles of cause-and-effect that are at the core of all good storytelling. Opposing forces repeatedly dinking with the “timeline” for their own ends as the entire driving force for a plot? Sorry, the contradictions just pile up to where you’re not even telling a story anymore. I’m not nearly as experienced a fiction writer as you or several regular commentators, but I just can’t imagine what I would do with a time-babble plot outline that was handed to me. No better than these guys did, I think.
The core of the problem may be that showrunners and writers don’t seem to grasp WHY time travel is such a problem; you could see this in DIS season 3, when the crew got in such hot water for “traveling” into the future as if there was no difference between that and traveling into the past. Not only are different regions of space having time elapse at different rates a well-established and rigorously observed part of physics in our own time, but it doesn’t violate the principles of causality in the slightest. Having extremely sophisticated characters lump that with a trip into the past and back as equally impermissible forms of “time travel” is nonsense, but DIS took it for granted, which means they didn’t understand the issues with time travel in the first place.
Sorry, I’m with the Vulcan Science Directorate on this one.
{/endrant} {/hobbyhorsetoshelf}
S
(Edit to clarify: The “you” above is not “you, KRAD”, but “you, hypothetical generic writer”. Damn English anyway.)
Not exactly my favorite episode, either, but my reasons are different …
When you board a cloaked enemy vessel in a temporal cold war, do you take the best low-ranking tactical specialists or the crew with the highest security clearance? And what happens to your answer if you plan to keep vital strategic intelligence from your superiors in your notion of “how to protect the timeline?”
On the other hand, the self-pity was feeling out of place. Enterprise has seen plenty of mayhem in her first season. How many deaths in Civilization? That jailbreak in Detained?
Unfortunately, Enterprise was removeld from all streaming services before I could watch this episode, and since I cannot currently afford (nor is it high on my priority list) a subscription to Paramount+, I won’t be able to comment from first-hand watching going forward. Which is a shame; reading this summary made the episode sound, if not necesarily good, but definately (possibly) entertaining.
Ecthelion: it wasn’t removed from “all” streaming services, as it’s on Paramount+. Which is a streaming service, just like Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and Amazon Prime.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
With the Commando Raid, I can see Archer (because he knows what he’s looking for), but it would have been better with Reed (because part of his job is to be Phase Pistol Guy) and an extra in a Red Trimmed uniform (for obvious TOS callback reasons). They’re trying to do KSM but Tucker doesn’t really fill the M part of the equation IMO.
Ecthelion of Greg, IF you have access to Heroes and Icons, Enterprise is on Sunday-Friday at Midnight Eastern. It’s part of their Classic Trek Block. The only downside is that as a conventional Cable/OTA channel you can’t choose what episode to watch.
I still have never gotten past ‘hey, we have all this amazing future information stacked up in a simply sealed off crewman’s office that could solve so many things and no one ever even thinks of sneaking in.’
You would think there might be other time agents who could clean that up or something? Or destroy it if its such a huge risk. But nope, might need the plotmentium some day/
I saw Enterprise in syndication on SyFy. They didn’t show the episodes in sequence, and I started the show in midstream. That caused me to miss the Temporal Cold War until I was well invested in the show, which was good, because I hate the Temporal Cold War arc.
At the very least they could have answered Who, What, When, Where, and Why:
1. Who are the Temporal Cold Wars players?
2. What do they want?
3. What century or centuries are they operating from?
4. Where are they working ?
5. What is their goal?
Both STAR TREK ONLINE and @Christopher did much better versions of the Temporal Cold War. The Star Trek Online one wasn’t HIGH ART but it had a beginning, middle, and end. Also, the Time War of Doctor Who was one of the most tragic and interesting plots of the entire franchise.
It COULD have been done but they NEVER did anything but the BAREST effort here and even that failed because if you can’t even say what the villain’s name is then you have failed as a writer.
My big problem with this episode is that the ending makes no sense. Okay, it’s an accepted conceit of time travel stories that if you take someone out of the past who’s important to your history, you’ll change that history and the present will be altered. That’s what happened in “City on the Edge,” just in reverse, with McCoy saving Edith. But what doesn’t make sense is, why is Daniels still there? Why didn’t he get erased along with the rest of his civilization? If he had gone back to get Archer and returned to the future to find it changed, that would work (cf. “Yesteryear”), but he brought Archer to him in the 31st century and it changed around him, inexplicably leaving Daniels himself unaffected. Daniels could have had some sort of temporal technology to protect himself from the change to the timeline, but then, why was only he protected and not the other Temporal Agents? It’s completely self-contradictory and they never bother to rationalize it.
Also, how is a 31st-century time agency so stupid about how time travel works that they don’t realize this will happen when they take Archer out of time?
A lot of people used this episode to argue that ENT took place in a separate timeline from the previous shows, since history was clearly changed with the colony’s destruction. But that’s predicated on the assumption that Daniels was from the Prime timeline to begin with. Later episodes, particularly in season 4, would show things connecting more clearly to the TOS and TNG eras, and new shows like Picard and Discovery have treated ENT, TOS, and TNG as all part of the same background. So I presume that Daniels is actually from a slightly alternate version of the Federation, and the time changes occurring in ENT shifted that timeline to become the Prime Timeline as we know it.
@17 krad – That was a little pedantic, don’t you think? You know what his point was, which also frustrated me, as you could catch any of the Trek shows on multiple streamers like Amazon and Netflix.
I would assume that since Voyager made it home, by the 31st Century, the Federation has made contact with the Krenim and has operatives that are able to exist outside of the conventional linear time stream. That could explain why Daniels didn’t disappear when the future was altered.
@25/Charles: “That could explain why Daniels didn’t disappear when the future was altered.”
As I already said, if Daniels could protect himself against timeline changes, then the rest of his agency should have had the same protection and should have remained along with him. What doesn’t make sense is that he and only he remained unaltered.
@24 Thanks for saying that Austin. I thought krad’s response was a bit harsh, too.
@23: Even though it’s not clear on screen, I always assumed that, as you said, Daniels left that time period in order to bring Archer forward and then returned to find the devastation.
I’m trying to think of a way he could have been protected otherwise, such as whatever mechanism he was using protecting its operator from the changes but not anyone else, but it seems unlike that their time machines would be able to protect their operators but not themselves…
I wonder if the Crewman Daniels we see in this episode is from a period in his personal timeline BEFORE his death at the hands of the Cabal? (That was my working theory while watching this episode, at least, since it seemed the most simple explanation – now that Mr Bennett mentions it, this theory would also explain why ‘Daniels’ appears to have had an unusual degree of protection, since his superiors would want to do everything possible to avoid the adverse consequences of someone dying ‘out of sequence’*).
*Though this rather assumes that Daniels’ faction prefer to avoid fiddling with personal timelines – presumably in this case they wanted somebody Captain Archer would know and were willing to bend the rules to get that someone.
The only problem I ever had with the temporal cold war storyline was that it was completely dropped. We never found out what happens, who the mystery guy commanding the Sulibans is, etc. Obviously they expected to have more seasons, and were planning to focus on the first Romulan war with humans in season 5, which is why they had that Romulan episode in season 4 to kick things off. So perhaps we would have got an answer to what was really going on in the temporal cold War. But at the end Daniels just goes “ah you were successful, good, that means absolutely everything is reset and none of this ever happened, doesn’t it look pretty?“ as all the video clips are hurtling around them. Literally makes the entire thing seem pointless, if none of it ever actually happened.
Although that is that similar episode of DS9 that did this and it actually worked really really well in that episode (Children of Time, season 5 episode 22). They pulled a “none of it ever really happened” in that too, but it is treated instead as a philosophical question, and I think Sisko at the end says something like “as long as we remember them, they did definitely live whole lives. They did exist”.
In that epicode they had a crash while trying to exit the planet and went back in time 200 years with no way to leave the planet or contact starfleet or anybody. So the Defiant crew interact with all their great great great great grandchildren. And Odo, because changelings seem to live indefinitely, like lobsters. I always loved the touch of Odo still not looking quite exactly like a humanoid, but with the 200 years of extra practice he’s definitely much better at it than the Odo who originally landed on the planet. But everyone else obviously eventually died, on that planet, and their children lived on. Oh and Dax, obviously. The Dax symbiont got passed down like a family heirloom. But yeah the inhabitants of that planet try to trick the Defiant crew into recreating the crash in order to maintain their existence, because without the crew there from 200 years ago, they never had children and developed a town.
So the Defiant crew are in two kinds about it. Because they really want to get off the planet, but they know they’d be killing all of these people on the planet by doing so. I guess that episode was good because the whole point was that none of it ever happened, and it was a really tough decision to make. It’s Sci fi at its best, asking interesting philosophical or moral questions using sci-fi’s magical unrealistic technology to create these bizarre situations and ask the question “what if it was real? How would it impact the lives of these people?“. That’s what Star Trek is best at, those kinds of questions. You could remake star wars but have it set in a Lord of the rings fantasy world and you wouldn’t have to change much to make it work, like just change lightsabers to swords etc. That’s why star wars isn’t Sci Fi, it’s Sci fantasy. Star trek though, you couldn’t adapt these stories to a fantasy setting, or a western setting, or anything like that, because it only works with this crazy future technology being able to create these fascinating dilemmas. Not that there’s anything wrong with science fantasy, but I just prefer Sci fi.
But yeah maybe it’s just that that episode of DS9 was one episode. Not the overarching plot of the entire series. So we couldn’t get attached and invested enough into it. I wish the writers of ENT would at least tell us what the rough plan is for who the mystery future man was going to be. But as far as I know, none of them have ever said anything about it. I know most people theorise that it’s Archer from the future, but that doesn’t really make any sense. People on the crew got killed by the Suliban, and archer would never have gone along with that. It’s not Archer.
The idea that it was a Romulan though? That would have been perfect. But oh well. Imagine if they brought back someone. An old Romulan actor that we already know. Like they could have brought back Andreas Katsulas, aka Tomalak. He was still alive at the time, and he even appeared in an episode of ENT already (he played Drennik in that weird episode where the aliens all get married and then hire these really weird non-binary slave people to grow the baby inside of, and the slave is not allowed to read, to leave her room unaccompanied, to watch TV, to eat with others, etc, even though they’re demonstrably at least as intelligent as everyone else in their species (if not MORE intelligent, because the slave in the episode learned how to read human English text within a few hours of being introduced to it which is crazy). But they had no rights. Anyway, he was the old fella in that episode, the captain of the alien ship.
But anyway yeah, that means that they could definitely have made Tomalak from TNG make a comeback and be on TNG. You could say he was from decades after TNG was set, to explain why he looks older. This stuff writes itself. And he seems like exactly the kind of moron to kill off the federation before realising that they defeated the borg and the dominion and so without them, the romulan empire dies.
But that’s just an idea. Anyone would have been better than what we got, nobody. And again I get that the writers were shocked by the show being cancelled as they hadn’t expected that at all (even the last episode of the show, that’s set on the TNG holodeck, was supposed to be the season finale that year and then the next season would have carried on with the real timeline in season 5). But it’s been long enough now that the show is never coming back, so I’d really like to hear the writers tell us who they were gonna make the mystery man.
As it is, it makes every time travel episode of the show seem completely pointless. I still enjoy them, because they’re good episodes, but it’d be like only having 6 seasons of DS9 and then it gets cancelled and we never find out who wins the war cos the writers refuse to discuss it.
For the record I’ve really enjoyed ENTERPRISE Season 1 – nothing groundbreaking, but good ‘back to basics’ STAR TREK adventuring in the main (and with at least a few absolutely excellent elements – I’m tempted to say “Porthos” but it would be more fair to invoke Doctor Phlox and T’Pol* the clear winners in the search for MVP/NX-01).
*Not to mention their actors.
In general the show has been a nice break from the more intensely serialised programmes I’ve been following recently (not least THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE) and it’s interesting to not how many references to prior episodes the show smuggles in as it goes along).
Also, I think it’s fair to note that while ENTERPRISE doesn’t bother with pre-credits cliffhangers, when the show does it goes HARD: just look at ‘Shuttlepod zone’ or this very episode!
@16. Ecthelion of Greg
Netflix in Europe still has TOS, TNG, VOY, DS9, and ENT so if you don’t mind using a VPN to change your region that might be an option for you.
As another commenter suggested you can probably find Star Trek available on TV in reruns. I set up my DVR to collect all the episodes and rewatched that way.
As the Shockwave finishes up season 1 with a cliffhanger I want to comment on the Temporal Cold War story arc and longer story arcs in general. When I first watched Enterprise I didn’t understand how Star Trek worked behind the scenes. I hadd been a big fan of Babylon 5 and knew that JMS planned out most the story arc in advance (and included “trap doors” for every character just in case). I figured that the bigger and far better funded Star Trek must have planned ahead and at least had the broad strokes of the story figured out, but now I’m fairly certain they never even tried to plan ahead. I’ve since learned that Star Trek writers paint themselves into a corner and even with 2 part episode they don’t plan out ahead of time how the cliffhanger will be resolved. For example when Michael Piller wrote the big Borg cliffhanger in “The Best of Both Worlds” he didn’t know how part 2 would end, and was looking for a new job (but ultimately stayed on TNG). Producer Rick Berman commended himself for taking the unusual step of taking a few extra weeks at the end of season to plan for season 2.[Link: TrekToday – Berman Talks ‘Shockwave Part II’] So while he was doing more planning than they might have normally done, that seems like shockingly little planning to me for a cliffhanger, not to mention the longer storylines that evidently had very little planning. I am not saying that writers have to stick to the plan if they come up with better ideas later but clearly producers were used to episodic storytelling and were only paying lip service to the idea of serialized storytelling, and with the Temporal Cold War or Xindi story arcs they were fundamentally unprepared. By failing to prepare adequately they had given themselves little chance of success.
This was a nice cliffhanger but I don’t think it ever paid off … and I look forward to next weeks review.
@33/Bob: The thing about Babylon 5 is that it was essentially the first TV series to have that kind of plan for its entire storyline worked out in advance. J. Michael Straczynski envisioned it as a “novel for television” and thus plotted it as a single whole, although of course with enough flexibility to accommodate all the changes that had to be made along the way. Most shows today follow a similar approach, planning out at least an entire season at a time and usually having a multi-season arc in mind. But that was a novelty when B5 came along, and it was a while before it became as common as it is today.
So at the time of the Berman-era Trek shows, their approach was the norm, not the exception. Most shows were still plotted on an episode-by-episode basis, and continuity was more a matter of remembering past events and building on their consequences rather than having the entire future planned out ahead of time. In the case of Trek’s cliffhanger season finales, it was standard operating procedure to write the cliffhanger without knowing how it would be resolved, and then to figure it out over the midseason break. That’s why the conclusions tended to be fairly weak, albeit with exceptions like “The Best of Both Worlds.”
I can still remember how impressed I was by the momentum B5 built up, unlike anything I’d previously experienced on television, and the way seemingly throw away plot points, like the death of Sheridan’s wife paid off seasons on when you’d all but forgotten about them. Present serialized stories don’t seem to have the same sense of direction.
Ecthelion of Greg, Austin, and Drunes: I’m sorry if my comment came across as harsh. Best I can say in my defense is that I’ve constantly heard people complain about having to pay for Trek when they also had to pay for it when it was on Netflix. Or, for that matter, when it was on cable. Certain recurring bills become so commonplace that people forget they’re actually paying money for it. And Ecthelion’s initial comment was, in fact, incorrect — the Trek shows haven’t been removed from all streaming services, they’ve simply been removed from the ones Ecthelion subscribes to.
But this isn’t unique to Trek — balkanized streaming services is how things are right now, just as being stuck with eight million cable channels 90% of which you never watched used to be how things are and people complained that they couldn’t pick and choose what they wanted. Now they can pick and choose, and there are more complaints about too many choices…..
Anyhow, sorry for being overly pedantic. Blame the Jesuits (I’m a graduate of Fordham University…).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, Pedant
I loved this episode — I thought it was one of the few times in S1 where Enterprise really delivered on its idea of getting back to TOS-style, old-school sci fi adventure.
It pretty much never made sense to send the captain, first officer and ship’s doctor down into hostile situations, but TOS made it work.
One of the behind scenes notes is that “Storm Front” was designed to wrap up the Temporal Cold War because they didn’t want any more stories with them. The distaste for the whole thing was something that the writers never got away from and thus they slapped together a finale for it and the cliffhanger ending that was already ridiculous (NAZI ALIENS!).
At $5/month, Paramount+ is a great deal and offers me more of what I enjoy watching than Netflix does.
@34. ChristopherLBennett
Well yes, more the fool me for thinking that Star Trek would pay any attention to other ground breaking science fiction television or even learn significant lessons from Deep Space Nine. I was not expecting Star Trek to be an entire series as a novel at the level of Babylon 5, but Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a contemporary show and they did an adequate job of keep a running “big bad” to each season, dropping breadcrumbs occasionally. As I recall they did promote the Temporal Cold War storyline like as if they had a plan but that does not seem to have been the case, so it felt like Enterprise overpromised and underdelivered.
Episodic storytelling is fine too but then I think instead there has to be better character building. The characters can be set up as generic archetypes that will always make sense to new viewers but I would hope they gradually gain more character and become more specific to longer term viewers while staying informed by their strong establishing characteristics. That way the characters will still make sense no matter where you take them.
I don’t think the pressures of network television did them any favors either (compared to TNG which was in syndication). I know it was a difficult job, and I understand they were banging these out on regular basis and 26 episodes in a season a is a lot, but that does not mean I don’t still wish the producers could have planned it all a bit better. I’m a reader not a writer, I’m an eater not a chef, I couldn’t do it better myself but I can still say it didn’t taste great and I think that’s fair criticism. In some ways it is impressive that they would write themselves into a corner and then have the challenge of getting out of it but they kept doing the same thing and got diminishing returns.
Anyway I enjoy these reviews and the great comments. Thanks all.
#36
I expect that one day some conglomerate, probably Disney, will monopolize the streaming world and put all content on one service. And they shall call it… New Cable TV!
The only thing I remember from this episode (and it wasn’t that long ago that I watched it) is the killing of the colony and everyone being rightly bummed out about it, plus the cliffhanger ending. And I remember absolutely nothing about how it all gets resolved, which tells you how much I care about the temporal cold war nonsense. Too bad we won’t actually get past it until season 4.
@36 krad – Ok, you made me laugh. And my main beef with Trek being taken off the other streaming services wasn’t so much having to pay for Paramount+, but more of a beef with the current climate of everyone and their mom starting a streaming service. Seriously, some of these new and obscure streaming services defy explanation (R.I.P. CNN+). As @41 joked, we’re basically going to have a cable TV system again. And as you said, Keith, we don’t even watch 90% of it! I’m just not a fan of the decentralized content that requires more money and more app downloads and log-ins.
I’ll probably revisit the theme in Season 2, but it always felt like the model for the Temporal Cold War arc wasn’t Babylon 5 but The X-Files: Introduce some mysteries, have a few recurring characters that pop up two or three times a season for the “myth-arc” episodes sprinkled in between the mostly stand-alone tales, and maybe every now and then you’ll resolve something or maybe you’ll just forget about it or maybe you can get away with just asking the same questions without coming closer to an answer, especially if you have a decent action set-piece to end the episode on…
As for all the gnashing of teeth over shows disappearing from streaming services…call me an eccentric throwback if you like, but this is why for me, streaming will never replace physical media. I’ve got Season 1 on 13 VHS tapes, I’ve got Seasons 2-4 on three DVD box sets, and they’re probably not going to mysteriously disappear when I go to watch them. Provided I avoid standing on them or getting buried underneath 30+ years of accumulated paraphernalia…
@44/cap-mjb: Except that VHS tapes and DVDs can wear out. Several of my DVDs of the 1990 The Flash are unplayable now due to a manufacturing defect, and the last time I tried to rewatch an old show I had on VHS, the playback was too jerky and I ended up watching the show on YouTube instead.
Life is rarely so simple as for one thing to be absolutely better than another. Usually both have their pluses and minuses.
Ahhhh yes, the temporal cold bore. Yawn
@45/CL;B: Oh, for sure, there’s problems with anything. I managed to get two copies of Season 3 with a faulty first disc: The first one wouldn’t play at all, the replacement would only play two of the episodes at which point I gave up and didn’t get another replacement until years later. And I freely admit that if I want to check a scene of something, I’ll often look for it online rather than going to the trouble of finding the tape or disc.
But hey, I made it through seven seasons of Voyager on VHS and the first season of Enterprise for these rewatches, so it’s working for me so far!
@38. C.T. Phipps: I love ‘Storm Front’ and always have – and if loving an episode where NX-01 dog-fights Nazis IN SPACE is wrong then I don’t WANT to be Right!
I’m of two minds about this finale. On one hand, I think it has a terrific setup (not the whole crew reacts to matriarchal society bit – rather the accident itself and the consequences). Some of my favorite Enterprise scenes are the ones where Archer agonizes over decisions that went horribly wrong. Bakula sells that feeling of guilt well – not as good as Stewart or Brooks, but better than Shatner and Mulgrew. The death of the Paraagans as a whole, and that scene of him dismissing his senior officers as well as Porthos trying to cheer him up. That part works beautifully for me.
And coming after Voyager’s Endgame, this was a major improvement as a finale. Sure, we know the human/vulcan conflict over whether they belong in space has an expiration date, but I still feel the episode conveys the feeling of everything faling apart over the unintended blast, and it’s still more effective than the X-Files equivalent of THEY’RE SHUTTING DOWN MY OFFICE bit they did over and over.
Of course, going by the X-Files parallels, this is where the episode hits its primary obstacle and my issue with it: the Temporal Cold War. In terms of sheer visuals and unexpected reversals, the ending cliffhanger with Archer and Daniels in the far apocalyptic future does work. But once you know what happens in part 2 and how the whole storyline ends up in the long run, it becomes a tiresome slog that retroactively taints this two parter quite a bit. Especially with part 2, it becomes clear just how poorly thought out this whole arc was.
So that’s my assessment. An episode that I do enjoy, but one that ends up tainted because of what comes next.
One of the reasons I’ve never been a fan of time-travel stories, *especially* Trek ones is the whole “great individual”/singular moment theory of history that too many subscribe to.
Assasinate Hitler or send him to Art School to prevent WWII! Nothing could be simpler!
The problem is that this approach so often assumes that only that person is important. And Enterprise had a real fascination with the idea that showed up every time time-travel came up that a person just somehow was whole and individual — and not a conglomeration of every person we know and experience we’ve had.
Maybe your third-grade teacher was boring and inspired nothing in you, to the point that you can’t even remember them. Yes, even that had a role in shaping your life. Or how about when you had an allergic reaction at a restaurant after they swore an ingredient wasn’t in a dish (surprise! it was!) and you ended up in the ER, but had to wait while it felt like you were dying, as it got harder to breathe, but you were still breathing, unlike that other poor someone who was the reason the ER docs were busy and couldn’t treat you. So you learned a little more about patience and compassion.
Enterprise made it text that anyone other than the designated hero, that any event other than the key, pivotal one, was unimportant. Go ahead, skip past those other, failed relationships. It’s not like you’re going to learn anything or change in any way. We only need to save this guy. The others? They don’t matter. Advisors always give the same advice, and our guy already knows all he needs to know, anyway.
It’s a simple theory, great for the “memorize the points” style of history, but it’s utter garbage. Sure, you could pack Ferdinand a sandwich, or send Torquemada for a tumble, but that tension in the Balkans didn’t appear from nowhere so you’ve maybe kicked things down the line a month or two. And while his may be the prominent name on the documents, an Inquisition does not run on the mere say-so of a single fanatic. There were plenty of other antisemitic ultra-catholic churchmen eager to prove their piety through other people’s screams.
It also doesn’t help that Enterprise chose the bland, boring white guy as their DH. The problem with a hero that the lowest common denominator of the US spending class can find unobjectional is that he’s (as a result) rather boring.
(And if you must give me a time-travel story where there’s one “important” person, let it be some random dishwasher at a cafe who gets stopped for directions and is late for work, and the food poisoning event from them not being there starts a chain of events that culminates in the apparent significant person being where they are when needed. GI tract bugs are responsible for far more history than they’re given credit for).
@50/malevolentpixy: To be fair, I have the impression that the idea here wasn’t that taking Archer out of history at all destroyed the future, but that taking him out of this specific sequence of events did so because he had an important role to play in resolving them. So it was more a “right place at the right time” sort of thing than a Great Man Theory thing. Though I’m not sure I recall exactly what role he had to play in resolving things here.
SPOILER FOR PART TWO:
@51/CLB: He made a speech about a gazelle.
@51 ChristopherLBennett It becomes blatant text in future episodes.
@52 cap-mjb
krad, in the “Welcome Aboard” segment, you named three guest stars, then observed that “All four will be back in Part 2.” Did you leave off a name, or miscount?
I think Archer was needed on the raid, since he had all this knowledge. But why send the three highest in command? That’s just bad planning. Except that they’re all in the opening credits, so…
I agree. I had trouble maintaining my interest because of the Temporal Cold War idiocy. I couldn’t explain it if I tried. And if I could, it would probably seem even more bunk than it already does.
“And if I could [explain the TCW], it would probably seem even more bunk than it already does.”
I hope not, since I wrote the novel that did try to explain it…