“Future Tense”
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by James Whitmore Jr.
Season 2, Episode 16
Production episode 042
Original air date: February 19, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise comes across a pod floating in space. They take it on board and get it open (which requires a phaser, as the hatch is welded shut) only to find what appears to be a human corpse inside.
This is farther out than any human has been reported to have gone, so this is quite the find. Making it more fascinating is Phlox’s autopsy, which reveals DNA from several other species in the corpse’s genetic makeup, including Vulcan. His Vulcan ancestor has to have been a distant one, which is a neat trick since humans and Vulcans haven’t known each other long enough for that to be possible.
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Unless, of course, he’s a time traveler.
Tucker and Reed continue to examine the pod, uncovering a hatch that exposes what appears to be biological circuitry. But when they open the hatch, they find a ladder that goes down well past the bottom of the pod. Somehow, the pod has considerably more space inside it than outside it. For reasons known only to the voices in their heads, Tucker and Reed climb down to investigate without telling Archer first.
Meanwhile, Archer has his own problems to deal with, as a Suliban cell ship shows up, claiming the pod. Archer refuses to give it over, and he manages to fight off the cell ship and Tucker and Reed fight off the Suliban who board the ship and try to take the pod.
Then some Tholians show up, also demanding the pod. They back off when Archer threatens to destroy the pod.
A Vulcan ship, the Tal’Kir, will rendezvous with Enterprise to take the pod and the corpse back to Earth. While en route, Archer and T’Pol go into Daniels’ quarters to check out the database, and they find the pod as a thirty-first-century vessel powered by a temporal displacement drive.
Tucker and Reed discuss time travel while further investigating the pod. They find themselves reliving the same conversations and repeating the same actions over and over again. Once they realize that’s happening, they get examined by Phlox, but he finds nothing wrong.
They found what seems to be a black box in the pod, but it turns out to be a signaling device of some sort, which is now turned on. Tucker thinks it might be a distress signal.
The Suliban come back with reinforcements and chase Enterprise en route to their rendezvous. When they reach the Tal’Kir, they find it damaged by a bunch of Tholians, who also have reinforcements.
The Suliban and the Tholians fight it out, with Enterprise caught in the middle. Their warp drive is out. Archer and Reed take a torpedo and set it to destroy the pod as a last resort. Unfortunately, they too get stuck in a time loop, which means they have to keep starting to set the torpedo from scratch.
The Tholians break into the launch bay, snag the pod, and take it in tow. Then, suddenly, the beacon and the corpse disappear from Enterprise and the pod disappears from the Tholians’ tractor beam. At which point, everyone buggers off.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? When examining a strange pod that they can’t get any readings on until they open it, Archer, T’Pol, and Reed are remarkably cavalier and unsafe with doing so, as are Tucker and Reed later: they don’t wear any kind of protective gear, they open the hatch and hope that there’s no poisons or contagions inside (seriously, when we got to Archer opening the hatch and shoving his head in to smell it, I was flashing to the scene in Galaxy Quest where Guy cries out, “Is there air? You don’t know!”), and then they fondle all the stuff inside.
The gazelle speech. Archer refuses to give up the pod to anyone who’s claiming it on the theory that it’s a human being on board (even with the extra DNA), and so it’s his.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, T’Pol stubbornly sticks to her agreement with the Vulcan Science Directorate’s opinion that time travel isn’t possible.
Florida Man. Florida Man Explores Alien Ship Without Taking Any Precautions Or Informing His Captain What He’s Doing.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox mentions that Denobulans believed themselves to be the only sentient species in the galaxy, a belief that was challenged when the B’Saari made first contact. He uses that story to remind T’Pol to have an open mind about time travel and Vulcan-human interspecies breeding.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… T’Pol opines that the Vulcan Science Directorate would sooner believe in time travel than they would humans and Vulcans interbreeding.
More on this later… The human corpse is the first exposure anyone in the crew has to interspecies breeding, which is commonplace by the subsequent century. Indeed, interspecies breeding has been a part of Star Trek from the very beginning, in the person of Spock, initially established as having a human ancestor, later retconned to his mother.
This episode marks first human contact with the Tholians.
We also see a mess of familiar ship designs from the later shows in Daniels’ database.
I’ve got faith…
“How many times do you think we’ve done this?”
“At least twice—maybe more.”
“Let’s hope we’ve got it down by now.”
–Archer and Reed stuck in a time loop.
Welcome aboard. For the second week in a row, Vaughn Armstrong gets to play Forrest as a face on a computer screen early in the episode. He’ll be back in “Regeneration.” Cullen Douglas plays the Suliban commander.
Trivial matters: This is the first appearance of the Tholians (though they don’t actually appear, they’re only heard) since the original series’ “The Tholian Web,” though they were mentioned a bunch of times on TNG and DS9 and will be again in Nemesis and Short Treks. Their Mirror Universe counterparts will be seen in “In a Mirror Darkly.”
One of the initial theories about the identity of the human they find is that it’s Zefram Cochrane, who was established as having disappeared in the original series’ “Metamorphosis.” The mystery of his disappearance was solved in that episode, when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Hedford found him on a planetoid with a floating omelette for company.
Star Trek Online establishes that the human they find is named Kal Dano, whose ship was damaged by Tholians.
The original title for this was “Crash Landing.” Writers Michael Sussman & Phyllis Strong originally intended to have a direct confrontation between Archer and folks from the future, but it was cut. The original pitch was for it to be the Defiant, also from “The Tholian Web” show up, having traveled through time through the interspatial rift in that episode, but it was changed to avoid giving Archer too much knowledge of the future.
That the pod is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside was inspired by Doctor Who’s TARDIS, a time-travelling machine that is dimensionally transcendental (which means it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside…).
This is the last time Daniels’ database is seen.
It’s been a long road… “I’m tired of these factions interfering with our century.” Back in the mists of prehistory when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, television shows lived and died by Nielsen ratings, in which viewership was calculated based on a representative sampling of reporting TV viewers. These were collected in diaries sent to Nielsen households and then the data collated. Because that was an arduous task, they tended to focus their energies on the data in certain months of the year.
One of those months was February, and because of that, a lot of shows would put some of their best stuff in February to take advantage. So it’s not a surprised that, in 2003, Enterprise made sure to cover their two big overarching plotlines two straight weeks in February: the Vulcan-Andorian conflict (complete with spiffy guest stars) last time and the Temporal Cold War this time.
But unlike last episode, this one just kinda sits there and doesn’t really accomplish anything. It’s pretty much there to remind us that the Temporal Cold War is still a thing, but we’re given no real good reason to care about the conflict. We don’t learn anything new of significance, except that the Tholians have a stake, but that doesn’t really go anywhere, either.
There are some isolated moments that are good, like Tucker and Reed’s conversation about time travel—with Tucker not wanting to know the future, and Reed eager to know it—Archer and Forrest speculating about Cochrane, Phlox and T’Pol’s conversation about time travel and interspecies breeding, and the time loops that Tucker, Reed, and Archer get stuck in.
Then there are moments when I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen, particularly watching them examine the ship in their uniforms with no gloves or masks or protective gear of any sort, and without things that you know the other shows that take place in the future might have like sterile force fields and the like. Plus the stuff about humans and Vulcans interbreeding is a bit too wink-at-the-viewer considering the most popular character in the franchise is a human-Vulcan hybrid…
And then the future stuff is all just taken away with no explanation, and it’s the most anticlimactic climax imaginable. Just a waste of an episode.
Warp factor rating: 3
Rewatcher’s note: The Enterprise Rewatch will be off next week for Indigenous People’s Day. We’ll be back on the 17th with the rewatch of “Canamar.”
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the Kickstarter for Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. Co-edited by Keith and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, this anthology from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers will feature classic characters banding together: Captain Nemo with Frankenstein’s monster; Ace Harlem with the Conjure-Man; Marian of Sherwood with Annie Oakley; Prospero with Don Quixote; Lydia Bennet with Lord Ruthven; and tons more, including stories by Trek scribes Greg Cox, David Mack, Dayton Ward, Kevin J. Anderson, Rigel Ailur, and Derek Tyler Attico, and TNG screenwriter Diana Dru Botsford. Click here to support it.
A plea from your humble rewatcher: Folks, we’re down to the last nine days of the Kickstarter for Double Trouble, and we’ve still got a ways to go to hit our funding goal. We really really wanna do this anthology, so please consider supporting. Lots of Trek writers in the table of contents, as I said in my bio, so please check it out.
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Thanks! We now return you to your comments on Enterprise, already in progress…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That whole Temporal Cold War thing was one of the dumbest things this series did (and I admit, there are many options to select from). It came out of nowhere (which, I suppose, makes it Temporal), it only shows up when there’s nothing else to do, and it fizzled out (at least on screen) with no explanation whatsoever. Did it end? Is it still going on in Kirk’s time? Or TNG? Or Discovery (far future version)? Who knows. It’s never talked about.
First rule of the Temporal Cold War is you don’t walk about the Temporal Cold War.
I know that I watched this episode, because I recorded and watched every episode of Star Trek back in the day without fail, but from your description of the episode, I feel like Gandalf in the tunnels of Khazad- Dum– “I have no memory of this place”.
For my money this episode would have benefitted from being framed as a Ghost Story, rather than a mystery – it’s most effective when leaning into the eerie aspects of time travel & allied technologies, for my money, and the prosaic nature of the episode as a whole somewhat undercuts this.
Also, I remain wedded to my pet theory that Time Travel is T’Pol’s personal line in the sand – with all the nonsense she’s had to accept at face value over the years, it’s hard to blame her indulging in the occasional “NOPE”.
I don’t recall this episode, but I will say this: That is some fantastic makeup work in the last photo. Looks like a real mummified dude lying there.
“Future Tense” is an okay little story, but symptomatic of this season in that, even though it’s part of the Temporal Cold War arc, it doesn’t actually advance that arc but just goes off on a little tangent that doesn’t connect to anything (except “Metamorphosis” in the acknowledgment of Cochrane’s disappearance).
When I was working out Phlox’s family tree for Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code, I decided that one of the sons of Phlox’s first wife and one of her co-husbands lived on the B’Saari homeworld, and that their son married two B’Saari wives. I named them in my notes as “Yuul (B’Saari)” and “Sheel (B’Saari).” Say them out loud, folks.
By this point, the Temporal Cold War had become perfunctory. Future Tense is the definition of running in place. Granted, Sussman and Strong manage to make the proceedings seem tense and exciting, and there is some nice character work mixed in. But you also get the impression that this is building to something interesting, and then…. it doesn’t. It only serves to show the concept never quite fit right on Enterprise.
Other parts play very much like late TNG or VOY event episodes that were overplotted, with plenty of leaps in logic that are a product of writing these things at a breakneck pace – yet another indicator that Trek’s 26 episode seasons were nearing the end of their shelf life.
But for what it’s worth, a good writer never lets a good idea unfulfilled – Sussman would bring back the Tholians for the Mirror Darkly two parter.
though they were mentioned a bunch of times on TNG and DS9 and will be again in Nemesis and Short Treks
@krad: Nemesis opened in theatres 2 months before this episode aired.
@6. ChristopherLBennett: You old rascal you – also, isn’t it more accurate to describe a Denobulan family tree as a Family Jungle? (I’d imagine those documents can get pretty darned extensive … and more than a bit wild).
Also, I’m now even more curious about the nature of the B’Saari than I was previously (and, since Memory Alpha & Memory Beta suggests the species has conducted some seriously Frankenstein-esque researches, I was already pretty darned curious*).
*I wonder if we ought to conceptualise this species as the living epitome of old black-and-white horror movies with a dash of Lovecraftian “Man was not meant to know” – wait a minute, why not make them look like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON?
I actually kind of like that this specific episode went nowhere and just kinda ended with more question marks.
One of my personal bugbears with time travel stories is that they’re almost always written from the perspective of the time travelers, which makes sense for a dramatic presentation, but always leaves us guessing what the characters in-universe experienced (especially once the handwaves about rewritten or implanted memories start flying). It seems like a universe where time travel exists should be full of these weird little “UFO” encounters that will never make any sense (much like our world, actually, which is either encouraging or terrifying).
(Which is just one of the reasons I love Christopher’s DTI novels, which apply this philosophy to Star Trek, and offer a better take on the Temporal Cold War than Enterprise ever did.)
“How can a ship be bigger on the inside than on the outside?”
For me, this is the point where “The Chris Carter Effect” kicks in. The point where you realise that the people running the show have absolutely no idea what they want to do with the Temporal Cold War arc and have made it far too complicated to ever resolve it properly. We have the Suliban, who are working for a mysterious individual from the future whose identity and aims we don’t understand. (And never will.) We have Daniels and his fellow Time Agents, who seem to be trying to preserve established history, so at least we’ve got a grasp on where they fit in. We’ve got the Tandarans, who were revealed to be at war with the Suliban and treated as really important in the first season, but have now been forgotten, never to be mentioned again. And on top of this, we now have the Tholians who, if Archer’s guess is correct, are working for another faction in the Temporal Cold War who are rivals of whoever it is the Suliban are working for, and whose identity and aims are as much of a mystery. And, yep, you’ve guessed it, this will never be mentioned again either. Nothing in the episode will have any effect on future episodes: It’s just getting the Temporal Cold War toys out for a play to show they haven’t forgotten about the storyline.
(For what it’s worth though, we do get a “conclusion” to the arc, such as it is, in the two-part fourth season opener.)
Bearing that in mind…the episode isn’t completely unentertaining. For a start, we have Enterprise discovering what’s basically a TARDIS. And there is a definite sense of mystery in the opening scenes (complete with Archer coming out with a theory that anyone who knows the mythology will realise instantly is wrong), and of the crew investigating, although I accept Keith’s point that they show the worst knowledge of basic safety procedures since Joe Tormolen. There’s some fairly decent character work: T’Pol seems willing to indulge Archer’s time travel theories at first but gets more hardline as the episode progresses, she and Archer seem really intrigued about the question of whether or not they can reproduce(!), Reed shoots down Tucker’s half-based philosophising about knowing the future beautifully, and we have another example of Phlox piercing T’Pol’s armour in the way that only another outsider can.
It’s a bit convenient that the Suliban and Tholians do more damage to each other than Enterprise, but I guess they didn’t want to damage the time ship. (Also, if the Tholians’ employers know about the events of ‘Shockwave’, it’s possible they want Enterprise left intact in the same way Future Guy presumably does.) The Suliban who board Enterprise seem to retreat despite having the upper hand? (Maybe their ship, which fared less well, didn’t want to leave them behind.) It’s a gut-punch when we see that the Vulcan ship that was meant to be the cavalry has already been defeated. (And Archer again shows he isn’t completely anti-Vulcan by being sincere in his regret.) T’Pol makes a valiant attempt to bluff the Tholians. Archer and Reed spending several minutes working on a plan that promptly fails feels very much like padding, with Tucker working on the beacon turning out to be the important part.
Silik and Daniels are both mentioned.