Enterprise 3x24 "Zero Hour"

rating: ****

the story: The Xindi conflict's resolution.

what it's all about: Well, this is it!  And finally we see where Archer's bull-headed pursuit of victory has landed him, and that's almost more interesting to talk about than the episode itself.

But let's just acknowledge that seeing the crew defeat Dolim and the Sphere Builders is a terrific and thrilling reward, well worth investing in three episodes to see them beat the clock.  Archer first demonstrates his apparent lack of perspective by pushing Hoshi, who's just survived slightly worse pressuring by the Xindi-Reptilians in "Countdown," to help him destroy the weapon.  Then Daniels appears and at first it seems like a reversion to "Carpenter Street" making the Temporal Cold War arc look cheap, instead of "Azati Prime," which made it look strong.  Fans who think it's a little on the nose for Archer to be outright crucial for the birth of the Federation might gag at this material, and again, it makes the Temporal Cold War look weak if all it ultimately accomplishes is produce Daniels to say how important Archer is, in this instance putting truth to the old adage show rather than tell.  But by the end of the series Archer is once again being given credit for the Federation, and fans complain that we don't get to see his big speech in "These Are the Voyages..."  So I wouldn't worry too much about whether or not fans are happy about Archer's status so much as quibbling about how it's presented.

But the real treat of "Zero Hour" is its twist ending.  In a way, it redeems two other Temporal Cold War stories.  One is from near the start of the series, "Shockwave," which concluded the first season and began the second.  In hindsight "Zero Hour" links "Shockwave" with "Storm Front," the two-part story that opens the fourth season and concludes the Temporal Cold War arc.  Daniels showing up to warn Archer in "Zero Hour" in effect translates "Storm Front" into a rephrasing of "Shockwave."  "Shockwave" is about what happens if Archer is removed from history.  He and Daniels discover a future that has been devastated.  "Storm Front" suggests much the same, only instead of going with Archer and Daniels to the future, we go to the past, WWII.  Our last glimpse of Archer in "Zero Hour" is with Nazis staring down at him, and one of them is an alien.

Now, I began to view "Shockwave" as ultimately disappointing, and "Storm Front" has always frustrated me as a conclusion to the Temporal Cold War arc.  "Shockwave" shortchanges its story by making it too simple too early.  "Storm Front" shortchanges itself by providing no conclusive answers about "Future Guy," the leading antagonist of the bad guys in the conflict.  And yet, as Archer angrily states he's tired of being a pawn in someone else's conflict...he's also admitting what "Zero Hour" makes plain, that he has been a pawn.  The Temporal Cold War is a complex series of power plays.  "Storm Front" illustrates how a faction of antagonists becomes trapped in the past.  I always wanted to believe that alien Nazi was "Future Guy," but I guess that was never really necessary.  Archer's disgust is its own statement, and illustrative of his emerging need to take control of his own fate, and as such embrace his destiny.  But it's also a confirmation that Daniels wasn't kidding when he said Archer was crucial to the future.  Whether or not he ends up captive of the Nazis for a time, we see him isolated from his crew by the end of "Zero Hour," and so it's is Archer and not him and his crew that Daniels is worrying about.  It's his choice to destroy the weapon personally that Daniels worries about, the risk he's taking, and Archer is transported to the past, and the rest of the crew, separately, too. 

In a last desperate bid, Daniels is responsible for transporting Archer and the crew to the past.  Happily, he sets about the circumstances that stop the alien Nazi and also Archer's declaration.  So Daniels has actually helped push Archer out of the conflict.  You kind of need the whole context to appreciate this, and so I give "Zero Hour" most of the credit for this.  It's appropriate for Daniels' ultimate role to be obscure like this, as his first appearance, in "Cold Front," features his rival Silik trying to convince Archer it's not so clear cut about which of them to trust.  But both Silik and Daniels, or versions of them, die in "Storm Front," Silik more obviously as a hero.  So it really does even out.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The big conclusion to one of Star Trek's biggest arcs.
• series - And the setup to the conclusion of another.
• character - Archer's determination motivates him to the last of his extreme actions.
• essential - Provides the key to unlock the Temporal Cold War.

notable guest-stars:
Matt Winston (Daniels)
Scott MacDonald (Dolim)
Tucker Smallwood
Rick Worthy
J. Paul Boehmer
Jeffrey Combs (Shran)

Enterprise 3x18 "Azati Prime"

rating: ****

the story: The crew finally intercepts the Xindi weapon.

what it's all about: As proof that the whole season really is one big arc, the seeming climactic moment occurs now rather than at the end of the season...And then we discover that it won't be that easy. 

Daniels and the Temporal Cold War find a kind of redemption here, it must be stated.  In "Carpenter Street" a few episodes earlier, they'd been used as a kind of plot convenience.  Here they are used with pin-point accuracy.  For the first time ever, Daniels offers solid proof of a positive good in the future, an Enterprise-J that's involved in a battle with the Sphere Builders, the aliens manipulating the Xindi. He gives Archer proof that the Xindi in fact join the Federation in the future, and that will end up convincing Degra, the Xindi scientist who designed the weapon and whom Archer conned into giving them its location in "Stratagem," to abandon the cause and switch sides.  And then we discover that Dolim, the lead Xindi-Reptilian, will turn out to be the lead villainous Xindi...

All that accomplished in one episode, after building up material throughout the season.  It's remarkable, and probably unparalleled in Star Trek until Discovery, the first purely serialized series in the franchise.  It provides ample dramatic material for the rest of the season and makes the rest of it more desperate than the original mission itself, which was already desperate, but hadn't always felt like it was, until this moment, when all the stakes and players are finally revealed.  Kind of Shakespearean, really!

And it's probably the most thoroughly satisfying serialized material of the whole series.  Deep Space Nine wrung a lot of great material out of the Dominion War, but with only a single season to work with, Enterprise rises to the task and proves the worth of the whole experiment.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Meets or exceeds the standard of serialized storytelling in Star Trek lore.
• series - The unquestioned great moment of the serialized aspects of the Xindi arc.
• character - Archer rises to the occasion as a bold leader.
• essential - You can't appreciate the arc or the series without savoring this moment.

notable guest-stars:
Matt Winston (Daniels)
Randy Oglesby (Degra)
Scott MacDonald (Dolim)
Tucker Smallwood
Rick Worthy

Enterprise 3x11 "Carpenter Street"

rating: ***

the story: Xindi-Reptilians attempt to engineer a bio-weapon in Earth's past.

what it's all about: Episodes set in the current day tend to feel like money-savers.  The original series did it first, naturally, only to do it again in the movies with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and eventually Voyager did it, too, the Bill Gates-evoking "Future's End" two-parter.  "Carpenter Street" at first glance looks like a waste of such an opportunity, but it really isn't.

It's actually got a lot going on.  The most convenient angle, and probably what ultimately made the Temporal Cold War look most like a cheap gimmick, was using Daniels mostly as a kind of time-traveling cab driver (although that would be a fantastic gimmick!), bringing Archer and T'Pol to the exact moment they need to thwart the latest Xindi plan.  "Thwart the latest Xindi plan" sounds as bad as trivializing Daniels, but it's actually the second best thing about the episode.  Or best, depending how much you like the next thing I'm going to talk about.

The present day (2004) is represented mostly at night, and by a scuzzball whose major contribution to showing Archer and T'Pol what 2004 looks like is having them bring him to the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant.  We'd already seen this guy scarfing down delivery pizza.  The drive-thru scene is classic, especially as T'Pol clearly wants no part of it, right around the time when our real world culture was transitioning away from taking fast food burgers for granted and seeking healthier alternatives.  Yet this guy lives on the stuff!  Take everything else out of the story, and having our future characters experience the present this way...absolutely perfect.

But the scuzzball is also unwittingly a pawn of a Xindi faction.  Up till now, the various Xindi species hadn't really distinguished themselves.  "The Shipment" had focused on a Xindi-Sloth, and we'd begun to suspect that Xindi-Humanoid Degra was probably going to be more important than he seemed.  What about the others?  Were any of them truly nasty?  "Carpenter Street" answers that in a big way, and also foreshadows the later truly nasty turn the Xindi-Reptilians take.  The Walking Dead's infamous bat-swinging Negan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, plays one of them, and apparently seriously contemplated quitting acting because he hated the prosthetics process.  I know some characters who would've been happy if he had...!  But it also sucks that Star Trek actually had Morgan in an episode, and we didn't even get to see his face.  In the words of McCoy (circa Star Trek Beyond), "Typical."

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The tradition of visiting the present day maintained.
• series - Yet it actually proves incredibly relevant in hindsight.
• character - Daniels, and the whole Temporal Cold War, kind of feels sabotaged.
• essential - The drive-thru scene is a classic.  And prescient!

notable guest-stars:
Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Leland Orser
Matt Winston (Daniels)

Enterprise 1x26 "Shockwave"

rating: **

the story: The mission is cancelled after a horrific accident, but turns out it's really meddling from agents of the Temporal Cold War.

what it's all about: "Shockwave" is a blunt concept, too obvious in at least one element.  It might be the reason fans never warmed to the concept of the Temporal Cold War.  It's all obvious setup for a season finale: the crew finally managed to screw up that badly?  And Archer's stuck in the future with no time travel devices to get him back home?  And of course the second season premiere quickly resolves both of these issues, and it's back to the status quo as if nothing ever happened.  It just feels too cheap, especially for being a featured element of the series.

Silik doesn't have the same chemistry with Archer as he did in "Cold Front," and that's a major problem in and of itself.  Daniels is as fascinating as always (well, as he'd been in his debut, "Cold Front"); in fact he's the best part of this finale and an even better part of the second part.  But again, here he's mostly relegated to setup.

The Temporal Cold War deserved a much better push if it was going to be featured in such a climactic moment.  Maybe learning more about "Future Guy," the shadowy instigator of the Suliban, but not only do we learn nothing more than when we saw him in the pilot ("Broken Bow"), we never learn more about him, even with the rushed wrap up of the arc at the start of the fourth season ("Storm Front").  And that's the most disappointing thing of all.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Will casual fans really care about too-obvious material?
• series - Despite reservations, it does serve as a reminder of the Temporal Cold War, and its scope.
• character - Archer's the one caught in the crosshairs, as always.
• essential - It's the most painful thing to say about a season finale, that it isn't essential.

notable guest-stars:
John Fleck (Silik)
Matt Winston (Daniels)
James Horan ("Future Guy")
Vaughn Armstrong (Forrest)

Enterprise 1x11 "Cold Front"

rating: ****

the story: Archer is confronted by rival agents in the Temporal Cold War.

what it's all about: The Temporal Cold War proved to be controversial among fans.  They thought it was poor compensation for having a prequel series that looked backward instead of ahead.  And yet it was an obvious extension of the increasingly sophisticated view of time travel in the franchise, building on the Department of Temporal Investigations (Deep Space Nine's "Trials and Tribble-ations") and a future Starfleet that actually policed time travel (Voyager's Captain Braxton, as seen in "Future's End" and "Relativity").  In "Cold Front" we meet Daniels, who comes later still than Braxton, and becomes the second most important figure we meet in the arc, other than Silik, who debuted in the pilot, and the forever-mysterious "Future Guy," Silik's shadowy boss. 

"Cold Front," I always thought, was actually the best Temporal Cold War episode.  Rather than attempt a major event, it merely plays up the "cold war" aspect, in which agents are constantly working against each other, as happened between operatives of the United States and Soviet Union.  It's a spy story, essentially.  It casts the arc back to the origins of the franchise, when the real world cold war was running hottest, and adversarial aliens like the Klingons and Romulans earned their enduring place in Star Trek lore, having been cast in the roles of the Chinese and Russians, the two biggest communist threats. 

Which means Daniels and Silik are actually the best reasons to enjoy the episode, not only for their own sake, but how they play off Archer.  And actually, this is the best Archer showcase of the series to this point, and as with his earlier foreshadowing in "The Andorian Incident," proves that his real importance will be his ability to pivot humans between opposing forces, as would develop in the fourth season, the birth of the Federation. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A powerful argument in favor of the Temporal Cold War as an extension of classic Star Trek storytelling.
• series - An explanation for the stakes of a signature Enterprise arc.
• character - The introduction of Daniels, a key player in the arc.
• essential - It not only sells the concept, but it helps contextualize it, once you realize what it's really about.

notable guest-stars:
Matt Winston (Daniels)
John Fleck (Silik)

Enterprise 2x1 "Shockwave, Part 2"

*

I love Enterprise.  I quickly became one of its biggest fans and defenders, necessitated by the fact that a lot of fans weren't so keen on it or Star Trek in general at the time.  As time has passed, little has changed about my attitudes concerning the show except possibly in one crucial area.  The Temporal Cold War.

Part of this may be my growing disappointment at how the series abandoned the arc unceremoniously at the start of its fourth and final season, leaving its resolution in a cloud of ambiguity.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I still find the concept to be fascinating, and there is much to recommend it.  Yet its importance and specifically how its use is now reflected years after the fact becomes more problematic the more perspective I try to gain on the series as a whole.  The biggest victim of this changing attitude is the second season premiere, "Shockwave, Part 2."

Following the first season finale, in which the Suliban, agents of the shadowy Future Guy, attempt to sabotage Archer's mission and provoke the Vulcans into withdrawing their crucial support after a disastrous incident at a mining colony, Daniels has whisked Archer away in an attempt to salvage a contaminated timeline.  The problem is that the changes his foes have wrought leave Daniels in a future that has been completely altered.  (Yes, the Temporal Cold War may as a whole be compared to the exceedingly clever two-part Voyager episode "Year of Hell," and it's this episode that makes it most clear.)  

While the crew of the Enterprise attempt to combat invading Suliban forces, Daniels and Archer attempt to get past their bad break, which is made easier by the fact that Daniels was studying time travel when he was in grade school.  It all leads to Archer getting back to his own time and essentially overlooking the dire developments of the previous episode.  

So yes, "Shockwave" attempts to play both ends of the Enterprise story at that point, the Temporal Cold War and Archer's destiny to lead a successful mission and help found the Federation (you know that's his fate because Daniels can't seem to avoid saying so every time he appears).  The problem making an episode like this so early in the series is that it trivializes everything.  Not only is there a distinct lack of consequences, but it also proves how easily the Temporal Cold War can be resolved, no matter how grim the circumstances can get.  It's a far more interesting concept when used by proxy, as the series figures out in later episodes and indeed whole arcs, except when the creators decide to listen to the fans who probably only had "Shockwave" in mind when they decided the whole thing was a giant waste of time.

Daniels is a great character, but he's done no favors in this one.  Silik is similar interesting, except in this one. Seeing a pattern?

"Shockwave," and specifically this part of the story, is a moment that was incredibly important at the time, but its significance is weakened when compared to other developments, especially the speedy resolution.  When an overriding high-concept arc can find any kind of resolution in what most other incarnations of Star Trek had routinely done in season finale and premiere two-part episodes, there's a problem.  It's the "Descent" problem, the story that began Next Generation's final season, where the Borg have been completely neutered.  It would be like Deep Space Nine attempting to resolve Sisko's role as the Emissary in anything but the final episode.

That's why I'm extremely reluctant to recommend "Shockwave" as anything but an episode you might want to watch as part of the series as a whole.  It could so easily have been something of greater significance.  But it's just an extremely awkward moment, a rare moment of true miscalculation for a show that was far better than most fans were willing to admit.  Now that some of them are softening those views, it's important to recognize that there were indeed some problems, and "Shockwave" was one of them.  But don't let this one episode color everything in its mediocre shade.  It's an exception.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Gary Graham
Vaughn Armstrong
Matt Winston
John Fleck
James Horan

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 4x1/4x2 "Storm Front"

**

The fourth season of Enterprise is generally regarded to be its finest, the year that finally started to tackle all the continuity points fans expected from the series.

Of course, before all that, the show's own continuity had to be acknowledged one last time.  Since the first episode, something called the Temporal Cold War had been a recurring element of the plot, a way to visit the far future while sticking to the past.  At this point in franchise lore, you must remember, each new series had always moved forward.  Enterprise was the first look back, as it attempted to illustrate how Starfleet and the Federation helped create a landscape that seemed fully formed from the moment the original series debuted in 1966 (this, of course, is hogwash: "Starfleet" as a term didn't spring up for years).

The creators of Enterprise thought they were having their cake and eating it, too, but fans were already discontent, had been discontent probably since 1994, when Kirk was killed off falling from a bridge.  They felt betrayed by Star Trek, and so started betraying Star Trek in droves, fragmenting the fanbase until it finally collapsed on itself.  In 2009, the reboot finally came, and by starting fresh, the franchise found its greatest success to date.

That goes to show that the fans who were convinced they knew how everything should be done maybe weren't as right as they thought they were.  They thought the Temporal Cold War was an unnecessary complication to Enterprise, and so "Storm Front" concludes the arc, sending Archer and crew to WWII, because for some reason Star Trek has always loved bringing back the Nazis.

On a purely intellectual basis, "Storm Front" is a worthy culmination of the arc.  Since it was long implied that the whole basis of the Temporal Cold War was the absurd logistics of carrying out a conflict across time, it makes sense that it ends with a questionable amount of satisfaction.  Both Silik and Daniels, key players from the start, appear, but their participation is a far cry from appearances like "Cold Front," the best episode of the arc.  Future Guy, the shadowy instigator of the whole affair, does not make an appearance, unless you subscribe to my theory that he's the alien Nazi Archer defeats.

And that's it.  Archer even states for the record that he never wants to see Daniels again, and wants no further part of the Temporal Cold War.  Message received.  In some alternate version of the series, which would have lasted the traditional seven seasons, you know the arc would have been heavily featured in the finale.

It's a fine adventure, but it's a clear blow-off, skirting the thing it's featuring, and while it's possible to interpret "Storm Front" as more significant than it appears to be, you have to massage the material.  In one way, it's essential to the series, but given its placement and treatment, you can also pretend, as the show itself wants to at this point, that it never happened.  In that sense, how you feel about "Storm Front" remains entirely your decision.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
John Fleck
J. Paul Boehmer
Tom Wright
Matt Winston

Memory Alpha summary, Part 2.