If you made it through the entire first season of Enterprise and were still watching when "Shockwave Part 1", the season-ending cliff hanger, rolled across your television screen, this wretched piece of television must have been the final straw, the last nail in the coffin of your loyalty.
Written by Braga and Berman, "Shockwave" is a confused, poorly plotted, poorly paced and often silly two-parter that failed to renew interest in the series and actually led to a further drop in the show's ratings.
By re-introducing the "Temporal Cold War" and slinging Archer hither and yon in the time line, "Shockwave" also re-committed the series to a path that was sure to drive away even the most loyal of Star Trek enthusiasts. Used intermittently in a television series, time travel provides interesting possibilities -- used as the basic underlying premise of a television series like Enterprise, time travel undermines everything that happens, may happen, did happen and ensures that there is no possibility of drama or tension.
Because it ensures that anything that happened is un-doable, routine time travel sucks the suspense from every episode.
And, with "Shockwave", B&B double down on their commitment to time travel as the basis for season two of Enterprise, ensuring that any fan who managed to overlook the series' many many other faults (from poor writing to homophobia, from nonsensical plots to the celebration of bullying, harassment and xenophobia, from hackneyed characterization to the presentation of a future Human society as being less advanced and less mature than the Human society watching the show on TV) will choose not to return for the new season.
Enterprise is invited to visit a very successful mining colony planted decades before by an alien race. While the colony has blossomed from a few brave souls into a thriving community of almost 4,000, its mining efforts have laced the planet's atmosphere with an explosive compound that could be ignited by the superheated exhaust of any small space craft that enters the atmosphere. Ignition means immolation of the entire colony.
Having learned long before that the transporter device is safe for the transport of living beings, Enterprise of course chooses to avoid the risk of sending a shuttle to the planet and beams Archer, T'Pol, Reed and Tucker to the surface for the visit.
Oh wait, no they don't. Despite the availability of the proven safe transporter, they send a shuttle anyway.
But of course this very successful colony, having become well aware of the immolation risk they themselves have created, has invested some of its massive profits into building a protective dome over their installation so that, even if the atmosphere is ignited, the colonists and their assets are well protected.
Oh wait, no they didn't. Despite decades of successful mining and significant growth, the colonists have decided that, well, you know, it's no big deal that the penetration of any alien space craft into their atmosphere could set their very air on fire and burn them all instantaneously out of existence. Because, you know, no alien race would ever raid a successful mining colony!
So down goes the shuttle, up goes the planet's atmosphere and, poof, 3,600 colonists die.
Despite the fact that all investigations show he did everything according to the colony's safety protocols, Reed can't help but blame himself (I've finally figured out which character in literature Malcolm Reed most reminds me: Eey'ore from the Winnie the Pooh stories!).
Archer also descends into a funk of self-loathing and, when Star Fleet cancels Enterprise's mission at the behest of the Vulcans, Archer accepts the order without challenge (but with a lot of hand-wringing).
T'Pol challenges his little pity party but to no avail. Sato and Mayweather pledge their allegiance to their great and glorious leader and vow to defend him against anyone who might suggest he or his mission was a failure.
Then Archer wakes up in the past and Crewman Daniels re-appears and explains to him that the Suliban, using stealth technology, had set up the Enterprise shuttle to ignite the atmosphere in order to cause Star Fleet to cancel Archer's mission, all for the sake of the Temporal Cold War. Daniels also provides Archer with the information he needs to return to the present and gather damning evidence against the Suliban so that Enterprise's mission can continue.
Which begs the question: if Daniels can return Archer to the day after the incineration of the colony, why can't he return Archer to the day before the incineration of the colony so that he can expose the Suliban plot, save the colonists and, in the process, save Enterprise's all important mission?
Ahh, yes, that vexing time-travel question: If all is un-doable, how do you choose what to un-do?
And, if all is un-doable, why should anyone get bent out of shape by what happens?
Archer returns to the day after, uses Daniels' intel to expose the cloaked Suliban ship (which conveniently chooses to hang out at the colony planet for a full 24-hours after its mission has been accomplished) and steals a set of data discs from it that prove Suliban involvement in the destruction of the colony.
Archer does not, however, choose to destroy the Suliban ship.
When challenged as to why he is not worried that the Suliban might pursue and catch Enterprise before it reaches safe harbor with its precious data discs, Archer actually quotes "old biblical movies": "because it is written."
Brilliant man that he is, he actually believes that, with time travel now established as being completely routine and with time lines so changeable, he can actually trust that Daniels' history is actually trustworthy.
Needless to say, the Suliban do chase down Enterprise but, on orders from the future, demand only that Archer surrender himself. Because, as we all know by now, Captain Jonathan Archer alone stands between the proper development of history and all hell breaking loose. No one else matters but our buddy JA.
What is really impressive is the ease with which, what, 30 or so Suliban helixes overtake Enterprise, which is travelling at Warp 4, and the fact that these 30 little ships all have cloaking technology and apparently weapons that are more powerful than those on Enterprise.
With that much technology and firepower, why haven't the Suliban already simply overwhelmed all the forces of good in the galaxy and imposed their will on it?
Archer chooses to surrender himself in order to save his ship and crew but, when he steps through the docking hatch into a Suliban ship, he ends up instead in the 31st Century. With Crewman Daniels. Among the ruins of Human civilization.
A distraught Daniels then tells him that, ten minutes earlier, all was well in the 31st Century. Daniels was having a nice breakfast and enjoying the view. And now, all is lost. Some change in the distance past has resulted in a fairly recent (in terms of centuries, of course) completely annihilation of the Human race and its mother Earth.
Worse still, Daniels no longer has any means to return Archer to his original time period. That technology, too, was destroyed. Fade out. End of season. End of the show making any sense at all.
The time travel aspects of this show (and of this series so far) have made the plots so patently silly that it's almost not worth discussing. I still can't figure out why the Suliban don't simply kill Archer on one of their many opportunities to do so, if the good captain so all fired important to the TCWar. And I have no idea how Daniels, alone, managed to survive the destruction of Human history and to remember both the before time and the after time.
Isn't it a fact of Star Trek time travel that, if a time line is changed as a result of time travel, those actually in the time line have no idea that a change has occurred? This fact is made very clear in any number of Star Trek time travel episodes, including "Yesterday's Enterprise", where only the mysterious Guinan seems to have even the remotest inkling that things have changed after Enterprise C goes back to its property time.
In TOS's "City on the Edge of Forever", the argument is that the landing party was protected from the change in time caused by McCoy's interference in the 1930s by its proximity to the Guardian of Forever. In the movie "First Contact", the Enterprise crew is protected from the impact of the Borg interference in Human First Contact by the fact that Enterprise was caught up in the Borg time portal at the time of the change.
Yet Daniels states very clearly that, ten minutes before Archer's arrival, he had been sitting having a pleasant meal in an unchanged 31st Century. Then, everything changed and he found himself amid the devastation of the change. How is that possible?
Okay okay okay. You can drive yourself mad trying to work it all out, especially when the writers don't even follow their own rules.
I think it is also important to point out that, once again, B&B were so short on ideas for this two parter that they indulged themselves in valueless efforts to waste time and, I guess, build suspense in two scenes in this episode: first, when Enterprise begins to experience warp field fluctuations while fleeing with the data discs; and second, when Archer finds himself in the past, the day before Klang is captured at Broken Bow.
B&B spend a good three minutes trying to build up suspense with the warp field fluctuations issue. Tucker is called to the bridge and everyone scratches their heads, worrying about what is happening. Yet we soon learn that the fluctuations are caused by the presence of numerous cloaked Suliban ships all around Enterprise. Why do the Suliban delay in contacting Enterprise and ordering her to deliver Archer to them? It makes no sense at all. The attempt to build suspense is silly since it depends on irrational behaviour from the Suliban.
And, I'm sorry, but there was absolutely no reason to spend several minutes having Archer trying to figure out where and when he was when Daniels transports him back in time. Daniels was already there. Why bother with all the other stuff? I can only guess that the show was a couple of minutes short and they needed some filler.
Meanwhile, as all of this time travel garbage is going on, the deaths of 3,600 innocent colonists in a silly and contrived situation are all but forgotten.
Awful television. An insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. If only we could go back in time and ensure that B&B were never assigned to any role related to Star Trek. Now that would be timeline change worth fighting for.
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