So strong, in fact, that I was very upset when my brand new DVD (the fourth DVD in the second season of Enterprise, purchased through Amazon) turned out to be damaged such that it abruptly quit with about seven minutes left in the episode.
I had to scramble to find out what happened. Since I'm no good at online streaming and am hesitant about giving my credit card information to anyone online, I ended up having to find out how the episode ended by finding a version of the script on some website somewhere.
I am very much looking forward to seeing the ending someday.
"Future Tense" was written by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, who were apparently members of the "writing room" for Enterprise. According to Wikipedia, they spent the first season creating scripts from stories written by B&B (which accounts for why they were so bad) but were allowed to create new scripts from scratch in season two. This would appear to be one of them.
There is a lot going on in this story which deals with the aftermath of Enterprise's discovery of a tiny space ship, drifting along on its own at a distance from Earth far greater than any Earth vessel had ever travelled until Enterprise, with an apparently human corpse at the controls. The mystery deepens when Phlox discovers that the corpse is mostly human but contains DNA from numerous other alien races, including Vulcan, and Tucker and Reid figure out that the tiny ship is actually huge inside and has some form of biological circuitry.
So, it comes from the distant future.
And apparently everybody wants it, including the Suliban and the Tholians, who send warships after Enterprise to get it back.
The episode moves along at a break-neck pace and is so frantic that the viewer never really knows what will happen next. The breathtaking climax, when Enterprise reaches its rendezvous with a Vulcan Battle Cruiser (??!!??) only to find the massive Vulcan ship floating helpless in space, is (or would have been had I been able to see it) awesome and the battle between the Tholians, the Suliban and the Enterprise (who are all fighting for custody of the future ship) epic.
We learn just how formidable the Tholians are (they disabled the Vulcan ship and win the battle over the Suliban fleet) in their star-shaped ships that capture the essence of the ships that appeared in the well-known TOS episode "The Tholian Web".
We also get hints that the Temporal Cold War doesn't just involve the Suliban against everyone else.
Too bad Sussman and Strong felt they had to buy into the good ol' boys relationship between Tucker and Reid as they decide to explore the unexpected depths of the future ship without reporting their discovery to anyone, in direct contravention of procedure and good sense.
Other than that, however, this is a riveting episode. I can't wait to see it.
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