Day 345: Enterprise, Storm Front (Part 1)

Show: Star Trek; Enterprise

Episode Particulars: S4EP1, “Storm Front, Part 1”

 Summary: Things haven’t turned out quite as expected for the Enterprise and her crew. Instead of triumphantly returning to Earth after ending the conflict with the Xindi, they’ve found themselves thrown back in time to WWII. But this is a very different war then the one they’ve read about in the history books; it’s 1944, and the Nazis have taken over most of America’s East Coast. The reason for this change, as they eventually figure out when a severely aged Daniels stumbles into Sickbay, is that one faction of the Temporal Cold War traveled back to this time and is rewriting history to suit its needs. Meanwhile, down on Earth, Captain Archer (who was presumed dead when the Xindi weapon exploded) initially finds himself in the clutches of the Nazis, only to be rescued by the New York resistance movement. He doesn’t have the same facts the Enterprise does, but he’s smart enough to figure it out by himself. Having to explain it to his allies may be a little more difficult, though.

Standalone Thoughts: Honestly, I found this episode somewhat blah. Maybe it’s just cultural saturation; media’s fascination with WWII (and especially alternate history/sci-fi assisted WWII) means that you start to get a feel for the tropes after a while, and it can be hard to make things feel fresh. And in this case, nothing really feels fresh. You’ve got the Nazis getting improved future technology to help them win the war, battles taking place on American soil, a ragtag resistance movement made up of a diverse group of people just to show how the war has brought people closer, and plenty of evidence that the Nazis (as a group) were terrible people, complete with references to the concentration camps. Even the Temporal Cold War stuff doesn’t bring anything new to the table, because time travel is often a part of stories like this. The only thing that felt different (or at least amused me) was the heavy implication that the Mafia were using their tactics to try to fight the Nazis, because it puts me in mind of the hypothetical “who would win in a fight” situations you ask with your friends. If you’re really into WWII stories, you might have more fun with this, but for me, it feels like the writers weren’t sure what to do, and pulled out the old “time travel/alternate history” card because they were familiar with it. Hopefully Part Two will be a little better.

How it Relates to the Whole: The most obvious connection here is the Temporal Cold War, but I think there might be a bit of an homage to The Original Series here as well. Gangsters fighting Nazis sounds suspiciously like someone wanted to smash “A Piece of the Action” and “Patterns of Force” together. I’m not judging this; I’m just saying that sometimes crossovers like that can be difficult to resist.

Other: *Just one today, and it doesn’t even have to do with the episode proper. During the “previously on” segment that explains how we got to this point, we see Archer running away from the explosions taking place inside the Xindi weapon. But the way the scene is shot and cut makes it look like something out of Baywatch. I’m not sure if that was intended or not (probably not), but it does make it hard to take it entirely seriously.

Badass Malcolm Moment: Malcolm doesn’t get to do too much in this episode, unfortunately, but he does manage to track a damaged shuttle despite its transponder being offline. I’m sure the sensors did most of the work, but he's the one who brought it to the crew’s attention. Yeah, it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do this time around.

After the Fact Update: To be fair to the writers, this might not have been entirely their fault. According to the Memory Alpha entry for “Zero Hour”;

In a special feature on the Season 4 DVD, Connor Trinneer says he believes that the producers deliberately created an ending so ambiguous that, had the series been canceled, the reaction to it ending that way would've been so negative as to make the network execs miserable – calling it a "wily move" on their part.

I’ve heard of producers doing things like this before in order to have things work out the way they want, so I can believe this theory. I just suspect that, once they got what they wanted, they weren’t entirely sure where to go from there.

On an unrelated note, Memory Alpha also thinks it was Shuttlepod Two that gets stolen and damaged in this episode, instead of the normally accident-prone Shuttlepod One. Since I’ve talked about this before, I figured it was worth mentioning when the status quo got shaken up a bit.