Laurie's No-Nonsense Review

In brief: Entertaining enough, but strictly a no-brainer.

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"Future Tense"
Enterprise Season 2, Episode 16
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by James Whitmore, Jr.
Brief summary: The discovery of a wrecked ship, apparently from the
future, thrusts Archer and the Enterprise right in the middle of the
Temporal Cold War.
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When "Enterprise" first began, I had decidedly mixed emotions about
the Temporal Cold War. It struck me as a potentially decent plot
conceit, but with the potential to become a dreadful excuse to remake
all of Trek in this new series' image if not dealt with carefully.

Interestingly, that doesn't seem to have been the case, at least so far.
Most of the "alterations" to Trek history, pro or con, have been in ways
that have nothing whatsoever to do with said war -- they've simply been
around as a matter of course. Now, that's not necessarily a good thing
for the series as a whole, since it potentially means big contradictions
are being introduced for not much reason at all, but up until now the
TCW has been more of a positive than a negative. "Cold Front" was
one of the more intriguing shows of the first season, and "Shockwave,"
while substantially less deep, made for an entertaining story.

"Future Tense" is continuing that progression, but in ways that feel a
bit more empty than intriguing. It's an entertaining enough hour, but
it's so busy keeping a juggling act afloat that I'm not getting much
sense of what lies beyond it, if anything. In part, that's because we're
back to characters who routinely commit actions which have me
questioning their reasoning ability, if not their sanity. It may get the
plot moving, but it's not getting me to root for them.

The plot hinges on a derelict spacecraft which Enterprise finds in the
starting moments of the episode. There are no communications
coming from it, it seems almost sensor-proof, and although it looks
somewhat damaged it's hard to tell what might have caused that
damage. Curious, Archer decides to bring it into the launch bay.
Right off the bat this doesn't strike me as an overly smart move -- after
all, if it's almost sensor-proof there could be anything hiding inside,
from a weapon set to detonate as soon as the hull is breached to a herd
of angry wildebeest with digestive problems. But let's just accept it for
the moment.

Silly Action #2: Archer, Reed, and T'Pol all walk into the launch bay
and start inspecting the ship with absolutely no sense that any of them
is prepared for the unexpected. Reed -- the ultra-paranoid tactical
officer who feels it's his job to keep Archer out of harm's way -- isn't
even armed at first. What's more, once Reed melts open the hatch,
what's the first thing Archer does? Pry off the door and take in a good
whiff of air. He's no idea at this point if the owners of that ship were
humanoid, let alone oxygen-breathers. Apart from giving me a nice
MSTing ("hey, does anyone else smell almonds?"), things weren't
getting off to a good start.

Afterwards, however, things start moving along a bit more smoothly.
There's one body on board the ship -- long dead, and apparently
human. There's initially a lot of speculation about who it could
possibly be -- including serious musings about it being Zefram
Cochrane, which I thought was a great touch. As that mystery
deepens, however, so does another: when exploring, Trip and Reed
find a junction on the derelict that seems to go on for an impossibly
long way. "How could a ship be bigger on the inside than on the
outside?" wonders Trip. (Anyone sufficiently well versed in older
SFTV undoubtedly said something about it being "dimensionally
transcendental" at this point.) He and Reed descend, and find what
might be the ship's black box.

Things can't be that simple, though. The Suliban show up (albeit in a
single lightly-armed craft) and attempt to claim the derelict as their
own. The Enterprise manages to fight them off, but it's something of a
close call -- and it's clear that this is something bigger than a simple
Earth vessel.

Just what it is becomes clear fairly soon thereafter. Phlox finds out
that the occupant wasn't really human -- not fully, anyway. He has so
much other genetic material in him -- Vulcan, Tarellian, Rigellian, and
others Phlox can't even identify -- that Phlox is convinced the man's a
result of "several generations of interspecies breeding."

Intrigued by a possibility, Archer takes T'Pol into the quarters of our
old friend Daniels, where he digs through Daniels' database and
eventually finds the specs for the derelict ship. It's a bit of an
anachronism -- it's not going to be commissioned for another 900
years or so. Archer theorizes that one of the historians Daniels
mentioned must have somehow gotten stranded in Archer's time, and
that if the Suliban get their hands on this ship the technology involved
could change the whole course of the Temporal Cold War.

It was hard at this point for me not to see the episode as picking and
choosing elements from other SF I've seen or read. The "bigger on the
inside than on the outside" phrase is perhaps obvious to anyone with
even a passing interest in "Doctor Who," but the idea of "humans find
a ship with a single corpse that gets lots of the galaxy up in arms" is
very much at the heart of most of David Brin's Uplift novels, which are
greatly entertaining space opera in their own right. I'm not saying
there's any wholesale lifting being done here -- ideas that basic are
hard to claim ownership of, for one thing, and they're also things it's
easy enough to come up with independently. I'm more concerned that
about *all* the episode was doing up to now was reminding me of
other stories.

Well, okay, maybe not all. Phlox's revelation about this corpse's
ancestry also spawns (if you'll pardon the pun) another sexually
charged conversation between Archer and T'Pol. Archer seems to find
it intriguing that humans and Vulcans may one day interbreed, but
when T'Pol says that due to biological incompatibilities, "it's unlikely
we'd be able to reproduce," Archer gives her a look which suggests he
thinks she means *him* rather than the species as a whole. Yeah, Jon,
you're that irresistible -- and all viewers want to do is picture the leads
getting it on. I think "ho-hum" sums up my reaction here.

My interest level rose quite a bit, however, when a second ship comes
to claim the derelict. This one's not Suliban, however -- it's Tholian.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have been all that surprised the Tholians were
involved somehow -- after all, "Tholia" is one of the words Klaang
muttered way back in "Broken Bow." The Tholians are a great choice
of race to use here, though -- they've only shown up on screen once
and been mentioned a few times since, and as such they're a fairly
wide-open field. For a one-shot race, moreover, the Tholians have
sparked an awful lot of fan interest for decades, at least so far as I've
seen ... and they were visually distinctive enough in 1968 to make one
wonder what you could do with visually given today's technology.

(Of course, we didn't really find out what can be done with the visuals
here beyond the ship -- perhaps wisely, the powers that be decided to
make them an audio-only race for the time being. The ships look quite
nice while being recognizably Tholian, though -- kudos.)

The Tholians, regardless, also want the ship, claiming that it's emitting
temporal radiation that's a threat to Archer and company. Archer
manages to bluff them off, but it's clear that at the moment the
Enterprise is wearing a very large neon target on its saucer. There's a
Vulcan combat cruiser not far away, but time could be growing tight.

There are a few interesting character moments here and there,
interspersed among all of this jeopardy. T'Pol's skepticism about time
travel is starting to wear a little thin (being more than a little
reminiscent of Scully's eternal skepticism even in the face of
overwhelming evidence), but Phlox's attitude is more interesting. In a
nice scene with T'Pol, he doesn't really say exactly what he thinks of
Archer's theory, but says instead, "I believe in embracing surprises."
Very Phlox, and not a bad sentiment in general, I think.

A second scene that's a little more thoughtful than the rest of the show
is Trip's conversation with Reed about the future. Reed would jump at
the chance to take a trip into the 31st century, but Trip wouldn't -- he
prefers to let the story unfold at its own pace, as it were. He spins a
scenario for Reed: Reed discovers the name of the woman he's fated
to marry, meets her, romances her, marries her, and lives happily ever
after. "Now -- did you marry her for love, or because some book told
you to?" he asks. While Reed's answer ("if it's all happily ever after,
what's the difference?") says something about his character, I think the
overall question's a good one worth gnawing on for a while. (Beyond
the broad philosophical question, I think a specific one within fandom
is whether all the spoiler information we're privy to these days is a help
or a hindrance. I've certainly seen arguments that knowing what's
going to happen ten episodes down the line makes the episodes in
between seem like something you've got to "get through" in order to
get there. I'm not at all sure that's a good thing.)

After that, however, it's back to the jeopardy. We discover that the
derelict actually *is* emitting some sort of temporal radiation, the
effect of which is making people relive short periods in time. There's
not much explanation given of this, but for some reason it makes T'Pol
really nervous -- and she urges Archer to destroy the derelict before
matters get worse.

That scene felt very forced to me, as if someone felt that the jeopardy
without had to be matched by conflict within just because it did. Sure,
T'Pol's usually cautious, but this seemed downright paranoid.
Wouldn't it be at least as prudent to simply call the Vulcan ship up and
have them show up earlier rather than just sit there waiting?

From here, it's pretty much action the rest of the way. Trip discovers
that the "black box" is actually an emergency beacon, just as the
Suliban come back and attack. The Enterprise holds them off long
enough to make it to the Vulcan ship, only to find that it's been
disabled by the Tholians. Suddenly the big E is caught in the middle,
and Archer thinks that one of their only options is to activate that
beacon, in the hope that the ship's owners might be able to help. At the
same time, Reed and Archer also work on planting a photon torpedo
warhead in the derelict, so that if they have to they can release the ship
and then destroy it remotely.

The torpedo concept works well enough, but it also felt like a forced
way to do things. Let's remember that in "Dead Stop" just half a
season ago, Reed managed to set up an explosive in the repair station
and detonate it remotely, seemingly without all of the fuss that was
needed here. Why is a photon torpedo the only option?

That objection didn't stop the ending from being fairly exciting -- it's
nice to see a battle that actually feels a bit epic, as though events have
spiraled out of control. (In fiction, anyway, he said while keeping a
close eye on news reports...) It was certainly no surprise that everyone
survived in the end, or that the derelict wound up "reclaimed" by its
former owners, but it kept me engaged.

The last scene, however, almost put me right back where the first ones
did, in the land of "has anyone thought this through?" During
breakfast (I presume), Trip is amazed at how quickly the derelict's
owners acted after he'd activated the beacon. Archer says that time is
irrelevant to them -- they had plenty of time on their end to set things
up, then travel to whatever time they pleased to act.

All well and good -- but it's a bad can of worms to open, because it
begs an obvious question. Why not act *before* all this happens,
then? Why not grab the derelict before Archer even finds it, or at least
before the Suliban and Tholians get involved? I'd be happy with the
speculation that they had motives of their own, but when no one even
raises the question it looks as though the writers forgot about it.
(Actually, there's a semi-obvious reason -- the owners didn't want to
create a paradox -- but even that would've been nice to point out.)

And, of course, we get Archer wondering again about humans and
Vulcans "swapping chromosomes one day," and T'Pol responding that
the High Command is "more likely to believe in time travel." You
could almost hear the sitcom "wa-wa-wa-WAAAAAA" afterwards.
Sigh.

Other thoughts:

-- Science nitpick: during the chase to the Vulcan ship, at one point it's
said to be 600,000 kilometers away. All well and good, but that's only
two seconds away *at light speed*. At maximum warp, you'll be
zipping past it in almost no time. Maybe 600 million would have been
a better choice?

-- A nice comment made almost on the fly is that the ship would have
been more or less completely sensor-invisible were it not for the
damage it had already taken. That implies, albeit subtly, that there
could be bunches of those ships around all the time. I like it.

-- Trip's comment about the future -- "where's the fun in exploring if
you know how it all turns out?" -- is a good comment, but dangerous
to make given the premise of the series. It's a statement that could be
thrown back in the series' face far too easily.

I think that's about it. "Future Tense" is an odd mishmash: it's got
some cute visual sequences, some mind-bending SF tropes (albeit ones
that aren't all that new), a couple of good character moments and a
good long-term use for the Tholians. On the other hand, it also comes
off as tissue-paper thin in a lot of ways, with lots of moments that
aren't thought out and a sense that the Temporal Cold War might be all
flash and little substance. As an hour goes, I've seen far worse from
Enterprise -- but I've also seen lots better.

So, to sum up:

Writing: Fun, but erratic.
Directing: I think more could have been done to make the time-loops
seem stranger, but decent enough.
Acting: No real complaints, but not a lot of standout work either.

OVERALL: Let's go with a 7. Perfectly watchable once, but not
necessarily something you'll want to come back to.

NEXT WEEK:

Archer! Behind! Bars!

Tim Lynch (Castilleja School, Science Department)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*>
"Are you saying you believe time travel is possible?"
"Surprises, Sub-Commander. I believe in embracing surprises."
-- T'Pol and Phlox
--
Copyright 2003, Timothy W. Lynch. All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
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