Enterprise 6-May-03

[John Crichton]

I don't want to leave you hanging but as I reread our back and forth in this thread I must admit to being completely lost at this point.

Shall we just agree that we both have viable, if somewhat differing, explanations?

That's kinda funny because as I read your conversation I felt like I was watching a tennis match where the ball was replaced with a live gerbil. Halfway through, the gerbil decided he had enough and scurried off...

 

[Viking Bastard]

Well, it never was much of a debate. Just inqueries and counter-inqueries.

 

[Silver Moon]

Methinks that some people are forgetting and important point, which some earlier posters have pointed out. The episode rocked! This is about entertainment, and by nearly all accounts, it was a very entertaining episode. Even the nay-sayers will probably admit that the first 15-20 minutes were fantastic and different from any Trek episode we've seen before.

 

[Viking Bastard]

It's not really that people are forgettin' that point as much
as they're beyond it. We've established that the majority
seems to like the ep, so now it's time to fill the plot holes!

It's the natural order of things.

 

[myrdden]

Sure, piling on the paradoxes can be annoying, but time travel is one of the most valuable tools/tropes an SF writer has when it comes to making metaphors {about regret/loss/redemption/The Road Not Taken}.

There was a brilliant DS9 time-travel episode with a totally wonky set-up --basically the was a planet with a time-differential field around it and Odo, Kira and Co. essentially crashland on a town full of their descendants.

The whole time-travel/SF set-up was in service of the character drama; an exploraion of Odo/Kira's budding relationship. It rocked.

And then there was More Tribbles, More Troubles, which was damn near perfect.

I totally forgot about that DS9 episode. I thought it was quite good too.

My point wasn't that they should never use time travel, but rather they seem to rely upon it too much. If done right the time travel plot device can be quite effective - its just hard to effectively pull off I think.

Myrdden

 

[Mark]

I think it depends on when the temporal stuff is introduced into the writing process of an episode. If it is part of the process from the very conception of the episode, it usually turns out to be a good thing. If it is introduced toward the end of the process as a way to clean up a loose plot, it usually turns out to be a bad thing. Besides, this episode isn't really about time travel at all. Simply an episode about what comes later...or before...or...

Help me out here!

 

[myrdden]

I think it depends on when the temporal stuff is introduced into the writing process of an episode. If it is part of the process from the very conception of the episode, it usually turns out to be a good thing. If it is introduced toward the end of the process as a way to clean up a loose plot, it usually turns out to be a bad thing. Besides, this episode isn't really about time travel at all. Simply an episode about what comes later...or before...or...

Help me out here!

I'll agree with you on that. I think I'm just tired of all the temporal/spacial/inverted tacyon/anamolies that seemed to have cropped up so much in all the series. I rarely watched VOY but everytime I watched it seemed to be an episode centered around one of the above things. Maybe my timing was just poor.

I have to admit, after watching this episode again, I liked it more. It was well done.

Myrdden

 

[uv23]

I caught the episode on Sunday after missing it Tuesday and I have to admit that I actually enjoyed it, time-travel rubbish aside. It had a rather dark vibe and everything seemed to flow well.

They should have scripted the sabotage scene differently; rather than shooting down a bunch of borgs (who would definitely have adapted by then) they should have collapsed a bulkhead or something. That scene bothered me.

It also bothers me how much captain's hesitation there is in Star Trek. Not just Enterprise mind you, any series. While the ship is being shot up and hull plating goes hurling off into the distance, Captain Archer is pacing around his bridge hesitating about what to do. And yet the ship seems ok with this, miraculously taking less damage during his hesitation scenes. I'd rather see some snap decisions, speedy action and real tension. The easy pace is maddening sometimes.

Anyways the clip for the next episode looked cheesy and gratuitous. There'll be a whole legion of pimpled teen aged boys taping that one for sure.

 

[Richards]

Ah, but there's another reason to rejoice for this week's episodes: not just the "T'Pol goes into pon farr" shtick, but there's going to be a Tellarite! I don't think we've seen a Tellarite since "Journey to Babel" from the original series. Woo hoo!

(For those who can't place them, the Tellarites are the hairy pig people with the thick fingers.)

Johnathan

 

[Staffan]

I did not see the episode but I have to ask a silly question.

How did the Enterprise know the message was going to somewhere deep in the Delta Quadrant?

Did they somehow intercept and decode the message and get the target coordinates? If not all they would get is a bearing on the transmission beam and have no clue how far the message was expected to travel before getting to its destination.

They didn't intercept the beam. They only knew about it because Phlox was semi-logged into the Borg mini-collective at the time, and he picked it up.