In the eleventh episode of the first season of Enterprise, YES. THANK YOU. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
What an unexpected treat, y’all. If this is an indication of a serialized plot over this season (or show???), then I am SUPER FUCKING EXCITED. “Cold Front” is a bold, confusing, and nerve-wracking episode, and all those descriptors are intended to be positive. Look, time travel has been done a million times before, and it’s been done at least a thousand times within Star Trek canon. Yet virtually none of this episode felt familiar to me. Part of that comes from the way that this conflict exists in an external state: aside from the premiere episode, this massive “war” is something happening to other people. It’s only twice now that the Temporal Cold War has intersected with the Enterprise timeline, but I’m guessing that this won’t be the last time.
It’s fascinating, though, that as a single piece of storytelling, “Cold Front” basically fails all the tests of what makes a “good” story.” It starts in the middle of the war, and we’re given very little contextual basis to understand it. (More on that in a bit.) The main characters of Enterprise are NOT the main characters in this war, either. In fact, I highly doubt that Silik or Daniels are either. They seem like pawns or minor players. And the events of “Cold Front” center on the helpful sabotage of Enterprise, and by the end of the episode, WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHY SILIK SAVED THE SHIP. If Silik doesn’t like Archer interfering, why the hell did he save his life?
Thus, Enterprise tackles time travel through a story that seems like a realistic attempt to portray the bewildering nature of it. It’s not coherent. By the very nature of it, it’s nonlinear, and therefore, the story we get within this episode feels impossibly labyrinthine. AND I FUCKING LOVE IT. I love the shocking way in which Daniels reveals himself to be more-or-less human and from NINE HUNDRED YEARS IN THE FUTURE. It speaks to the importance of this very moment in history: something must be so pivotal that both Daniels and Silik were both willing to cast off their disguises and confront Archer directly. Granted, it also made for compelling drama, so there’s that. But I saw this as a story of desperation: the temporal agents and factions from the future were aware that the twenty-first century was a front in this war, and they were both scrambling to get ahead of one another. Who was the collateral damage? People like those on Enterprise, folks who are left in the dark, characters who cannot understand the full extent of what was happening to them.
That’s a pervasive tone to this episode, and again, that’s a good thing. Daniels’s reveal of his true identity and his expository introduction still felt surreal, so much so that you couldn’t quite believe him. I wanted to, but the challenge of introducing this conflict in such a fractured manner meant that one could never be sure who was telling the truth or what the truth actually is. What if Daniels’s really was the villain and we’re biased against Silik because of how he looks or behaves? I don’t think that’s what is happening here, but LOOK, I’M BEING CAREFUL. My guess? Daniels was telling the truth, and whomever Silik is working for wants to drastically alter the past, most likely to benefit themselves. At the same time, I don’t know what faction Daniels worked for. What if they also want to change the past for their own benefit?
I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know anything, and the disturbing way that “Cold Front” ends did not help me. Whatever Silik did to Enterprise is left unsaid, especially since he JUMPS OUT OF THE SHIP AND MAKES IT TO AN ESCAPE POD. Daniels’s death means that a source of information has been taken away from these characters. At the conclusion of this episode, we are deliberately left unsatisfied. It’s the point of this all. I have no shame in admitting that this worked on me because by gods, y’all, I CANNOT WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF THE TEMPORAL COLD WAR ARC. Hurry up??? Please???
The video for “Cold Front” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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