The commencement speech Archer is reading on the monitor when Hoshi notifies him of the Tarkalean ship's distress call is a great touch. If you pause the blu-ray, you can actually read it (gotta love HD Star Trek). As I suspected, Archer confirms that they're Zefram Cochrane's words in a later scene. As much as Enterprise loves to mess with the existing continuity of the Trek universe, this episode is a great example of what it can do when it builds upon, instead of contradicts, the established events. The "message to the 24th century" is the only really trite part of this episode; everything else is extremely well done and fits so perfectly with the Borg stories we got to watch in the latter half of Voyager, it's hard to truly find fault with this episode.
What does bug me a bit is the seemingly automatic use of the established terms for things like "nanoprobes", "tubules", etc. Phlox is the one who introduces all of these Borg-related terms, which seems suspicious because he does so before becoming "infected" himself. It's been rather a long time since I saw First Contact, so perhaps those terms came up in Cochrane's retracted statements about the events surrounding his first warp flight and the influence of these cybernetic beings from the future?
It's much harder to excuse the fact that the security team's phase pistols cease working on the Borg drones who are trying to take over Enterprise well before the rifles Reed and Archer took over to the assimilated transport stop being effective. The same modifications were made to both weapon types, and the drones are part of the same local hive consciousness, so they should adapt to the weapons fire at the same time. (Yes, I was an avid reader of The Nitpicker's Guide when I last went through TNG.)
Review by dgwVIP 10BlockedParent2018-03-23T04:57:26Z
The commencement speech Archer is reading on the monitor when Hoshi notifies him of the Tarkalean ship's distress call is a great touch. If you pause the blu-ray, you can actually read it (gotta love HD Star Trek). As I suspected, Archer confirms that they're Zefram Cochrane's words in a later scene. As much as Enterprise loves to mess with the existing continuity of the Trek universe, this episode is a great example of what it can do when it builds upon, instead of contradicts, the established events. The "message to the 24th century" is the only really trite part of this episode; everything else is extremely well done and fits so perfectly with the Borg stories we got to watch in the latter half of Voyager, it's hard to truly find fault with this episode.
What does bug me a bit is the seemingly automatic use of the established terms for things like "nanoprobes", "tubules", etc. Phlox is the one who introduces all of these Borg-related terms, which seems suspicious because he does so before becoming "infected" himself. It's been rather a long time since I saw First Contact, so perhaps those terms came up in Cochrane's retracted statements about the events surrounding his first warp flight and the influence of these cybernetic beings from the future?
It's much harder to excuse the fact that the security team's phase pistols cease working on the Borg drones who are trying to take over Enterprise well before the rifles Reed and Archer took over to the assimilated transport stop being effective. The same modifications were made to both weapon types, and the drones are part of the same local hive consciousness, so they should adapt to the weapons fire at the same time. (Yes, I was an avid reader of The Nitpicker's Guide when I last went through TNG.)