4x01 Storm Front (1)

[6.8/10] I’m not particularly up on the behind-the-scenes details of Star Trek: Enterprise, but I am aware of the fact that Manny Coto (later of Dexter fame) takes over as showrunner in season 4, and that he’s a big fan of The Original Series. You can feel that influence here, as the combination of our heroes having to deal with Nazis, while also enlisting the help of 1940s gangsters, comes off like a combination of “Patterns of Force” and “A Piece of the Action.” Plus, the wacky time travel stuff is a trope the 1960s series would return to time and time again.

But I like the fact that we’re back to at least addressing the Temporal Cold War material. I’ll admit, I was wondering if the show was going to dispense with it entirely once the Xindi arc started. I wasn’t sure if the show meant to imply that the Sphere-Builders were the ones who had put the Suliban up to all their meddling, and if the little glimpse we got of them in the season 3 premiere was going to be the end of them as a regular thing.

Instead, either coincidentally or consequently, after the Xindi battle, the Temporal Cold War has turned into open time-based warfare, and Daniels has sent our heroes back in time to help defeat a never-before-mentioned uber villain named Vosk. Apparently he and his cronies are attacking temporal agents across the time stream, and it’s all Daniels could do to get the Enterprise and its crew back to 1944 to help them save history.

That’s...fine? I tend to give science fiction shows a pretty wide berth when it comes to time travel stuff, because it’s pretty hard to make it all make sense. But the connections between all of these events, and how one impacts another, is all still pretty vague and ill-defined, which makes the threat and the challenge less meaningful.

But the threat is at least, er, colorful? Vosk and his group have taken over the Nazis, and with the alien help, the Third Reich as taken over much of America’s Eastern Seaboard, including a newly swastika-decked White House. As I said in my write-up for the prior episode, I don’t know what Star Trek’s fascination with Nazis is, but it’s a little tiresome and even uncomfortable to see them reduced to being basically cartoon villains here. I suppose it’s an easy shorthand for evil, and Enterprise wants to shock the audience with the alternate history, but it feels like a lazy way to create that setup.

Still, after a ton of “what the hell are we doing here?” mystery boxing, the show reveals the major details. Vosk figured out that by going back to this time, and using some stealth time travel technology, he could disrupt the timestream enough to win the war. The catch is that it’s a one way trip using that technology, so he has to utilize that Nazi war machine to build a “conduit” back to the future.

It’s pretty silly stuff, to be quite honest. Why the Nazis stretching themselves thin in North America results in Vosk’s time traveling aliens winning the Temporal Cold War is opaque at best. (And if the reason is that it means Archer will never be born, because Archer is the Most Important Person in the Galaxy:tm:, I will tear my hair out.) Still, it gives the good guys a clear goal -- destroy that conduit so that Vosk can’t get back to win the war in the future (I guess that’s how the effects of time travel are supposed to work here?) and the regular, natural timeline is saved. Straightforward objectives are a good thing for a show like Enterprise.

To achieve it though, Archer is working with an American resistance cell in Brooklyn. It’s a little convenient that his Nazi prisoner caravan is attacked by them and he finds himself in their good graces, but it works as a way to deliver a little exposition and add in one of those standard Star Trek “guest character local to the situation” people. In this instance, it’s Alicia Travers, a young black woman who’s in league with some former Italian gangsters to help be a thorn in the side of the occupying Nazis.

There’s not much too these scenes. The show seems to vaguely want to introduce some romantic tension between Archer and Alicia (feh) despite the fact that she mentions having a husband in the pacfiic theater. There’s some nebulous “here’s the effect the Nazis have had on New York” shtick. But on the whole, it seems like an excuse to pull a Dr. Taylor from Star Trek IV and have someone contemporary help our heroes. I will say it’s at least a little fun seeing Archer have to team up with the 1940s gangsters (including Bobby Bacala for my fellow Sopranos fans!), but it’s mostly in service of solving a less-than-super-interesting mystery about why Archer and these demon-looking aliens are here.

Things are a little more lively back on the ship. Trip is testy. T’Pol is trying to be a steady new captain. And things get complicated when our heroes have new run-ins with Silik and Daniels. Silik’s arrival gives us the mandatory fist fight (another Original Series staple), but also the intrigue that Silik didn’t kill Trip when he easily could have. And Daniels’ appearance gives us some timely exposition, and the distinctive body horror when the different parts of his body, inside and out, are aging at different rates. The work on his face in particular is disturbing in a good way, since it conveys the kind of freakiness and gravity the show wants to go for with this conflict.

Eventually, Archer makes it back to the ship after a predictable close shave. The show thankfully dispenses with the crew mourning him for too long given that the audience knows he’s alive, but the reactions to his return from Hoshi, T’Pol, and (sigh) Porthos tell the tale nicely. He can’t celebrate too much though, given that Trip and Mayweather get trapped by the bad guys (yet another 1960s Star Trek trope) at the end of the episode.

All of this is fine. There’s little, if anything, outright bad here (beyond some dodgy 2004 CGI), but it’s just all fairly uninspired. There’s nothing wrong with pulling influence from the show that started it all for Star Trek. But those tropes need updating, and not just through the convoluted mid-2000s mystery box approach. There’s nothing especially thoughtful about this conflict, and it’s a little too all over the place as an adventure story to have much force. Still, after a long while mired in a Xindi conflict where the Suliban and their mysterious allies were conveniently absent, it’s at least nice to see the show tying off some loose ends.