Just got done with “Cold Front“, this week’s Enterprise episode. Haven’t had a lot of time to digest it just yet, just some first impressions.
Overall, not bad — not bad at all. Nice to see that they’re continuing the Temporal Cold War plotline introduced in the pilot, though I’ve got somewhat mixed feelings on their choice of what to use for an ongoing plot. Time travel can be a fascinating thing to play with, but I’ve felt for a long time that Star Trek has tended to focus on that a bit too much, and a bit too freely, given the number of paradoxical situations that can arise all too easily. I’ll be quite happy if they can pull it off…but at the moment, I’m definitely withholding judgement.
For instance, in original Trek, time travel was shown as a somewhat simple, if not trivial, concept — most of the time, all you had to do was get going fast enough (usually by slingshotting the ship around a star) and you’d suddenly rocket backwards in time. Now, however, we’re being told that the Vulcans have “studied time travel extensively” and determined that it’s an impossibility. Admittedly, Enterprise is set before the original series, but it seems a bit odd that in however long the Vulcans have been hopping galaxies, they never encountered any sort of phenomena that would give them some experience in this area.
Additionally, Daniels (the agent from the future) tells Archer that while his people (900 years in Enterprise’s future) have the technology to physically travel back in time, they only developed that after much work and study, and the Suliban’s conspirators (from an as yet undisclosed time between Enterprises’s future and the agent’s past) cannot do that yet, and are only able to send transmissions between the past and the future. Again — in all the years since Kirk, no-one else figured out the slingshot trick? He was able to bounce back and forth between various eras without much problem at all.
Ah, well…we’ll just have to see how things go from here.