“Future Tense”
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by James Whitmore Jr.
Season 2, Episode 16
Production episode 042
Original air date: February 19, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise comes across a pod floating in space. They take it on board and get it open (which requires a phaser, as the hatch is welded shut) only to find what appears to be a human corpse inside.
This is farther out than any human has been reported to have gone, so this is quite the find. Making it more fascinating is Phlox’s autopsy, which reveals DNA from several other species in the corpse’s genetic makeup, including Vulcan. His Vulcan ancestor has to have been a distant one, which is a neat trick since humans and Vulcans haven’t known each other long enough for that to be possible.
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Unless, of course, he’s a time traveler.
Tucker and Reed continue to examine the pod, uncovering a hatch that exposes what appears to be biological circuitry. But when they open the hatch, they find a ladder that goes down well past the bottom of the pod. Somehow, the pod has considerably more space inside it than outside it. For reasons known only to the voices in their heads, Tucker and Reed climb down to investigate without telling Archer first.
Meanwhile, Archer has his own problems to deal with, as a Suliban cell ship shows up, claiming the pod. Archer refuses to give it over, and he manages to fight off the cell ship and Tucker and Reed fight off the Suliban who board the ship and try to take the pod.
Then some Tholians show up, also demanding the pod. They back off when Archer threatens to destroy the pod.
A Vulcan ship, the Tal’Kir, will rendezvous with Enterprise to take the pod and the corpse back to Earth. While en route, Archer and T’Pol go into Daniels’ quarters to check out the database, and they find the pod as a thirty-first-century vessel powered by a temporal displacement drive.
Tucker and Reed discuss time travel while further investigating the pod. They find themselves reliving the same conversations and repeating the same actions over and over again. Once they realize that’s happening, they get examined by Phlox, but he finds nothing wrong.
They found what seems to be a black box in the pod, but it turns out to be a signaling device of some sort, which is now turned on. Tucker thinks it might be a distress signal.
The Suliban come back with reinforcements and chase Enterprise en route to their rendezvous. When they reach the Tal’Kir, they find it damaged by a bunch of Tholians, who also have reinforcements.
The Suliban and the Tholians fight it out, with Enterprise caught in the middle. Their warp drive is out. Archer and Reed take a torpedo and set it to destroy the pod as a last resort. Unfortunately, they too get stuck in a time loop, which means they have to keep starting to set the torpedo from scratch.
The Tholians break into the launch bay, snag the pod, and take it in tow. Then, suddenly, the beacon and the corpse disappear from Enterprise and the pod disappears from the Tholians’ tractor beam. At which point, everyone buggers off.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? When examining a strange pod that they can’t get any readings on until they open it, Archer, T’Pol, and Reed are remarkably cavalier and unsafe with doing so, as are Tucker and Reed later: they don’t wear any kind of protective gear, they open the hatch and hope that there’s no poisons or contagions inside (seriously, when we got to Archer opening the hatch and shoving his head in to smell it, I was flashing to the scene in Galaxy Quest where Guy cries out, “Is there air? You don’t know!”), and then they fondle all the stuff inside.
The gazelle speech. Archer refuses to give up the pod to anyone who’s claiming it on the theory that it’s a human being on board (even with the extra DNA), and so it’s his.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, T’Pol stubbornly sticks to her agreement with the Vulcan Science Directorate’s opinion that time travel isn’t possible.
Florida Man. Florida Man Explores Alien Ship Without Taking Any Precautions Or Informing His Captain What He’s Doing.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox mentions that Denobulans believed themselves to be the only sentient species in the galaxy, a belief that was challenged when the B’Saari made first contact. He uses that story to remind T’Pol to have an open mind about time travel and Vulcan-human interspecies breeding.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… T’Pol opines that the Vulcan Science Directorate would sooner believe in time travel than they would humans and Vulcans interbreeding.
More on this later… The human corpse is the first exposure anyone in the crew has to interspecies breeding, which is commonplace by the subsequent century. Indeed, interspecies breeding has been a part of Star Trek from the very beginning, in the person of Spock, initially established as having a human ancestor, later retconned to his mother.
This episode marks first human contact with the Tholians.
We also see a mess of familiar ship designs from the later shows in Daniels’ database.
I’ve got faith…
“How many times do you think we’ve done this?”
“At least twice—maybe more.”
“Let’s hope we’ve got it down by now.”
–Archer and Reed stuck in a time loop.
Welcome aboard. For the second week in a row, Vaughn Armstrong gets to play Forrest as a face on a computer screen early in the episode. He’ll be back in “Regeneration.” Cullen Douglas plays the Suliban commander.
Trivial matters: This is the first appearance of the Tholians (though they don’t actually appear, they’re only heard) since the original series’ “The Tholian Web,” though they were mentioned a bunch of times on TNG and DS9 and will be again in Nemesis and Short Treks. Their Mirror Universe counterparts will be seen in “In a Mirror Darkly.”
One of the initial theories about the identity of the human they find is that it’s Zefram Cochrane, who was established as having disappeared in the original series’ “Metamorphosis.” The mystery of his disappearance was solved in that episode, when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Hedford found him on a planetoid with a floating omelette for company.
Star Trek Online establishes that the human they find is named Kal Dano, whose ship was damaged by Tholians.
The original title for this was “Crash Landing.” Writers Michael Sussman & Phyllis Strong originally intended to have a direct confrontation between Archer and folks from the future, but it was cut. The original pitch was for it to be the Defiant, also from “The Tholian Web” show up, having traveled through time through the interspatial rift in that episode, but it was changed to avoid giving Archer too much knowledge of the future.
That the pod is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside was inspired by Doctor Who’s TARDIS, a time-travelling machine that is dimensionally transcendental (which means it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside…).
This is the last time Daniels’ database is seen.
It’s been a long road… “I’m tired of these factions interfering with our century.” Back in the mists of prehistory when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, television shows lived and died by Nielsen ratings, in which viewership was calculated based on a representative sampling of reporting TV viewers. These were collected in diaries sent to Nielsen households and then the data collated. Because that was an arduous task, they tended to focus their energies on the data in certain months of the year.
One of those months was February, and because of that, a lot of shows would put some of their best stuff in February to take advantage. So it’s not a surprised that, in 2003, Enterprise made sure to cover their two big overarching plotlines two straight weeks in February: the Vulcan-Andorian conflict (complete with spiffy guest stars) last time and the Temporal Cold War this time.
But unlike last episode, this one just kinda sits there and doesn’t really accomplish anything. It’s pretty much there to remind us that the Temporal Cold War is still a thing, but we’re given no real good reason to care about the conflict. We don’t learn anything new of significance, except that the Tholians have a stake, but that doesn’t really go anywhere, either.
There are some isolated moments that are good, like Tucker and Reed’s conversation about time travel—with Tucker not wanting to know the future, and Reed eager to know it—Archer and Forrest speculating about Cochrane, Phlox and T’Pol’s conversation about time travel and interspecies breeding, and the time loops that Tucker, Reed, and Archer get stuck in.
Then there are moments when I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen, particularly watching them examine the ship in their uniforms with no gloves or masks or protective gear of any sort, and without things that you know the other shows that take place in the future might have like sterile force fields and the like. Plus the stuff about humans and Vulcans interbreeding is a bit too wink-at-the-viewer considering the most popular character in the franchise is a human-Vulcan hybrid…
And then the future stuff is all just taken away with no explanation, and it’s the most anticlimactic climax imaginable. Just a waste of an episode.
Warp factor rating: 3
Rewatcher’s note: The Enterprise Rewatch will be off next week for Indigenous People’s Day. We’ll be back on the 17th with the rewatch of “Canamar.”
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the Kickstarter for Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. Co-edited by Keith and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, this anthology from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers will feature classic characters banding together: Captain Nemo with Frankenstein’s monster; Ace Harlem with the Conjure-Man; Marian of Sherwood with Annie Oakley; Prospero with Don Quixote; Lydia Bennet with Lord Ruthven; and tons more, including stories by Trek scribes Greg Cox, David Mack, Dayton Ward, Kevin J. Anderson, Rigel Ailur, and Derek Tyler Attico, and TNG screenwriter Diana Dru Botsford. Click here to support it.
