“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.
A plea from your humble rewatcher: Folks, we’re down to the last nine days of the Kickstarter for Double Trouble, and we’ve still got a ways to go to hit our funding goal. We really really wanna do this anthology, so please consider supporting. Lots of Trek writers in the table of contents, as I said in my bio, so please check it out.
http://kck.st/3Dic0qZ
Thanks! We now return you to your comments on Enterprise, already in progress…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That whole Temporal Cold War thing was one of the dumbest things this series did (and I admit, there are many options to select from). It came out of nowhere (which, I suppose, makes it Temporal), it only shows up when there’s nothing else to do, and it fizzled out (at least on screen) with no explanation whatsoever. Did it end? Is it still going on in Kirk’s time? Or TNG? Or Discovery (far future version)? Who knows. It’s never talked about.
First rule of the Temporal Cold War is you don’t walk about the Temporal Cold War.
I know that I watched this episode, because I recorded and watched every episode of Star Trek back in the day without fail, but from your description of the episode, I feel like Gandalf in the tunnels of Khazad- Dum– “I have no memory of this place”.
For my money this episode would have benefitted from being framed as a Ghost Story, rather than a mystery – it’s most effective when leaning into the eerie aspects of time travel & allied technologies, for my money, and the prosaic nature of the episode as a whole somewhat undercuts this.
Also, I remain wedded to my pet theory that Time Travel is T’Pol’s personal line in the sand – with all the nonsense she’s had to accept at face value over the years, it’s hard to blame her indulging in the occasional “NOPE”.
I don’t recall this episode, but I will say this: That is some fantastic makeup work in the last photo. Looks like a real mummified dude lying there.
“Future Tense” is an okay little story, but symptomatic of this season in that, even though it’s part of the Temporal Cold War arc, it doesn’t actually advance that arc but just goes off on a little tangent that doesn’t connect to anything (except “Metamorphosis” in the acknowledgment of Cochrane’s disappearance).
When I was working out Phlox’s family tree for Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code, I decided that one of the sons of Phlox’s first wife and one of her co-husbands lived on the B’Saari homeworld, and that their son married two B’Saari wives. I named them in my notes as “Yuul (B’Saari)” and “Sheel (B’Saari).” Say them out loud, folks.
By this point, the Temporal Cold War had become perfunctory. Future Tense is the definition of running in place. Granted, Sussman and Strong manage to make the proceedings seem tense and exciting, and there is some nice character work mixed in. But you also get the impression that this is building to something interesting, and then…. it doesn’t. It only serves to show the concept never quite fit right on Enterprise.
Other parts play very much like late TNG or VOY event episodes that were overplotted, with plenty of leaps in logic that are a product of writing these things at a breakneck pace – yet another indicator that Trek’s 26 episode seasons were nearing the end of their shelf life.
But for what it’s worth, a good writer never lets a good idea unfulfilled – Sussman would bring back the Tholians for the Mirror Darkly two parter.
though they were mentioned a bunch of times on TNG and DS9 and will be again in Nemesis and Short Treks
@krad: Nemesis opened in theatres 2 months before this episode aired.
@6. ChristopherLBennett: You old rascal you – also, isn’t it more accurate to describe a Denobulan family tree as a Family Jungle? (I’d imagine those documents can get pretty darned extensive … and more than a bit wild).
Also, I’m now even more curious about the nature of the B’Saari than I was previously (and, since Memory Alpha & Memory Beta suggests the species has conducted some seriously Frankenstein-esque researches, I was already pretty darned curious*).
*I wonder if we ought to conceptualise this species as the living epitome of old black-and-white horror movies with a dash of Lovecraftian “Man was not meant to know” – wait a minute, why not make them look like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON?
I actually kind of like that this specific episode went nowhere and just kinda ended with more question marks.
One of my personal bugbears with time travel stories is that they’re almost always written from the perspective of the time travelers, which makes sense for a dramatic presentation, but always leaves us guessing what the characters in-universe experienced (especially once the handwaves about rewritten or implanted memories start flying). It seems like a universe where time travel exists should be full of these weird little “UFO” encounters that will never make any sense (much like our world, actually, which is either encouraging or terrifying).
(Which is just one of the reasons I love Christopher’s DTI novels, which apply this philosophy to Star Trek, and offer a better take on the Temporal Cold War than Enterprise ever did.)
“How can a ship be bigger on the inside than on the outside?”
For me, this is the point where “The Chris Carter Effect” kicks in. The point where you realise that the people running the show have absolutely no idea what they want to do with the Temporal Cold War arc and have made it far too complicated to ever resolve it properly. We have the Suliban, who are working for a mysterious individual from the future whose identity and aims we don’t understand. (And never will.) We have Daniels and his fellow Time Agents, who seem to be trying to preserve established history, so at least we’ve got a grasp on where they fit in. We’ve got the Tandarans, who were revealed to be at war with the Suliban and treated as really important in the first season, but have now been forgotten, never to be mentioned again. And on top of this, we now have the Tholians who, if Archer’s guess is correct, are working for another faction in the Temporal Cold War who are rivals of whoever it is the Suliban are working for, and whose identity and aims are as much of a mystery. And, yep, you’ve guessed it, this will never be mentioned again either. Nothing in the episode will have any effect on future episodes: It’s just getting the Temporal Cold War toys out for a play to show they haven’t forgotten about the storyline.
(For what it’s worth though, we do get a “conclusion” to the arc, such as it is, in the two-part fourth season opener.)
Bearing that in mind…the episode isn’t completely unentertaining. For a start, we have Enterprise discovering what’s basically a TARDIS. And there is a definite sense of mystery in the opening scenes (complete with Archer coming out with a theory that anyone who knows the mythology will realise instantly is wrong), and of the crew investigating, although I accept Keith’s point that they show the worst knowledge of basic safety procedures since Joe Tormolen. There’s some fairly decent character work: T’Pol seems willing to indulge Archer’s time travel theories at first but gets more hardline as the episode progresses, she and Archer seem really intrigued about the question of whether or not they can reproduce(!), Reed shoots down Tucker’s half-based philosophising about knowing the future beautifully, and we have another example of Phlox piercing T’Pol’s armour in the way that only another outsider can.
It’s a bit convenient that the Suliban and Tholians do more damage to each other than Enterprise, but I guess they didn’t want to damage the time ship. (Also, if the Tholians’ employers know about the events of ‘Shockwave’, it’s possible they want Enterprise left intact in the same way Future Guy presumably does.) The Suliban who board Enterprise seem to retreat despite having the upper hand? (Maybe their ship, which fared less well, didn’t want to leave them behind.) It’s a gut-punch when we see that the Vulcan ship that was meant to be the cavalry has already been defeated. (And Archer again shows he isn’t completely anti-Vulcan by being sincere in his regret.) T’Pol makes a valiant attempt to bluff the Tholians. Archer and Reed spending several minutes working on a plan that promptly fails feels very much like padding, with Tucker working on the beacon turning out to be the important part.
Silik and Daniels are both mentioned.
My biggest issue was including the Tholians as the other faction trying to get the Time Ship. We already know that the Klingons are somehow involved in the Temporal Cold War (based on Broken Bow). Using the Tholians opens up a plot hole in TOS (IF Enterprise encountered the Tholians presumably information on their ships would have made it into the Starfleet database, which would mean that the TOS Enterprise or at least Spock would recognize the “alien” ship as being Tholians). Having a Klingon faction being involved would have worked at least as well.
@6 – I see what you did there.
@11 I think the Klingons are involved only in the sense that Starfleet’s involved: They know about it and they’ve been targeted by Future Guy but they’re not active participants as far as we know. (Maybe even less involved than Enterprise unless they’ve got an equivalent of Daniels asking for help.) Still, I take your point that the episode could have brought the Klingons into a more active role, although if they had, that would probably have needed to be addressed later on since, unlike the Tholians, the Klingons aren’t going to be quietly forgotten.
@11/Charles: I looked over the transcript of “The Tholian Web,” and the dialogue doesn’t explicitly say they don’t recognize the Tholian ship; Sulu just says “a vessel” is approaching, it appears on the viewer, and moments later Loskene hails them. And Spock later refers to “the renowned Tholian punctuality,” so clearly the Federation does have prior knowledge of the Tholians.
Charles: Christopher is correct, “The Tholian Web” was not Starfleet’s first encounter with the Tholians by any means.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
We know that Klang was bringing a message relating to the Temporal Cold War to the High Council in “Broken Bow”. Klang confronting the Suliman before being shot by the farmer indicates that at least 1 faction on the Council IS involved in the TCW (my guess would be Duras and his allies). IF it’s Duras that’s involved, having the Klingons be the second faction in this episode neatly ties into the personal animosity towards Archer (which gets resolved at the end of the season in any event).
@15/krad: Although I have always felt that “The Tholian Web” was inconsistent in its portrayal of how much Starfleet knew about the Tholians. In some scenes it seemed like they barely knew anything about them, and in others it seemed they had greater familiarity. Like many season 3 scripts, it could’ve used more polishing.
Just a little comment, they decided to follow up on the ears angle from last week. Is this some heavy-handed foreshadowing of Spock’s appearance, or a sign that humans take the shape of the ears more seriously than green blood, a (completely?) different genome, and a different mindset?
@11
Looking at what we do get to see regarding the Tholians, even in “The Tholian Web”, I don’t have a huge issue with them being involved with the Temporal Cold War. We know that they have cross-dimensional capabilities like what they’ve done with the USS Defiant (Constitution class) both from the TOS “The Tholian Web” and ENT “In a Mirror Darkly”. The only thing is we don’t know much about the Tholians anyway so it’s hard to make a clear determination on their motives.
@19/navibc31: The Tholians weren’t responsible for the spatial interphase in “The Tholian Web.” It was a naturally occurring phenomenon. The Tholians weren’t even aware of it until Spock told them about it, and they were taken by surprise when Spock use the interphase space to escape their web. The only connection they have to the interphase, in either universe, is that it’s located near their territory (or inside it, if you ask them).
This was an episode that had an intriguing premise and interesting moments, as well as an exciting chronological debut of the Tholians. But ultimately the story went nowhere and amounted to nothing, and thus is a waste of time.
@20 / ChristopherLBennett: I guess to paraphrase Lily Sloane from First Contact, I never watched it. I guess I made some assumptions off of In a Mirror Darkly. Here I go again talking about a white whale from a book I never read (though I did actually read Moby Dick).
Starfleet’s knowledge of the Tholians in TOS could be from second hand information, such as a Vulcan ship. Starfleet would be aware of their existence and some of their habits, such as punctuality but this could be the first face to carapace meeting.
KRAD – Starfleet has been beaming down to planets in what is basically a T-shirt and jeans for decades with not so much as a mask in sight. About the only time this was acknowledged as a bad ideas was in TAS The Infinite Vulcan. Popping open an alien pod and expecting it to have a safe, breathable atmosphere is hardly surprising at this point.
@24- yes! While I am glad krad acknowledged the issue with masks and safety precautions, not sure why this particular episode is the one where it’s
kkozoriz and fullyfunctional: As I said in the rewatch entry, I’m willing to believe that 23rd- and 24th-century technology is capable of doing something with force fields and such that can protect people to a degree, not to mention transporter biofilters and such. I don’t buy it with 22nd-century tech.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Safety: In the 22nd century, all shirts are red. :-) (I might have a faulty TV.)
This story: As you say, the Enterprise NX-01 has collected a TARDIS from the future. And people know. The realistic chance of Enterprise doing anything useful with their trophy is not high. In some stories, that’s what happens. The practical solution is to set off the car alarm on it, and let its future owners instantly locate and collect it themselves (instant from our point of view, maybe they had breakfast at the end of the universe first). Sometimes it has to be deus ex machina.
Having said that, this universe logic demands that the 22nd century crew must be less capable than their descendants such as on NCC-1701 who got into big fistfights most weeks. Borg or Ferengi or that alien who is three bodies stuck together show up and they’re struggling at best or dead at worst. It actually stops them from achieving solutions that later generations can do. I suppose that Captain Archer scores that time he’s trapped in the 31st century. He comes back and challenges Silik to a fistfight.
@26 – Enterprise tries to do something about the issue with the whole ”lets smear gel on each other” decontamination bits. However, that does nothing to protect the planet of the week and any lifeforms on it.
Not wearing protective gear, be it for biological, radiation or even just cold weather has long been part of the story. The Enemy Within showed that while they could beam down blankets, apparently parkas were never thought of as a solution.
The one time we saw protective gear, it was easily defeated by someone simply taking off his glove. Starfleet probably gave up even trying to prevent contamination at that point.
I thought this episode was fun even if it was ultimately a pointless exercise. Krad makes some good points about how cavalier everyone is with safety during the ship’s examination, but I honestly never even thought about that. Perhaps it says more about me than the episode, but whatever. I’m still not bothered by it. I was more curious about the ship than I was about immersion in realism. Tucker’s reason for exploring the hole in the floor, “gotta get my spanner back,” is as amusing as it is foolish. However, I’m not bothered by that either; at least I got a chuckle out of it. And it’s definitely in character for him. It was nice to see the Tholians for the first time too. I like how the design of their ships was kept just as simple as in TOS. It might be odd that there doesn’t appear to be much evolution in their technology from time period to time period. But for a one-off appearance, it worked for me.
@29/Thierafhal: “It might be odd that there doesn’t appear to be much evolution in their technology from time period to time period.”
Well, a modern boat doesn’t look that much different from a 19th-century boat. Form generally follows function. I often feel that Trek starships should have more consistent designs dictated by the physics of starflight, like how all boats or all wheeled vehicles or all fixed-wing aircraft have certain fundamental similarities.
@30: BBC World Service radio show “CrowdScience”, which spends about half an hour on a listener’s question each week, recently ran on “Why are fish fish-shaped?”. But they pointed out that very many fish aren’t “fish-shaped”. Technically “fish” is any living thing that you found in the water, except maybe Ursula Andress in “Dr No”.
The shape of an automobile also varies over time…
@31/Robert Carnegie: “The shape of an automobile also varies over time…”
Yeah, but they still almost always have four wheels, a front and side windows, doors on the sides, and other shared fundamentals. You wouldn’t see a car that’s, say, in the shape of a giant top balancing on a square unicycle wheel, with the passengers strapped upside-down to its underside. You can vary the details of the shape, but there are some constants dictated by the physics and mechanics of how a car works.
You can see this design logic in Matt Jefferies’s ship designs in TOS. Federation, Romulan, and Klingon ships all had two nacelles, and the Klingon ship had a deflector dish in front like a Starfleet ship (though TAS and TMP retconned it to a torpedo tube). There were implicitly certain fundamentals that were necessary for warp travel, dictated by its physics and engineering, even when everything else was drastically different, as in the Klingon ship. But later designers just went for what they thought looked cool.
I have the same reaction to the term “temporal cold war” as I do “Borg queen”. Supreme indifference. Yawn.
31. Robert Carnegie
Technically “fish” is any living thing that you found in the water, except maybe Ursula Andress in “Dr No”.
I would argue that technically “fish” means any of the various groups once classified as Pisces . Thus they are legless with gills and several other requirements.
While common usage sometimes includes various invertebrates and marine mammals, none of those are fish.
The point is, while there are exceptions, the laws of hydrodynamics influence the shape of things, whether living or manufactured, that need to move through the water. That’s why three different lines of vertebrates — fish, ichthyosaurs, and cetaceans — all independently evolved very similar shapes, and so did penguins and seals to an extent. It’s not the only shape, no, but just because there are exceptions to a rule does not mean the rule doesn’t exist.
The point is that it’s not random, that form follows function and is shaped by universal physical laws rather than pure aesthetics. Fiction tends to give every alien species its own unique spaceship design style, but that doesn’t make physical sense. There might be more than one shape that allows FTL travel, but it stands to reason that, since the laws of physics are universal, different species would arrive at designs that have certain fundamentals in common — just as multiple different human cultures that independently invented boats ended up with some kind of concave shape, usually elongated and pointed in front. The physics constrain the form. Indeed, achieving FTL travel would require bending the laws of physics to their breaking point, taking advantage of an extremely narrow loophole in what the laws allow. It would be far harder to achieve than swimming or flight, requiring you to get things precisely right to create the effect. So there probably wouldn’t be a lot of different mechanisms for achieving that.
@30:
19th-cen boats were, at best, steamships (and were often either wind or muscle-powered), and all exclusively displacement vessels. 21st-cen boats do, in fact, look quite different.
Compare:
There’s lots of other variations, of course. The point here is that there can be some similarities, but it’d be much like saying, say, that all books are fundamentally shaped by their environment.
@36/foamy: Nothing you say disagrees with what I’ve already said. I have never said that all starships should look exactly alike. I’m saying that there should be some broadly recurring features dictated by the physics of warp travel, even if the rest of the design is different — in the same way that all the boats you illustrate still have fundamental features in common like watertight, concave undersides that are elongated from front to back. The stuff above the water can be whatever it needs to be, but the shape of the part that contacts the water is constrained by the laws of physics.
I’ve already pointed out how Matt Jefferies applied that design logic to Starfleet and Klingon ships, extremely different in shape yet still possessing widely separated twin nacelles at the rear. His working assumption was that, even if everything else was different, a two-nacelle system would still be a standard way to achieve a space warp, independently arrived at by multiple civilizations. Okay, we also saw at least one exception in the Tholian ships, but there was a recurring norm used by the majority of the civilizations we saw.
One of those is literally a square raft, not a “concave elogated underside”. Another is a hydrofoil, whose “part that contacts the water” is in fact a series of lifting surfaces. Even something as simple as a planing hull compared to a displacement hull has dramatically different characteristics and design even if, to an overreductionist eye, it looks a bit closer together. The hull layout of a ski boat is very different than that of a 20th cen. dreadnought.
@38/foamy: You’re splitting hairs at this point, and again, it does not refute my argument in any way, because I have made it repeatedly clear that I was not asserting a universal absolute, merely the existence of a pattern.
The Temporal Cold War is one of the two things that disappointed me most about STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE and basically went to establish what I considered to be my realization that I fundamentally disagreed with what they wanted from the show versus what I would have liked from it. After DS9 and Babylon Five, I didn’t necessarily need serialized storytelling.
But I needed CONSISTENT storytelling and that is something Enterprise had no interest in doing. As someone mentioned with Chris Carter, there were never any answers to the “mystery box” and thus whatever answers they provided were pointless and disappointing. The box is empty.
With ENT:
1:] The world building was terrible: Who are the major powers in the Alpha Quadrant? What are their diplomatic relations? How are they different in the 22nd century? It’s no coincidence that the Andorian and Vulcans being ancient enemies are some of the better plots because at least that is a story with stakes and consequences.
2:] The Temporal Cold War was a mess: I know it was enforced on them from above but shouldn’t that still inspire you to try to make the best of a raw deal? They could have used this to fundamentally change Trek continuity or soft reboot the setting with modern special effects. They could have threatened to undo decades of continuity (but our heroes preserve it) and dealt with existential crises (“No, Archer, the NX-01 was never meant to fly!”)
On its own this episode is ok but you can get a much wider scope of the story from the Star Trek Online game which has a storyline that connects directly to this episode (and others like Captains Holiday from TNG) . With the extended story this episode becomes a bit more interesting especialy if you saw the episode first and then played the game and realise your taking part in certain key scenes of the episodes. Also an explanation of who the dead alien is and what happened.
I remember a book I read in the 90’s where Kirk picked up Chochran from his planet and he immediately recognised the Klingon ship as a warship due to the fairly flat layout of the nacelles. He commented it was much less efficient than the more upright layout of starfleet warp nacelles but presented a smaller aspect so worth it for tactical advantage.
I’m not sure if that was lifted from some other material but when the Defiant came along that popped into my head.
Think it might have been a crossover with tng with Kirk and Picard only briefly encountering each other in an anomaly.
@42/Steven: You must be thinking of Federation by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens.