Enterprise: Future Tense

A ship is brought on board Enterprise which contains the body of a man apparently from the future, but both the Suliban and the Tholians want it.

Lots of crowd-pleasing elements to this story, but they're not as pleasing as someone might have thought. As far as I'm aware, there's no reason the Enterprise crew can't see some Tholians, so why don't any turn up, or at least communicate with video rather than just audio? The Suliban are also back, but they do little more than threaten and shoot things. All we really get from the presence of these two races is a big space battle that looks pretty cool effects-wise.

The trouble is that the main premise, the ship apparently from the future, is resolutely left unexplained. Even if Archer and the others can't cope with temporal mechanics, we viewers should have had more than enough experience by now for some information to be workable. After some time-killing prevaricating about how the corpse could be Zephram Cochrane's – no it couldn't, we all know he wound up on a planet with a glowy blob creature who loved him – we then get the obligatory rummage round in Daniels' quarters where Archer finds exactly what he was looking for. The thing is, it seems to provide little or no explanation as to why, where or how, and on this show I'm not entirely confident we'll ever find out. Why make these Temporal Cold War episodes when they never have any kind of explanation as to what is going on? This isn't the first time we've had a load of time travel nonsense, and for any casual viewers tuning in, this story will give them no reason whatsoever to tune in again the following week. At the end we don't know anything much about the pod, or why the Tholians and Suliban are fighting over it, or who either side is working for.

The only bits I really liked were where time repeated itself, but these just don't make sense. How can the crew members involved realize they're repeating something so quickly? Why can't Archer and Reed fix the warhead they're messing with outside of the cargo bay, as this is where they admit the problem is the strongest? More of this needs to make sense to be any good at all. Someone somewhere in the Enterprise offices knows what's going on, but they seem oddly reticent in informing anyone watching.

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