Star Trek 639: Cold Front

639. Cold Front

FORMULA: Broken Bow + Relativity

WHY WE LIKE IT: The Archer-Silik confrontation.

WHY WE DON'T: The dreaded Temporal Cold War.

REVIEW: Silik and mysterious Future Guy return as the Temporal Cold War makes its triumphant - and annoying - return. But this time, there's also a time agent on the side of good, Daniels, in deep cover aboard Enterprise and tasked with capturing Silik (finally named) and finding out who he's working for. If anything he says is to be believed, he's from 900 years in the future, a few centuries ahead of Future Guy, and part of an organization enforcing the Temporal Accords. He talks about being human and about Earth as if those concepts have changed meaning, and he's got a box of toys hidden in his quarters that contains, but is not limited to, a cool temporal scanner/portable holodeck and an interphase device that allows him to walk through walls. His gang also seems to place little value in a Temporal Prime Directive, because he tells Archer and others about this.

As for Silik, he actually saves Enterprise from destruction here. Which is fine for throwing ambiguity into the story, but a little disturbing for the Star Trek viewer. If Silik saves Enterprise, then in the original timeline, Enterprise was destroyed. Are we diverging from the timeline that culminates in TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY? Or was that culmination the work of temporal shenanigans all along? Or did a third party sabotage Enterprise to Future Guy's detriment? There is such a thing as too much mystery, especially when Temporal Cold War episodes only come along a couple times a season. Part of the confusion probably stems from the writers still working blind. If you don't know from the start who Future Guy is and what his plans are, then his plans may well contradict each other. Heck, Future Guy's own history may be changing and his agenda with him. Nothing matches because there's no standard to match things to.

One thing we can be sure is true is that there's time travel going on, even if we don't know what the various parties want or which ones to trust. So T'Pol's "reasonable skepticism" is nothing more than padding. Scully, she's not. Despite my grave reservations about the whole arc, I still enjoyed the confrontation between Archer and Silik. Silik gets the upper hand each time - how he discovers Daniels' identity, escaping by jumping into space - but Archer's never far behind. It's a great rivalry and a lot more physical than, say, Picard and Tomalak, or even Sisko and Dukat.

The B-plot is really more of a setting, as Enterprise meets up with some alien pilgrims at a sacred site. Gives something for the eternally curious Phlox to do. A nice sidestep into different reasons for space travel and fighting preconceptions where it can. As for Daniels, he seems to get blown up here, but you know how time travelers are. While we wait for his retconned return, his quarters get quarantined, with a nice foreboding shot of his door closing out the show.

LESSON: There's no trying to understand the Temporal Cold---oooh, pretty colors!

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: While a watchable head-scratcher, the lack of eventual resolution hampers any Temporal Cold War episode's relevance.