Enterprise review: "Future Tense".
(Episode 42)

Another generic pathetic title. Didn't the ship have a name?

Oh come on! You're in the Shuttlebay for God's Sakes! The alien ship's door is fused shut. Do you get Engineering tools that should already be present and on hand? Like a cutter or a torch? No. Because for some odd reason that can't be explained, there weren't any. So Reed goes and gets a Phase Pistol and phasers the door open. Luckily for Reed, the Shuttlebay was equipped with a weapon locker right there on the wall!

Huh?

Actually, that's all she did. She raised an eyebrow and went on business as usual. And T'Pol raises an eyebrow all the time so that's nothing new. While mundane-nosed Scott Bakula was acting like Richard Dreyfuss when he cut open the "Jaws" shark.

Why wasn't Tucker there when they brought onboard the strange ship of probable strange alien origin and technology? He was the Chief Engineer you know. It made SENSE for him to be there.

But then if Tucker was there, he would have grabbed a torch and not let Reed phaser the alien spacecraft.

Can you imagine Picard letting Worf just grab a Phaser and burn open a door to a spaceship they just found while Chief Engineer La Forge was unexplainably gone? As much as we want the story speeded up and we want the Trek Captains to be full of action, even on TOS we saw Scotty torch open more wall panels than Kirk had phasered open doors.

Brannon Braga's an idiot. Which is why he once thought he was "joking" when he said he would go work on "Andromeda", but we can ALL totally see Kevin Sorbo open doors with weaponry. And B&B are dumbing this stuff down more and more like that. As much as they want the show targeted towards 12-year-olds, even 12-year-olds aren't dumb enough to just accept that the Shuttlebay has NO Engineering tools but DOES have a Weapons Locker on the wall.

And then to rub it in, Reed later tells Tucker "You're the Engineer".

Not once reference!?!?!?!?!?

You duplicate one of the most pivotal elements of the longest-running science-fiction series ever made, and you don't include not one reference? Not even by the british Malcolm Reed?

Oh, that's right. Most viewers would never get such a reference to some obscure british TV show canceled 15 years ago. But it's okay to put constant references to the number 47 in everything you do as some inside joke about your college. It's okay to name starships after Braga's hometown. It's okay to give Archer a dog named after somebody else's dog on the production staff. It's even okay for Jeri Taylor to cast her son as Vorik the Vulcan, Piller to have his son pitch stories, Piller's obsession with baseball jammed into TNG & DS9, Braga to bang the catsuit, John Logan to cast his former girlfriend as a Romulan from some old TV Movie he once wrote, or include multiple references to teacher Ms. Melvin on both episodes of Voyager AND Enterprise, whoever the hell Ms. Melvin is. But suddenly something that millions of viewers (if Enterprise actually had millions of viewers who could see it) would understand is now "taboo" and is frowned upon. Remember kids, the final say for every line of dialogue falls on Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. Even IF that line WAS there, these are the two people who would remove it. And I can't believe during the entire 7-minute creative process it took to come up with this story, not one person made mention of Doctor Who and Braga replied "No, viewers won't get that".

The writers were probably thinking crap like "hologram", "another dimension", "technobabble this" or "polarized that". But as soon as we saw the endless stairway in the itty bitty ship, the first thing the most of us thought was.... Doctor Who.

Yeah, the targeted 12-year-old audience probably doesn't know what Doctor Who is, but they're on the internet, and they'll learn about it when everybody else points it out. But it doesn't make sense why references that viewers WOULD get are left out (Continuity? What's that?), while crap that only 7 Hollywood Producers get is shoved at us. Meanwhile, the constant references to Braga's former bimbos or Berman's favorite car will continue to be forced into these series. I shall also point out that millions and millions of Star Trek fans DO know what Doctor Who is and have seen the show, while Star Trek Producer Brannon Braga "prides" himself on not actually having watched the original "Star Trek" series itself that he's trying to devalue.

Let's try to understand this. The Suliban detected the time ship three days ago - and left it to drift - unguarded - unmonitored - waited a half a week, then sent one single slow-moving, under-armed freighter to retrieve it.

But yet they then try to claim that the ship is SOOOooo important to them, not only a fleet of Suliban Cell ships come after them, but a fleet of Tholian ships come after them, too.

What was so important that the Suliban ship that first found it three days ago had to leave it to go elsewhere?

Nothing. Because it's yet another gaping plot hole that the Producers have already long forgotten once they got this week's paycheck, but we as viewers are permanently stuck with forever.

Let's look at some facts.

* - The series premiere introduced the Temporal Cold War.

* - Rick Berman and Brannon Braga created Enterprise, so of course they wrote the series premiere.

* - Brannon Braga has repeatedly publicly stated that he likes to write (or co-write) the "big" episodes, such as the season finale cliffhangers (Voyager's season finale's "Scorpion", "Hope and Fear", "Equinox", "Unimatrix Zero"), two-parters for sweeps months (Voyager's "Dark Frontier" movie), Voyager's 100th episode "Timeless" (with Rick Berman), and he co-wrote Voyager's series finale "End Game". So of course Enterprise's first season finale cliffhanger was written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, which also happened to feature the Temporal Cold War.

But... Other than these premieres and finales which were going to be written by B&B whether it was about the Cold War or not, all other Temporal Cold War episodes were written by other writers entirely. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga claim they have the Cold War story-arc worked out (at least 25% they claim). Yet "Cold Front" was written by Stephen Beck & Tim Finch. And this episode was written by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong.

This means except for the Braga-written "default" episodes, the entire Temporal Cold War up to now has been created, plotted and moved forward by people other than B&B. Zero Percent of the regular Cold War episodes were written by B&B at all.

No matter how much they spin the Cold War story-arc into some glorious intricate sub-plot to the series, they don't have a clue what they're doing. By definition, a "story-arc" has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Temporal Cold War is missing at least two of those. It's crap that they're making up as they go along. And because it has no plot, it's not going to go anywhere. It's going to plod along, and every "story-arc" episode will end with a Reset Button - ESPECIALLY if it's written by others than B&B, as they won't commit to long-term consequences for the series that THEY didn't put into place themselves.

There's no story-arc here.