Jammersreviews

Note: This review contains significant spoilers.


In brief: Watchable but nonsensical -- and there's little here that you 
wouldn't have easily extrapolated from the ending of "Zero Hour."

Plot description: The crew of the Enterprise finds itself in an alternate 
version of 1944 where Germany, assisted by an alien influence involved in 
the Temporal Cold War, occupies the eastern United States.

-----
Star Trek: Enterprise - "Storm Front, Part I"

Airdate: 10/8/2004 (USA)
Written by Manny Coto
Directed by Allan Kroeker

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
Rating out of 4: **1/2

"What's happening is beyond your comprehension." -- Silik, describing the 
timeline plot
-----

The bad news is that "Storm Front" inherits so much nonsensical time-travel 
baggage from previous episodes (including last season's final 60 seconds) 
that the premise is all but indefensible.

The good news is that this episode sets up all the pieces to possibly end --  
once and for all -- the Temporal Cold War and all its related, incoherent 
BS. Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Personally, I'm in favor of the end of the 
TCW in "Storm Front, Part II."

The other bad news is that ending the temporal war (or at the very least 
this two-parter) will apparently be accomplished with a Temporal Reset 
Button -- of the sort found in Voyager's "Year of Hell." The idea goes 
something like this: Blow up something that's real big and controls time, 
and all of the "correct" timelines will be magically and instantly restored. 
The paradoxes are everywhere, but they all become irrelevant if you can blow 
up the device that has created (or has not yet created) all of the paradoxes 
and manipulations. Or something like that. (The new paradox becomes, how do 
you stop something that never was destined to be a by-product of a 
paradoxical event in the first place, and ... oh, never mind.)

The other good news is that this is all tolerable under the 
oh-just-forget-the-paradox-stuff writing of Manny Coto and the brisk 
directing of Allan Kroeker. It's not what I would call good, but it's 
tolerable and sometimes entertaining as nonsense.

I guess that makes this episode a real mixed bag. Reaching into World War II 
is a time-travel cliche, and alien Nazis are in concept no less goofy here 
than they were at the end of "Zero Hour." But at least now we can see how 
the writers develop and play out this "Twilight Zone" concept. Their 
approach is in the tradition of silly sci-fi fun, which is maybe the only 
workable approach, since the concept is too ridiculous to be worthy of 
social relevance.

In this rendition of an alternate 1944, World War II has taken a very 
different course because aliens have been helping the German war effort by 
supplying them with better weapons in exchange for the Germans helping the 
aliens build a temporal "conduit" (more on that later). This alliance has 
allowed the Germans to defeat Europe and invade the United States, the 
eastern portion of which they now occupy. There's an amusing shot of the 
White House adorned (defaced) with Nazi banners. It's amusing because it's 
simply impossible to take the image the least bit seriously in the context 
of this zany story. I'm not complaining that it's amusing, because I 
actually like the creators' audacity in showing it. (Later, we see a map 
that spells out the battle lines and the occupied U.S. territory.)

During an ambush, Archer escapes his captivity from the Germans and finds 
himself in a history that doesn't track with what he knows to be the actual 
timeline. He is rescued by American resistance fighters based in an occupied 
Brooklyn. Included among them is a young African-American woman named Alicia 
(Golden Brooks) and two Italian-American former loan sharks (read: mobsters) 
named Carmine (Steven R. Schirripa) and Sal (Joe Maruzzo).

If there's a message to be found in this episode (and it's mostly reduced to 
a non-point) it's that this version of 1944 America seems to have been 
forced, as a matter of survival to fight the Germans, to put aside more of 
its social and ethnic prejudices more quickly than its counterpart in the 
real timeline. It's a message the story does not insist upon or underline, 
but simply presents as a given. It's the only trace of social relevance in 
an otherwise nuts-and-bolts installment where dialog is mainly limited to 
exposition (there are a lot of characters who have to figure out just what 
exactly is going on here).

Meanwhile, the Enterprise crew, orbiting 1944 Earth and still believing 
Archer was killed when the Xindi weapon exploded, must figure out how to 
return to their own time. They get some clues into the mystery with the help 
of Temporal Nonsense Agent Daniels (Matt Winston), who shows up on the 
Enterprise but is practically unrecognizable. Phlox discovers that some sort 
of temporal cataclysm has caused various parts of Daniels' body to transform 
to differently aged stages, from infancy to elderly, turning him into a 
grotesque patchwork that we might as well call the Temporal Frankenstein 
Monster.

About here, Silik (John Fleck) shows up on the Enterprise, attacks Trip, 
steals a shuttlepod, and takes it down to the surface for reasons left 
unknown to us until part two. Trip and Travis beam down to find Silik but 
find only the abandoned shuttlepod, which the Nazis stumble across just 
after Trip and Travis have rigged it to explode. What's the only thing 
better than the writers blowing up a shuttlepod? Blowing up a shuttlepod 
full of Nazis, naturally. Unfortunately, Trip and Travis are immediately 
captured by another patrol, then held prisoner and threatened by Vosk (Jack 
Gwaltney), the leader of the time-traveling aliens.

Meanwhile, some friction arises between Archer, Sal, and Carmine, when the 
Nazis start storming through the neighborhoods looking for the escaped 
Archer. Sal and Carmine want to know how Archer figures into all this. 
Archer, for that matter, wants answers to his own questions. Eventually they 
work together to arrange a meeting with one of their informant's contacts, 
rumored to be a gray-skinned, red-eyed, inhuman Nazi collaborator. This 
alien believes Archer is a temporal agent sent through time to stop them 
from building their temporal conduit. Archer gets some crucial information 
before Sal shoots the alien to death.

Later, there's a shootout when the Nazis try to recapture Archer. This scene 
is an effete, bullet-riddled action sequence that's allowed to go on too 
long, but it's ironic that Schirripa's character ends up killing more people 
in a single scene on Star Trek than in four seasons on "The Sopranos." 
Archer contacts the Enterprise with a stolen alien communicator, and Archer 
and Alicia are beamed up in perfect transporter ex machina fashion.

Daniels, at death's door, explains to Archer that Vosk is the leader of a 
dangerous, radical faction waging a full-throttled temporal war, and is 
responsible for all the shifts in the timeline, and who has put himself on 
1944 Earth to rewrite history -- and that 1944 Earth is the one time/place 
he can truly be stopped, because to stop him here is to stop him from ever 
having tampered with the timeline in the first place. Daniels tells Archer 
that he must find and destroy Vosk's conduit (read: big time machine), 
before Vosk can escape to ... somewhere/somewhen.

Daniels then expires right on cue. The guy always was a master of convenient 
timing (and probably will be again; you never know with those temporal 
loopholes).

This plot is a transparently obvious concoction, but on those terms it moves 
from beat to beat and engages our attention. The story invites us to embrace 
its absurdity and works as entertainment. It basically breaks down the 
entire temporal war (at least I think it does) to a single battle in Earth's 
past, that revolves around a single sci-fi MacGuffin: Vosk's conduit that 
the Nazis are constructing for him. The episode ends on an intriguing image 
that contains an effective "Raiders of the Lost Ark" echo -- a massive time 
machine being built in a warehouse where Nazi banners hang from the ceiling.

But the biggest problem with "Storm Front" is its apparent, inherent 
meaninglessness. There's just something frustrating about a plot where none 
of the guest characters matter because they're all phantoms in a timeline 
that's going to be erased. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself and should wait 
for part two, but if you listen to what Daniels has to say, it practically 
plays like the writers' confession that all this temporal nonsense has 
gotten so out of hand that they simply have to wipe the slate clean in one 
bold, contrived stroke.

Then again, that may not necessarily be a bad thing, because then we can get 
back to stories that matter and make sense.

--
Next week: The Enterprise battles to save its own future. Bet you've never 
heard that line before.

-----
Copyright 2004 Jamahl Epsicokhan. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.

Star Trek: Hypertext - http://www.st-hypertext.com/
Jamahl Epsicokhan - jammer@...