"Storm Front: Part I"

Written by Manny Coto
Directed by Allan Kroeker


In which Archer and Enterprise find themselves separately arriving on Earth in 1944, where the Nazis have invaded North America with the help of aliens from the future...

Captain's Log - Final Analysis







Captain's Log

At the conclusion of the third season, it was clear that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga were no longer the ones running the show. Their names were still technically on the door, but Manny Coto had been brought in to fix many of their mistakes earlier in the season, and Coto was more or less named the heir apparent, pending the renewal of the series. Berman and Braga would still be involved, but Coto was the one calling the shots in the future.

Since they were still the ones technically running the show at the end of the season, they were the ones who wrote the season finale. They brought the season arc to a relatively strong conclusion, and then did something that was completely unnecessary: dropped Archer and Enterprise into 1944, where aliens were apparently helping the Nazis conquer the world. Despite appearances, Berman and Braga swore up and down that it was the intended direction of the final episode for the season.

The truth, of course, has since come out: the 1944 Nazi plot was tacked on the end of the episode completely out of spite. Apparently upset that Paramount had finally recognized that the two producers couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag, and in fact had left the series in shambles after the aimless second season, Berman and Braga decided to leave Coto with an near-impossible cliffhanger to resolve.

Coto, more than aware that Berman and Braga had dumped far more than just the Nazi plot thread in his lap, wrote the first couple episodes of the season as a combination therapy: make the Nazi bit work while also wrapping up the directionless Temporal Cold War plot thread from the series premiere. The result is not unlike what happens when a talented new executive is brought in to fix what the senile moron left unfinished. An attempt is made to gloss over the most glaring weaknesses while just getting the damn thing worked out.

Perhaps aware that the fourth season was doomed to start with a weak episode, Coto takes his time. Much of the episode is spent in crisis mode, with the characters reacting to the fact that they are all in the same place without knowing it. As a result, the Archer plot thread spends most of the episode distinct from the Enterprise plot thread, allowing both to grow independently into a situation that sets up the second part of the story in the next episode.

Archer’s plot thread is perhaps the least interesting and most annoying. Allusions to Nazi Germany have become all too familiar on Trek, and this episode tries to minimize that by focusing on the fact that aliens have taken control of the Third Reich, whether the Nazis want to admit it or not. Much like Coto’s Xindi episodes in the third season, an attempt is made to flesh out the relationship between the aliens and the Nazis. Unlike those Xindi episodes, however, Coto has no time to reveal aspects of the alien culture beyond their goals. This is a weakness that the episode is unable to fully transcend.

At the same time, T’Pol commands Enterprise as they try to determine how they ended up in 1944. Considering that nothing happened in the third season finale to explain this little plot twist, it’s no surprise that the characters are confused. So is the audience! The question is more or less answered when Daniels appears out of nowhere, terribly injured.

The overall premise is simple enough: the most belligerent of the Temporal Cold War factions in the future has decided to make one fundamental change to the timeline that will end the war for good. By coming back in time to 1944 Earth, these aliens have ravaged the timeline by eliminating everything that those other factions depend on. (One can only assume that they read the details of Kirk’s report after the TOS episode “City on the Edge of Forever”, since that episode also noted that a Nazi victory means no Federation.)

To complete the trick, however, the aliens have to return to their own time. Daniels doesn’t quite explain why this is the case; one would think that the Nazi invasion of North America would remain even if the aliens never made it back to the future. At any rate, the aliens need to build a “conduit” back to their own time, and they are using the Nazis to accomplish this feat. Daniels sent Archer and Enterprise back into the past to stop the aliens from getting back to the future. Somehow, this will effectively end the Temporal Cold War once and for all, allowing the timeline to progress as it should.

It’s easy enough to see why Coto would go in this direction; it’s quite another to say that the plot makes perfect sense. Two things don’t quite mesh: the fact that the aliens have to go back to the future to make their changes to the timeline permanent, and the idea that defeating the aliens will result in the end of the Temporal Cold War. If there are other factions running around changing things, why would they stop if Vosk and his people are defeated? Wouldn’t that simply shift the power to the other factions?

This seems to be the point of Silik appearing on the scene. If Vosk had wiped out most of the opposition, then how could Silik be in the past as well, serving his own master? The implication is that whatever factions survived Vosk’s “attack” sent back agents to stop Vosk and use the situation to their own advantage. Silik seems to go out of his way to keep Enterprise safe, which could indicate that previous interpretations of the Temporal Cold War were correct: the faction employing the Suliban need the Federation to exist, but under different condition than Daniels’ faction.

Whatever the case, the apparent resolution to the Temporal Cold War is vastly oversimplified. Everything is boiled down to a simple plot device: stop Vosk from going back to the future. Stop Vosk, and the whole timeline goes back to normal. For that matter, it seems rather clear that Enterprise is meant to use the “conduit” before it is destroyed, so they can return to their own time. How that works, however, is about as clear as the rest of the plot.

It’s understood that Coto had very little time to prepare the episode, since the strained situation surrounding the renewal left the production team with a shortened schedule. Given that, and the ridiculous cliffhanger dropped in his lap, Coto should be credited for doing everything in his power to resolve the dangling plot threads as cleanly as possible. If the larger issues are hopelessly entangled, then at least the episode itself is relatively straightforward.

There are some nice touches. It makes a certain amount of sense that the former criminal element would evolve into an effective resistance movement; that is, after all, what organized crime ultimately is. The characters are a bit stereotypical, and some of the dialogue seems forced, but there would have been little time to polish the scenes. Alicia provides a window, however small, into the nature of the Nazi occupation.

Most of the characters get some minor scenes that give them a chance to shine, something that Berman and Braga could never seem to do. In this case, of course, the demands of the story force those character moments to be fleeting. Trip and T’Pol thankfully have no bizarre relationship scenes. In fact, T’Pol’s reaction to Archer’s return was exactly as nuanced as it should have been. Everyone was in character, which is a shock when speaking of “Enterprise”.

That said, Coto is forced by the demands of the plot to skim over the details of the Nazi occupation, to the point that the audience is obviously meant to fill in the blanks. It’s not hard to understand how the Nazis are supposed to act; it would have been nice, however, to actually see it. That points to another problem with the episode, which has more to do with the post-production that the writing.

Because “Enterprise” is a series that takes place in a fantastic setting, the material is presented with a color grading that makes the image look somewhat unreal. Looking back at TOS, this is similar to the style that was used on that series (though in that case, it was hardly intentional). While this adds a certain realism to the scenes that take place in space or on alien worlds, the grading process makes anything approaching the “real world” look rather fake. For example, the period costumes for the organized crime characters don’t look like real clothes; they almost appear to be digitally rendered.

Perhaps it has something to do with the grading used for the CGI shots. If so, then it is connected to another problem for the episode. The CGI shots in this episode look incredibly fake, much worse than anything that was done at the end of the third season. In particular, Silik’s “morphing” was quite horribly done. It’s possible that the real effects work was saved for the second part of the story, but it certainly doesn’t help bring back the audience when the effects are less effective than the limited-budget offerings of “Babylon 5” (at least they had an excuse).

What makes this episode especially difficult to judge is the fact that it’s the middle chapter of a larger story arc. The next episode could very well explain many of the plot contrivances (like Trip and Mayweather getting caught by the Nazis). But the likelihood is that the next episode will simply conclude what was begun here: fixing the adolescent sabotage of Berman and Braga.


Final Analysis

Overall, this episode is mostly an exercise in correcting the intentional sabotage of the fourth season by Berman and Braga. Manny Coto does everything possible to make the plot thread work for him, but the truncated production schedule did him no favors. Still, the character moments are far better than during the previous regime, and this is hardly representative of what Coto is likely to do during the rest of the season.

Writing: 1/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 1/2
Style: 1/4

Final Rating: 5/10




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