1x11 Cold Front

Essential
Themes: main season arc, time travel

Warning: contains ST Discovery Season 2 spoilers.

Finally we get to the main plot of suliban and Temporal Cold War. Episode starts with Sulik getting stripped of his supersight, which I guess is important for larger story because it shows that suliban can be stripped of genetic modification, which would explain why they haven't conquered the galaxy in any of the other shows.

Anyhow, the show introduces bellboy Daniels with captain seems familiar with. Enterprise is going to star nursery where they encounter a ship full of tech monks who are there to observe some rare phenomenon. They enter a plasma storm and almost encounter catastrophic cascade falure that would destroy the ship, if not for our friendly diguised avokado man. Now, that's a turn of events! Daniels reveals to captain he is time police, sent to 22nd century to prevent meddling with timeline and he believes Suliban is on the ship and saved them, and now wants captain to help catch him. Now, that's a turn of events. He has portable holodeck that displays the current timeline and device that allows him to walk through walls, which is enough to convince even skeptic T'Pol.

Meanwhile, Silik confronts captain and throws cloud of suspicion over Danielses motives. Now that's intriguing. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode gives us little reason to believe Sulik, as he kills Daniels and almost kills Archer. The question what they stand to gain from saving Enterprise still stands though. Sulik was after timeline thingy, but they lose both that and walk-through-walls device in a fight as Sulik makes his escape by HALO jumping out of the ship.
Add resistance to space conditions to long list of suliban enhancements, along with invisibility, contortion and climbing on walls.

Now, that's more like it! Really compelling storyline that puts Enterprise at the forefront of temporal war and with that brings gravity to its story and position in ST universe.
It's interesting to put facts that we got from Daniels into context. He says he is from approximately 900 years in the future. That would put him around year 3050. Last episode of Voyager ends around year 2400. In Discovery, Burnhams mom is stuck in approximately year 3150 (I guess Calypso Short Trek as well). And though Daniels doesn't say when time travel was invented, he says that primitive versions existed a century before. But Discovery plot discovers that humans already had working time travel device in 23rd century. Interesting, and I wonder if they even considered this episode when building a plot for Discovery, as clearly they worked on integrating Discovery into ST cannon.

One complaint I have is that they could have left it a little more ambiguous. They built up intrigue of whom to trust nicely, and if they left it at that it could have been much more intriguing going forward.

[7.3/10] There’s an old moral philosophy thought experiment that goes like this: someone comes running up to you on the street and says “Someone’s chasing me and wants to kill me! Please don’t let them find me!” Another person follows a minute later and says, “A killer is on the loose! Have you seen them?” What do you do? Who do you believe?

That’s essentially what “Cold Front” is going for. A heretofore unknown Starfleet officer named Daniels shows up in the opening scene, and the rules of Star Trek and the law of conservation of characters dictates that he must either die by the end of the episode or be hiding some terrible secret. (Or, I guess, he could also be some character’s quickly developed and forgotten love interest -- the field is wide open!) But after some suspicious comments, he invites Archer into his quarters and declares that he is a time traveler on a mission to stop the Suliban named Silik who Archer clashed with in the series premiere.

There’s a lot of exposition in this scene, which douses Archer and Daniels in some green screen finery, but I like the new wrinkles we get to the season arc here. The notion that there is a time accord, where time-traveling species have agreed to only go to the past for research, is an interesting one. (Boy, they must have hated Kirk.) The same goes for the idea that there are factions who don’t agree with this principle and want to go back and muck around in the timeline. The delivery is a little clunky, but it establishes the sides for the “temporal cold war” that was mentioned in the first episodes, while leaving enough mystery for us to be spoonfed at some later point.

But what I really like is the question of whether to believe/trust him. T’Pol and Trip rightly raise the point that Daniels has provided no concrete proof of his claims, and that even in just the first four months of Starfleet’s first deep space mission, they’ve met aliens with technologies that blew them away. The best Daniels can offer to convince Archer that he’s telling the truth is “I make your scrambled eggs soft, just the way you like them,” which is a good line, but not exactly evidence.

Then you have Silik, who while surprising Archer, claims that there’s more to the story than Daniels is saying. Silik points out that he acted to save the Enterprise, hardly the actions of a malevolent group. And he notes that he’s the one being pursued, arguing that their are bigger forces at work than Archer understands and challenging Daniels’s assertions about the time accord and what’s really going on.

I like that ambiguity a lot. We’re inclined to believe Daniels because he’s (1.) human (2.) in a Starfleet uniform and (3.) friendly. And we’re inclined to be suspicious of Silik because he’s (1.) an alien (2.) looks like a lizard had a baby with a cantaloupe and (3.) someone who’s tried to fight Archer in the past. But Archer’s chief advisors are right to note that we don’t really know what the full story is here, and we (and they) don’t have any real way of verifying anything either Daniels or Silik says. We Star Trek fans are conditioned to know that time travel happens all the time in this universe, but the humans (and per T’Pol, the Vulcans) don’t know that, so the whole thing makes it tricky to pick a side.

That’s particularly true when one of the self-described time travelers has infiltrated your crew, and the other has infiltrated a group of religious folk who have come aboard your ship as part of the cultural exchange. The latter point was barely plot-relevant, connecting only so far as it provided cover for Silik to sneak aboard Enterprise and tinker with its controls. But honestly, I really liked it. To borrow a phrase from Avatar: The Last Airbender, “This is the kind of wacky time-wasting nonsense I've been missing.”

Which is another way of saying, sure, all the Enterprise crew’s interactions with the spiritualists assembled to witness the Plume of Agosoria don’t advance the plot much, but it’s the sort of texture and detail that makes the Star Trek universe feel like a deeper richer place. Just the sense that there are other species and cultures out there, with their own practices and beliefs, adds to the sense of place in the series. For a ship whose mission is predicated on first contact, taking time away from the more plot-relevant fireworks to just show us the awkward business of diplomacy in action as a sort of “slice of life” experience is a deft choice.

It’s also full of nice little character moments. I love the detail that the captain of the ship taking the spiritualists to see the plume is an impatient non-believer who’s clearly just doing his job. His sort of barely-tolerating Archer’s requests, and only perking up when he thinks there might be a reward involved gives us a sense of deep space as a sort of workaday space for many species who don’t share the humans sense of novelty or wonder. I’m also enjoying Dr. Phlox as a sort of alien Frasier Crane: more than a little dorky, but smart, as he gladly dives in to all of these cultural experiences. And while a little cheesy, the scene where Mayweather (with Hoshi’s prodding) gives sitting in the captain’s chair is nicely revealing, both at how much he reveres the position and how far he has to go.

Unfortunately, all of that is just window dressing when the show loses the music in the third act. Instead of the interesting question of whom Archer should believe, Enterprise just reestablishes that sly-talking Silik is an evil dude who’ll shoot Archer, kill Daniels, and try to suffocate his foe by opening the cargo bay doors. It’s a disappointingly quick and predictable resolution to the intriguing question the show sets up. The last act also devolves into an action-y standoff featuring Archer, which has not been this show’s strong suit in the early going. The “hanging off a ledge” bit looks silly and unconvincing, and the fact that both Archer and Silik lose their fancy new tech is super convenient.

But hey, an exciting moral question with a rote answer, along with a heap of interesting but not exactly plot-relevant interludes with the visitors of the week is a combination that Star Trek fans are well-familiar with. I hope that the rest of the “temporal cold war” arc offers better finishes than this one did, but as a building block toward a larger conflict, this wasn’t bad.