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Star Trek Ent - Season 1 - Episode 11

Star Trek Ent - 1x11 - Cold Front

Originally Aired: 2001-11-28

Synopsis:
While Enterprise joins an alien pilgrimage to witness a religious stellar occurrence, Archer finds himself again faced against the Suliban warrior Silik. [DVD]

My Rating - 5

Fan Rating Average - 5.97

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Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 9 1 1 3 7 16 17 13 12 10 8

Problems
- The explosive decompression featured in this episode was extremely unrealistic.

Factoids
- This episode establishes that several human religions are still in existence and in practice at this time, including Buddhism and Christianity.

Remarkable Scenes
- Archer: "Looks like we could be having guests. Tell chef to prepare... something."
- Trip describing how the warp engines work.
- Daniels revealing himself.
- Archer: "Are you human?" Daniels: "More or less."
- T'Pol denying that time travel exists.
- Daniels making vague remarks about the future of Earth.
- Daniels' little walk through walls device.
- Silik confronting "Jon."

My Review
This is the first episode since the pilot which deals with this Temporal Cold War thing. Silik's return is a welcome one, and this episode introduces a new player in the Temporal Cold War, Daniels, who is apparently killed. This episode blurs the image of who's good and who's evil though in the Temporal Cold War. The man who Silik is working for wanted to see the Klingon Empire destroyed, but also wanted to save Enterprise here. My first instincts told me he was a Romulan from the future. But if this were the case, why would he want to save Enterprise? Daniels appeared to be a more advanced version of Captain Braxton and crew from Voy: Relativity, but again, it's hard to be sure of any of this. Cold Front was a sufficiently entertaining episode, but the ending was anticlimactic. This episode may be worth more points than I'm giving it, but it's hard to rate an episode whose ending raises more questions than it answers. And to be honest, I'm not sure if a Temporal Cold War is a particularly good idea for Enterprise. This is Star Trek, not Time Trek.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Jadzia Guinan Smith on 2010-08-30 at 4:59pm:
    It's clear that in "later" Star Trek history human religions lose their influence significantly, but I'm not sure they disappear altogether. On DS9 Kassidy said her mother would probably insist she were married by a minister rather than a Bajoran Vedek. I know it's an obscure reference, but I just watched the episode recently :)
  • From Old Fat Trekkie on 2011-12-06 at 8:25pm:
    There was another Sci-fi "Sliders" that introduced something very similar to the "Temporal Cold War" of Enterprise. I thought it was a disaster to go down that road in both cases.

    TOS had a great deal in place - how did that all get there? I believe both TOS and TOS naive audiences would have enjoyed seeing much of that. And of course, I would love to have seen the first Romulan War, and the explanation concerning why the future Federation had such sparce information about them.

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