Ladies and gentlemen, the following episode was written by Mike Sussman. You may remember that I used to do a joke giving all his episodes 5 star reviews and I stopped doing that after he wrote
Twilight, which actually was a 5 star episode. I wish I could say I was smart enough to retire the joke at that point, but the truth is that I was dumb enough to forget to do it for
Stratagem, and because of that I've decided to pretend that I was smart enough to retire it after
Twilight.
E² (*½)
This episode reminds me of another, but I can't remember the title. Children of Yesterday? Children of Tomorrow? The Children are our Future? The Time-Traveller's Child? Wife of Time? Bride of Time? Bride of Frankenstien? Bride of Chaotica!? Yeah, that was it,
Bride of Chaotica!, this episode is a complete rip off of
Bride of Chaotica!! It has aliens and... space... Hmm, they're not that similar at all. It must have been a different episode I was thinking of, but since I can't remember the title of that episode I'm not going to mark the score down.
(The real reason I'm not marking the score down is because MA claims that Mike Sussman wanted to do this episode about the NX-02 Columbia, but BB&C thought it would be better to do it about the descendants of the Enterprise and overruled his objections that it was too similar to
Children of Time. Since I've given Sussman a hard time in the past, and I actually like the guy's work for the most part, I don't want to be marking him down for an episode he wrote at gunpoint. Call it a double standard if you will.
)
Firstly, I don't like the time travel in this episode, it muddies the water in a way that it needn't have been. NuEnterprise was fighting the Xindi before they launched the probe? And the Xindi never got a picture of it? Riiiight.
Why didn't nuEnterprise go back to Earth a day before the probe attacked and warn Earth to station their ships above Florida? Why didn't nuEnterprise intercept Enterprise Prime the moment they entered the expanse and tell them where the weapon is being built rather than have Archer and co searching for 6 months? Why didn't nuEnterprise help to fight off the Xindi during the battle of Azati Prime? None of this makes sense to me.
The episode itself isn't inspired either, it is full of the standard guff that I had thought Sussman left behind in season 2. Enterprise gets in a firefight with itself because the two captains were too stupid to talk out the situation, the Enterprises get in a firefight with some shroomie aliens because the shroomie aliens were too stupid to talk out the situation, and Trip and T'Pol fail to talk out the situation because... they're too stupid to talk out the situation. And don't get me started on old Livia T'Prano, the world's first albino Vulcan.
Then there's the plot resolution where nuEnterprise is destroyed and Archer takes solace in the fact that they probably never existed. I believe Tennyson had a saying "'Tis better to have lived and died than to never have existed at all due to a stupid temporal abnormality which doesn't make any sense". I'm paraphrasing, obviously.
The best part of this episode? When Degra shows up at the end because that means there will be no more filler.
Disappearing Aliens: 29