Stormfront would have been better if...

[Gotham Central]

Instead of giving us yet more alien Nazis they had shown us an alternate history where Kahn and his superman had been victorious or visited WWIII. Doing so would have been in keeping with the larger theme of season 4 and fleshed out a part of Trek history that has largely been ignored.

Given the possibilities of the Eugenics Wars or WWIII, one wonders why the writers dipped back into the familiar and overused well of alien Nazis?

[jespah]

Lazy writing, perhaps - e. g. guaranteed shock value. Godwin's Law in Trek!

I think they liked the idea of the time period, too, and the gangsters gave it a relation to the TOS episode, A Piece of the Action, in addition to being a nod to TOS's Patterns of Force.

[Skywalker]

They kind of had to do alien Nazis because that's how "Zero Hour" ended.

[Gotham Central]

Skywalker wrote:

---

They kind of had to do alien Nazis because that's how "Zero Hour" ended.

Well...by default I was including the conclusion of Zero Hour in this as well.

Imagine how much more interesting it might have been if in Zero Hour the Shuttle Pod had been fired on by forces of the Imperial Kahnate and Archer had been found and dragged before a powerful but clearly ancient Kahn himself.

Doing that would have made the later augment storyline much more personal.

Instead we got nazis

[Praetor_Shinzon]

Zero Hour was such a great episode...and it has such an odd cliffhanger. never liked the Nazis showing up. i think a better cliffhanger would be to just stop the ep right after the crew realizes Archer didn't make it. that would give the writers time to come up with something better than Nazis.

[R. Star]

Gotham Central wrote:

---

Instead of giving us yet more alien Nazis they had shown us an alternate history where Kahn and his superman had been victorious or visited WWIII. Doing so would have been in keeping with the larger theme of season 4 and fleshed out a part of Trek history that has largely been ignored.

Given the possibilities of the Eugenics Wars or WWIII, one wonders why the writers dipped back into the familiar and overused well of alien Nazis?

You know, I fully clicked on this thread intending to state "if it never happened" but this is a great idea.

Using Nazi knockoffs is just the ultimate lack of creativity by any writer to force the audience to "identify" with a villain being bad.

[Praetor_Shinzon]

R. Star wrote:

---

Using Nazi knockoffs is just the ultimate lack of creativity by any writer to force the audience to "identify" with a villain being bad.

agreed

[LobsterAfternoon]

Damn, landing in the middle of the rise of the augments would've been a lot better. Good idea, OP.

[DonIago]

Never so quickly has my reaction to a season finale of television gone from "That was pretty darn good...maybe even a bit better than I expected..." to "OMG, are you serious???" The ending taints the entire episode.

I'd love to support the OP's idea, but it would really depend on how the rest of that particular arc played out. In short, I'd rather not see an "Augments Win the Eugenics War" storyline than see it portrayed badly.

So, I suppose it would have been a lot less laughable but a fair bit more anxiety-provoking.

[Skywalker]

Them showing up in the middle of the Eugenics Wars would have been a lot more interesting, yeah. But I would have preferred that they just returned to the Earth they knew and received a hero's welcome. The whole "Okay, the Xindi have been defeated...but now there's this!" twist at the end is entirely unnecessary.

[R. Star]

Skywalker wrote:

---

Them showing up in the middle of the Eugenics Wars would have been a lot more interesting, yeah. But I would have preferred that they just returned to the Earth they knew and received a hero's welcome. The whole "Okay, the Xindi have been defeated...but now there's this!" twist at the end is entirely unnecessary.

That was always my take on it, but seeing the Eugenics wars, and possibly a younger Khan would be cool too. On my last rewatch, I just skipped Storm Front entirely and started season 4 with Home.

[Guy Gardener]

They had the costumes from Voyager and they could reuse the sfx from Voyager which they did.

It was just convenient.

I would have loved to have seen some conflation.

NAZIs vs. Cowboys.

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

They'd never have done the Eugenics Wars in detail on Enterprise. Berman-Trek had pussyfooted around that so much, moving the date forward (DS9's Bashir reveal), back again (an offhand comment in ENT's Augments arc), pretending they never happened at all (VOY's "Future's End") ... it was like they didn't know how to handle Trek's 1990's not syncing with reality, so deliberately ignored it as much as possible. Which is understandable.

Abrams-Trek on the other hand? Co-writer Bob Orci has read Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars novels (which portays them as a secret history, the truth of which only became public knowledge later) and there's a big guy in white with a ponytail walking thru a room full of stasis tubes in the Into Darkness trailer...

[Guy Gardener]

At first I thought that Voyager ignored the war too, but Berman was just a few years ahead of his times in accepting that Americans can ignore ongoing horrific bloody wars really well, even wars they started and they're the only ones still fighting. I saw America during World War II through hundreds of movies while growing up and the entire country was focussed towards sacrificing enough to construct a winning army...

"Sigh"

A model of Khan's Sleeper Ship was on Sarah Silverman's desk in her Lab at the Observatory... So, someone in the props department had a soul, even if Berman was almost completely dead inside.

[Seven of Five]

Skywalker wrote:

---

Them showing up in the middle of the Eugenics Wars would have been a lot more interesting, yeah. But I would have preferred that they just returned to the Earth they knew and received a hero's welcome. The whole "Okay, the Xindi have been defeated...but now there's this!" twist at the end is entirely unnecessary.

Ugh, I totally agree. Storm Front just wasn't very interesting, and was a terrible way to finish the storyline. The TCW was a convoluted mess anyway, so I can see how they would struggle to end it satisfactorily. Alien Nazis, however, should have been bottom of the list, and tacking it onto the end of Zero Hero was pathetic.

Perhaps it should have ended in season three, with the end of the Xindi arc?

King Daniel wrote:

---

They'd never have done the Eugenics Wars in detail on Enterprise. Berman-Trek had pussyfooted around that so much, moving the date forward (DS9's Bashir reveal), back again (an offhand comment in ENT's Augments arc), pretending they never happened at all (VOY's "Future's End") ... it was like they didn't know how to handle Trek's 1990's not syncing with reality, so deliberately ignored it as much as possible. Which is understandable.

Well Ron D. Moore fucked up with the Eugenics War timeline. He admitted that in DS9 he just copied Khan's comment from TWOK about it happening two centuries ago, without updating it. Bit of silly moment, but I think it shows that he at least intended for the war to have happened during the 90s.

VOY I can't really explain away. It just wasn't relevant to the story they were telling, so they ignored it. Bit of a shame they didn't refer to it in some way. The sleeper ship in the background is a cute reference though.

Anyway, I think the ENT crew ending up in the middle of the Augment conflict could have worked really well. It would have linked into the arc they ended up doing, which I thought overall was a bit underwhelming, and ending up having more weight to it.