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]

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

 

[Saga]

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]

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.

 

[Saga]

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?

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]

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.

 

[F. King Daniel]

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]

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?

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.

 

[Guy Gardener]

India and Pakistan are always squaring off.

No one cares.

Not even India and Pakistan.

It's just how they communicate.

Although his empire comprised India, Pakistan (Bangladesh, Shir Lanka, etc...) and the middle east, and probably a chunk of China too...

Just brown and yellow people.

Although all that oil in the Middle East?

Did Khan convert into a Muslim, was he already a Muslim or did he dissolve the religion when he took over the Middle East? Controlling that part of the world is difficult, Winston Churchill called Iraq "an ungrateful Volcano" but what would you rather have? Genetic augmentation or faith in a god that doesn't listen? Although if Khan was a... He wore a Turban in the Space Seed, had long hair and carried a sword and had an Indian surname... Unintentional or otherwise from the wardrobe department in the 60s, that frakk was a Sikh. A Sikh ruling faction could totally integrate and co-operate with the Muslim world if they walked a very fine line without having to resort to criminalizing the Muslim faith.

And now for something really insulting.

If you tripled the intellect of everyone in the middle east, they would quickly realise that all religion is just charming bedtime stories that work well as moral guidelines for sheep and cowards. Hells, if he couldn't just dose the water table, khan could sell augmentation as a gift from god or even apotheosis and the true believers would line up by the million. (Although if Khan had a sense of humour he would have only augmented the women.)

Religion wouldn't matter?

So possibly seamlessly Khan takes over in the aftermath or even during Desert Storm I, his troops under a UN or Indian Flag marched on Baghdad, when all orders and common sense prevailed that they should have stopped, yet some how his superior intellect maintains order and maintains the supply of oil to the west. And as long as the oil keeps flowing America stays happy and doesn't have to turn on it's war machine and 1996 looks exactly like how it did in Voy: Futures End.

Khan sends Saddam's severed head in a box to President Bubbah for his birthday.... Or if Desert Storm I, had actually had a satisfying conclusion, maybe Bush snr would have had his second term?

But which ever President that Khan sent that chubby head to: Best friends FOREVER!

 

[DarKush]

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.

Yeah I was thinking of something like that too. If Archer hadn't made it, that would've been a very powerful moment.

Other than that, if they had to shock us, I wish Archer had wound up on an alternate Earth or a changed time line where the Romulans or Remans had invaded. When he returned to normal time the crews memories could be erased. I figured it would be a way to get a Romulan War without having to devote a lot of seasons or time to it. But a little four or five episode arc could've been awesome.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I think archer should have lost an arm.

It would have changed his perspective.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8452/7909530962_5b5c39c717_z.jpg

 

[BillJ]

I like Storm Front just fine the way it is.

 

[lurok]

They could have ended it with Trip and Mayweather flying down to SF and then getting shot at by...Zeros! That would have been different at least. (Could Dick have sued? )