Ah yes, the adventures of Super!Archer and Sidekick!Polly...
3x11 – “Carpenter Street”
oh goody, another time travel episode…
Let’s see, Earth is put in danger of destruction through an act of time travel, so our crew is made to travel back to the year the episode was originally filmed/aired in to prevent said destruction, with the help/interference of people from the distant future. Sound familiar? It is essentially the description for both
Carpenter Street,
and VOY’s
Future’s End, which just happens to have been co-written by Brannon Braga. Only the players are different in this episode, as we are once again made to endure the infamous Temporal Cold war that is quite artificially injected into the Xindi arc.
Seems that the Xindi Reptilians decided to go ahead with their plans for a bio-weapon to use against humanity, only some far-flung moon or planet wasn’t a good enough hiding place, so they decided to go to 2003, Detroit, Michigan, at a time when fear is in the air due to the terrorist threat in their country of choice. And just how did these strange aliens not only go unnoticed in an abandoned factory even though they have power and have installed a security system from that era? How’d they get all of the needed currency? Why Earth’s past? Why not some other uninhabited place where they might have better gone unnoticed to even Daniels and his people?
Speaking of, why didn’t Daniels and his people take care of this problem, not to mention the main Xindi problem all on their own? This excuse of following the “temporal accords” requiring non-interference doesn’t fly, just for the fact that even contacting Archer and co., let alone actually giving them equipment and pushing them through time to do their bidding for them is interfering with the timeline every bit as much as if they’d just discretely do the work themselves using technology that is undoubtedly far more advanced than anything Archer and T’Pol are able to carry on their persons.
Actually I’m more than a little fed up with Daniels continually showing up with no answers (likely because no one has put any real thought into coming up with those answers). I was already fed up the first time Archer burst in on T’Pol during the middle of the night, so seeing it again didn’t make me a happy camper. Scully T’Pol had also worn thin some time ago, so having her remain skeptical despite finally having experienced time travel herself was just that much mroe irritating.
Heh, I had to laugh at not only Archer’s choice of vehicle, which was hardly inconspicuous, but that he also somehow knew how to drive it, right down to all the rules of the road so as not to draw the attention of law enforcement in that stolen Dodge Ram.
T’Pol gets to use the Vulcan nerve pinch again on that sniveling little man that played the insane sniveling little hologram on an early VOY episode (can’t think of the title). Unfortunately the same Angry!Archer! that threw that Osari into the airlock makes another appearance, this time by not only screaming at the Xindi collaborator, but taking at least one solid swing at him, after untying him first, because otherwise it wouldn’t make Archer manly enough.
But what really gets me is that T’Pol plays along.
T’Pol also once again went on and on about how bad humanity was, at least in this era.
I guess it’s in Star Trek tradition to go on about how bad we are in our modern times….
Anyway, later on I kind of liked T’Pol’s reaction to Archer and the sniveling little collaborator ordering food from that fast food joint and then started eating it. She was pretty disgusted when he accidentally spilled some meat on her, but that revulsion was lost by her touching her food in contradiction to the Vulcan taboo, once again….
Everything after that was fairly predictable; with Archer going in guns blazing while T’Pol has to wait outside to get only one of the two Xindi when Archer fails to despite an advantage of hiding behind bright lights and having the advantage of elevation and surprise. Am I to understand that the same man who fraks up despite those advantages and having plenty of time to aim yet misses that first shot is later to be made into some kind of freaking marksman, even better than trained professionals who have been firing weapons for a living?
Unfortunately there is a complication with the little sniveler so sidekick Polly can’t get both of the escaping Xindi, and instead they all end up on the roof of some building, where Sidekick Polly has to lay down cover fire while Super!Archer! flies from one building to the next to save the day, but not after the usual last ditch effort by the bad guy to make our hero’s victory bittersweet.
Four words: not impressed, goose egg.
