First Xindi attack made no sense

[stj]

Yup, sounds like Archer swallowed Future Guy's lies hook, line and sinker... While the Xindi had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

The device was probing the path to Earth.

Sounds like a good idea. But this should and could have been done covertly, without firing a superweapon at Earth!

The device was probing possible resistance.

The above goes doubly for this. If there is resistance, surely it shouldn't be allowed to witness the Xindi death ray in action! Probing should be conducted so that only the Xindi benefit from it, not the enemy...

Timo Saloniemi

Detection is much easier than defense. It is unlikely that any probe could have operated covertly. If testing the ability to reach through the Expanse to Earth was the sole objective, the probe shouldn't have been armed at all, or even manned and should have self-destructed out in the Oort cloud. Any Xindi attack would still need intelligence on the Earth defenses.

Read literally, the posts above call for covert testing of Earth defenses! That is impossible. A major attack evolking all Earth's defenses was needed.

It is true that the attack gave away information. But what the Xindi gave away was not essential to the Earth defense (that came from Future Guy) while what the Xindi gained was essential to their preemptive (as they believed) attack. A tradeoff in intelligence was inevitable and the Xindi would have won the exchange without Future Guy.

 

[Christopher]

While I understand your point about applying human motives and thought processes to an alien race, the fact is that it's a fictional alien race, and in Star Trek, nine times out of ten an alien is going to think and act the exact same way as a human would.

Yup -- and humans often make very bad decisions.

 

[Amasov]

Because there wouldn't have been a season three without it.

 

[Melakon]

And Ferengi is from the Turkish and Arabic (or maybe Persian?) words for a European (derived from "Frank," i.e. a French person).

I missed that one. I discovered jemadar while searching Roget's Thesaurus when trying to invent ranks for an alien race.

 

[JiNX-01]

I agree. The advance warning attack makes absolutely no sense.

I would have Daniels warn Archer of the Xindi plan. Daniels wasn't a member of his crew, and Archer isn't at liberty to tell SF about him. Besides they won't believe him.

Archer tells his officers about Daniels. He "steals" Enterprise. The crew is told they have a new assignment. The Klingons are still after Archer, slowing him down thus giving Columbia a chance to catch up with Enterprise. A team of MACOs is on board to ensure the NX-01 surrenders without incident.

When the Columbia catches up with Enterprise, the MACOs transport aboard the NX-01 immediately. Archer persuades Erica to help him get away. She knows him well enough to realize that he hasn't gone off his rocker. The MACOs think she's is aiding and abetting a rogue captain. They refuse to return to Columbia.

The MACOS become a big problem for the crew who trust Archer. Eventually Major Hayes realizes they've been on the wrong side.

The mission goes as originally written with these exceptions:

NO:

Extinction
Rajiin
Exile
North Star
Carpenter Street
Doctor's Orders
Hatchery
E2
Not one of these episodes contributed substantively to the season.

 

[Mach5]

We obviously need some new ENT topics.

My novel Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures will be coming out in just under 5 months, so there will be new stuff to talk about then.

I'm actually pretty excited about that one.

Archer being Future Guy would make about as much sense as a WWE wrestling story line.

"At the 2009 VegasCon, Manny Coto and Brannon Braga stated that "Future Guy" was "probably going to be a Romulan" and would have tied into the Romulan War as a future Romulan, trying to "instigate things."
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Humanoid_Figure

I'm not so sure I like the idea of the Romulan War being a product of timeline tampering... However, Rommies getting advice from their progeny would have been acceptable.

 

[Christopher]

I would have Daniels warn Archer of the Xindi plan. Daniels wasn't a member of his crew, and Archer isn't at liberty to tell SF about him. Besides they won't believe him.

Archer tells his officers about Daniels. He "steals" Enterprise.

But if there were no initial attack, there would've been no 9/11 allegory, which was pretty much the whole point of the season. Star Trek at its best engages with real-world issues and contemporary concerns. "A Private Little War" was a Vietnam allegory; The Undiscovered Country was an allegory for glasnost and the fall of the Iron Curtain; and the Xindi arc was an allegory for 9/11 and the subsequent debate over how far to compromise our ethics in the name of self-defense. Take away the initial attack and its psychological impact on Earth society and the NX-01 crew, and you strip the season of its relevance and meaning. Not to mention the character threads you lose -- Archer wrestling with his conscience over how far to go, Trip mourning his sister, T'Pol being motivated to resign from the High Command in protest of their refusal to help Earth in its time of need, Degra having to live with the horror of what he'd done, etc. Plus you never would've had "Demons"/'Terra Prime," one of the high points of the whole series. If there'd never been a successful Xindi attack on Earth, then the wave of xenophobia that fed Terra Prime wouldn't have occurred.

 

[JiNX-01]

I would have Daniels warn Archer of the Xindi plan. Daniels wasn't a member of his crew, and Archer isn't at liberty to tell SF about him. Besides they won't believe him.

Archer tells his officers about Daniels. He "steals" Enterprise.

But if there were no initial attack, there would've been no 9/11 allegory, which was pretty much the whole point of the season.

Star Trek at its best engages with real-world issues and contemporary concerns. "A Private Little War" was a Vietnam allegory; The Undiscovered Country was an allegory for glasnost and the fall of the Iron Curtain; and the Xindi arc was an allegory for 9/11 and the subsequent debate over how far to compromise our ethics in the name of self-defense. Take away the initial attack and its psychological impact on Earth society and the NX-01 crew, and you strip the season of its relevance and meaning. Not to mention the character threads you lose -- Archer wrestling with his conscience over how far to go, Trip mourning his sister, T'Pol being motivated to resign from the High Command in protest of their refusal to help Earth in its time of need, Degra having to live with the horror of what he'd done, etc. Plus you never would've had "Demons"/'Terra Prime," one of the high points of the whole series. If there'd never been a successful Xindi attack on Earth, then the wave of xenophobia that fed Terra Prime wouldn't have occurred.

I do get the analogies: to 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. I just think that when you're treading in fiction, you need to make the story more credible than real life.

 

[Christopher]

^But it's perfectly credible for military and political leaders to make strategically bad decisions that backfire against them. As I've said above, it happens a lot in real life.

 

[Timo]

Of course, the mechanisms of ENT would have allowed for a unique dodge here: the attack could have taken place, and then have been undone by time travel. Or could have taken place in a future Archer was shown, in advance, so that there would be time to stop the attack before it became unstoppable. You'd get an impending doom that you already saw happen.

But ENT could have used the same mechanisms for a more interesting threat: that of a massive attack being launched based on the results of the scouting mission - before the scouting mission... For all we know, this is exactly what the Sphere Builders promised the Xindi, and they either lied, or were unable to pull it off because of Archer's interference. It would make some plot sense that the final weapon was in fact intended to be deployed in the 1940s, which is why Archer and later the others got pulled there, even if the big weapon never made it that far.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ALF]

I must be the only one who enjoys the anonymity of Future Guy!

 

[BillJ]

The first attack never made any sense. Neither did the fact that they never tried to attack Earth again in the 20th century.

I always thought Future Guy should've been Henry Archer.

 

[Tiberius]

I recall something my father said once about how people tend to have blind spots about their enemies. The thing is, we all know that if our own country (whatever that may be) were attacked or conquered, it would just fire up our anger and national pride and inspire us to fight back all the harder. Yet somehow, countries throughout history have tended to assume that the same would not be true for their enemies, because their enemies are inferior and craven and would thus be cowed into submission by a show of force. So countries keep attacking or oppressing their enemies in the belief that it will defeat and demoralize them, but it usually has the opposite effect and backfires upon the attackers or oppressors. So Imperial Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and as a result we dismantle the empire; and conversely, the CIA helps overthrow a populist Iranian leader in favor of a US-friendly dictator, and as a result there's a populist revolution that turns Iran into one of our biggest enemies. Not to mention all the dictatorial regimes that have oppressed and terrorized their own people in the belief that it would keep them docile, only to provoke them into revolution instead.

You'd think that eventually people would learn to expect this sort of thing, to know that attacking or oppressing another nation -- or their own people -- would just backfire and lead to their defeat or overthrow. Yet century after century, people still don't get the message. They still assume that the other guy will react differently to threat or oppression than they themselves would, that the same things that would inspire themselves to greater determination and rage would instead break their enemies' spirits and leave them defeated forever. It's a bizarre but perennial blind spot.

So maybe that's why the Xindi attacked Earth with the test probe rather than some uninhabited moon somewhere -- because they thought it would demoralize humanity and leave us too afraid to strike back. It doesn't make sense, but then, it never has before, yet people keep trying it anyway. It's just the blind spot of xenophobia, the assumption that your enemy is fundamentally different from yourself and doesn't have the same virtues such as courage or patriotism or love for family to inspire them to fight back.

Philosophy aside, there's also the fact that Earth would never have known where the attack came from, or where to find the Xindi, if Future Guy hadn't tipped off Archer. So as far as the Xindi knew, Earth should've been unable to identify or locate their attackers in time to prevent the final attack. So they would've deemed the risk of retaliation low enough to justify launching an attack for the purpose of demoralizing the enemy.

That's not always the case. The US bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, and Japan surrendered. It didn't motivate them to fight back harder.

 

[Melakon]

That's not always the case. The US bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, and Japan surrendered. It didn't motivate them to fight back harder.

The Japanese thought the United States had more atom bombs, and were afraid one would be dropped on Tokyo. They didn't know the only two available were used, and the U.S. didn't tell them otherwise. Had they known, the war might have continued even longer.

 

[Christopher]

That's not always the case. The US bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, and Japan surrendered. It didn't motivate them to fight back harder.

Well, nothing applies 100 percent of the time, of course. If humans were that simple and predictable, history would be a lot simpler too, and fiction would be a lot more boring.

But it's worth keeping in mind a couple of things there. One, the actions of the Japanese military before and during WWII didn't really have a lot of support from the Japanese people or even the emperor. At least, the whole thing was driven by the military's ambitions and they used extensive propaganda to shape public opinion in their support. But their efforts proved a dismal failure and left Japan devastated and impoverished.

Two, more importantly, the victors who occupied Japan after the war did not oppress or punish the Japanese people, but helped them rebuild their society and economy. So they didn't make the mistake of thinking that beating down the other side would make them docile. They understood that constructive engagement was a better approach. Contrast that to the allies' harshly punitive treatment of Germany after WWI, which created great resentment and frustration among the German people and helped provoke the rise of Nazism.


My father made his observation in response to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides keep using force to try to break the other side down, yet it always just provokes more force in retaliation, and they just can't seem to see that violence against the other side only makes things worse for their own side. You'd think by now they would've caught on that it's just not working and they need to try a different approach.

 

[Melakon]

There was even an attempted coup d'etat within the Japanese military, in an attempt to prevent acceptance of the Potsdam offer. At least two officials were murdered for refusing to join, but the major conspirators of the failed coup committed suicide before the peace treaty was signed.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Best is to attack their supply lines, next best is to attack their armies, worst is to attack their cities. If Sun Tzu could figure that out, I think maybe the Xindi could figure out the same thing.

I think the best plot explanation is 'Reptilians are morons'.

One other possible theory, of course, is that people came back from the 35th century to stop people from the 31st century from preventing people from the 33rd century from stopping the 27th century people from warning Daniels that if he doesn't tell Captain Braxton to enlist Seven of Nine to make sure the Xindi send the initial attack, the Tox Uthat will be used to destroy Earth in the 28th century.

Because that would be far less unnecessarily convoluted than the actual Enterprise timeline.

 

[Melakon]

You mean it was actually Future Guy who sent McCoy back in time to save Edith Keeler, resulting in the Nazis winning WW2?

 

[stj]

All posts attempting to rationalize the mistake of the probing attack fail. Of course it gave away some information, but it did not give away the vital information. That came from Future Guy. The conclusion is inevitable, the Xindi did not make a mistake. Earth was only saved by a miracle out of the future.

Archer being Future Guy would nicely explain that, as the onscreen explanation really is insufficient. Other actions of Future Guy would then be explained as Archer following the script because he wanted the payoff in saving Earth with the warning. (Plus consequences of changes in Archer's perspective on the Suliban after detention, etc.)

Carpenter Street did not establish any ability to send massive amounts of equipment such as the final weapon back in time. The spheres were being built in real time, otherwise they could have been replaced instantly by spheres built at leisure somewhen else.

The Japanese government had already begun efforts to negotiate a surrender. The insistence on unconditional surrender, coupled with the ruthless extermination of all Japanese, probably did far more to extend the war. But unlike the European theater unconditional surrender was not a necessity to maintain an alliance between powers sharing unequal burderns. (The USSR was the nation that defeated the Nazis, even if the rest were in at the kill.)

Israel's resort to force has provided it with ever increasing amounts of Palestinian land, which is why it refuses to quit relying on violence, force and the threat of force. The Palestinians as a whole have never received any concessions whatsoever when they have not resisted. Only a handful of collaborators have been rewarded for acting as Israel's police, against the majority. Morally equating the actions of oppressors and oppressed is obscene.

 

[Melakon]

You're calling the Japanese of WW2 the oppressed?