Was "Shadow Guy" ever revealed?
- Thread starter Starfleet Engineer
- Start date
They should never have done time-travel on this show. Not in the way they did it, with Daniels, characters walking through a door and suddenly realising they were in a devastated 31st Century or 2004 Detroit etc. Particularly since Scott Bakula was the lead, and already well-known for Quantum Leap, which had an unconventional means of getting to the past. Unconventional, by which I mean no obvious transportation or vehicle to go there.
Although I quite like the idea of factions trying to undermine history. Like Future Guy communicating between the centuries, passing information and conducting a cold or proxy war, without any actual ability to go there. They could've carried that on, since the Xindi were prompted to attack Earth by one faction. The Romulans could've had their own Temporal Cold War ally... and the same with the Klingons. The Tholians must've done, because they were quick on the scene when an experimental pod and its dead occupant showed up in "Future Tense".
And then by the close of Enterprise, you flip the concept and have an episode set in those future times. We finally get to see who the shadowy humanoid forms are, and understand their reasons for playing a temporal game of chess with Archer's Enterprise and native species they encounter used as their pieces on a board.
There are loads of ways it could've gone down better. I suppose those wasted opportunities are ultimately all we have left.
Although I quite like the idea of factions trying to undermine history. Like Future Guy communicating between the centuries, passing information and conducting a cold or proxy war, without any actual ability to go there. They could've carried that on, since the Xindi were prompted to attack Earth by one faction. The Romulans could've had their own Temporal Cold War ally... and the same with the Klingons. The Tholians must've done, because they were quick on the scene when an experimental pod and its dead occupant showed up in "Future Tense".
And then by the close of Enterprise, you flip the concept and have an episode set in those future times. We finally get to see who the shadowy humanoid forms are, and understand their reasons for playing a temporal game of chess with Archer's Enterprise and native species they encounter used as their pieces on a board.
There are loads of ways it could've gone down better. I suppose those wasted opportunities are ultimately all we have left.
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If "Shadow" was actually Archer, then something catastrophic had happened to his existence where he was compelled to communicate through time to prevent it. As I've mentioned before, In canon terms - from TOS through TNG, its spinoffs and films, there's no mention of the NX-01 existing. Its as if their history was wiped out of the space time continuum.
Quantum Leap did say (but didn't real show) that Sam's leaps through time were the result of a large project and involved a technological device.
It really was a interesting concept, too bad the producers and writers screwed it up.
If it had been properly pre-planned (see: 12 Monkeys movie) it could have been epic. For example, in "Cold Front" it's implied the NX-01 was fated to be destroyed and them surviving is a corruption, but later Archer is the hero who HAS to be around to found the Federation. Hmmm.
Riker and Troi, of course!
This is what really annoyed me, they threw things like that out there but then they never follow up on it. They clearly didn't know what they were doing. That's one thing I like about Discovery, they do go back and explain things.
It's as if the writers of Star Trek thought up the idea of a PREQUEL after TNG/VOY/DS9 went off the air!!!!
Yeah, as a in-universe explaination that doesn't work.
"retcon"
The ironic thing is, as stupid as it sounds to have Archer be FG, it's really the only option that would have been satisfying. (Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I firmly believe that during the production of ENT, B&B had no idea who FG was, and the idea that he was Archer only came years after the fact.) Because, who would care if FG was some future Romulan, or anyone else that the audience would have no connection with? The only issue now is that we'd have to figure out what FutureArcher's motivation was, and just how far into the future he's from.
I like the "Legends of Tomorrow" way of doing things (Vixen, in particular) where a character can have an entire career of adventures in time, and still end up right back in their old life without skipping a beat to keep the timeline proper. Archer somehow became a major player in the Temporal Cold War after the events of the series, obviously.
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