Why did the Xindi test their weapon on earth (and not another planet)?

[Timo]

We know a single starship can destroy everything there's worth destroying on a planet, including its whole crust - if unopposed.

Any sort of opposition would call for either a more resilient attacker, or then a faster acting weapon. And the Xindi were able to do the second one.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[STEPhon IT]

OK, so you believe humanity will destroy your species in four hundred years or so, so you decide to wipe out humanity, in fact, literally blow up Earth.(a bit of overkill if you ask me, if a stealthy virus could have done the same job, but OK).

That's no trivial task, so you have to design and test in several phases. That's all understandable.

But why did they test one of their designs on earth itself? I mean, I can understand that you want to perform certain test in environments that are as much like the target environment as possible, but still ... did they hope humanity wouldn't notice or care? Did they hope humanity wouldn't be able to find out who did this to them in time? Why spoil their element of surprise in the first place, given how many inhabitable (but uninhabited) planets there seem to be they could have chosen for their test?

Something that significant was never mentioned on TOS, or TNG or DS9 or VOY and this series was supposed to be a prequel??? This event was so irresponsible by the showrunners because nothing could ever follow it; this would be as horrible as the Eugenics Wars. Setting the events on another planet... maybe Earth II (MIRI) could make the event plausible and something to remember, but because it's set on Earth I dismissed it as throwing shit on the wall storytelling and hoping it would stick. Not a fan of this shit but this crap might have worked if the narrative drew us to the Romulans were the masterminds and spawned the war which was prefaced in "Balance of Terror". But that would take doing some homework and researching which I believe should've been essential in creating a "SO-CALLED" prequel to Star Trek.

 

[Timo]

Something that significant was never mentioned on TOS, or TNG or DS9 or VOY and this series was supposed to be a prequel???

How is this unusual for Star Trek? We never heard of Klingons before we did. We never heard of Cardassians before we did. Technically, the heroes were at war with these guys for untold episodes without ever mentioning them!

"Significant" is relative. At the rate our heroes go through adventures, the significance of literally Earth-shattering events isn't likely to survive the roll of the century, or even the decade. Which is why Trek is a safe environment for doing prequels: there's no pressing need to carry a single plotline through the centuries and spinoffs, what with so much precedent against there being one.

(Not that any cop show today would bring up the Haymarket Affair, or even the 1960s anti-war riots, compared to which the policing stuff that does get discussed isn't particularly interesting or significant.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[STEPhon IT]

That event happened on ENT appeared to be a shattering sense of a circumstance and was never mentioned. As for the Klingons (TNG, "First Contact" and the Romulans (as mentioned before "Balance of Terror" there were episodes which addressed some historical context which for the characters who told it showed it was important based on the story told. For Star Trek those events survived, but maybe an attack on Earth that significant on ENT was not as eventful as it seemed to you and should be ignored... which I agree with because I don't see ENT as a prequel to TOS.

 

[dupersuper]

That event happened on ENT appeared to be a shattering sense of a circumstance and was never mentioned. As for the Klingons (TNG, "First Contact" and the Romulans (as mentioned before "Balance of Terror" there were episodes which addressed some historical context which for the characters who told it showed it was important based on the story told. For Star Trek those events survived, but maybe an attack on Earth that significant on ENT was not as eventful as it seemed to you and should be ignored... which I agree with because I don't see ENT as a prequel to TOS.

It was over a century before TOS. How often do you talk about WW1 in casual conversation?

 

[somebuddyX]

Future Guy was a dick.
He probably could have helped our heroes a lot more instead he seemed to play all sides.

Boo! I say Future Guy was the real hero here. Daniels wanted to let the Enterprise blow up in "Cold Front" and let these pioneers perish in the deep of space. FG sent Silk to save the ship, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap... will be the leap home.

 

[Timo]

That event happened on ENT appeared to be a shattering sense of a circumstance and was never mentioned.

Which is exactly what we would expect: "shattering sense of a circumstance" happens fairly frequently on screen and basically never gets a mention, suggesting it happens even more often off screen. Say, half the TOS movies featured the end of the world: V'Ger blasted its way to Earth, Genesis was unleashed, and the Whale Probe made weather go murderous. And then there was the very brink of the Big One with the Klingons.

Now, the first of those was a bit of a non-event to non-Starfleeters because Kirk saved the day after only a few hundred or thousand servicemen had died. The second was thwarted by Kirk, too, even though there were public political repercussions. But the third is likely to have killed millions of civilians, and affected the whole globe rather than just a bunch of people in Florida and Cuba. None of them get any sort of a mention, ever. Not even the 1-2-3 combo of them, which might be remembered if it were somehow exceptional. But these things never are - there's always another event to upstage them, and the earlier ones are not discussed even in the context of the newer ones. Not even within Starfleet, which might show professional interest towards V'Ger and its ilk.

Really, ENT adds nothing to this formula, other than this perhaps being a first. But we can't even be certain of that: if we want to speak precedent, the Kzinti supposedly hurt mankind some in the days preceding ENT, and nobody brings that up.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Well, really...Bakula should have been called “Captain” all through the series, with him looking in the mirror at Jeffrey Hunter, and leaping out