By O. Deus / 02:22, 11 October 2004 / ENTERPRISE Reviews

Synopsis: Enterprise and Archer find themselves back in time during WW2 as the Nazis overrun America's east coast and a new alien race is changing Earth's history.

Review: ENTERPRISE's Season 2 closed with an alien race carrying out a devastating attack on Earth with Season 3 dedicated to unraveling the nature of the attack, the agendas of the aliens behind it and dealing with the threat. Similarly ENTERPRISE's Season 3 closed with an alien race carrying out a devastating attack on Earth and Season 4 begins with an episode in which Enterprise begins trying to unravel what is going on while being given an assignment to stop those responsible. The key difference though of course is that where the attack on Earth in Season 2 that killed Seven million people was an actual physical attack with devastating consequences that could not be undone regardless of what the Enterprise crew would do, this latest attack on Earth is a temporal attack which has no physical consequences that cannot be undone. Daniels even assures them that if they do their jobs, the war will never have happened.







This undercuts the crisis from the start and transforms the attack and the events we are experiencing into a kind of holodeck where time travel allows the crew to play out and us to experience something like VOYAGER's Killing Game, which also featured a STAR TREK crew contending against Nazis led by gruesome aliens in Nazi uniforms. At times Storm Front captures the onrushing flow of bizarre contrasts that made Killing Game so entertaining like the Enterprise being attacked by American WW2 fighter planes or Vosk displaying grainy black and white footage of aliens weapons to a Nazi General or the White House covered in red Nazi flags. Mostly though Storm Front seems to continue ENTERPRISE's transformation from an exploration based series to an adventure action sci-fi series in the vein of Stargate SG1. A holodeck style format in which things go wrong with time for the Enterprise crew to repair before pushing the reset button and returning back to their own future with no impact on the world at large is ideal for such a format.







That is not to say that Storm Front isn't entertaining, indeed it often is though as with the season finale it increasingly moves over the weight of the material to Archer actually confronting the aliens in the thick of the crisis while much of the Enterprise crew stay on or around the ship and do foolish things such as running around in the middle of a war zone to blow up a shuttlecraft they could easily blow up from orbit or surrendering to troops with primitive weapons without stunning them all. New York overrun by Nazis might have made for a more devastating sight if New York didn't look like the same Paramount Hollywood back lot that feels about as authentic as California landscapes resemble alien planets and if Nazi Germany's evil had more moral weight.







It has become conventional, particularly on STAR TREK, to use Nazi Germany as shorthand for villains but the Germans in question were not Vampires or Werewolves or evil aliens. They were evil people who committed horrific atrocities for reasons that need to be examined or at the very least their crimes need to be elaborated rather than simply using them as cartoonish background and using Nazi symbols and uniforms as symbolic shorthand for 'bad guys' cheapens the impact of WW2 and the Holocaust as well as rendering the material meaningless precisely because they've been so overused. It's ironic that Killing Game with its holographic Nazis still had a Nazi character who had contrasts and a character arc while Storm Front reduces the Nazis to racist bullies of interracial couples who ban black music. Only in Vosk's scene at the Nazified White House when he discusses using biological weapons to wipe out entire races do we get a sense of the vast evil at work behind the now familiar swasti kas and German accents. But that is not nearly enough.







Storm Front presents what is essentially a holodeck crisis and that has to be outweighed by a real ongoing threat that cannot be 'reset buttoned' from the aliens and by making the change to earth's history as devastating or even more devastating than the Xindi's attack at the end of Season 2 but Storm Front is more inclined to take refuge in cutesy local color and gags which are entertaining particularly in scenes with the loan sharks turned resistance fighters but falls flat in extended scenes with Alicia who just isn't particularly interesting a character. Little things like an offhand reference to Nazi concentration camps in upstate New York might have helped to make Storm Front's Nazis and by extension the episode itself more than cartoonish. Hopefully that will be remedied in Storm Front Part II.







The problem is that Part I of Storm Front lacks either the devastating impact of The Expanse on the crew and humanity and Enterprise's mission but it also lacks the sustained humor and flow of bizarre scenes that sustained the Killing Game, an episode which by the way also looked far better than Storm Front does. STAR TREK has traditionally always been about asking the bigger questions. The Expanse asked them, Storm Front does not. It's a mildly entertaining outing with some cartoonish Nazis and some cartoonish New Yorkers too and the Enterprise crew blundering up around in orbit but Enterprise can do better and needs to do better if it's going to survive in a poor time slot and threatened with cancellation. And Manny Coto, who wrote this episode, and Allan Kroeker can certainly do better and have usually done much better in the past. Hopefully they will also do better in the future.







Next week: Storm Front part II, and here we thought hurricane season was over.

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