Star Trek: Enterprise — 2x16 — Future Tense

Aired 2003-02-19

SpaceOpera.com rating:7

Average reader rating:6.15

Synopsis

Enterprise finds a small craft adrift in space that contains what appears to be a human corpse, one the Suliban and the Tholians both try to retrieve.

Remarkable scenes

Trip and Reed discovering that the ship is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside... literally. :)
Reed: "This gives space exploration a whole new meaning!"
Phlox discovering that the dead pilot is actually a hybrid of several species, including human and Vulcan.
Archer: "If a human and a Vulcan did have a child, I wonder if he'd have pointed ears?"
The Tholians!
Trip and Reed getting stuck in a time loop.
Enterprise battling the Suliban.
The Tholians battling the Suliban.
Time repeating for Archer and Reed.
Archer regarding the Vulcan High Command: "I wonder if they'll believe that humans and Vulcans will be swapping chromosomes one day?" T'Pol: "They're more likely to believe in time travel."

Review

Ent: Future Tense is yet another Temporal Cold War episode which depicts conflict and action without much explanation. Reminds me a bit of Ent: Cold Front. This episode is quite a bit more successful though. The object of the plot itself was most original. The ship itself and the body inside were fascinating. The Temporal Cold War is further aggravated by the appearance of the Tholians. Despite my lack of appreciation of the Temporal Cold War in general, this was a really great use of the Tholians. TOS: The Tholian Web utterly failed to show us anything of significance when it introduced the Tholians. This episode is a continuity goldmine concerning them, and manages not to create any problems too! As exciting as the episode is, I'm only annoyed that we learn nothing new about the Temporal Cold War other than that the Tholians may be working for one of the factions and that they're opposed to the Suliban. So this episode ends up being a grand, albeit exciting, waste of time from a developmental standpoint.

6 reader comments

Not only does Enterprise now have phasers, but apparently they are capable of being fired at warp now too! Sloppy writing…
by Pete | 08/04/2010 at 2:07 am

Archer: The vulans? T'Pol: 600,000 km
(That means they are 2 seconds away at warp 1!)
10 seconds later, its 200,000 and Archer asks Travis to take them out of warp!
by Shamin Asaikar | 12/01/2012 at 4:29 am

a grand (and elaborate) "waste of time" is right… it would've been a better episode if it was just about the mysterious ship/corpse and didn't get into the temporal cold war stuff, because as kethinov mentions, it really didn't explain or progress a thing… in the end, the ship disappeared and everyone went home… a very annoying TV reset button…
by -_Name_- | 07/04/2013 at 5:30 pm

Did anyone else notice that the metal cover which connects the pod to "larger on the inside" part of the ship was covered in "TARDIS Blue" paint… a nod of the head to Dr. Who.
by bf | 11/17/2013 at 2:35 pm

These temporal cold war episodes remind me of when I used to watch X Files on TV back in high school. Amid the various monster of the week episodes ran a narrative thread about a conspiracy Mulder is unraveling concerning his sister, who he remembers being abducted by aliens when they were children. I thought of these episodes as "Smoking Man" episodes, and the temporal cold war reminds me of them: at first they seemed cool and intriguing, but as the show wore on they never lived up to their initial potential and I'd find myself wanting another monster of the week.
by Dstyle | 09/21/2015 at 7:12 pm

Pretty good episode, I would say! But… How did the Suliban get into the docking bay in the beginning?
by Hugo von Ahlenius | 01/08/2018 at 9:38 pm