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11/27/2003: Enterprise: 3x10 Carpenter Street
I think it's one of the staples of Star Trek series to send (some of) the Enterprise crew back in time to the current present, though I'm not that confident with Star Trek canon. But I remember at least a TOS episode with them in the 60s preventing some nuclear missile launch, and then there was one of the movies (number four I think?) from the 80s where they went back to the 80s.
I'm not very fond of this kind of story, one reason is that somehow it intrudes into my fiction bubble that they usually go back to about the time when the episode was filmed, which may be really practical, but I don't see why the Xindi would choose 2004 to experiment on humans and not 1980 or 2014, or some period with lots of chaos.
For that matter, purely based on internal reasons of the fictional universe, I have no idea why the Xindi should choose the United States for their human experiments, when they could set up their little lab in plenty of places where it wouldn't bother anyone if a few dozen people vanished until they collected all human blood types without the help of some moron who only turns into a liability anyway. I mean, with their technology, why not set up their lab operation in a place with an ongoing genocide or civil war for example, who'd notice a few more or less people killed there? They wouldn't have to do all the complicated cloak and dagger stuff either, they could just abduct all the people of some villages or fighting units and kill them all afterwards, without anybody thinking twice about something that's simply another mass grave, should it ever be discovered. Even if they wanted to release their bio weapon in the US (though I think if I understood it right, they originally wanted to take the weapon back to the future with them), it would be more inconspicuous to develop it elsewhere, IMO. At least if I was an alien developing a bio weapon I wouldn't abduct people from an urban area in the US and do my experiments there.
Also, in the final scene when the desperate Xindi decides to release it, I don't see why he (or maybe she? who knows) waits so long before trying to throw it into the ventilation shaft. It's obviously just so that Archer can grab it dramatically at the last moment, but again from an internal perspective it doesn't make much sense. It's like in those fight scenes, when there are overwhelming odds, but the opponents for some reason decide to attack the hero in a very polite manner, one at a time, instead of making their numbers work for them.
I missed the rest of the crew, even though it was fun to see T'Pol and Archer deal with cars, ATM machines, fast food and such. And the last scene was funny when that guy who helped the Xindi talked about lizard people and was humored by the cops.
Overall I had fun watching the episode, despite the problems I have with this "time travel to the present" setup. I don't even try anymore to make the "time war" mytharc pieces we got so far fit. Like how, according to Daniels, the changes to the timeline haven't affected the future yet, and all that stuff.
