Storm Front

**** (4 stars out of 5)

As Winston Churchill put it so succinctly, there's no time to slow down, we've got to keep buggering on at freak-out speed. I think that was Churchill, anyway.

Captain Archer awakens in Nazi-Occupied New York state, 1944. Remans are colluding with Aryans to deliver tank-blasting plasma rifles and, soon, Joker toxin in the water supply. SNAFU, to coin a phrase.

Enterprise is here, too, their shuttle met with the standard hail... of bullets.

The Temporal Cold War got Hot, and here in the hottest pocket of all, Time-Spy Daniels got burned by paradox on the way to see Archer. Sections of his body are aging at different rates when he dies (again) with a dire warning on his ancient lips.

Alicia Masters.. uh, I mean, Travers lives in oppressed Brooklyn and conspires with Archer and half the cast of The Sopranos to resist the wave of homogenous Grey Supremacists. The in-fighting but diverse underdogs of America are mending ethnic fences to combat the evil alien threat, much as the Xindi did back in Season 3.

Silik of the Suliban rears his ugly head once more. Well, collapses his ugly head more than rears. Silik steals a shuttlepod, but he goes out of his way not to kill Tucker. (If Archer is crucial to Daniel's utopian future, Silik knows who to preserve when it comes to ratings!)

"Storm Front", and all of Star Trek Enterprise Season 4, was MINE, ALL MINE. No-one in my peer group was watching anymore, so I could stop caring whether it was clever, or good for me, and just be entertained by it again. It became my favorite season since All Good Things... 

The Killing Game, Part II

*** (3 stars out of 5)

It's Hirogen vs the Frankenstien's monster crew of historical re-enactment soldiers they created last episode. This will happen if you plaster up hundreds of holo-emitters in the halls. At least they don't have era-appropriate trench mouth.

The Hirogen doctor finally has enough of the EMH's bleeding heart and shuts him down. Human wounded will now be placed carefully in the trash.

Tom as "Lt. Davis" nearly shoots a suspiciously Asian Harry Kim without the right answer. The right answer is: Betty Grable has great gams. Thankfully, Harry knew this. I'm not sure I would have survived in his place. I don't know Betty Grable from Betty Boop. (I'm no good with sports questions, either, but with a blog like this one you've probably guessed that.)

In her right mind, Janeway forms an alliance with Chakotay's "Captain Miller" and Neelix's Drunk Klingon "K'Leenix". Holographic explosives work just fine on real corridors.

Young Hirogen Taranj is inspired by the strength and purity of a Holo-Nazi's speechifying. He guns down his Alpha superior and returns to the Most Dangerous Game with Janeway herself. She fakes him out with pretend cowardice and real fisticuffs. (Plus a gun. Kathy's no dope.)

After "heavy casualties" which seem to have happened offscreen again, the Hirogen leave with a trophy: Janeway gives their new Alpha some holodeck tech so he can whip holo-characters like uppity rent boys to his cold lizard heart's content. Morally questionable to sell a hypothetical holo-race into slavery? Who cares! We'll never see THEM again!

"The Killing Game, Part II" is a fannish run-around. But I'm a fan, so what the hell. My biggest question is: why not leave the holoemitters up? Handy as the Doctor is, wouldn't this be like giving him wheelchair ramps? Helpful, right? Plus... (and granted this might get confusing) why not program a complete copy of your crew to do all your work? Oh, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Killing Game

*** (3 stars out of 5)

What the what? Janeway's a Klingon? And stabbed? What can the Hirogen be playing at?

They really are playing. They captured the Voyager, and true to form, they cut the geeks up for fish bait. Everyone's dead and the series is over.

No? No. Instead, their too-clever leader must have seen the movie 'Dark City' and decided to do that instead. He's rigged the crew up with neural interfaces so they all believe themselves to be holodeck characters. Their Nerd Slave Harry Kim has been tasked to expand the holodecks. He's wallpapered the whole ship in holo-emitters from the spring collection, as you do. Now they'll be killing: not for real-real, but for play-play.

They've been at this for weeks. At least one crewer has died, despite the Doctor's non-stop efforts to keep everyone alive in this Hirogen blender.

Why, you ask? "Species that don't change... die," the commander insists. He wants to re-build Hirogen civilization before they spread themselves too thin and die out. Play Nintendo Duck Hunt instead of Hunt Actual Ducks. His men would rather shout the Hirogen equivalent of 'yee-haw' and splatter all the guts, but what are you gonna do.

So they hang out with brain-hijacked Janeway as Rick from 'Casablanca' in a French Night Club in September 1944, taking pot-shots at Neelix while he peddles around on his baguette bicyclette. It is both absurd and horrible. Absorrible!

The Doctor and Harry manage to re-set Mademoiselle Sept de Neuf back to Seven of Nine. Apparently she never assimilated a chanteuse, because she immediately forgets how to sing. Can she succeed against a box of action figures like 'Tommy-Gun Tuvok' and 'G.I. Maquis Joe'? The fire-fight in Sainte Claire blows a hole through the holodeck walls and angry brainwashed crew spill into the real ship.

"The Killing Game" is visually interesting, and does actually have a better SF premise than the previous Nazi alien outing "Patterns of Force". But it's also got more explosions than brains. So turn off the brains and enjoy the pretty explosions.

Patterns of Force

* (1 star out of 5)

All these Nazi costumes hanging empty in the Props Department- seems like a shame to waste them...

What luck! Here's a Nazi Planet!

Kirk's old academy history instructor, Professor John Gill, hasn't reported in from his studies of planet Ekos. And the Ekosians suddenly have thermonuclear missiles. Coincidence?

The warlike Ekosians were technologically primitive, while their peaceful neighbours on planet Zeon have interplanetary ships. Now the Ekosians have adopted Nazi culture, declared John Gill the Fuhrer, and are dealing death to Zeon pigs. (For story purposes, don't ask why the Zeons didn't just take their ships back to Zeon.)

If dressing up as Mobsters was funny, dressing up as Nazis should be a RIOT!

Kirk & Spock are instantly captured and jailed.

It's time for shirtlessness and whipping again. Gotta have something for the ladies.

Thanks to Voltaire for summing up the plot of this episode in his song "U.S.S. Make Shit Up": "We met a nasty Nazi alien who locked our asses up. We used a hunk of crystal and a metal piece of bed, and made a laser phaser gun and shot him in the head."

Ekosians love Nazi culture so much, they changed their own name for themselves, but they write in English on their Fire Doors? I sense the genius of the Red Skull behind this!

The Zeons are named Abrom, Isak, & Davod. If no Earther was messing with planet Zeon, how come they're so Jewish already? Spock (despite Miri's Earth & others) states the Ekosians being Nazi parallels was IMPOSSIBLE. But nobody wonders what's up with Zion, uh, Zeon.

Ask the Enterprise computer for a 1944 Gestapo Doctor Colonel uniform and no problem, away you go. Ask what the flipping flying frak John Gill was thinking and all I hear is the wind...

Granted, Deputy Fuhrer Melakon seized power, drugged Gill, and corrupted the 'Nazi Efficiency Without Nazi Sadism' Plan. But even for a fictional character, John Gill must be the dumbest history professor in Starfleet history. Why did he interfere at all? Why give them nukes? Why does dressing as Nazis make them more efficient? Maybe the biggest question of all: why would he want to make violent aliens MORE efficient?

Kirk's closing statements seem to include the notion that 'The Leader Principle' is innately bad. I... but... huh? Doesn't Kirk know he's a leader? Don't go looking for answers in "Patterns of Force".