(ST Ent) Why so much hate for the Temporal Cold War?

[Thebestoftherest]

I think time travel works in star trek as a one off episode not a major arc, or if you want time travel to be such a big deal just have it be a show about time travelers in the trek uniuverse

[CharlesPhipps]

I think part of the problem is that the show is suppose to be about teh first ship to carry the name enterprise and time travel doesn't really belong there.

I mean we know that ship already will always be the one in the Sixties and the NX-01 is retconned in.

So, why not have a story about time travel? Can we save Star Trek's future from being retconned!

If I was doing it, I would have leaned into it hard:

ALTERNATE EPISODE 1x10

Archer: You have no right to mess with our lives, Daniels! We were meant to be out here!

Daniels: No...you weren't.

Archer: What?

Daniels: Jonathan Archer, you were never meant to be a starship captain. In the timeline as it was meant to be, Earth cancelled the Warp 4 project and started from scratch. When the U.S.S Constitution launched, it was almost ten years later using an engine you designed as a warp engineer who never left Earth. Hoshi is a professor. Malcolm became a freighter captain. Trip? Well, Trip actually does go into space but is already married and has a wife as well as kids back on Earth. All of this ship and its adventures are anomalies. Ones we're struggling to prevent from destroying our future.

Archer: That's...not possible.

Daniels: The question is whether stopping you will make things better...or worse.

[Nealithi]

In many ways they had to assassinate other species to fit the shifts. I was not as against Archer when it came to the Vulcans. The Vulcans came off as overlords or bad parents and teachers. There is no word on the Vulcans actually helping humanity cleanup after the war. To pick humanity up. They were there. Okay so they stood there in the doorway while we cleaned our rooms? They were not educating on how and why with warp drive. They just said 'no do it again'. I had that in education, you don't learn anything but to hate the supposed teacher. Nothing explained, just wrong do it again. Heck even T'Pol's job on the Enterprise was a backhanded punch to Spock's role. Spock was the head of sciences. He gathered the information, did scans and analysis and looked items up in the library computer. T'pol? She reads the vulcan database because it has a humans keep out tag on it. What?
All this I think is because they rushed things to shoe horn in the temporal cold war.

Try again ;P

So in all of Trek prior to Enterprise you found One vulcan that felt superior to humans openly. Sorry that does not invalidate that the way T'pol was used as a badly redone Spock. Nor that they do not show in Enterprise that the vulcans did anything other than look at humanity like they were better than something they needed to wipe off the bottom of their shoe.

Please note other vulcans we have seen. Saavik, Sarek, and the one from DS9 that bought weapons for the maquis. Saavik did not assume superiority. Oh she was not perfect, she did an academy senior proud. Head full of rules and certain what she was taught made her ready to handle anything. That is what those schools teach. Not now you have the basics.
The one from DS9? She tried to follow logic. But as I see logic there is not a single answer. Answers change depending on how many variables are used. That is why Quark using economic theory really could work to alter her perspective on the problem.
Sarek did not seem to ever disdain Kirk and crew. He did not understand his son's commitments to them. He also did not stand over other species as a whole. He represented the accused and I liked his jabs at the klingon ambassador. When the whale probe came he went to the president to offer what aid he could. The best he had was understanding. "It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question."

Now compare that to Enterprise era vulcans.

[Nealithi]

I think part of the problem is that the show is suppose to be about teh first ship to carry the name enterprise and time travel doesn't really belong there.

I mean we know that ship already will always be the one in the Sixties and the NX-01 is retconned in.

So, why not have a story about time travel? Can we save Star Trek's future from being retconned!

If I was doing it, I would have leaned into it hard:

ALTERNATE EPISODE 1x10

Archer: You have no right to mess with our lives, Daniels! We were meant to be out here!

Daniels: No...you weren't.

Archer: What?

Daniels: Jonathan Archer, you were never meant to be a starship captain. In the timeline as it was meant to be, Earth cancelled the Warp 4 project and started from scratch. When the U.S.S Constitution launched, it was almost ten years later using an engine you designed as a warp engineer who never left Earth. Hoshi is a professor. Malcolm became a freighter captain. Trip? Well, Trip actually does go into space but is already married and has a wife as well as kids back on Earth. All of this ship and its adventures are anomalies. Ones we're struggling to prevent from destroying our future.

Archer: That's...not possible.

Daniels: The question is whether stopping you will make things better...or worse.

Your version and Chuck's both have merit. Oddly Chuck's idea seems to be what they did for Discovery. The ship that never was.

But I want to ask, is this original or in retrospect? Let me explain. My parents and I like to discuss history. WW2 often as my father is an amateur historian of it. One thing my mother always does is say what should have been done here or there because of how bad things like Auschwitz were. My father, and I agree with him on this, always asks 'what did you know. And when did you know it.'
Hindsight is 20/20 after all. I can think of ways Enterprise would be potentially more entertaining that it came out. But that is me looking at the mistakes. Look at it from the period in perspective. We have a mandate to put out a new Star Trek show. But the magic science is handwaving stories away. Go lower tech so they need to out think or out fight more problems. We don't want to be in TOS, so lets go before. Prequels work. So you work on writing scripts. Then this time travel thing is dropped and they turn it into a cold war scenario. How much plotting do you actually have?
I don't think anyone even considered why are we inserting a new Enterprise in the timeline and how to justify it. It just is, explain too much and people will get lost.

Okay rambling. Please answer if you can find the question in my writing.

[TGLS]

We have a mandate to put out a new Star Trek show. But the magic science is handwaving stories away. Go lower tech so they need to out think or out fight more problems.

How many problems were actually just "Job Done" by magic science? I mean, there's a lot of, "Harry was dead, but then he got better with the bullshit bullshit". But that isn't really "Job Done". Guns still kill often enough (Notwithstanding 90s TV Action Violence). The tractor beam doesn't work when that would be too easy. I mean, apart from the transporter, there's no or very little: "This tech ruins stories." And the Transporter is practically synonymous with Star Trek.

Then this time travel thing is dropped and they turn it into a cold war scenario. How much plotting do you actually have?

I'm not sure how accurate the "TCW was created by the execs" story is. From Memory Alpha:

According to Brannon Braga, the Temporal Cold War arc was created at the request of the studio, which wanted something more "futuristic."

This comes off as, "we don't like your idea of something really close to Modern Earth in Star Trek. We think viewers will tune out if it isn't really futuristic like Voyager was." Or in other words, "We hate your past Trek idea."

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

In many ways they had to assassinate other species to fit the shifts. I was not as against Archer when it came to the Vulcans. The Vulcans came off as overlords or bad parents and teachers. There is no word on the Vulcans actually helping humanity cleanup after the war. To pick humanity up. They were there. Okay so they stood there in the doorway while we cleaned our rooms? They were not educating on how and why with warp drive. They just said 'no do it again'. I had that in education, you don't learn anything but to hate the supposed teacher. Nothing explained, just wrong do it again. Heck even T'Pol's job on the Enterprise was a backhanded punch to Spock's role. Spock was the head of sciences. He gathered the information, did scans and analysis and looked items up in the library computer. T'pol? She reads the vulcan database because it has a humans keep out tag on it. What?
All this I think is because they rushed things to shoe horn in the temporal cold war.

Try again ;P

So in all of Trek prior to Enterprise you found One vulcan that felt superior to humans openly. Sorry that does not invalidate that the way T'pol was used as a badly redone Spock. Nor that they do not show in Enterprise that the vulcans did anything other than look at humanity like they were better than something they needed to wipe off the bottom of their shoe.

Please note other vulcans we have seen. Saavik, Sarek, and the one from DS9 that bought weapons for the maquis. Saavik did not assume superiority. Oh she was not perfect, she did an academy senior proud. Head full of rules and certain what she was taught made her ready to handle anything. That is what those schools teach. Not now you have the basics.
The one from DS9? She tried to follow logic. But as I see logic there is not a single answer. Answers change depending on how many variables are used. That is why Quark using economic theory really could work to alter her perspective on the problem.
Sarek did not seem to ever disdain Kirk and crew. He did not understand his son's commitments to them. He also did not stand over other species as a whole. He represented the accused and I liked his jabs at the klingon ambassador. When the whale probe came he went to the president to offer what aid he could. The best he had was understanding. "It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question."

Now compare that to Enterprise era vulcans.

There's a big problem with your breakdown in that these are individuals and not a collective species. Vulcan politics and how they dealt with teaching the humans warp drive isn't indicative of any personalities we see, including t'pol.

Enterprise shows us a proto union of Vulcans and Humans compared to what we later see in the TOS movies and TNG era on. From the original show, we know that Spock is quite the anomaly in that he is the first Vulcan/Human and that he is the first Vulcan officer in Starfleet, and those facets were held up in later embellishments of the Vulcan culture.

Naturally I think for First Contact the movie, they echoed what human-centric starfleet did in First Contact the episode, just with Vulcans having observed us instead of Starfleet which is a joint operation. This creates a logical/political conundrum of what happened between Vulcans and Humans that the story needs to be held accountable for.

We know that the Vulcans and Romulans were warp capable long before Earth, so we have a logical conundrum that has to put all these pieces together to explain the political complications that come in developing warp drive.

[CrypticMirror]

I think part of the problem is that the show is suppose to be about teh first ship to carry the name enterprise and time travel doesn't really belong there.

It felt that with the TCW the Enterprise were the guest stars in someone else's show. Only we never got to see that show! Archer and co. were someone else's wacky little side adventure in this. And that just didn't work.

[Beastro]

Sarek did not seem to ever disdain Kirk and crew. He did not understand his son's commitments to them. He also did not stand over other species as a whole. He represented the accused and I liked his jabs at the klingon ambassador. When the whale probe came he went to the president to offer what aid he could. The best he had was understanding. "It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question."

You can't use him as an example. The dude had a human wife.

That alone belies a soft spot for them, but even if he wasn't willing to admit it, having a spouse like that can't help but give you their perspective. He can't help but understand humans better than most Vulcans and it's probably what contributed to him being a good ambassador as he applied it to aliens in general.

Spock is worse at it and part of his charm is him trying to act purely Vulcan while letting slip here and their the deeper understanding of humanity within him.

[CharlesPhipps]

Actually, TOS is very clear the Vulcans are racist as fuck against humans and Sarek is uniquely humanophiliac in a literal sense. Part of Spock's journey, even without the movies, is the fact he became an incredibly popular and honored Vulcan by out-Vulcaning all the other Vulcans.

He just realized at the end of his life he didn't have to.

The problem is that Archer is being just as racist BACK at the Vulcans and it makes him look like an asshole.

Which he is.

[CrypticMirror]

Actually, TOS is very clear the Vulcans are racist as fuck against humans

Is it? We don't get a lot of Vulcans in TOS outside of Babel and Amok Time, and certainly in the latter they are pretty courteous. Especially given the crew is wading into something so taboo that Vulcans barely even talk about among themselves. T'Pau goes out of her way at least twice to bail Kirk out, in the fight and in squaring things with Starfleet. Neither that she really needs to do. She does it out of fairness. Even in the movies we really only see them at the end of III and the start of IV, and neither time are they rude and certainly by the start of IV we see that Vulcan has been spending a bit of political capital in keeping Kirk and co. safe.