ent s1 e26 shockwave pt. 1

GOOD EPISODE!! i'm gonna put part two on shortly but i wanted to post my thoughts before i forgot them. i'd been putting off watching it, being the season finale i wanted to wait until i was in a better mood but that didn't come so i decided i'd do it anyway. boy am i glad i did!

first of all i'm very glad to see the temporal cold war plotline in full focus, i'd been getting kind of irritated that it just faded into the background after being introduced. i like that it started with excitement to meet new people, like the atmosphere present throughout the season, then BOOM! you've just killed 3600 people! and reconciling that completely knocks archer down. i loved the scene of t'pol convincing him to keep fighting for his ship and his mission. the relationship built between them over the show to the point is very interesting. t'pol's speech sounded harsh "is this what humans call 'feeling sorry for yourself?'" but you can tell she does actually care and is willing to take his side, no matter what it takes. reminds me of shadows of p'jem, when t'pol was resigned to being recalled to vulcan and taking blame for the discovery of the surveillance program but archer tried to get her to stand up for herself and her position.

i liked the surrealism of archer's time travel. no fancy effects or lights, he just appears somewhere else, sometime else with no idea where or why. i also really liked the set design of the sulaban ship, even if we didn't see it for very long. very early '00s scifi. that whole part with archer just directing everyone with information that he, by all accounts, should not know, the ambush on the ship to get the data discs with perfect, silent execution and lots of phaser fire. that was sick. also neat to see daniels again with his mysterious future stuff.

the ending was sick as hell. daniels completely losing his level headed confidence after losing his advantage in temporal knowledge. "we can't send you back, our equipment isn't here anymore" surrounded by the rubble of what used to be 31st century earth. what an awesome final scene

(on a somewhat unrelated note, seeing that daniels comes from the 31st century makes the thing with discovery's time travel make a lot more sense. the temporal war mentioned in s3 is, for sure, the same event being covered here discovery traveling to the 32nd century seemed arbitrary without this context, it explains why the time travel was outlawed in that specific era. i appreciate discovery more for attention to detail of the franchise's timeline and acknowledgement of a plotline from a show that almost everyone else either hasn't seen or hates.)