#the ship i chose is a clipper ship for context

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in other news,,

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A list of all the historical images in that scene in Enterprise: Storm Front Pt 2

WHAT IS THE THESIS OF THIS COLLECTION I’ve lost sleep over this

Source video at ¼ speed:

So I went frame by frame on that scene in ENT s4e02 where Archer and Daniels are chatting and the timeline is “resetting itself” and this is every image they chose to represent Earth’s approximately 4.5 billion years of history, in order of appearance:

A fish

Lightning

A dividing cell

A dinosaur

A volcano

A cliff face

A cave painting of a horse

Stonehenge

A human fashioning some kind of tool

The pyramids

People carrying spears

Easter Island heads

Someone riding in a chariot

Egyptian art

A DIFFERENT guy riding in a chariot

Capitoline Wolf (the Romulus and Remus statue)

A couple cloaked guys riding horses

A knight jousting on a horse (like seriously you can stop with the horses we get it)

Some people with torches

The Vitruvian Man

A guy with a funny hat and a cross I *think* is Martin Luther

Some Pilgrims

Some kind of clipper ship

A 1800s guy with a quill and idk my heart tells me this is supposed to be Frederick Douglass

A guy at a piano (Beethoven??)

A battlefield I think? Maybe Napoleonic?

Some Black people in 1700s dress? I got nothin on this one

Washington crossing the Delaware

Betsy Ross (assumedly) sewing the goshdang American flag. The first-ever woman. Accurate

Buffalo

Teepees

People in a canoe. I’ve decided all I’m gonna say about these last three is “oof”

A ballroom dance (possibly antebellum)

Lincoln signing something (I assume the Emancipation Proclamation)

Confederate soldiers with a canon

Thomas Edison

An old oil well (like one of the triangular ones)

A train

A Model T car

The Wright brothers’ plane

Teddy Roosevelt

Lenin giving a speech

Woodrow Wilson (?) with troops

Trench warfare

A WWII plane

Winston Churchill

Hitler

FDR

Paratroopers

An atomic bomb

The KKK

A larger military-looking plane

A man watching a TV

JFK and Jackie

A guy with a rifle (Vietnam?)

A civil rights protest sign

The moon landing

An Apollo rocket

A guy at some kind of computer or typewriter

Nixon

From context I want to say Mao but it’s just the back of his head

A peace protest

Jimmy Carter being sworn in

A more modern military jet (first with the horses, now with the planes)

Ruhollah Khomeini / the Iranian hostage crisis (that took a little Wikipedia-ing)

George H. W. Bush being sworn in

A nuclear reactor

Margaret Thatcher

A space shuttle

Tiananmen Square

George H. W. Bush shaking hands with Gorbachev. This one took me an embarrassingly long time because I’d convinced myself a red flag with a hint of yellow at the corner had to be Chinese

Some kind of space or sea exploration coded device? I’m going to call this the Hubble Space Telescope so I can stop googling

Military looking guy? Iran-contra is all I can think of but it’s not Oliver North

Saddam Hussein

Someone with a laptop

Someone putting a CD into a drive

The Clintons

Some kind of space shuttle or boat? This one might be fictional not sure

A guy waving his arm around? This one’s driving me nuts. I’m not even sure if it’s a kid or an adult. Am I supposed to recognize this?? I’m gonna call it the fall of the Berlin wall even though that’s not in the right chronological order

Best guess is George Bush and Tony Blair

9/11. 9 freaking 11. The mad lads put that in there in the year of our Lord 2004.

A Middle Eastern looking guy with a gun

A weird lookin car – I assume it’s electric or something

The ISS

A Mars rover (or some kind of drone thing)

A CGI cityscape

ANOTHER CGI cityscape

The Enterprise at spacedock

The small Xindi weapon destroying Florida

Archer running through the exploding Xindi weapon

The Xindi weapon blowing up

And there ya have it folks that’s the timeline

Like. I don’t even know where to start. This is amazing. I want to meet the summer intern who took a high school world history course and then made this.

For those keeping score that’s three women outside of crowd shots; love that for them. That’s the same number of images of guys named George Bush in this thing. I can’t even begin to question why the TEMPORAL COLD WAR RESET is so Earth centric when it’s spending all its time being AMERICA centric, except for yadda-yaddaing over everything that happened after 2004 – which includes warp drive and at least ONE world war, right? I guess I could believe that this is Archer’s splice cut of the History of the Universe which would honestly explain a lot about him. But WHY DOES THE FISH COME BEFORE MULTICELLULAR LIFE

Apologies if someone already did this but I personally needed to know