You know, you could always choose to not watch it.
The show never clicked with me; I could not force myself to become interested in the characters.
My older daughter (Thing 1) watches it religiously and actually cares. YMMV
(These kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. Why, back when I was your age we had to walk five miles to watch reruns of the Original Series, on WPIX channel 11, at midnight, in the snow, uphill both ways. Nowadays the’ve got DVDs of seven hundred hours of five different series, and movies, with director’s comments and deleted scenes. We had to go to Conventions to see Blooper Reels, now they run them on demand. These new Trekkies are getting SOFT I tell you, probably never even sewed their own tribbles… )
You know, when I watched the TOS in reruns the local station clipped them a bit to add more commercials. One of the things that always got clipped was the title.
I never knew the episodes had titles till much later. I always had titles like the friends shows.
The one where Kirk and Spock become mobsters
The one with the big cloud
The one with the giant cucumber
The one with the tribbles
Then later I meet fellow Trekkies and they all know the real titles and although I know what I saw I have this inferority complex amongst trekkies. The littlest geek.
I saw a commercial last night for the DVD release of Voyager season 2. There was a line something like “20 hours of entertainment!” and all I could think was “but there are more than 20 episodes in a season.”
(Insert witty joke about unfavorable ratio of “minutes of entertainment” to “minutes of screentime” per Voyager episode here)
In my more rabid Trek fan days, I found that if I cut out commercials while taping, the episodes were about 47 minutes long and I could get 8 on a 6 hour tape if I cut the credits. Ergo, 24 episodes would run not quite 19 hours. Unless I’m forgetting the number of episodes per season, or they’re tacking on blooper reels or behind-the-scenes videos, they’re exaggerating by claiming 20 hours.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, Enterprise is the first Star Trek series I’ve embraced in ever so long. It’s a long story, but for years I could not bring myself to get too involved with ST. Strange story, but basically during the first season of ST-TNG, Something Bad Happened in my life, and for about a year I was really depressed. I was also watching TNG. After I got over the Bad Thing, I couldn’t watch ST-TNG—I associated it with the Bad Thing. And all the following series, well, I’d watch them a little, but I still just didn’t have it in me to really follow them for long because subconsciously I associated them with Bad Thing.
And now, finally, after so many years, I’ve finally gotten over it (about time!). Just a fwe months ago I started watching Enterprise with great zeal. It’s been great.
I am aware that it’s probably not the best of the Star Trek series, but dammit, I’m finally back in the Star Trek saddle and I’m pleased about it. I was going to be mighty upset if they pulled the rug out from underneath me and cancelled the damned thing.
So I’m really looking forward to what they do next year with the show! YAY!!!
It’s not my favorite Trek, but I like it a bit more then TNG or Voyager. I am disturbing by the huge screwing up of trek history and continity in certain episodes, but I do appreciate the fact they have a story arc that is somewhat interesting.
I like how John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox) approached the issue of cancellation/survival. He believed that the show would survive for no other reason than the makers need another season’s worth of episodes to make the show more valuable for syndication and recoup their investment. He wasn’t romanticizing the show or being overly optimistic because he didn’t want to face the idea of losing his job – he was just being pragmatic.