Enterprise-Carpenter Street spoilers

Cafe Society
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carnivorousplant, re: post 4284843 (BTW, how do I write a post reference URL?)[ul][li]Hookers should be prepared for John’s to jump them or at least be all grabby before the payment takes place. She’s on his territory. To not be prepared is stupid and she wouldn’t live long. (Oops, she might not have)[]Not a conversation about why Daniels couldn’t send Archer back to the ten minutes before the Xindi arrive so that they could shoot them. Etc.[]I don’t believe they have sophisticated replicators. Besides Archer told T’Pol to pick out something (okay, he could have meant from the catalogue). Besides, I don’t think a vegetarian would choose a leather coat.[]I think Archer drove at normal speeds, braked and maneuvered normally. Cite? Cervaise’s analysis that this was guerrilla filming on the cheap. :)[]I’ve heard stories of Americans renting cars in England only to take them back the same day because the traffic patterns drive them nuts. So Archer learns really fast? Must be the great^n-grandfather of the whiny calculus boy on TNG.[]When AB+ and B- were Loomis’ outstanding blood types, Archer said he was B-. I meant was it lucky that Loomis’ didn’t get a B- before. Else the whoooole plot would fail. :)[]As Xindi I would really want some monitors, even if they are medical, on my prisoners-whose-species-destroys-my-own.[*]But without those bars Archer would be stuck and the whooooole plot would fail. Good point by Cervaise about watching out for incidental fire and mucking up the timeline. DC-10 pilot, “All systems normal and, heh! We just lost our starboard engine…” (O’course, that’s just the kind of low-percentage chance that TV shows are famous for. Nothing so simple as explaining to the landlord why there’s a breeze in the flat because of a hole bored through the building.[/ul][/li]I too get suckered into the cuteness of seeing “our heroes” in “our world” and forget its just a way to film on the cheap. The plot holes are another matter. How about one where everybody keeps jumping back one hour or day as each plot fails? Meeting yourself and explaining the apparent creation of extra matter, etc.?

Wearia: However, if the Xindi are now capable of time travel, why not just take a piss in the evolutionary goo? Looks like they brought in an end that won’t easily be tied. They would say that some groups can only time-travel back X years, blah, blah, blah.

NoClueBoy: So, SFG doesn’t want Xindi to win either. Or does he? A ruse? Daniels said that the Xindi-on-Earth wasn’t in the normal time-line, and I think he said that all the Xindi stuff, especially destroying the Xindi, wasn’t in his time-line, so I think SFG is trying to create the conflict. This means that the end of the arc should have Archer & Co. fixing everything and Patrick Duffy appearing as the new Daniels with no memory of any of it. :frowning:

Cervaise Kolchak: The Night Stalker? I loved that series. :slight_smile: Considering the huge expense of sending people back in time, its hardly surprising they didn’t have any money left to go through a Grandy’s or a KFC.

Wearia Who is SFG anyway? Lor? Evil Picard? Bearded Spock? Intelligent Cloud of Methane? Why… don’t you know?! It’s Mayweather, Kirk’s great-great-great-grandfather! He’s pissed at being overlooked and is trying to go back and change the time-line!

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Cite? For a TV show?
You can’t be serious.
:slight_smile:

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Okay.

NoClueBoy = NoClue Boy = Naive Boy = Green Boy = Green Son-of-Man = Son of Green Man = Son of Tars Tarkas = Tarzan

And have you ever known Tarzan to Trip? or even inhale for that matter?

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The dark side of Starfleet Academy:

They grow Trip Blobs by the thousand in huge vats and feed the cloned brains to selected first-graders in order to transfer his “genetic knowledge” to the tykes, thereby permitting the leapfrogging of fifteen years of ordinary education. (The remaining body parts don’t go to waste, either; they’re shipped to the Klingon students’ mess hall.)

:wink:

Re the “filmed on the cheap” thing: I feel like should clarify my position somewhat. I don’t mind a stylistic departure, and I definitely think the Star Trek aesthetic could and should be shaken up a bit, to get them out of a creative rut. In these threads and elsewhere, over the last few months, I’ve suggested a couple of ideas for other shows in the same universe when Enterprise runs out of steam (e.g., a “Section 31” series, or a “post Starfleet empire” series), and both of them would be stylistically fairly different from what we’re used to.

And I don’t mind a cheap look for a show, if it comes out of the storytelling, and is based in artistic need. Look at that short-lived cop show Denis Leary did for a season or two, The Job, for example. Definitely a cheap show, with one handheld camera and lots of guerrilla filming on location. But it worked, because of the show’s rough-and-tumble, don’t-give-a-shit tone. I loved that series. A remake of Kolchak would benefit from a similar feel, too, I think; it would certainly set it apart from the slick and recognizable look of The X-Files, to which it would inevitably be compared (not without some irony, of course).

The only reason this approach bugged me in “Carpenter Street,” really, is that the priorities were clearly reversed. They didn’t make a stylistic departure because it benefited the story; it’s pretty clear (starting with the fact that the script comes straight from the pen of the Bermaga) that they began with the need to save some money. They didn’t say, “We’ve got this really cool story, and hey, it’ll be extra cool if we do it like this to set it apart from the rest of the series, and plus we’ll save a few dollars.” This is what made “City on the Edge of Forever” so neat; they start with a fabulous story, and the fact that they can shoot it on the backlot with cars and costumes from studio storage, and very few visual effects, is a bonus.

(The other way to save money is to do what Trek producers call a “bottle show,” which means it takes place entirely on the ship, using existing sets and few if any guest stars. Moreover, if you read the credits faithfully, as I do, you start to notice that, beginning with TNG, most of the outsider-written stories, including spec scripts they picked out of the slush pile, are bottle shows, because there’s a lot less risk in developing a new contributor’s material if it isn’t going to cost a lot. The pricey stuff is largely developed in-house because the creators are a known quantity; outsider teleplays that look expensive don’t often make it past a first reading. Seriously, look for it; you’ll be amazed at how often bottle shows pop up in between pricier outings.)

So with respect to “Carpenter Street,” I’m convinced they started with the need to tell a low-budget story, and worked from there: “Where can we save some bucks? Sets are expensive. Okay, how do we not build sets? We can shoot in an open field. No, location shooting in nature is spendy. Well, there’s an abandoned warehouse fifteen minutes from here. How about a time-travel story to the present? Okay, but we’ll have to close a bunch of streets and stuff. No, let’s just shoot it handheld on the sly. Now, where else can we save money? Let’s keep the guest cast to a minimum: one featured player, one supporting player, and a couple of walk-ons. All right, good. Now, what’s the story about? Uh…”

And by the way, note also that half the regular cast — Phlox, Sato, Reed, and, though this is hardly unusual, Mayweather — doesn’t even show up. Unless I missed something, all we see are Archer, Tucker, and T’Pol, plus Daniels. The cast gets their regular pay, but you don’t have to have them show up for makeup, costume, meals, or anything else. In addition, T’Pol’s outfit has her ears covered, ostensibly because she’s “in disguise,” but really because that represents additional savings. The more I think about it, the more I see cheap, cheap, cheap as being the motivation for the show.

Now, I suppose it’s possible they were pinching pennies here in order to make up for what were obviously very expensive episodes earlier. Consider “Impulse” (the zombie Vulcan show) as an example: It features lots of visual effects (the asteroid field, a big ship exploding, a shuttle landing on a 'roid, etc.), a number of new sets that had to be built for the Vulcan ship, several supporting guest cast to play all the zombies, lots of action scenes (fighting the zombies, jumping over the chasm at the end, etc.) which are complicated and expensive to produce and shoot, and so on. “Extinction” (where Archer, Reed, and Sato turn into monkey people), “Rajiin” (the spy seductress), “The Shipment” (infiltrating the Xindi bioweapon lab and getting Sloth Boy to go turncoat), and “Twilight” (Archer becomes Leonard Shelby in a quest for a Reset Button) are all production-intensive shows, for similar reasons. And further, upcoming shows look fairly spendy: “Chosen Realm” has the ship hijacked by a group of “religious zealots,” which means a bottle show but half a dozen guest actors; “Proving Ground” brings in the Andorians, which means expensive makeup and visual effects for their ship; and “Stratagem” is a Xindi-centric episode, which could go either way.

So I guess it isn’t surprising that they had to build a bargain-basement show into the schedule somewhere. I just wish it hadn’t been so painfully obvious, and that they’d bothered to come up with something other than a paint-by-numbers story to keep me engaged and prevent me from noticing all the scrimping and saving. When nothing else is going on, I can’t help but pay attention to the production.

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Archer has a lot of practice driving from his previous time travel job.

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Do you dislike Neelix even more than Wesley or Harry?

My Trip figure tastes like plastic.

Has anybody seen The Missing besides me?

NCB, your shipment is going to be… GREEN. :wink:

How’s that for a conversation?
:rolleyes:

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Neelix was in Bad Santa!

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This entire Xindi-arc doesn’t seem to be thought out enough. I haven’t written an arc but it seems as though it would be fleshed out with a beginning (Xindi attack Earth and Earth responds), middle (Earth finds out why), and end (Earth stops Xindi) with some meat. I can see an entire season devoted to raising questions - Who are the Xindi? Why do they hate us? Who is being misled, etc. Then the next season could start to dispel the misinformation.

This season we’ve learned the Xindi are a collection of related species. But there are no questions about how they are related. Do they all seem to be offshoots of another race or is one Xindi race a base for the others?

Their homeworld was destroyed, but this seems due to internal conflict revealed in one sentence in one episode. No ancient conundrums or prophecies that would tie in with time-travel. Why time-travel? Because humans apparently destroyed the homeworld 120 years ago. Does this tie-in to Xindi going to Earth 150 years in the past? No clues or even misleading information appear to be present.

The Anomalies are just part of the background to everyone. No one, not even the pirates, are trying to figure out spheres which are related to the Anomalies. First the Expanse was a strange place where Klingons were turned inside out and Vulcans went mad. Then somebody mentions it to humans after a Xindi attack. Some we’ll find Andorians popping up too. Seems like the Expanse is the get-a-way spot nobody mentions.

Shadowy Future Guy warns the Humans, Daniels talks about the Cold War, The Xindi probe is built with parts from multiple times, and we have one Oops-Xindi-On-Earth to fix.

Convoluted logic and clues are expected in an arc, but these all seem like separate items. We all want a mystery to solve, but it doesn’t seem like Bermaga had a master plan. They haven’t even put up much in the way of intriguing questions. Does it appear this way to you?

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I remember it. I also remember arguing with some guy who insisted that it was perfectly believable.

When I explained why I considered it implausible, he got upset and said, “Why are you saying that there will be no advancements in education over the next three centuries??? Are you nuts??”

:rolleyes:

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I think this is more of B&B not planning the Arc as tightly as possible, which leads to them having to rely on established characters to fill in weaker plots. What they should have done is have the entire Arc be seperate, but we still meet some familiar species (but the first time they show up on Enterprise), which are then brought into the next big arc, which involves forming the Federation, and Archer can get caught up with what happened while he was gone via remeeting all his old “friends” we missed a season on. Also, having the MACO leader be an evil bastard out to genocide the Xindi at all cost would have been a nice touch, followed by another MACO eing a goody two-shoes, but secretly an agent of the Time People, who tries the sabotage the mission (and we don’t find out about it until the last few episodes). And a crew member played by a chimp who is a genetically engineered superintelligent ape named Mr. Noodles would be fun, especially when he gets in the Trip/T’Pol/Mr. Noodles love triangle.

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Will they make Crewman Chimp wear a Fez?

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Will Crewman Chimp through fecal matter at the Xindi? Will Porthos eat it?

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throw

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I predict a guest appearance for a digitally un-aged Ronald Reagan. “It’s bedtime for Porthos!”

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Of Course! And Crewman Chimp sounds cooler than Mr. Noodles, so now we need two different monkey crew members. And in one episode, energy aliens that resemble ancient Greek Gods will make the monkeys fight to the death. With knives.

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i go a movie where young Ronald Reagan kills some people, so they could use that photage when the Xindi Attack. The best part would be never explaining why one of the characters was in black and white!

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Because he time-traveled forward from the 1940s. Duh. Anything can be explained with time travel.

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AND LEMURS!

:confused: Why does everyone forget the lemurs?! :mad:

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because of time travel! Duh!

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Speaking of lemurs:

The creepy guy in this episode (the one that kidnapped people for money and tried to stab T’Pol) looks and acts eerily like a new co-worker of mine. shudder