'Fraid not. What did we see? Reed ogling a weapon, asking about armor. Someone makes a passing reference to his expertise with “restraints” (!). All Weapons Officer stuff. This guy needs a life outside of his job. Take Travis Mayweather: he mentions his father, his background, his aspirations (in this episode, to solve the mystery of Terra Nova). Another technique is to portray inner conflict, such as Archer’s agonizing over leaving a crewman behind, or his self-loathing after fleeing the murder-ship in “Fight or Flight”. Or Hoshi’s doubts about her toughness (now a forgotten issue).
Reed was in one good scene – the musical interlude in the cave. I appreciate that scene, as it shows that B&B are making an effort to put something alien in every episode. More surreal stuff is a step in the right direction. But the scene added nothing to Reed except face time.
I literally had to stop watching the show (on tape) before the opening credits were done. That was the scene with the atrocious exposition about a colony 20 light-years from Earth, where relations sour over time. How did they communicate? When was this colony ship launched? 1948?
The numbers just don’t work out. FTL radio wasn’t invented until long after Cochrane’s first warp flight. It would seem (consulting my Trek Chronology here) that subspace radio will be invented out of necessity during the Romulan War. Which makes me wonder: Does Enterprise have FTL radio?
This very question is raised in the last scene of “Terra Nova” when someone mentions that solving the mystery will be “headline news” on Earth. Maybe, in 20 years! The fastest way for the crew to communicate with Earth is to return home periodically. Just like Columbus.
Now I am afraid that this show has, like Voyager, abandoned its premise. And in record time. I hope B&B prove me wrong.
I hadn’t thought of that! Good point. It’s also rather fun to see them dealing with situations that would be easily solved by the later crews, since they lack both the experience and some of the technology.
I think this going to force some creativity in the writers. Just the transporter being a last resort could change a lot of otherwise completely predicatable plotlines.
Maybe B&B changed the timeline yet again and had humanity discover subspace communications a lot earlier than expected.
Changing the timeline is of the very few things I hate about Star Trek deeply. And the excuse is always the same: “We wants our writers to have the freedom to create storylines and not be constrained by a timeline”. WTF?? Having a timeline set in stone is IMO essential to good storytelling. In what other TV show do we have writers completely ignoring what they have written in the past? I think it is just plain lazy to create storylines without first considering that they may be contradicting themselves. And for those who think that it is too difficult to follow the timeline every single time, I would disagree. All you would need to do is get 2 or 3 fans to go over the script before final approval.
What we need is a master storyteller to take the helm in writing future Enterprise scripts. Someone like J Michael Strazinski perhaps, who has no problem following timelines…
Hey, most of the inconsistencies go right by me. I’m not paying that close of attention, and am just looking for some entertainment. But even this casual fan knows that the key to scifi and fantasy is being true to the world that you have created! If your writers don’t own copies of the chronolgy, then at least hire some trekkie as a consultant, for goodness sake!
Hell, the Trek franchise had Sternbach and Okuda to run interference for them, but apparently they were deemed too nitpicky (I think it was just that the scripts got stinkier and less true to continuity) and were gradually closed out of the loop for script polishing.
Put fan-based consultants in there and the same thing will happen, is my though.
The excruciatingly awful continuity glitch in the introductory exposition scene hurt my ears. I wish I could ignore it, but I can’t.
Seventy year silence + 5 year colonization + 9 year FTL voyage = 84 years. If “Enterprise” is set in the mid-2150’s, that means Conastoga launched around 2070 – a mere 7 years after Cochrane’s first warp flight. Say they arrive at Terra Nova in 2079, then send a message back to Earth saying, “We made it!” Earth receives the message in 2099 and delivers a controversial reply. The Novans receive this in 2019, beginning their grudge with the humans. Oops. Now there’s only 35 years left until Enterprise catches up with them.
Which makes me wonder how anyone else associated with the production didn’t notice the blatant error in the script stage. Not the Story Editors. Not the Producers. Not Michael Okuda, now credited as “Technical Consultant” (i.e. resident trekkie). Hell, the blooper was so obvious to me that it’s hard to believe the actors didn’t notice it while filming the scene.
I notice that they’ve dropped the staff position of “Science Consultant.” I hope it’s because they realized it wasn’t doing any good back on Voyager (especially where DNA is involved). Of course, if they were conscious of their mistakes, they wouldn’t need a consultant to point them out.
This is beyond simple nitpicking. This is what it looks like when the producers make a sloppy show. Adhering to established continuity isn’t a constraint; rather, it is a springboard for new story opportunities. I mean, what would it be like if nobody on Earth knew what Enterprise had been doing until their tour brought them back home at the end of the year? There’s nothing undramatic about that!
I was bothered by the short amount of time as well, although I’m willing to forgive a lot if I enjoy the episode, which I did. And I think that if we accept the (IMO) rather small continuity problem of when FTL radio was invented, then the timeline isn’t too much of a squeeze. It also helps justify the show’s premise; humanity wouldn’t have sit still while the vulcans held them back. Except our first colony was a disaster; add to that the Valiant, our first deep-spcae mission which also failed, and humans would start believing the vulcan’s warnings that we weren’t ready to be out there yet. At least for a few years; by Archer’s time, that fear would have subsided.
If I were the geek I seem to be, I’d argue there was some method of FTL communication that wasn’t subspace; someone did a thesis that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare, but by someone else named William Shakespeare.
Sigh.
I think we must assume that subspace radio exists already.
I think they sacrifice continuity for art in storytelling. You do this sometimes, but without at least an effort at hand waving, this seems quite a sacrifice.
Resist…Geek…resist…
I wonder if this ‘communications tower’ wasn’t some huge device too big for a space ship?
That’s it, fellow trekers! Subspace radio * that could be carried by a spaceship * was invented during the Romulan War.
Hm. Okay. When I said that Reed’s character was given some depth, I was referring mostly to his interactions with Archer. Notice that he insisted on going first through the cave when there might have been danger ahead. Also, when he got shot in the leg, he said he was fine, making sure the Captain did not come back for him. He does need to get a life outside his job; that’s the whole point. The fact that you picked up on it shows that his character is becoming clear. From the Star Trek website: “Reed is the 22nd Century’s version of a ‘regular army guy.’ Rules and regulations, discipline, schedules; life is strictly by-the-book for this British officer who is fascinated by munitions and what he can create next in his lab. Around women, however, he becomes soft-spoken and tongue-tied.”
So we haven’t seen all of this, but like I said, he is beginning to get more of a character.
The fact that the only place to learn about a TV character is on an affiliated website, rather than the show itself, indicates that there’s something lacking in the production.
Even a “regular army guy” can still have a life. What got him into Starfleet? Does he have a family? Do we not know any of this because he aggressively protects his privacy? In 6 hours of showtime we have never seen any suggestion of this, not even a murmur from Reed’s crewmates.
Yes, I did pick up on Reed’s gung-ho attitude in “Terra Nova”. But that’s only because there is nothing else to learn about the guy.
I’m thinking back to the earliest episodes of “E.R.” and “Homicide”. The characters of Dr. Peter Benton and Frank Pembleton, respectively, were aloof and very private. We didn’t learn much about their hopes & dreams, or their families. BUT – their aloofness was their dominant character trait, and it was established in their respective series debuts. You didn’t need a website to tell you.
(How can “E.R.”, “Homicide”, or other present-day dramas so easily cram so much character into a single hour, while Star Trek episodes barely have enough time for a plot?)
I think what we’re running into here is a difference between open- and closed-ended storylines. Babylon 5 (Michael Straczynski’s creation) was clearly envisioned as a complete five-season story. The writers seem to have had a fair amount of freedom to explore characters, issues, sub-plots, etc., but within the boundaries of the main, over-arching plot and the “timeline” that went along with it. Babylon 5 was amazingly well-tailored that way.
The Star Trek series are obviously not envisioned that way which is fine for a new-adventure-each-week kind of series. Clearly the ST writers have elected to make history (if not just the characters) subservient to the plot. It doesn’t make for consistency, but if it makes for interesting stories, so be it. It’s the nature of this particular beast.
If Dallas can bring Bobby Ewing back from the grave, Star Trek can play with its own timeline and … oh yeah, and bring Tasha Yar back from the grave.
TheeGrumpy, you’re right. For some reason soap opera/drama series do manage to get in more characterization than action/adventure series. And believe you me, the only reason I’m even talking about the characters is because I’m satisfied with the plots.
Now, as for the background and stuff for Reed, I don’t think it’s all that necessary. Do we know why T’Pol is in the Vulcan military? Do we know what her parents were like? Not even close. But we do know something about her character.
I no longer need the website to tell me that Reed is a hard-and-fast military man. I don’t think anymore that he’s in the military just because he likes guns; I think he really is about discipline. That is his dominant character trait, and that’s what I’m glad they finally exposed. That whole thing about the soft-spokenness around women is corny enough that I’m inclined to ingore it.
The only series I’ve ever watched cover to cover happen to be Star Trek, so I probably can’t make a good comparison here. But, I remember that for the first several episodes of each of the Star Trek series, you could describe the characters in one sentence each. One of the funnest things (I thought) was watching them be made up as they went along. And I’m not saying they’ve done a thorough job in this series of fleshing anybody out. I’m just saying that now that everyone is one-dimensional, they can work on making them two-dimensional.
as someone who works with DNA every day, i just laugh out loud normally when it comes up on Voyager. Berman and Braga need to realize that they are getting bad scripts not because the writers have their hands tied by continuality, but because they suck. Hire some people who don’t suck!
I should probably note that i did like the episode, the evil theme-song is growing on me, much to my disgust, and next weeks episode is on at a different time than last weeks, continuing the St. Louis tradition of having no Enterprise episodes be at the same time for 2 consecutive weeks. At least Jeffery Combs is supposed to be in it, he rocks!
Because E.R. and Homicide and similar series are set in worlds that are already familiar to us. Ther is very little that needs explaining. Star Trek and other SF shows have to spend screen time describing their unknown settings and establishing the plot.
This latest episode had to tell us about this lost colony: when it left Earth; why it was lost; what happened to the colonists after losing contact with Earth; that the colonists aren’t doing so well and why. That doesn’t leave much screen time for character development. They need to do a show that is set entirely on the ship with few or no guest stars in order to spend adequate time developing the regular characters.
