The tape is on its way! I didn’t pay extra for Warp Postage (from CA to Aes’s state in 5 minutes or less), but it should arrive very soon.
Ratings? Every time I check them in the paper, every damn show on UPN is low-rated. Ditto for everything on the WB. But they keep them around anyway.
There’s a warp core breach in progress. I think Aes is about to explode. Tell those postal folks to hurry!
Which is rather wierd considering certain crewmembers don’t seem to feel that Star Fleet is the de facto Navy of the federation. Which the references to “Military” culture as if Star fleet was something completely civilian.
Methinks B&B should go back and watch the original series, where the enterprise was run like a Naval Vessal in many respects.
I was thinking the same thing, though in the Original series, the Enterprise seemed to have a lot of trappings of a Naval Vessal. So does Star Fleet start as a civilian outfit in Enterprise, become the Navy in TOS, and then go back to being Civilian in TNG?
I finally got to watch the episode this afternoon, so I can comment now. A few thoughts:
Thanks for the birthday wishes viva & Mr. B and happy birthday to you as well Mr. B.
The theme song: I’m one of the few people who didn’t hate the original theme song. It was somewhat wistful, yet hopeful and it did work well with the visuals (which I always thought were very well done). It might not have been to everyone’s tastes, but I never thought it was that bad. As for the new version, what the heck is this, Enterprise Bandstand? “Well Dick, I didn’t like, like the old song cause it was just kinda sad and stuff but the new one has a beat and I can dance to it.” I could understand if, conisdering the new, darker direction of the show, they wanted to change the theme song to make it a little more ominous and brooding, but come on, a drum machine and some guitars? I can just see the producers saying, “OK, the enterprise dudes are bad mamma-jammas now. What goes with bad-ass dudes like that? Let’s take that theme song and funk it up a little, get the kids interested.”
Regarding the military question with Major Whatshis name and Lt. Reed, I asked a couple of friends from work who are ex-military and they confirmed what I suspected. Although the Major outranks Lt. Reed, Reed, due to his position, has authority over over him and while calling him “sir” would not be standard protocol, it’s not actually incorrect.
As far as the actual “meat” of the episode, it wasn’t bad. I think that this was an episode that was meant to do two basic things. 1.) Set the basic tone as darker and grittier. 2.) Set up the long range story arc and introduce characters such as the special forces team (would that be a “spacial forces” team in this case?) and the Xindi counsel.
This week’s panda, while… uh… visually appealing… was poorly executed. It felt as if it had been tacked onto the end of the “A” storyline. The capture/rescue story went along nicely, climaxed, then suddenly there’s 10 more minutes of panda, followed by the trip through the rockpile. Just poorly put together.
Lastly, there’s the upcoming “North Star” episode, mentioned above. I think someone ought to send a note to the producers. Uh, guys, I know that Roddenberry pitched this as a “Wagon Train to the stars”, but I don’t think he meant that literally.
Oh, yeah… I forgot to wish you guys a happy birthday so happy belated, viva and Linus.
Also, as someone who actually liked the old theme music, I’m already cringing at what the new one’s going to sound like.
Am I the only Trek Doper who likes Reed? Sure, I wouldn’t want to hang out with him or anything but he seems like a nice enough guy when you get past the insecurities, the overbearingness, the…
Oh.
TOS did have an Old West Gunfight episode.
[hijack] OMG!!! Happy birthday belatedly, Viva! So sorry! 
[/hijack]
We now return to our regularly scheduled Enterprise Thread 
Yeah, but it was just a Spectre of the Gun.
:dubious:
Hippo
Birdy
2 Ewes
(That’s not a shopping list. Read it out loud.) 
Sure, we know that now!
Yeah, yeah, spectre… guns… western… telepaths. I’m not one of these TOS haters like Aesiron. But when I say literally, I mean literally. From the Trek Today page linked by Viva:
Thanks Aes, NCB (see, Aes, we can be nice to each other ).
I don’t think Reed is so bad. I mean, Porthos would be more fun, but given the choice between Reed and Mayweather—well, come on! Who’s got more of a personality, such as it is?
Except, they did lose some of the technology we saw in this episode between the 2150s and the 2260s!
That pop-up telescopic sight on the energy rifle, with the ability to see through fog? ST:TOS and 24th-century Trek had nothing like this.
Case in point: “The Siege of AR-558,” on Deep Space Nine. In their gritty, all-out land battle against the Jem Hadar, our Federation troopers used phaser rifles with no special sights at all. They were about as accurate and effective as a modern **semi-**automatic rifle. Surely, the ability to shoot at Jem Hadar a good distance away, and perhaps hidden by smoke, would have been to the Federation troopers’ advantage. How did such a handy gizmo manage to get itself un-invented between the 22nd century and the 24th?
[ignoring tracer’s post about my own] Did anyone notice if the credits had Star Trek: Enterprise on them or not? I was reading in a Livejournal community a little while ago and someone had linked to one site or another where it said that it’s finally listed as such.
I guess that finally blows the whole “Enterprise isn’t Star Trek” thing that some people still try and cling to out of the water, eh? [/itpamo]
There was a psycho Vulcan shooting folks with a see through walls sight on a rifle that transported the bullet on a DS-9 episode.
Poetic license. Berman or whoever admitted in a chat that they “toned the phaser rifle way down” to act like normal rifles for the story.
I’d like to know whatever happened to “stun grenades” in later centuries.
You can’t stun the Jem Had’ar, just piss them off.
Unfortunately, technological differences, especially differences in everyday technology, will never be able to be kept consistent between series. TOS was, after all, written thirty five years ago and technology has changed in ways that no one predicted, which is not surprising considereing that predictions like that have a looooong history of being way off (It’s the 21st century, darn it! Where is my flying car?). So it’s not even something that we can blame on the producers. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. If they keep everyday technolgy below level of TOS, they will be ridiculed by those who point out that we have some current technology that is in some ways superior. If they take current advancements into account, they’ll get nailed by the fanboys who will scornfully take them to task, asking how they could possibly have that yet (whatever that is), conisidering what was displayed in TOS. Although I am a beliver in adhereing to established “canon”, I think this is one place where we need to wink and nod and work extra hard to suspend disbelief.
All they have to do to explain the toning down of the phasers is say some sort of distortion field is up that interferes with the high-tech doo-hickeys on the rifles, so they go into default WW2 mode.
“Genlemen, stun has no effect on these creatures. Set phasers to ‘astound’.”