You’re just angry about all those arguments you lost to me.
I liked the Vulcan Andorian animosity, which (last time I watched it) ended up with the Andorians trying to overthrow some puppet Government of the Vulcans, which was great.
Nazis, time travel and trip getting pregnant in a holodeck, not to mention the entire temporal cold war ruined it. They had plenty of material there, enough with the time travel!
I watched perhaps eight or ten episodes of the first season, and maybe a couple from the second. I really wanted to like it, but it just didn’t happen. I have heard that the show found its stride in later seasons, and I hope to go back and check it out one of these days.
Things that turned me off:
Jerk-ass Vulcans. I mean, what the hell? Here’s the definitive Star Trek alien species, and we learn that they’re all just colossal dicks. Why are we allied with these guys instead of the Klingons? Oh, and it turns out that Vulcans of this era have no ability to mind-meld. Again, what the hell?
T’Pol. Thanks for having so much faith in your own show that you need to prominently feature yet another catsuited torpedo woman. Christ, I like looking at breasts just as much as the next guy, but this is more than a little insulting to everyone concerned. Woman, cover yourself. And could somebody nudge Jolene Blalock awake during her scenes once in awhile?
Speaking of counterproductive attempts at tittilation, that gel rubdown bit had to be the stupidest idea introduced in any SF series anywhere.
Scott Bakula. He seems like a nice enough guy, but he didn’t convey enough authority to convince me that he could program a DVD player without help, let alone command a starship. I would trust the dog to lead an away team before him.
The wacky alien doctor. Who the hell looked back at the previous Trek series and decided that yet another comic-relief alien was a good idea?
Maybe it was just my bad luck, but none of the episodes I watched seemed remotely memorable or interesting. At this point I couldn’t even tell you what the premiere episode was about. The one plot I remember was the episode that featured Jeffrey Combs as an Andorian, trying to locate an espionage station that the Vulcans had built in violation of interstellar treaty, because Vulcans are dicks.
Recently I’ve been following effects artist Doug Drexler’s weblog, Drex Files, which is updated extremely often and contains a lot of fascinating background information on Enterprise and the other recent series. Despite how the show’s premise may have been carried out in practice, it’s clear that a lot of people with great respect for the Trek franchise were working very hard to make it a worthy addition.
Before anyone mentions it, I LOVED the intro sequence. I thought visually it was beautifully done and I honestly didn’t mind the song. Both versions of it. Much like Smallville it adds something when everyone sitting down on the couch sings along as enthusiastically as possible. Unfortunately that was the only good thing about Smallville.
I am proud that my girlfriend used to be able to sing the Enterprise theme unaided word-perfect. That’s my kind of gal.
I never watched it when it aired originally, but started watching it in reruns. Unfortunately a lot of it doesn’t make sense when they’re shown out of sequence, especially when an episode is a sequel. I finally gave up.
And yeah, Bakula’s “acting” is a distraction.
I think that a Star Trek prequel could have been swell if it had been about the Valiant (the ship whose recorder was recovered in the TOS episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before”). For one thing, its finale writes itself.
Lots of room for dark, edgy, imperfect characters. Granted, it’s 100 years earlier than they wanted to go with Enterprise, but in my mind, that’s a good thing.
I’d have remade The Forbidden Planet.
It a Trek story already. Enterprise, a star cruiser is sent to check on a colony. They discover there are only two survivors, a scientist and his daughter who do no wish to return. The main characters are the Captain, First Office and Doctor.
While I liked Jolene Blalock’s silicone bulkheads set off by her skintight catsuit it was just such an overtly pandering move I felt vaguely used. Oddly, despite her inflatable sex toy aspect she was not a bad actress with decent material, and (IMO) was one of the better actors on the show.
Sci-Fi fans are the biggest bunch of passive aggressive freaks on the planet.
I’ve always loved how sci-fi fans will tell you how much a show sucks then turn right around and tell you every line from every scene form every episode. :rolleyes:
I think all the ST shows were fine. Some better than others. I never really cared too much for DS9 untill they went into “soap opera” mode.
Star Trek needs to bring it on with a new series already! Maybe, be a little more darring this time and have the main focus OFF of the Federation and zoom in on some thing like The Maquis, or the Klingons, etc…
Enterprise is hated because by the time it finally got good, too many people had already set their opinions on it in stone and wouldn’t give it a chance.
My opinions:
Season one wasn’t great, but neither were the first seasons of any of the other “modern” series.
Season two went the wrong way and got even worse than the first season, and almost got as bad as Voyager. I mean, really, did we need an episode about T’pol getting “mind meld AIDS”?
Season three, after a lot of people had already given up, improved things with the season long arc, but still had too many stinker eps thrown in. I particularly remember some horrid episode where a telepath is messing with Hoshi.
The fourth season, basically became “fix up the crap they messed up the previous years and also lets throw in lots of fan service” and was pretty fun, up until the stupid “holodeck finale”, but by then they were on Fridays, which only hurt ratings, and all but the most diehard fans had given up long ago. I swear, if they’d started the show this way, or even gone this way a year earlier, the show would’ve made it for the full 7 years modern Trek usually got.
(Posted without having read the entire thread.)
If you were to ask me about specific episodes of this series, I probably would not recall them. But when I see the reruns on SciFi or whatever, I recall having seen them before.
So if there is anything that can make a series instantly forgettable, my guess is it would be awfulness.
p.s. the whole Aliens as Nazis thing was unadulterated bull crap.
And the time travel stuff was no less than pig crap.
That’s what made DS9 so good. It was away from everywhere but still in contact with the Federation. Stuff didn’t work. It was dirty. The Cardassian/Bajoran conflict were a huge part of the story.
But most of all, the characters developed. And I mean that with the plural, unlike the other series where you were lucky if a single character did (for example, T’Pol in Enterprise).
Actually, the main thing I hated about the show was the theme tune. Seriously.
But time travel episodes in any sci-fi show are almost always awful - they bugger up continuity, present too many deus ex machina moments and generally mark a big red X on the show labelled Here Be Crappy Writing. Enterprise was no exception.
On a tangent, I’d always thought that a non-prequel Starfleet Academy was a potentially interesting show. Rather than a Muppet Babies approach (look how wacky Picard/Kirk/Janeway etc were as cadets!) there’d be new characters and a focus on Earth culture at, say, the TNG timeframe. Sadly, I doubt anyone would watch an ST show that didn’t involve a big CGI ship of some sort.
I agree with the points above. The jerk Vulcans. The gratuitous nudity that was more embarrassing than sexy. (Really, people in their underwear rubbing gel on each other? That’s supposed to be a turn on?) The blatant disregard for continuity, including destroying Florida, meeting the Borg hundreds of years ahead of schedule, meeting the Ferengi hundreds of years ahead of schedule, etc. By the way, did we really need another show trying to do a commentary on 9/11?
Vulcans have always been snotty jerks, and Spock gave as good as McCoy did.
How was Florida being attacked disregarding continuity? Practically nothing is known about post 20th Century Earth geopolitics.
I think that they had some good ideas, but they tended to get lost in trying to do wayyyyy too much. I started a complaint thread in here last year as I was watching the show on DVD from the beginning (I had caught some episodes at the time, but was not able to be a regular watcher). My main unhappinesses had to do with just simply losing sight of their actual premise.
The idea for the show was originally, and should have been, to show how it is humanity goes from basic space newbies (thank the stupid second TNG movie for that concept) to one of the dominant species of our corner of the galaxy. But instead of keeping focused on this, they did whatever they wanted each week without regard for how it advanced the central concept.
So, for example, the idea of the Vulcans being paternalistic isn’t a bad concept. One can understand a logic-devoted species seeing their role as our teachers and mentors deciding that a conservative, cautious approach must be maintained. And certainly, humanity would hardly be happy with that approach. But instead of letting the Vulcans appear logical and paternalistic, we got them being jerks and anything BUT logical and unemotional, as needed to allow the story of the week to develop. Of course, one can always assert that they really weren’t so bad, and that it was just through the filter of Captain Archer’s eyes that they get shown that way, but they never tried THAT concept, either. This, of course, left us with some considerable conflicts between the Vulcans of TOS and the Vulcans we were watching weekly on Enterprise.
Similarly, the time war concept could have been made an interesting aspect of a seasons long story arc. Every once in a while, just when things seem to be going reasonably well for humans, something gets mucked up by the temporal war. I think this would have been most effective if it was kept to a minimum (maybe four times a season it intrudes), and if the time war storyline didn’t necessarily focus on humans; we are simply caught up in the eddies in the time continuum (oh, god, I AM a geek, aren’t I?). But again, they couldn’t leave well enough alone. No, they had to go back to it, and back to it, and make it a central theme, at which point you simply end up with all the troubles that time-travel stories have to fight. And, of course, you begin to get the feeling quickly that this can’t be OUR future because how did we then get unscathed from this sort of central involvement in the time war to our eventual involvement in Star Fleet?
I’ve opined before that the third season was a disaster. The whole Xindi thing was awful. It’s not credible, it’s filled with too much silliness from a physics standpoint, and it forced us to suspend way too much disbelief. Plus, it doesn’t advance the central concept at all. We need to find out how it is that Vulcans, Andorians, humans, etc. get their act together. The Xindi arc was very unhelpful this way.
Of course, there was trouble with continuity with TOS, but folks, lets face it, they had long since decided that TOS was something to ignore as needed. I think that the franchise simply accepts the beginning of their continuum to be ST:TMP. Everything in TOS is just a fantasy telling of the story of Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise. It’s too bad, but let’s face it: Enterprise according to the timeline in TOS should have been using nuclear weapons and unable to contact alien species by video screen. Hell, even WE can use things more advanced than THAT. Gotta figure that our descendants aren’t so limited. 
I still feel that the Xindi arc was a way to avoid vilifying the Klingons, which is, of course, stupid. The Klingons at this time were the biggest threat in the quadrant, and they should have been treated as such, with the founding races of the Federation banding together to keep them from taking over.
Yes, I agree. Indeed, after setting up the potential for conflict with the emerging Klingon Empire, they just dropped that aspect, and thereafter, interaction with the Empire seemed more like a bad rerun of ST:TUC (I mean, really. What space-faring civilization has a main court that looks like some sort of bad dream sequence out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel??), without any appreciable change to the story line. :smack:
Yeah, Season 4 (which they probably knew at the time was going to be the last one) was actually pretty good. But that whole long, drawn-out Xindi plot was terrible. A decent idea, but bad execution.
I also thought they missed a big oppurtunity when they had Archer trapped in the future for one of the season finale cliffhangers and brought him back by the end of the next season’s opener. It would’ve been better to leave him in the future for awhile, and see the rest of the crew operate without him.