Yeah, we all them, even us fan boys. Especially after that runny anal discharge that was the first half of Season II.
It could be better over all. But Bergama has a strangle hold on it. Although, I must say, this Season III has turned out rather well.
Now, stay out of my Save Enterprise thread with negative comments. Put them here. No need to slam fan boy geeks, though. Play nice. But, I know many of us have serious gripes with either the curent series or the entire franchise.
So, let it out, man.
But, realise that some debate may come from what you post. Recognize that taste and opinions may vary, but feel free to disagree with anyone.
If you go personal*, though, I’ll kick your ass. And I’m a big strong freakazoid, too, so you’d better watch out!
*flaming any Dopers, fan boy or not, posting in this thread
I have been staring at your “save Enterprise” thread just barely managing to resist the temptation to post “yeah, let’s save it from The Bermaga” because it’s a slam in a thread you said you didn’t want slams in.
But here’s a new thread, and shiny and ready for exactly that sort of sentiment.
Thanks, NoClueBoy for posting this thread. I had been thinking about starting a similar thread ever since you started the original thread, since I would never have felt comfortable posting my thoughts about the cancellation in that one, but I didn’t feel like I have the SDMB Trek credentials to speak out, or maybe I was just chicken.
My thoughts about the cancellation of Enterprise can be summed up as follows: It’s about time!
Lord knows I love Trek, and I love Scott Bakula, but Enterprise, try as I might to like it, was just a bunch of dreck. Boring, unoriginal, sexist, blue-filtered, badly-acted, simplistic, ultimately unwatchable dreck.
Whew! That felt good.
I am not at all convinced that the end of Enterprise means the end of the Trek franchise. In fact, I think rooting out the least successful element may even help in the long run. It may take a while, but ultimately there will be other Trek incarnations. Since I stopped watching Enterprise, I find myself drawn more and more to the STNG reruns on Spike. There are whole new generations waiting to be sucked into…to discover the Trek phenomenon, and I’d rather they saw the brilliance and creative quality of the earlier shows and films than take one look at Enterprise and wonder what all the fuss was about.
This is a hijack (a hijack in an Enterprise related thread!?) but your last post made me think about Ira Steven Behr and Michael Piller, the co-Executive producers of DS9, the series that Enterprise is most closely resembling at this point, and since you’re the critical Trek Doper, I’m curious about your thoughts on the show, Cervaise.
… so some interdimensional race of aliens are trying to invade our dimension. I mean seriously, ST:VOY has barely been off the air a few years and all ready they are reusing stories. I mean, c’mon. C’mon.
Yes, Enterprise rehashes stories but what series doesn’t?
Was it the Greeks that said that there were only sixteen or so different story types? I’ve never actually believed that but I do believe that there are only so many different stories that can be told and that we, as a species, long ago exhausted all the originality there is and that we’ve been rehashing the same thing over and over again.
We continue to watch new things regardless though. Why is that? It’s for any number of reasons. The characters, the little twist that might be thrown in at the end, the slightly different way the story is told, and so on.
The only reason it’s more obvious in this case than it is in some others is that Trek borrows heavily from itself and has a highly nitpicky fanbase (and detractors too) that delight in finding everything wrong with an episode, for right or wrong.
Re recycled stories, there are about as many “story types” as there are story theoreticians. Robert McKee, for example, has ten (IIRC; the theories blend together). Depending on which Greek you read, you can get from three to twenty. The more you read about these assertions, the more you start to suspect that the final number of “story types” in a given theory has more to do with coming up with a nice, clean number and less about the actual story analysis. I don’t know of anybody who asserts 17 stories, for example; more likely the philosopher presenting the idea has artificially divided one or more of the categories, or fudged a bit to make the same idea look like two, in order to bring it up to an even 20. It’s not a hard-and-fast science by any means.
Re DS9, I’m one of those people who made the mistake of giving up when the show hit its creative valley in the fourth year. I bailed out right before, by all reports, it started getting really good again. So I don’t really have an answer for you.
As I said, I never put too much stock into the idea as a hard and fast rule but do believe in it to a point. There are only so many different stories to tell and in the 40,000 years or so we’ve been telling them, we’ve most likely exhausted them all.
I feel the same way. I managed to get through Season 2 only because I had watched almost every other episode of Star Trek ever and by God I wasn’t going to punk out now. S3 is better, but whenever I start to enjoy an episode, I get an overwhelming feeling of dread because I know there’s a better than even chance they’re going to screw it up by the final act. I’ve felt this ever since the epilogue to Voyager’s Deadlock (the one where the ship gets doubled) – where, instead of mourning over their lost comrades, Chakotay and Harry Kim think it’s worth a chuckle that an entire ship full of their friends have perished.
Now that Enterprise is in the Expanse, I’ve got that feeling of dread very frequently because of the moral bankruptcy of the crew – moral bankruptcy which, for the most part, is being presented as acceptable instead of leading to philosophic tension. Like when Archer threw that one dude in the airlock, or the fact that everyone was surprised that the sloth xindi in The Shipment would be unhappy that his work was going to be used for a genocide. Or, most recently, in Hatchery, the fact that the only reason that anyone thought it would be wrong to let 31 innocent children of a sentient species die was because he was infected by a neurotoxic defense mechanism. I thought these people were beyond prejudice, but apparently they not only embrace it, but the powers that be assume that the rest of us will embrace it too.
So maybe I’m glad that Enterprise might be going off the air so that some years from now, a new Star Trek will arise that’s led by someone who has a moral understanding more sophisticated than “humans good, aliens with bumpy heads bad – or, at best, acceptable to be caricatured.”
You know, maybe I’m giving them too much credit, but I kind of thought maybe they were reaching back to capture some of what they did during TOS. Remember the kiss with Kirk/Urhuru kind of like that. My guess was that maybe as they learn more about the Xindi, they’ll start to recognize the’re hatred for the fear that it is. Remember they’re trying to keep the entire planet form being blown to smithereens; a little irratonale hatred such be expected.
On to my major beef with Season Three: You’ve got marines, wtf is the captain or anyone else from the bridge crew for that matter leading the away parties. I can see it if they let the marines do a sweep first, then followed behind. It wouldn’t take much, a breif scene with the Major on speakers, “Has a perimeter been established?” “Yes Sir” “Ok Trip, Cannon Fodder you’re with me.”
:eek: <–something transpired