Having recently purchased the Firefly DVD set, I found that it showed me quite a few areas where Enterprise could improve. For example:
Space is rough- even apples and strawberries are a commodity in short supply! (Compare this with any Ent mess hall scene where the crew eats gigantic plates of tasty looking food)
Space is dangerous- In the first Firefly episode alone, three main characters get shot! With bullets!
Characters have depth and angst- Wash worries that the captain might have slept with his wife back in the day, Jayne is always up to no good, Inara has the unrequited (well somewhat) lurve for the captain, Simon and River never know who is going to come after them next, et cetera.
Things weren’t forgotten from week to week- for instance, Mal notices Jayne’s lack of loyalty in the first episode. This came back in “Ariel,” one of the best episodes. I won’t spoil it any further. There was also some great groundwork laid (no pun intended) with Saffron. The hands of blue guys were just evil and they only appeared twice! Firefly knows how to create conflict and keep it interesting. On Enterprise, Reed doesn’t get along with the MACOs. And he likes pineapple. WGASA?
The ship is fragile- a single component (catalyzer) mentioned in the first episode as being in need of repair does eventually break, causing all kinds of problems. There’s no magical repair station nearby. There’s no magical solution by use of particles that don’t exist (Star Trek’s famous “if we re-route the plasma manifolds through the main deflector we can create a subspace field that will…”). The captain has to make hard choices and he nearly dies trying to do things his own way.
There are no English speaking aliens! In fact, there are no aliens! No bumpy foreheads, no pointed ears, no human morals exaggerated into cultural traits. Just human beings trying to make a living in space.
The world seems more united in Firefly than it does in Enterprise’s utopia. On Firefly, the characters are fluent in Chinese and English and there’s been a fairly obvious blending of the cultures (Simon and River for example). With Enterprise (and Star Trek in general I guess) we’re left to suppose that after WWIII all the bad brown people were gone and all the nice clean white people could bring their morals to the rest of the ignorant galaxy. Star Trek implies that the problems were solved but never gets into the how. Firefly just tells it straight: humanity fucked up and had to leave.
Plus the bad guys on Firefly wear hats.
On preview: Sorry all, didn’t mean to hijack the thread and turn it into a round of Firefly worship. But Firefly did make it very clear to me that Enterprise is and always will be painfully lacking by comparison.