I give the show, so far, a B-.
By comparison, the first season of TNG gets a C-, the first season of DS9 gets a C+, and the first season of VOY gets a D. In other words, it’s better than expected, but it’s still nothing to drool about, like “24.” (You are watching “24,” right?)
My problems are as described by others: I don’t like T’Pol (I think Blalock is confused about her performance), some of the supporting characters aren’t being developed very well, and many of the scripts fall back too often on cliche. One of these is how frequently they’re resorting to the transporter as a problem-solving device; it should be much more unstable and dangerous to use.
I also hate, hate, the “temporal cold war” thing, even though it was handled reasonably well in the recent episode “Cold Front,” mostly because it was left ambiguous and unresolved. Time travel is a crutch in mediocre sci-fi, a fallback when you don’t have any better ideas. And when you don’t have a really, really good idea about how to resolve the various paradoxical aspects, it almost invariably winds up being forced and awkward. If I were the head writer on “Enterprise,” I’d make it so this mysterious “Future Guy” who’s directing the Suliban turns out to be some kind of renegade Vulcan in the same time frame who’s lying to the Suliban about being from the future in order to get them to do something important right now. I think that would be a killer twist, because it could drive an exploration of Vulcan society similar to what TNG did for the Klingons, and it would get rid of the stupid time-travel stuff. Besides, they came up with it purely as an excuse for getting actors from the other series into guest appearances, I bet.
That said, however, I really dig Trip and the Doctor, Archer’s boy-scout personality is seriously growing on me, and Hoshi, who was giving off huge “annoying character” red flags in the pilot and first hourlong episode, has rapidly become a viable part of the crew.
Most importantly, though, there’s an overall feeling of newness to the exploration that’s been missing since the first season of TOS. Space is big, dangerous, and complicated, and they never know what they’ll run into from day to day. They zip around with the best of intentions, but sometimes they make mistakes, because they don’t know any better. This going-where-no-one-has-gone-before stuff is great, particularly in comparison to the last three shows. VOY was supposed to have that, but they messed it up by immediately giving them a guide to the area in the form of Neelix. “Enterprise” doesn’t just have this quality, it (usually) makes it the core of the show, and that, in my opinion, makes a huge difference in storytelling energy. In “Cold Front,” for example, it was great how the alien captain rolled his eyes when he found out Archer’s crew was just another bunch of space newbies who were running around introducing themselves to everybody. (Imagine walking out to your car in the grocery-store parking lot and having somebody park next to you, jump out, and say, “Hi! I drive a car too!” Hee hee.)
That’s not to say they can’t screw it up. “Breaking the Ice” (the A plot: on the comet; B plot: T’Pol’s secret engagement) had promise, and an interesting if ham-handed literary parallel between the stories, but it didn’t really come through (and as observed, the comet science was bad on multiple levels). “Fortunate Son” had a fascinating setup we haven’t seen before on Trek (the culture of long-haul freighters), but the ending absolutely fell apart.
The show has potential, and so far it’s had a marginally better first season than the other series. The question is whether or not it can rise to the heights of TNG in seasons three to five, or sink to the week-after-week mediocrity that was Voyager. Me, I’m sticking with it for a while yet.
(it’s been great so far).