So I watched Enterprise for the first time last night...

Cafe Society
1

First reaction:

“WOW! Where’d the Vulcan babe get the Hooters!?!?!”

Honestly, do alien species in the Star Trek universe have a ‘large breast gene’ or something? First 7 of 9 and now this?

Second reaction:

“What the hell is going on?”

  1. So there’s apparently Andorians. The were in the old series and vanished in the Next Gen, DS9 and Voyager series. Where did they go?

  2. Apparently the Vulcan’s are trying to dominate Earth the way the United States smacks around banana republics? Do I have that right? And they do it to other species, too, leading to dislike of the Vulcan’s around the galaxy.

  3. No transporters, right? And no warp faster that Warp 6.5? Is that calculated the old way (from the technical manual). That would limit the ship to 274.625 times the speed of light. That’s awful slow to go gallivanting around the galaxy.
    Someone clue me in on the backstory, will you?

2

There isn’t a lot of backstory yet. That’s part of the point. They have introduced some of the species that we see in the other series – Andorians, Nausicans, Ferengi, Vulcans, Klingons. Supposedly there will be an initial encounter with the Romulans next season.

The Vulans aren’t so much dominating Earth as being very careful regarding what kinds of information and technology they give them. If Earth-people want to go out and do stuff on their own, the Vulcans aren’t trying to stop them. The Vulcans are a bit standoffish and self-righteous. That tends to rub people the wrong way.

The captain, played by the guy from Quantum Leap, is being portrayed as a numbskull.

Of course alien babes have big boobs! The real question is why she chooses to attend to her duties on a starship dressed in a catsuit.

They have transporters, but they’re not confident enough to use them all the time, especially for people. As far as warp speeds – eh, who can say? Supposedly they can go warp five, but, hey, it’s just a show.

3

I’m done with Enterprise. The time traveling killed it for me.

4

Time travelling?

5

Oh, yeah, one of the continuing plot points is that some time in the far future there is a “temporal war” or something going on, so people keep popping up on “Enterprise” – which is in their past – in order to try to change their history or prevent their history from being changed, whatever.

6

I’m fully expecting them to bring the Borg in for the third season cliff hanger and the dominion in the fifth.

I’m done with Trek.

7

Hasn’t this thing been on for like, 20 minutes, or something? How can people ‘keep’ coming back?

8

If you’re referring to the show, Season 1 ended in May.

9

Generally accepted warp scale formulae:

The original series (plus enterprise)velocity=warp factor^3c
The next generation velocity=(warp factor^3warp factor^1/3)*c

TOS warp factor 5=125c. If Archer and company drop of the Klingon at his home planet in only a few days, which puts Qo’nos(klingon homeworld), at most a few yightyears ayay from earth,
then the map of the galaxy makes no sense…the Klingon Empire would be INSIDE the United Federation of Planets in a few years!

10

You’re absolutely right, Enola. They could have actually made the first episode more interesting by extending the time to get to Qo’nos to about a month. This would have been easy to do storywise too. But no, the trip had to be 4 days, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Earth. Bastards.

11

As far as I know, the time travel plot was featured in at least three episodes in the first season, including the season finale. The implication is that this will be a recurring storyline.

12

I’m a big Star Trek fan, and what they’ve done to series continuity with Voyager and Enterprise really ticks me off. The power-that-be are still monkeying with the original premise to make the show appeal to a wider audience, they think, but from the comments I’ve read all that they are doing is alienating ( :smiley: ) their fan base, by contstantly changing the backstory.

An interesting speculation has come up, from where I forget at the moment, that the changes being made are the result of the time traveling and the intervention of the time travelers. Supposedly history is being rewritten to satisfy some yet unknown purpose, and Enterprise is a factor in this plot. It started with the movie First Contact, where Cochrane sees the Ent-E and models his future project after the shape (which was not supposed to be invented until they built the Constitution-class ships of TOS, like the original Enterprise.)

On another topic, when has there been a Star Trek series without a babe?

13

I started watching the show only in the middle of the season, and it’s kinda growing on me, but it’s awfully silly sometimes.

And yes, I do know the characters’ names, but for the following points I see them as figures, not personalities:

Vulcan babe in a catsuit and heels, played not as an unemotional being but as an icy bitch

All-American jock captain, determined to make the Vulcan act like a human and show some emotion; convinced he’s always right, he argues with her just because she’s disagreed with him (I’d hate working for this guy.). Gets too emotionally involved with his problems and shuts down.

Weapons guy alternates between “just let me shoot something,” by-the-book tough guy and fey Englishman

Good ol’ boy engineer alternates between hotheaded tough guy and ordinary guy who’s scared out of his wits. We’re supposed to believe these two would be pals and would go on shore leave together.

The younger officers should all be at least 30 but appear to be mid to late 20s. They look like a bunch of college interns!

Not only do these time travel storylines have a way of making established history awfully messy, but they tend to create the ultimate loophole: you can make anything happen that you need to have happen; there are no consequences.

Things I do like about the show:

The captain and the engineer are pals, especially given the age difference between them, and in one episode watch a pre-recorded game together while sharing beer and pretzels! Great stuff! This goes against everything we’ve ever seen in Star Trek, where the captain is necessarily standoffish and aloof. Yep; at the end of the day, he really just wants a beer like everybody else.

The crew in general is much more like the people in the first Alien movie than like typical SF heroes. They work, they play, they eat together, hang out socially, date; they get scared, they get lonely, they worry about getting fired.

They have all these nifty new weapons but are not immune from the effects of the common cold.

The show generally deals with all these relatively new problems in dealing with other planets and species, asking questions about when to help out and when to not get involved.

This future reality is already established in a time with interplanetary trade; the helmsman grew up on a trade ship, which are as isolated and insular as any frontier town. Great glimpse into a routine subculture.

Lithe young men in bright blue wrestlers. Mmmm.

The engineer cries at sad movies. Awww!

They show movies on the Enterprise, and classic ones, too. Cool!

14

I like it. But then, I haven’t seen any of the time travel episodes.

Maybe they’ll ditch that idea after the beginning of next season.

15

I would like the new Trek series a whole lot more without the dopey Temporal Cold War thing. And the end-of-season cliffhanger, whereArcher winds up stranded centuries in the future?Idiotic.

I’m going to tune in for the second season premiere, but if they keep hammering on the stupid time-travel stuff, my patience will wear thin.

16

I don’t know if I was the first one, but I did mention just such a possibility in this thread

17

I hope the time travel thing is killed off next season and forgotten. A series about the beginning of human warp travel and starfleet should not be contaminated by an established future. It should be purely exploration and adventure. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition.

It would be so much better if the Enterprise crew got into things like shaky alliances with the Klingons which fall apart, or encounters with Romulans which could fuel the confrontations of the future.

The crew should be ambassadors instead of cowboys, although cowboy behavior is permitted. It wouldn’t be an adventure without it.

Man, I’m really serious about this.

18

Yeah, like TOS never did time travel. :rolleyes:

19

There were two episodes I remember in TOS that involved time travel. One was “City on the Edge of Forever”, which I thought was one of the best TOS episodes made.

I don’t remember the name of the second time travel episode, but I know that it involved them doing the time warp(again!) and ending up in the skies over Coldwar USA, and Roddenbury planned to spin off a series based on a character in that ep. (I remember his last name was Six and he was an alien who owned a cat and was trying to prevent nuclear armageddon on Earth).

I think it’s safe to say that time travel was not overused in TOS, AtomicDog.

20

Tomorrow is Yesterday"
“The Naked Time”
“All Our Yesterdays”

Along with “City” and “Assingment: Earth”, that’s five.