I have a couple of big problems with the show, as described at length in various episode-specific threads. I’ll rehash them here because I’m killing a couple of hours before getting together with a friend to see a movie and visit his new apartment. 
First of all, I do not have a problem with the premise. I think it’s a great idea: going back to the beginning. I don’t even have a problem with the slightly altered timeline; I don’t take continuity as seriously as the hard-core Trek buffs. For example, the thing they’re apparently building with the Klingons, where the relationship is shaky but apparently okay at first but a misunderstanding causes Archer to become an enemy to the Empire and eventually leads to ruinous war, is a reasonable extrapolation to me from the shorthand description used by earlier incarnations of the show: “disastrous first contact.” Most folks take that as “disaster from the get-go,” but since we’re looking at three or four years out of hundreds in history, stretching it out like this works for me.
No, my problem is with the storytelling. As I’ve described before, I think they’re wasting energy trying to convince us that something is going to happen when we know it can’t. The biggest of these, of course, is putting a crew member in jeopardy of his or her life. We know Archer isn’t going to die. We know he’s going to get out of whatever pickle he’s in by the end of the show. There is zero suspense in that story.
Instead, the good series stories are the ones where somebody is changed by the experience: You know they probably won’t die, but at the end of the show, something emotional has happened to them that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives, and that will affect the way they make subsequent decisions. The two examples I used are from TOS, “City on the Edge of Forever,” and TNG, “Inner Light.” In the former, we know Kirk & Co. have to restore the timeline and get home at the end, so the emotional payoff is in our heroes making the horribly painful decision to let Joan Collins die. And in the latter, we know Picard will wake up and retake command at the end, so the emotional payoff is in letting him live a complete, satisfying life in the altered reality, and then ripping him back to the present. These stories matter to the characters, and it’s what keeps us engaged and interested in tuning back in week after week.
Compare an Enterprise episode, called (IIRC) “Horizon.” Usually-mute pilot Mayweather goes home to visit his family on their cargo ship. They want him to abandon Starfleet and take over command of the freighter; he wants his brother to grow up and assume responsibility. Toward the end of the show, he’s making modifications to the freighter’s weaponry, despite the fact that his brother has told him not to, and his brother catches him and yells at him. Then, in the climactic battle, the modified weapons come in handy, everybody feels better, and Mayweather goes home.
I mean, what the hell was accomplished here? Who learned anything? Well, the supporting characters learned something, but Our Hero is exactly the same as he was at the beginning. Basically, he’s an action figure, molded and unchanging. And that, to me, means the emphasis is wrong. Now, as I mentioned in that thread before, if it turns out that Mayweather’s decision goes horribly wrong, and the weapons he modified go offline or worse because nobody on the freighter knows what Mayweather knows about Starfleet engineering and they can’t do the maintenance, then that would be interesting, because there are consequences.
But as it is, Our Heroes are invariably right. Archer takes his dog to a diplomatic conference, and it pees on everything, offending the alien diplomats, and Archer is irritated with them for taking offense? At the end, he makes a half-hearted attempt at apology, but it’s played for laughs instead of genuine contrition. Or then there’s the episode where Archer is arrested and put on the Klingon prison world; he sticks to his guns, even when it’s obviously stupid to do so, and at the end it’s the Klingon attorney who learns from Archer and goes away a better man, while Archer just walks away, secure in his superiority. Are we ever going to see that Klingon attorney, ever again? Probably not. So why the hell do we care what happens to him? It’s Archer who should be growing and evolving as a character. And so on, and so forth. The producers said they’d be making an attempt at creating flawed characters who learn from their experiences and generate conflict within their own organization, but so far I just don’t see it.
The two episodes where they’ve come closest to realizing the full potential of the show, I think, are “Cogenitor” and “The Communicator.” In the latter, Reed accidentally leaves advanced technology behind on an away mission to a less-developed planet, and the crew’s attempts to recover the device and repair the damage just make things worse and worse, until at the end they slowly realize they were probably responsible for escalating the planet’s civil war and causing the deaths of millions. And in the former, Trip believes he has all the answers for making this alien person’s life better, except he mucks it all up and creates a horrible tragedy, not to mention a diplomatic incident. This is what interests me, as a viewer.
Second, aside from the mishandling of the characters, I think the storytelling sucks. Okay, there’s supposedly this big huge overarching story arc about the “temporal cold war.” :rolleyes: Ignoring for the moment the fact that time-travel stories are almost invariably stupid (aside from “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the risk-taking exception that proves the rule), there’s no sense that this major arc is really driving anything.
Compare (as I did in a previous thread) The X-Files. We’re told there’s some big conspiracy tying everything together. We get bits and pieces of it, here and there, but we don’t know the whole story or where these bits and pieces fit into it. Over the course of several seasons, we get more and more information, until at some point we start to expect the overall picture to begin getting clearer. And then we have a horrible realization: The writers don’t know what they’re doing. They themselves don’t know what the big conspiracy is; they’re making it up as they go. Finally, at the end, there’s a half-hearted attempt to tie everything together, but it just plain doesn’t work.
The same thing is happening with Enterprise. What is at stake in the temporal cold war? Who are the players? What are their tactics? If they can time-travel, then how do we trust week-to-week continuity? I’m not saying I want the answers to these questions now; I just want to know the writers have the answers and are building up a coherent picture. Otherwise they’re setting themselves up for failure.
That’s where, I think, Buffy the Vampire Slayer spoiled me as a viewer. Joss Whedon (despite his various flaws) made a point of creating an overall arc for each series, and driving toward it. Whether or not you felt confident you knew what was going on, you knew that by the end the plan would be revealed. That’s part of why season seven was so shaky, because they dumped the plan and started improvising halfway through. But prior to that, there was always the comfortable feeling that Whedon had charted everything out, and all the mind-bending plot twists would be tied together in the last couple of weeks. Firefly had the same feeling; you know that while we didn’t know who the Blue Hands were, or what Book’s background was, or what exactly River would turn out to be, the writers did, and were carefully parceling out chapters in a larger story.
I don’t believe Enterprise has the same thing going on, at all. I think the writers are making it up as they go, which is hugely dangerous. I mean, look at the upcoming season. Do you honestly believe the Xindi were even a gleam in anybody’s eye when they wrote “Broken Bow” to launch the series? Of course not. It’s a whole new direction for a struggling show, something they came up with to inject some energy into their stories. Except, as I’ve described above, they keep injecting the wrong kind of energy: They put the ship and/or crew in danger (even though we know they’ll escape at the end). They put the important emotional arcs on the supporting characters. And they try to convince us that there’s actually something to the temporal cold war, even though it’s painfully evident it’s nothing more than a hollow shell of a storyline.
So yes, I could absolutely do better. Fire Berman and Braga and give me control of Enterprise exactly the way it is now. I’ll put the dramatic emphasis where it belongs, and I’ll make the effort to plan out where the show is actually going (and communicate this clarity to the audience). The adjustments needed are simultaneously (and paradoxically) minor and huge.
And I’ll specify one last thing: I don’t hate Enterprise. Mostly, I’m just disappointed, because I see it as such a huge waste of potential. They’ve got a pretty good cast, both in terms of actors and characters. Production design is solid. Premise is good (minus the dopey temporal thing). They’ve got potential coolness just coming out their ears.
But instead of actually living up to it, by telling solid, compelling stories populated by interesting, identifiably complex characters, they make a desperate grab for viewers by blowing shit up and having the Vulcan hottie shake her tits around.
Bah.