I’d like to recommend something to you that may sound implausible at first.
Take another look at the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise.
Things are not as they were.
When Enterprise first took to the air, I was very hopeful. There were all kinds of dramatic potential in a prequel to the original Star Trek series. E.g., getting to see all those "lost ships" the Original Series Enterprise went in search of and, in particular, seeing the founding of the Federation.
Unfortunately, danger signals started coming from the series almost at once. It seemed to be set too far in the past for the show to deal with the founding of the Federation, and most of the shows seemed misdirected towards a kind of "gee whiz" exploration of the galaxy.
My personal ability to bond with the series was also hampered by the fact that (at the time it went on air) I couldn’t even get the series due to living in an apartment complex with the dinkiest cable in the world, though I managed to see some episodes anyway.
Things didn’t seem to get better in the show’s second season, and its ratings declined. Taking this decline seriously, the show’s third season focused on a year-long story arc that posed a direct threat to the survival of everyone on Earth (the Xindi arc).
I thought this was a step in the right direction, like the lengthy arcs that drove the shows Babylon 5 and (in its latter seasons) Deep Space 9. The quality of the show definitely improved in season 3.
Despite this, the series almost was not renewed for a fourth season, but in the end it was.
I thought, and still think, that the series needs to move to the Roman War that leads to the founding of the Federation as quickly as possible to get things back on track.
They’re not moving to that as quickly as I would if I were the show-runner (though they are definitely moving toward it), but the quality of the show has improved even more in the fourth season, and I want to recommend that you take another look at the program (or a first look, if you haven’t seen it before).
The characteristic of the present (fourth) season is that for the most part it features stories that are longer than one episode but shorter than a whole season. Most stories are three or four episodes long.
More important than the format is that the show’s creators are focused on integrating the series more closely with the established Star Trek mythology, letting us look at corners of things that we have heard of but never seen or never seen explored in detail.
One three-part arc, for example, featured Brent Spiner (Next Gen‘s Commander Data and his "father" Noonien Soong) as Data’s "grandfather" Arik Soong. At the time of Enterprise, the line of family geniuses was not intersted in robotics but in genetic engineering. Arik Soong tried to bring to fruition a line of genetically "improved" humans dating from the late-20th-century Eugenics Wars (a la Kahn Noonien Singh). His disastrous failure in these episodes convinced him that trying to improve on the breed was a mistake, and by the end he turned to cybernetics, paving the way for the creation of Commander Data by his son.
Another trilogy of episodes focused on the planet Vulcan. We got to see things we’d heard about before, like the harsh desert known as Vulcan’s Forge (a reference to Roman mythology, incidentally) and we got an explanation for something Enterprise fans had long complained about: The Vulcans we saw in the series don’t seem the same as the Vulcans we know from the Original Series. They aren’t pacifists. They’re (somewhat) more emotional. They aren’t normally mind-melders. And they tend to be suspicious toward humans rather than respectful of them. In fact, they’re more like Romulans than the Vulcans we know from previous Star Trek shows.
Turns out that these differences are explained by a simple fact: Under the (hidden) influence of Romulans, the Vulcans of Enterprise‘s day have strayed from the teachings of their planetary peacemaker, Surak (who we kind-of met in the Original Series). But due to the intervention of the Enterprise crew, a social revolution starts that will lead to the dominance of the philosophy of the Vulcans that we know and love.
Upcoming episodes and min-arcs seem no less ambitious.
One such episode features the inventor of transporter technology.
A quadrology of episodes focuses on the Andorians and their homeworld.
An upcoming trilogy focuses on the Klingons and holds the prospect of finally offering an on-screen explanation of why the Klingons we saw in the Original Series are so different visually from the Klingons of the movies and subsequent series.
And Bill Shatner is likely to appear soon.
However things work out, a change has definitely been made in the Star Trek: Enterprise series. I’m already seeing messages on Internet boards like "What’s happening to me? I am actually loving Star Trek again."
There’s something to love here, again.
Tune in Friday nights to see what it is.
Start watching this Friday and be ready for the dramatic episodes that will start airing in January.
Jimmy, I was in a similar situation as you — I didn’t get UPN for the first 3 seasons of Enterprise, because of my cable system. When I moved here (Morgantown, WV) in 1995, I found to my dismay that the cable system did not carry channel 22, the Pittsburgh UPN affiliate at the time. As a result, I missed most of the first three seasons of Voyager, and finally was able to watch later seasons because a coworker’s parents lived in Uniontown, PA, about 45 minutes to the north, where they *did* get UPN. She would have her parents tape Voy and then make copies.
Eventually, we did get Pittsburgh’s channel 22 — but by then that channel had changed to The WB. Arrrgh!!!
I got to see a fair number of season 2 episodes of Ent, because another coworker, who got the New York UPN station via her satellite dish, would tape the episodes and circulate them around the office. But she got fed up with Ent and stopped the tapes.
Finally in September of this year, my cable system picked up the current Pittsburgh UPN station — just in time for the season 4 premiere. And I’ve generally liked what I have seen. 🙂
I just love the look on Bashir’s face in DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” when the original series Klingons were pointed out to him:
Bashir to Worf: “THOSE ARE KLINGONS?”
In other related news, have you heard about the new Babylon 5 movie? Slashdot has an article on it. Titled “Memory of the Shadows” and apparently centers on an intelligence officer Diane Baker with help from Galen (from Crusades).
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=7515
I’m not sure I can forgive Enterprise for the Lesbian Sex Episodeâ„¢.
More than a couple people whose opinions I respect have been saying that Enterprise is getting better, but I just don’t see it. Not that much anyway. I am hopeful that Manny Coto’s presence will help substantially but they have much ill will to undo before I can become the O/C fan I was before. My biggest gripe from the beginning was the art direction. I could’ve forgiven a lot of bad writing if they had made a greater effort at visual continuity with TOS. A daunting task, I know. It’s difficult to design a show that is the artistic predecessor of the 1701, and beehive hairdos and miniskirts. But, darn it, they should’ve tried harder! (Ahem) Sorry, I’ll go get a life now.
Jimmy,
I have to agree wholeheartedly. While I was originally somewhat disappointed in the Zindi arc due to the length, I felt that the writers pulled that storyline off quite well. The last two stories have been very well written, and I’m very interested in seeing how they proceed from the brief mention of the Romulans in the last episode to the Romulan war.
The idea of having more multiple episode story arcs, like they did with the Augments and Vulcan’s Forge, seems to work very well and allows them more room for storytelling, and not have to fall into the 35 minutes of development, 5 minutes of climax and conclusion routine that many shows (Star Trek francise especially) fall into. Hopefully they’ll continue with this idea, as it could really turn the series around.
Another change that seems to be occuring is less emphasis on sex. The first couple of seasons almost seemed to me to be just a way for the producers to show as much skin as possible. More than a few episodes revolved around the decontamination chamber, where the crew was usually barely dressed. Between last season and what they’ve shown so far, it’s gotten much better. Yes, it’s still not perfect (Jolene Blalock still runs around in an outfit two sizes too small), but it actually seems to be better than most things on TV. Just watch a couple back episodes of Smallville, for example, to see a good show that’s gotten much more sexually explicit.
I must say that I prefer the current Vulcans. But then I always did like the Rihansu, apart from their government.
Did you realize that revealing the end of Vulcan’s Forge is a spoiler? It hasn’t shown yet here (so far as I know) I think that will be this coming weekend.
I may be overly paranoid after the election season, but I had the strong sense that the Forge story arc was a not-so-veiled criticism of the Bush Administration. When the Vulcans started talking about a pre-emptive strike against the Andorians because of doctored intelligence showing the blue-skins were developing a weapon of mass destruction, I rolled my eyes and thought, “Here we go again.”
Enterprise has been great so far this season! It was cool finding out why the Vulcans have been acting so strangely, and the episodes with the augments was a lot of fun. I was hoping that that series of episodes would explain why the Klingons started to look different: some disease got ’em. Maybe that’ll still happen. And yes, there’s been too much sex in Enterprise, although not so much this season. My brother described the pilot episode as being “soft porn”, which almost ruined the entire series for me. This season has really changed for the better – in fact, I might just name a future cat after a character.
Well, I took your advice and saw last Friday’s Enterprise.
First some background: I’m a die-hard ST fan, who watched all of the 1st season of Enterprise (I was very excited about the concept). It was disappointing, but I decided to stick it out for season 2. About 5 episodes into season 2, I looked at my wife and said, “why are we wasting our time watching this? It’s just not good”. From Bakula’s terrible acting to the silly reasons to get people undressed, the whole thing was painful to watch. So we stopped and never looked back (until now).
The episode last Friday (the first “Augments” one) was still disappointing. It didn’t have any major problems, but it was just not that interesting to watch. I’m glad they’re pulling in ST history, but the characters still have to be interesting – I’m not drawn to any of them (Trip a little bit, but that’s it). I’ll watch this three-episode arc then re-consider, but from what I’ve seen so far, I’ll have to just continue doing something more interesting on Friday nights.