Enterprise series?

I always liked the theme tune. Was an interesting change.

 

I think we have missed out on some stellar TV in a hypothetical Enterprise season 5.

 

I think so, too.

Ironically, as Meng metioned above, I think everyone was, indeed, "Trekked out" - including myself. While I was disappointed we didn't get to see what a 5th season would have provided, at the time I was thankful the show was ending, and that no new Trek was on the horizon. I say this as a lifelong Star Trek fan going on around 43 years now. I needed a break from Trek.

Today, I wish we had that 5th - and possibly more - season of Enterprise to watch.

 

The story is continued in the books. The Romulan War - Beneath the Raptor's Wing by Michael A. Martin is the best in my opinion.

Mr. Martin solves the continuity problem of Archers Enterprise having digital controls and Kirks having analog with a clever plot line. The Romulans invent a computer hijacking program that allows them to take control of their enemy’s star ships. The only way to block this is to use analog controls as a front end for the computers.

The best of Enterprise in my opinion. Right up there with "Trials and Tribulations" from Deep Space 9 for Trekkie trivia.

All the mirror universe unies look cool, especially T'Pol's (Jolene Blalock). They even bring back red shirts with the predictable results.

 

The third and fourth season is when the show really connected. I have the feeling that Manny Cotto adapted his storyline for his own TV show that was cancelled ("Odyssey Five") for "Enterprise" although I really liked the way "Odyssey Five" developed the storyline. It's a pity that show wasn't allowed to develop.

 

Were the ratings that low? I never saw any numbers for it.

 

Ratings dropped each season. Season 4's ratings were about half of Season 1.

 

One of the best episodes in the first season, IMHO, was "Dear Doctor". It presented a moral dilemma that was explored quite well, and it was framed much in the style of a M*A*S*H episode, with the doctor formulating a letter to a colleague on his home planet. A nurse in the episode, who has an attraction for Dr. Phlox, is named Cutler, the same name as an early nurse in the M*A*S*H series.

I haven't really revisited ENTERPRISE since it aired. I did catch a bunch of first-season episodes on a cable channel once a few years ago, and I have all of them on VHS tape. I just haven't the time or desire to revisit them in that state. The show was filmed in a widescreen aspect ratio, so the VHS tapes are letterboxed, making them look pretty ugly on today's big HDTV screens.

I understand the series is going to Blu-ray. Most of the episodes were filmed in high-def, if I recall correctly, though I never got to experience an episode in high-def. We got our first HDTV the week after ENTERPRISE finished its final episode back in 2005. It was never rerun on that Paramount network, so I never got to see one in all its glory.

The show seemed to get off on a slow footing. Some of the attempts to fit into established Trek canon - and some of the ignoring of it - made the series problematic. When I first heard that Scott Bakula was cast as the captain, I was quite eager to see it, but the reality is he really didn't quite make it as the Captain/authority figure. I'm not eager to spend a lot of money on the series, so if I want to see it, I'll either dig out my VHS tapes, watch it on hulu (it's free!), wait for a DVD sale when the Blu-ray's hit the market, or wait even longer for the Blu-rays to go on sale.

Harry

 

As I recall, Enterprise wasn't exactly having a fair shot. It was tied into network struggles with the sinking UPN and all that, which affected exposure in some areas; it was coming in as a relatively good-natured show when it seemed like it was becoming unhip to call for anything but "DARKER!" attitudes (the Battlestar reboot was much better timed in that respect) and it was coming in when Trek was suffering what one might call franchise exhaustion. Trek already had another Trek ship series, Voyager, that was going the full 7 years despite seeming tired (at least in terms of audience enthusiasm). In many respects including overall "look" and dramatic sensibilities, Voyager was from the same cloth as the 7 year long Next Generation and the 7 year long Deep Space Nine. Perhaps if there had been only one Trek series at a time or a break before Enterprise launched, it could have met with greater anticipation. It was managing a fresher feel.

Also, it seemed to me that Enterprise was cancelled when scifi fandom was pretty sick of cancellations and tired of campaigning for more (Firefly, Babylon 5, Farscape, etc) and getting iffy to embarrassing tv movies or miniseries, if anything at all. News was met with fair measures of relief or resignation. The show itself, taken on its own, wasn't to fault for most of that and deserved better.

Enjoyed what I saw of it (excepting that Dianne Warren theme song).

 

Regarding the cancellation, you can't ignore how bereft of new ideas Rick Bergman and Brannon Braga were by the point Enterprise was launched. Nothing against these two guys. They gave their all for Star Trek. But they had written and created hundreds of episodes by then. Season One and Two had many great episodes. They also had a lot of retreads. What in the Hell are the Ferengi doing here? Even though Manny Coto was hired for season 4, it wasn't enough. The die was cast. Enterprise was a has-been before the first episode of Season 4 was shot. (For years TrekBBS was my Internet forum outlet.) The only reason production continued was to get the series to the magic 100 episodes needed for syndication.

Beyond that, apilecole got it right.

As for the theme song, my parody, "Smell of the Fart," was deleted within an hour of posting on TrekBBS.

 

Whew I'll take your word.

Yes, Rick Bergman and Brannon Braga had really put in the mileage. That definitely wasn't the only series with "show runners" who could've done with higher degrees of collaboration with differing creative input, whether the limitations were imposed upon them or by their own choices.

 

I agree. Well written! I got sick of Voyager at the fourth season or so. Enterprise despite its flaws was a better show in my opinion.

 

About six or seven years ago, I worked with a guy on a pilot who had previously been one of the producers on Enterprise for several years. I told him I liked the original show, but balked at watching the new one because they had "retro-modernized" the ship to the point where it was far more advanced than the old 1960s show. He agreed, and said this had been heatedly debated right before the show first started, but it was ultimately Paramount's decision to go with a more contemporary look, on the basis that "this is a series for audiences in the 2000s... not audiences in the 1960s." Hard to argue with that.

You can argue similar issues with the J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, which clearly doesn't even come close to the 1960s series, or even with George Lucas' three Star Wars prequels. At some point, even with a prequel, you have to decide whether to make the show accurate or entertaining, and I think producers tend to go with the latter.

 

Out of all the Star Trek series, I did like the opening and the theme music from Voyager the best.

 

I remember that when the original press stories about Enterprise came out, before the first episode aired, the series was described as being set in the period before the original Star Trek, and also of course, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The show was supposed to feature a crew set in the time when the technology was far less advanced, the Vulcans were still tutoring humans on the transition from first contact to just beginning to go out into space, and the crew had never contacted other alien worlds. I thought that this would be an interesting idea. I thought it would show the humans full of wonder about everything in space, making mistakes of inexperience but somehow perservering through qualities of the human heart and spirit, so that the next generation (Kirk, Spock etc.) would have a chance to build on what the Enterprise crew had pioneered.

But the show never followed through on that. It was an uneasy mishmash of lip service to being part of an earlier era, with the crew actually operating as if it was in the Next Generation era, if not later. The crew was just not credible as the first space pioneers. It seemed to me that the producers and writers could not come up with interesting ideas for that earlier time frame, so they just had the crew fly around in space, having the same type of adventures as the Next Generation or even Voyager crews.

The producers and writers cheated on the earlier time frame idea by having the more advanced Vulcans influence the crew a great deal in the earlier seasons. I think that the show really jumped the shark on the earlier time frame idea when the time traveler character came on board. He had a secret locker on the ship full of the technology we had all known on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, which the crew looked at sometimes, and which was used as a key part of the plots of some episodes.

I liked some episodes though. I found it interesting that of all the Star Fleet captains to encounter the Borg, only Scott Bakula's character exercised good judgment about what to do in the encounter. That showed that the human intellect, emotional intelligence, and spirit could overcome lack of technology or deep space experience. There should have been more shows like that.

The ship's doctor was a great character on Enterprise, I thought. But too many characters on Enterprise were dull, just not very interesting as people.

There were great problems in continuity between this so-called earlier show and the later Star Trek history which were notable to viewers of the original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. I read that Enterprise "does not respect the Star Trek canon". I think that was very true--the show's producers and writers did not seem to care about that.

The Borg episode is a good example. What Bakula's character did in the Borg encounter was a textbook example of the best way to handle an encounter with the Borg. Yet many years later, when Captain Picard first encountered the Borg, the Star Fleet databases were searched and nothing came up on them, and Picard made serious errors in judgment about how to think about the Borg. The Picard era databases would have had the Enterprise era's captain's log in them. But those involved with the Enterprise show did not seem to care about such things, and did not try to smooth out that inconsistency. It was as if someone with the show said, "hey, the Borg will boost ratings! Let's just dump the Borg in here even though it does not fit this show or any of the other Star Trek series history at all!"

 

Agreed on the Borg. What part of "first contact by Picard" don't these guys understand?

I almost expected Enterprise in the last episode to introduce that it was an alternate time line. Or maybe that the rest of Trek was an alternate reality. It would have explained a lot.

As much as the Borg and Ferengi showing up bothered me, my biggest holy smokes moment was the introduction of Nazis at the beginning of the fourth season. Wait - we have all the dangers of the galaxy to challenge the crew and we, the viewer, instead should be scared of 1940s Nazis? When Star Trek runs out of ideas, they bring on the Nazis. Can't blame Manny Coto for that. Storm Front has Braga's and Berman's fingerprints all over it.

 

Yeah the Borg episode was 'wrong' but actually one of the best episodes they did.

In defence of Picard's handling of the Borg, he did admit at the end that they had got over confident and forgot that it's a big galaxy and there could well be someone bigger and badder out there.

 

You expressed my thought about this so perfectly. This is exactly how I felt about the show and for me it didn't deliver and I enjoyed very little of it.

-- Sanjay

 

T'Pol was nice to look at, but her personality was that of a disagreeable, angst filled Vulcan, who was uncomfortable and unhappy being with most of the humans. I found it to be out of character for her when she had a love affair with Chief Engineer Trip Tucker toward the end of the show. This seemed mostly to be an excuse to nearly show forbidden female nudity on a network TV show, while not quite crossing the line.

Other than Captain Archer and Dr. Phlox, all of the other main characters were either boring or unpleasant, to me.

Trip Tucker, the chief engineer, was a Texan who became intense and negatively emotional often, instead of being thoughtful. At the time, I thought that his character was deliberately supposed to remind us of George W. Bush, as if the show's creators thought that this would make us like him more.

Tactical officer Malcolm Reed was a repressed, gloomy guy. It was revealed that he had some severe childhood experiences which made him unable to express emotion.

Communication officer Hoshi Sato was to me, rather hesitant, underconfident and wimpy. Her character was apparently supposed to be interesting because somehow she functioned in a high stress job, despite these personality traits.

Travis Mayweather played a young helmsman whose father had run a space freighter and therefore he had a little bit of experience being out in space, when the others did not. But to me, he was not very interesting as a character.

To me, none of those characters were at all interesting, fun, likeable, charming, or engaging. There was no desire on my part to tune in the next week to find out what they would be doing next. I did like certain characters on all of the other Star Trek series and did enjoy seeing their characters develop and have new experiences. But the Enterprise group of characters was the most boring, unlikeable set of characters on any network TV show that I can think of.

Captain Archer and Dr. Phlox were engaging, likeable and interesting, to me. But it was not enough to get past the dead spots of the other characters.

 

TrekCore has a two part interview up with Brannon Braga that discusses Enterprise:
http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/03/exclusive-brannon-braga-interview-part-i/

 

Statements like these demand proof.

 

For some reason my older post didn't work. Trying again:

 

Thanks for posting this. Good interview. Obviously we disagree about the Borg on Enterprise but then, he wrote the episode with Mike Sussman (one of the best things about Enterprise - his script for the third season episode, Twilight, is brilliant) and he should be proud of it.

And Brannon Braga slept with Jeri Ryan for a couple of years. I never have. It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that any sour grapes I have comes purely from envy.

 

What I did enjoy about the Borg episode on Enterprise is how it echoed The Thing--it had a creepy vibe and it managed to work. Honestly, having these series being consistent is precisely in terms ofhistory was what robbed the show of spontaneity and made sapped the later series of vitality. The other issue is that shows often became predictable and rote.

By the way, anyone low when the visuals for Enterprise went to high def? Watching it on Bd and it looks good but is a bit soft and the visuals suffer from aliasing and other issues from being up razzed among other things.

Still, I enjoyed Enterprise particularly when Manny Cotto was brought on board--he gave the show a much needed shot in the arm.