Star Trek Enterprise

Okay, let's boldly go where everybody else has gone before. No, really, first the negatives:

suckiest theme song of all time. (Agreed. It reminds me of the theme song from PBS's Clifford the Big Red Dog.) The montage is very similar in concept to HBO's Band of Brothers opening.
'orrible schmaltzy ending on the pilot.
o god not another time travel plot!
klingon first contact is supposed to be a disaster, you continuity dolts. (Without a bug-free UniversalTranslator, there is already trouble brewing, see?)
ScottBakula?
a starship captain doesn't know where Rigel is. I mean, they have to spell it for him ...
ScottBakula?. Oh, did I already say that?
same horrible, dried out writers as all previous Trek shows. Don't expect anything original.
Neelix with a buttcrack as a doctor.
a stripper with big tits for a Vulcan. Definitely Unsexy.
- They gotta match her ears, ya know.
a crew with absolutely no room for character death or major development.
an arch enemy (Silik) that gets weaker and weaker as time goes on.
no mystery and hence no suspense.
same old "universe is our backyard, let's cross the galaxy next week" attitude to space travel.
more casual attitude to first contacts with new species than TNG's
attempt to make Vulcans into arch enemies only makes humans seem like idiots
see http://www.firsttvdrama.com/enterprise/index.php3 for a very thoughtful (and thoroughly negative) critique of the show episode by episode.

So, all that said - YOW! Vunderbar! You Beauty! - a wonderful new direction for the franchise. Positives:

The new ship is a complete throwback to ForbiddenPlanet, right down to the baseball caps.
Snotty American attitudes on the crew are a refreshing change from the 23/4th century altruistic drones.
Vulcan girl is not only pout-central, but not afraid to oil-wrestle in the airlock. Hey, you missed a spot!
ScottBakula? knows he looks just like Dubya - and he's not afraid to use it.
No more Janeway - hooray!
The producers know what geeks like. Geeks like Rigelian butterfly eating latex girls (A direct descendant/ancestor to Yvonne Craig in green body makeup).
A Vulcan that raises his voice ... say, anyone got a tribble handy?
The Grappler

Discussion of Episodes (perhaps someday refactored to StarTrekEnterpriseSeasonOne??)

Broken Bow

Broken Bow was the name of the place where the Klingon got shot.

Anybody else think the bad guy in the time travel device looked like a Founder?

I listened closely to his voice the second time the episode was broadcast (Sunday). Same tone and inflections as the vulcan-who-raises-his-voice guy. Listening to it again on tape it's even more obvious. If they think this plotline is going to last the whole series there better be more to it ...

Perhaps this Vulcan is really a Romulan...

Um, what was the dental appliance then? Founders need their teeth straightened? If I had to bet, I'd bet time travel guy is a human with an intimate relationship with Archer. How else could the suliban attendant have known Archer's name? If I really had to bet, I'd bet time travel guy is Archer. Broken Bow - get it?

I missed the dental appliance - though the guy was pretty fuzzy in that thing. I was looking at the hair and ears.

An episode whose name I forget went here.

Strange New World

Ah, the debut of the Vulcan Nerve Pinch and the word "phaser" (Vulcan for Phase Pistol). The only reason the guy who was transported didn't die is because he wasn't wearing a RedShirt.

I actually like the new series. It's a hopeless rip-off of the first series, but with better sets and a hotter vulcan. When is she going to take off her uniform again? I'm guessing next week...

Unexpected

Where can I get me a hot LizardWoman??

Uh, in real life they call this urge "bestiality"...

Oh rubbish. If they're sentient, old enough, and willing, and the PrimeDirective doesn't trouble you, they're fair game, whether they look like squids or houseflies. Bestiality is doing it with animals, not sentients.

"I want to date her, Data, not dissect her!" If Picard had said that, would it have sounded as though he was repeating himself in the middle of the sentence?

LizardWoman? has scales and lidless eyes, but she also had mammary glands (and not on her wrists either). Apparently, other species' DNA on different planets is more powerful than ours, or else we'd have lots of Sheep-Boys from NewZealand or Ireland or Kentucky by now.

Please notice how crummy the klingon spaceship looked. Very original StarTrek.

I guess we couldn't get through 4 episodes without reintroducing the holodeck. DeusExMachina.

If one takes the episodes of the forgotten Star Trek Animated Series as canon, one must know that Kirk's Enterprise had a holodeck -- it was just never seen in live action. So it's not inconceivable for holodeck technology to have existed at this series' point in history.

To quote the Klingon "I can see my house from here."

Also some ScottBakula? beefcake to go with the JoleneBlalock? NipOns? from the first show. Speaking of JoleneBlalock?, she is unrecognizable in the latest Stuff (or Maxim, I forget which).

More important is the origin of the cloaking device. I believe T'Pol can be detected kicking Tucker underneath the table.

Uncategorized Discussion

I invite all trekkers to go pull out their tape of the first ST:TNG, "Encounter at Farpoint", and observe how doofuss it now appears. Clumsy acting, bad camera shots, bad clothes, an idiotic & self-serving plot, and the Ferengi were supposed to be the New Enemy!

In short - very nice effort, can only get better. Bets taken on how they resolve the discontinuity between bumpy and smooth head klingons ...

They're going to completely ignore it.

Roddenberry stated that he always wanted Klingon's to have bumpy heads but they didn't have the money or the costume expertise.

I think this was alluded to in the Deep Space 9 episode where O'Brien, Worf and others go back to Kirk's Enterprise during the "Trouble With Tribbles" episode. One of DS9's crew asked Worf why Kirk's Klingons didn't have bumpy heads. Worf responded with something like, "We do not speak of it." Must be something rather embarrassing for the Klingons.

One of the fan-books (no I did NOT buy it) said that certain border colonies of Klingons had cosmetic surgery in order to "fit in" with the smoother humanoids against whom they had no local numeric superiority.

We've now had screened in the UK the episode that "explains" this anomaly. It's to do with genetic experiments and trying to create "enhanced" klingons. Or something. It felt like a complete kludge.

Sometimes it takes a kludge to fix a kludge.

See GiantSpaceGoingAmoebae ;-)

It is only a television show.

That's just the Evil Kirk talking, from Episode 5, 'The Enemy Within'

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010930

[refactored from inline image to link, as it was showing a 'bad inliner, no biscuit' warning cartoon (with Great Chthulu threatening to eat your head) instead of the cartoon in question]

From UserFriendly.

From TheOnion:

The usual hopeless SciFi-fan technical nitpicking...

In the pilot for the first StarTrek ("The Cage", with Cap'n Christopher Pike), the tokomak pattern buffer below the transporter took like almost a minute to warm up to a pattern before de-rezzing it. (That's the rising siren noise.) But in STE, supposedly >50 years before or whatever, the transporter (though built for cargo) warms up at STNG speed. Meaning fast enough to instantly beam the Captain out of sticky situations.

Ah, but the STE ones are too unreliable to be used for humans except in emergencies. The warm-up time no doubt increases reliability ...

Please don't expect any consistency between the new series and the 'earliest' original StarTrek series history. The "The Cage" was done over 30 years ago and included things that didn't even jibe with the original series (Spock smiling!). Expecting consistency with the "HistoricalDocuments" will leave you vulnerable to WilliamShatner's charge "Get a life!"*

(*) I can't believe that I'm the first to contribute a page on GalaxyQuest!

In the opening montage, the real shots of Earth at the start from the SpaceShuttle don't match the SFX shots at the end when the Enterprise leaves orbit.

What did you expect, two hundred years, world war three (the Khans and Genetically engineered people) have occurred as well as heavy vulcan-based monitoring on the world. It's bound to change. The montage is supposed to cover two or three centuries of the earth. As a note, I believe they started warming up the transporter before they could beam Archer out. I'll have to review the episode... but it definitely looked like they had thought of the warm up. -- WyattMatthews

I'm waiting for them to go back to the planet where they left Sluggo (which was NOT its native planet), and find that they have created an ecological disaster.

I'm predicting that Sluggo could turn into a GiantSpaceGoingAmoebae and save the enterprise from a tough jam. I seem to remember a similar story from an old GreenLantern? Comic Book. (I was so sure the lifeform that Enterprise-D spawned (!) in one of the final episodes of TNG was going to appear in Voyager and aid, if not wholly rescue them. Why else would something like that be unleashed into continuity at the last minute? Oh well.)

Ditto for the planet in the 10/10 episode - letting your dog out on a new planet? Can you say eco-stupid?

This actually parallels a JoulieDoucette? cartoon in which Kirk and Spock go around peeing on new planets, announcing for each one "We claim this territory in the name of the United Federation of Planets".

But one should wonder what folks do on long away missions. Probably just like camping.

Is it still true that nobody's ever seen a bathroom (toilet, shower) in an episode of any Star Trek series? I had heard of that years ago during an online chat discussion of the differences between StarTrek and BabylonFive, but then that was before Voyager.

There's a "sonic shower" shown in StarTrekTheMotionPicture?.

As Counselor Troi exits her bathroom in STNG, you can hear a toilet flush sound. She has a pleased smile on her face. There's no appliance to see, though.

Beagles in space. How cool is that? I can't wait for it to get possessed by aliens or save the ship. You know it's only a matter of time.

Observe the second episode of STNG. The crew all got high on that stuff that affected Cap'n Kirk in "The Naked Time". Then Wesley Crusher took over the ship by simulating Captain Picard's voice.

This was the second episode because they used the psychoactive substance to produce "dramatic exposition" on all the characters. We learn that Geordi feels bad about not being able to just see normally, that Data can get horny, etc.

On STE, this episode was the third.

The relationship between the Humans and Vulcans on the show is the same as between the Americans and the British. The British are cold and unfeeling (cultural stereotype) and they had this huge empire which the Americans took over. Same thing with the Vulcans who aren't concerned with exploration (in contradiction to all other StarTrek shows) yet maintain this huge empire which will eventually be under Human control.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for them to come up with a Star Trek musical, like Buffy had.

There might be room for an eulogy down here...

The last season - the Xindi Mission - sucked ass. The season tried to maintain "the StarTrek tradition" of social commentary, while at the same time paralleling the WarOnSomeTerrorism?. Yes, we know attacking North America's eastern seaboard makes earthlings warlike. Yes, we know the attackers were themselves manipulated by a Cold War. Yes, we know our captains must lose their integrity in search of short-term gains and convenient murders. But all the ridiculous nuances, like Daniels constantly showing up like a Fairy Godfather to course-correct the plot, were hideously trying. As someone said years ago atop this page, "Oh ghod not another time-travel plot!"

This season, probably the last, has been one of the best in StarTrek history. The ST thought leaders have delicately and expertly weaved together both obvious and alleged Federation history, including explaining the missing brow ridges in "The Trouble With Tribbles". And we finally got to go on an away mission to the same mysterious Andoria which supplied background characters for every other series!

However, sliding down on last season's poor ratings, clueless network executives tossed the show into the Friday-night deadspot, expecting it to compete with "Washington Week in Review" and "Reba". Uh, even Trekkers make Friday a night out. Especially the mature balanced ones the network hoped to attract.

Rest in peace, ST.

Apparently, it didn't happen. At least not like that. See RetroactiveContinuity.

CategoryScienceFiction