Star Trek: Enterprise

[AsahinaKimi]

Poll question: Star Trek: Enterprise

I have recently started watching for the first time: STAR TREK: Enterprise
(at this link):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244365/episodes
for free.

I have a feeling many of you didn't enjoy it. I have heard people say it was the worst of the series, but I would like to know why. So far, I haven't found much to complain about, and I find it quite entertaining.. So what is your beef with the series??

[MilesColtrane]

1. Hated the theme song.

Bakula's not a very good actor.

The writing went from acceptable to mediocre to bad as the series progressed.

I still watched it though.

[Posteritatis]

7. The beagle was my favorite character. (nt)

[MilesColtrane]

13. I liked the beagle and T'Pol.

Now a show about those two in space, like Ripley and Jones the cat...that would've been cool.

[Sebastian Doyle]

24. I thought Bakula was great on Quantum Leap

The problem with Archer is he just looked like Sam Beckett in an Enterprise uniform. I kept expecting to see Al walk on to the bridge. (he finally seems to have found a non-Sam character on his most recent show "Men of a Certain Age")

And yeah the theme song sucked. What the Hell does an 80's style cheese ballad have to do with Star Trek? :shrug:

[csziggy]

26. I kept expecting him to say "Oh, boy." and jump

But I enjoyed both series. Quantum Leap was better written, but it did not have the big freight of past ST stuff to carry.

[Deep13]

30. Hated, hated, hated the theme song. nt

[Touchdown]

2. I gave it a chance.

I quit watching after a season and a half. Like Voyager before it, it just didn't hold my interest.

[edbermac]

3. They jumped the shark with Voyager.

Didn't think they could get any worse with Voyager, but they managed.

My ranking:

1) TNG
2) TOS
3) DS9
4) Voyager
5) Enterprise

[MicaelS]

5. Voyager was great!

It was nice to have ST series that had an actual ending, rather than some open ended crap.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. My family will watch all things Trek. We're Trekaholics.

[ceile]

6. Next to TNG, I think it was the best in the franchise

Stories were great, the characters were great (loved Flox).

[Ikonoklast]

8. I wanted all the characters to die in a spectacularly painful and gory way.

And then have their mutilated lifeless corpses shot into the heart of a neutron star, just to make sure that they couldn't come back as some sort of space zombie.

That about sums it up for me.

[Spock_is_Skeptical]

31. Ditto.

It was the most horrid "Trek" of them all. I still don't consider it as Trek-related, it was so fuckawful.

[Tikki]

9. Hoshi was so believable...

and her job would be so important. The most important Star Trek job ever, maybe.




Tikki

[Xithras]

10. The real problem was that it was poorly planned, and BermanBraga was slow to fix it.

They could never really decide who they wanted to market it to. They wanted to be "different" for the sake of being "different", and did things like tossing canon out the window, expunging "Star Trek" from the shows name (it was retitled ST:E in the third season), and having the cheesiest themesong ever. The claim, originally, was that they wanted a more mass market oriented Trek that would appeal to a more general viewership (the number of regular Trek viewers had been declining since the end of TNG). When longtime Trekkies wailed about the changes, they were rapidly slapped down by UPN, and were essentially told that it wasn't a show for "them".

While the original idea may have had merit, the implementation was terrible. It was created and written by two people who had worked on all of the previous Trek shows, shared many of the same writers as the previous Trek shows, and more than a quarter of the episodes were even directed by various alumni of the previous Trek shows. The result, predictably, was a show that was 100% Star Trek, and fit right in with the general writing style of every Trek show since TNG. This would have been fine if UPN had marketed it as a Trek show, but the mainstream viewership quickly realized they'd been handed a bait-and-switch and bailed. Trekkie viewers, who initially avoided the show because of its horrible pre-launch marketing, were slow to warm up to it.

By the third season, the writers and producers finally dropped the pretense of being a "new" show and did some retooling to try and appeal to the Trekkie audiences again, but they went about it all wrong. The war with the Xindi was meant to borrow on the successes of TNG's war against the Borg, or DS:9's war against the Dominion. They ignored the fact that, in those shows, the "wars" followed a long buildup in viewership and backstory that made the war make sense. ST:E simply tossed the viewers into a war with little explanation of what was going on. They turned it into a space shoot-em-up. While Trekkies have never been averse to the occasional shoot-em-up, we like them to have context and meaning. Most Trekkies were very bummed when Berman and Braga made overtures to try and pull classic Trek fandom into the show, and were then greeted with an inexplicable war.

They finally figured it out by the fourth season and returned to the roots of what made Star Trek great in the first place. Debates over the ethics and morality of war, racism and bigotry, and xenophobia dominated the story lines. The writing was great, and the acting was even better, but it was just too late. The show had taken too long to find its footing and had alienated too many people. If UPN had given it another season, it might have pulled some of the audience back in, but that wasn't in the cards.

So Berman and Braga got even with everyone by writing the worst series finale in Trek history.

[Posteritatis]

14. What finale? I remember an especially bad TNG episode, but not an ENT finale.. (nt)

[Xithras]

16. Yep, I was practically screaming at my TV.

And not just for the ham handed story line and pointless killing of a main character. Jonathan Frakes summed it up well when he later said that the episode was a huge personal insult to the actors on the show, essentially telling them that their show wasn't even good enough to have its own finale, and that it needed to be wrapped up with a ratings stunt. Both Frakes and Marina Sirtis later said that they regretted even agreeing to film the episode because of the way it demeaned their fellow actors.

[Posteritatis]

18. I'd heard most of the Enterprise cast refused to actually watch the completed episode

I can't say I blame them.

[WillParkinson]

35. According to what I read...

Commander Tucker didn't really 'die'. He actually appears in the books after the event. (I was bummed when I read he died so I had to go look it up.)

[renegade000]

22. you nailed it

I liked the 4th season, the rest were mainly "meh". If they had just focused the show on the formation of the Federation (and had plots focusing on the core Federation races) from the start it would have been a lot more interesting, at least for the Trek fans.

[proteus_lives]

11. Good idea, poorly executed.

[skygazer]

12. I liked it

Face it, every version of Trek ever was cheesy, dopey and absurd with moments of absolute brilliance. I enjoy the cheesy and dopey just as much as I do the brilliance. Honestly, the only Trek series I didn't care for was Deep Space Nine which got too darn weird and mystical for me.

And the Beagle was adorable.

[TheMightyFavog]

15. Bunch of retconned bullshit. Does not exist in my book.

One of the reasons Star Trek is dead to me. It all started when that bastard Berman retconned Zefram Cochrane's backstory.

To me, Zefram Cochran was and always will be a native of Alpha Centauri, not Earth.

[Liberal_in_LA]

17. Star Trek NG ruled!

[LostInAnomie]

19. So many things were bad about it.

1. The theme song was fucking horrible.
2. The cast had no chemistry.
3. The series had a bad habit of shitting on ideas already established in other series.
4. Tried too hard to establish nemesis races that just weren't well thought out.
5. The Hoshi character was so fucking unbelievable she should have never made it on screen. (Seriously, she can hear a few words of almost any language and know it fluently!?)
6. Bakula's Capt. Archer was an incredibly weak character especially for someone that would be so important to human history.
7. The crew was too human. (Yes, I know it was supposed to be the start of Star Fleet, but still too many humans).

I could go on and on, but altogether, I think someone got into too much of a rush to put out another ST series that they forgot to make it good.

[MicaelS]

20. Prequels are just a flat bad idea...

Not just with ST, but with any series.

[NewJeffCT]

21. It wasn't bad, but it never grabbed me

Foe TNG, DS9 and Voyager, I watched every episode as it was aired for the first time. (OK, I may have missed one or two for vacations or whatnot, but I'm sure I caught up quickly...)

For some reason, however, Enterprise just didn't inspire me to do the same, even though I thought most of the characters & stories were pretty good. Maybe the cast chemistry didn't do it for me?

[Yavin4]

23. Why It Sucked In Three Words

No Will Wheaton.


(just kidding)

[47of74]

25. 4th season it picked up a little bit

I kind of dropped out during the 2nd and 3rd seasons but came back in the 4th season. After three seasons of crap I thought it got somewhat better in the 4th season, especially with the birth of the Federation direction they were going and the attempt to reconcile the series with past Star Trek works and make the series fit better into the canon.

[Call Me Wesley]

27. Haven't seen all of it,

but I did enjoy it. And I enjoyed the opening song, too; something different.

And to all who scream that the continuity is messed up here, enjoy these five parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1chtJQFQNs&feature=related

;)

[Iggo]

28. Saw one episode. It didn't take. (n/t)

[WildEyedLiberal]

29. It's better than Voyager, but like Voyager, it never quite lived up to its premise

Enterprise is not nearly as terrible as its harshest critics claim it is, but it doesn't come close to being as good as TNG or DS9, either. Granted, this is partly because ENT is basically two different shows - seasons 1 & 2 and seasons 3 & 4 are entirely different in tone and substance. Seasons 1 and 2 are decent - not earth-shattering, mostly forgettable, but not awful (for the most part - there are some seriously stinky episodes scattered throughout). Season 3 really kicks it up a notch, to the show's decided benefit - though I do agree with the previous poster who said that the lack of context for the Xindi War is a serious flaw, unlike the Borg and Dominion War storylines that were sufficiently built up beforehand. And Season 4 is really what Enterprise should've been all along - serialized storytelling with arcs that carry over and impact future episodes, all of which actually fit into the broader Trek canon. It's a pity the show was canceled just as it figured out what it should have been doing all along.

That said, I find the show overall less disappointing than Voyager, which had the potential to be as gritty and dramatic as Battlestar Galactica later was, but ended up being a second-rate retread of TNG with a cast that had a fraction of the chemistry. Hell, Voyager even abandoned the idea of its own *villains* by season three, opting to rehash the Borg and Q, both of which were done to far, far better effect on TNG.

[MilesColtrane]

34. Did you ever see the Voyager two-parter "Equinox"?

That was damned good.

And gritty?

It featured Janeway torturing a fellow Federation crewmember.

[WildEyedLiberal]

37. There were certainly moments where Voyager lived up to its potential

And that was one of them (Barge of the Dead was also awesome, as I recall). One of Voyager's best outings by far. I guess for me the occasional great episode just reinforced what a mediocre rehash most of the rest of it was.

There should've been constant conflicts between the Starfleet and Maquis crewmembers for at least the first season or two, and things should've still been a bit tense for a while after that - but instead, they toyed with the idea of intercrew conflict only to pretty much abandon it by the middle of season one, when the differences between the Maquis and Starfleet became irrelevant at best. The Delta Quadrant should've been a much more harsh and unforgiving place than it really was, where the might and benevolence of the Federation was unheard of - but Janeway and Co. very rarely ran into situations that they could not handle by the Starfleet book. Don't get me wrong - I'll watch an episode of Voyager if it's on, but when I think about what Voyager COULD have been, it just disappoints me.

[Orsino]

32. Uniformly good acting, good to great writing...

...and some silly-ass plots to go along with some fair-to-great ones.

It was Another Goddamned Shipboard Trek, but they kept it fresh for me with a lot of small talk and a cast that looked like us--just plain folks trying to get a job done. For me, it was the right Trek at the right time. The opening montage that ran over that beer-commercial theme was inspiring, and the the show fulfilled that promise, for the most part. Also, turning Vulcans practically into villains--believable ones--really worked.

They should have trusted us just a bit more. They didn't have to call this ship Enterprise, and they should have called the show Prime Directive, since it was all about our mistakes. and they should have had Bakula sing the theme song himself, backed jut by an acoustic guitar. The dream was fucking his, not Michael Bolton's.

[Bucky]

33. Okay, I guess, but unnecessarily boring. Technically, the only part of Star Trek still canon.

It was a great premise ruined by artistically risk-averse producers. A shame.

[Owl]

36. Star Trek Enterprise was at it's best at the end of the series.

It took a while to get established, so it seems. I was disappointed when it was canceled.

And why, oh why, did we only get one season of Firefly?! Absolutely loved that one. An incredibly entertaining show.

[AsahinaKimi]

38. I am at the Fourth Season ...Now..

The war with the Xindi was tiresome. The theme of Star Trek:Enterprise seems to say that at its start of their exploration it was a run and gun fight. Everyone they met were seemed to be trying to shoot at them, take their stuff, their people.. and then Archer commits torture,.. and an act of piracy by stealing a warp coil from a friendly race. (Maybe he had no choice, as the Weapon against Earth had to be stopped.) The Vulcans were not very trust worthy, and the Andorians seemed a pretty good ally however Shran's use of "pink skins" made me wince!

Still I don't think I really saw a bad episode, that was not entertaining. I am looking forward to watching the fourth season now.. on the above mentioned link!

One thing about the theme song.. After watching so many episodes in a row, it gets stuck in your head!!

[denbot]

39. I enjoyed it.

I only caught half or so of the episodes but to me it was a win.