Theory About Why Most Don't Care for Enterprise as Much...

No one ever complains about Spock being the only alien in the crew in TOS.

 

And he was only half-Vulcan!

 

I was not a fan of Spock initially. I was fresh off The Outer Limits* a few years earlier. My first reaction upon seeing Spock was that he was the worst looking alien I'd ever seen. I thought it was sort of hokey to put an alien on the bridge. Maybe I was resenting the need for aliens to help humanity advance. Maybe it was a Forbidden Planet influence (or This Island Earth). Maybe I thought it was treating the Vulcans like technological gods. I don't know. Though usually I don't go around complaining about him like this.

EDIT: But I'm also a preacher's kid too (though he's long gone), so perhaps that's part of it.

* = Like that ugly mask Skip is wearing over there on the left between the cowboy and Melakon.

 

I dunno, Spock was always overrated to me. Sure he's an interesting character, but he just never clicked for me. He's there, he's a Trek icon, but I just don't get excited about him.

 

You need the context of Spock pre-rest of Trek. He was damn exciting before Trek filled up with main character aliens and entire species histories.

 

I dunno. I sorta think Spock's excitement factor was mostly due to fantasies from teenage girls. Kirk drew me in because he was the athlete and leader that I wasn't. Oddly, it didn't have anything to do with the actors. I just liked Kirk better than Spock. At 15 I thought Nimoy was a better actor than Shatner. My opinion of the Shatman gradually modified to move him up a few points, but not until I could study his work better with a VCR. Now I consider them at about the same skill level, but they have different styles.

 

Didn't you read David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek?? It is full of touching tales from NOT teenage girls about how Spock saved their lives etc..

 

I did read that book, but the brain cells have eroded enough I don't remember the interviews, just some of his interpretations. I also read his Tribbles book and Yesterday's Children.

 

Back in those days of yore when the Star Trek section was half a book shelf..

Spock. Messiah!

 

That has to be looked at in the context of when the series was made, when a culturally diverse human crew was of more significance than aliens.

 

See? To me that's like saying peanut butter was exciting before steak came around.

 

Oddly enough, I prefer peanut butter.

 

And I have hadn't had a steak since 1995.

 

Different tastes, different people.

 

Why haven't you had steak since 1995?

 

Ent was a prequal to TOS (by 200 years), so it actually may have been more realistic to show no aliens as part of the NX-01 crew. But just because Ent was produced some 50 years after TOS, doesn't mean that the prequal should appear more culturally evolved (with respect to aliens) than it's "sequel" (TOS). Indeed, it should not.

But Dream's point, I believe, was that people who complain that there were not enough aliens in the NX-01 crew usually don't have the same complaint about TOS having only one alien crewmember. It implies a double standard.

 

Spock was the only alien we saw, there were likely dozens of others onboard that kept missing the camera. Its the same way we never saw a stellar cartographer in TOS but you assume that a ship of exploration has several.

ENT as a Earth-based ship makes sense to have few aliens onboard, but it should have been an early Federation ship instead with lots of aliens on the crew.

 

In a similar vein, I'd prefer if it were set shortly after the founding of the Federation, but in a time when things were much less tightly connected.

I'd have the Federation Starfleet essentially be a conglomeration of vessels from the fleets of member worlds (which are not yet integrated) and have it be a big deal to have exchange officers from one ship/fleet to another. The lead ship (I'd call it Phoenix) should report to UESPA first and be sort of "on loan" to the UFP Starfleet. It makes sense after a war, with the founding of a new government, that things would be more contentious.

 

The transporters worked just fine, where we saw many malfunctions and they hardly ever worked right in TOS. The Vulcan really, really bothered me. She was too emotional at times, where yes Spock became emotional too but I just feel like her emotional-ness was just....not right, can't explain it really. Everything just worked too well for it to be before TOS time.

 

That's when I became poor. The biggest food luxury anymore is going to the fried chicken fastfood place (not even KFC), or walking 4 or 5 blocks for a cheap pizza from Little Caesars. The hard part is getting 2 $5 pizzas home when you don't have a car, and walk with a cane. It's hard to get 2 pizza boxes under one arm, and you can't carry them level. If I really want to splurge, I take the train about 12 blocks to McDonalds. But the easiest thing to get is chicken.

If I even wanted to buy a raw steak, I'd have to take the train to a grocery store that has fresh meat, there's none such in my immediate neighborhood anymore. And when at the grocery, I have to be careful about the weight of everything I'm buying, as I have to carry it all home at least 3 blocks with only one hand as the cane's in the other.

Though for a while after moving into this apartment 7 years ago, I would sometimes call a pizza delivery joint or a local (a mile away) sit-down family restaurant that does delivery.