So what's with all the Archer hate?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Enterprise' started by jibrilmudo, Oct 15, 2013.

  1. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    That was a stirring post 2takes..

    :: slow claps ::

    (I'm taking the piss here..)

    Most Trek meaningful wordy moments are awkward hamhanded events. Kirk got away with a lot more because Shatner is so theatrical and the man was all ego, he is charismatic no matter how ridiculous. Picard had a gravitas that particularly seduced the American audience (enamored with accents). Janeway had more inflection in a syllable or a hand wave than Archer managed to pump into a whole speech. But Sisko, he was as awkward as Archer IMO, but the material was always better.

    I think Soval was sincere though. You have to remember the Archer he first met in Broken Bow, all threats and huff. His clapping may be his way of patting Archer on the head for coming so far, but I do think he had a genuine change of perspective as far as humans go over the years prior.
     
  2. Captain_Nick

    Captain_Nick Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Wow. I'll probably get chased off the board for saying this, but I loved the Archer character. He was probably the most human of the captains - not as cool as Shatner, maybe, but the most real, the most relatable. Watching Enterprise made me feel like it was us, in the future, not like DS9 or Voyager where every problem could be solved by gravometric neutrino flux fields.

    Loved the dog. Loved the poor interspecies relations. Enterprise was a top show, easily the best Trek series of them all. Made me feel like if I hung around long enough I might see a ship like that in my old age. Not a bad feeling to have actually.

    One question though. What's the deal with those Suliban? Were they making a TV series or a message for the middle east in that third season?
     
  3. 2takesfrakes

    2takesfrakes Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    ...............................................................
     
  4. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Collingwood Nick I always liked this description of Archer from a past poster.. kind of rehabilitated him for me. I think it works well:

    http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=5798284&postcount=12

    You'll have to scroll down to the Archer part.

    Archer is not my favorite anything but I have a high opinion of Enterprise as a whole.
     
  5. Captain_Nick

    Captain_Nick Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Yep, what that guy said. I agree with the whole post.
     
  6. WarpCore

    WarpCore Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Pulaski was virtually irrelevant to the show as a whole. My biggest problem with Archer is that the series revolved around the character too much but without the confidence or intelligence Kirk had. He was constantly portrayed as a highly flawed human being (even by today's standards) who doubled as a freaking super hero episode after episode. The writers could have done the show a favor by letting other characters do something occasionally. When they finally decided to do that, the show was already being canceled.

    These would be lines either spoken by a character or to/about him or her.

    TOS Total Lines 29213
    Kirk 9521 (32.59%)
    captain 3057 (10.46%)
    Spock 6046 (20.70%)
    McCoy 2843 (9.73%)
    Scott 1943 (6.65%)
    Sulu 1071 (3.67%)
    Uhura 858 (2.94%)
    Chekov 649 (2.22%)


    TNG Total Lines 63813
    Picard 13060 (20.47%)
    captain 3280 (5.14%)
    Riker 7940 (12.44%)
    Data 8129 (12.74%)
    Worf 4685 (7.34%)
    LaForge 4590 (7.19%)
    Geordi 431 (0.68%)
    Crusher 3551 (5.56%)
    Troi 3398 (5.32%)
    Pulaski 569 (0.89%)


    Total DS9 Lines 67528
    Sisko 9133 (13.52%)
    Kira 5805 (8.60%)
    Odo 5446 (8.06%)
    Bashir 5371 (7.95%)
    O'Brien 5310 (7.86%)
    Quark 5182 (7.67%)
    Dax 4320 (6.40%)
    Rom 2979 (4.41%)
    Worf 2461 (3.64%)
    Jake 1932 (2.86%)
    Garak 1766 (2.62%)
    Nog 1567 (2.32%)


    Total Voyager Lines 68322
    Janeway 11921 (17.45%)
    captain 2993 (4.38%)
    Chakotay 6251 (9.15%)
    EMH 6068 (8.88%)
    Doctor 1119 (1.64%)
    Paris 5617 (8.22%)
    Tuvok 5444 (7.97%)
    Seven 5041 (7.38%)
    Kim 4761 (6.97%)
    Harry 508 (0.74%)
    Torres 4579 (6.70%)
    Neelix 3852 (5.64%)


    Total Enterprise Lines 34298
    Archer 8701 (25.37%)
    captain 1440 (4.20%)
    T'Pol 4698 (13.70%)
    Tucker 4493 (13.10%)
    Reed 2758 (8.04%)
    Phlox 2212 (6.45%)
    Hoshi 1740 (5.07%)
    Travis 1485 (4.33%)
    Xindi 145 (0.42%)
    Suliban 87 (0.25%)

    Malcolm 164 (0.48%)
    Mayweather 49 (0.14%)
    Sato 43 (0.13%)

    An outline story of DS9 would revolve around a Starfleet Commander predestined to transform into a god of an alien culture. The writers get there with pretty good ensemble character balance and moderate reliance on guest stars. The 3rd tier character development in DS9 is excellent, while Sisko obviously isn't ignored.

    An outline story of Enterprise would be about the early usage of the namesake ship to lay the groundwork for an interplanetary alliance. It gets there by heavily focusing on a single man. So any negative views of the individual reflect upon the story, and vica-versa any negative views of the story reflect upon the individual regardless the merits of some criticism.
     
  7. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Warpcore did you manually add all that up from chakoteya (which gives figures by episodes) or did you find a total somewhere?

    And I don't get fully what the 'captain' part is. That is people saying captain to the captain? Are all the other lines spoken directly by the character or are they also lines about the character?
     
  8. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

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    This method reminds me of the Bechdel test, which produces interesting data that is not necessarily definitive. DS9 was the only Trek series in which the bridge and the command crew was not conceptualized as the primary setting. The promenade was far more important. Moreover, Brooks was good at grunting: that's a lot of acting that may not require any lines. ETA: the complexity of later scripts also meant that secondary characters were often used to give the main actors a break.

    Overall, I tend to think like WarpCore: Archer got more lines than other character. However, showing this to be the case requires more attention to episodes like Strange New World, where Bakula is speaking lines that should have gone to Billingsley.
     
  9. BigJake

    BigJake Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Interesting exercise WarpCore. But... aside from the "captain" category being confusing, something seems wonky about some of the figures. Frex: Pulaski had more lines in TNG than LaForge did? That can't be right, she was only on the show for one season.
     
  10. WarpCore

    WarpCore Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    These are any lines spoken by that character, to that character, OR about that character by anyone else. Essentially any time a writer used that character in any line in any fashion. Manual wouldn't quite be the best way to put it, but I created the data myself from running searches on the chakoteya transcripts. She provides line counts for Voyager. This is a little different.

    If you're familiar with *nix command line, best way to explain would be an example of exactly what I did. I've had the transcripts saved locally for years, so all this searching doesn't hit her server at all. It's all local.

    Code:
    ~/NextGen $ for i in *.htm;do links2 -dump $i > $i.txt;done  
    ~/NextGen $ grep \: *.txt|wc -l
    63813
    ~/NextGen $ grep \: *.txt|grep -i "number one"|wc -l
    390
    First I started by stripping all the html markup with links2.
    Then I got a rough count of all dialog for the entire season. In TNG's case 63813. The first search (grep) only matches lines that contain a colon, thus most non-dialog and whitespace/empty lines are removed.
    The 3rd line shows an example of a search. The 2nd grep command reduces the output to only lines where anyone says the phrase "number one", typically referring to Riker of course. The "wc -l" counts the number of lines that were output by grep. In this search that was 390 times or lines of dialog. From there I put the outputs of searches into a spreadsheet.

    I included "captain" because it was often used to refer to the main character regardless of series, but obviously it wasn't always so I didn't just sum the results together. This is nothing more than a word count of the chakoteya transcripts for the word "captain".

    For example the line
    RIKER: Captain Picard to the bridge.

    The single line would add 1 to all 3 searches of Picard, captain, and Riker.

    PICARD: Captain, welcome aboard.

    That line would add to both Picard and captain. It's simply a total hit of a word, regardless of who is saying it.

    My basic thought or question was how much the writers "used" any particular character in creating lines of dialog. That doesn't necessarily mean a certain actor is even involved in a scene. But I think it demonstrates how much all the characters' lives are being portrayed as existing around another individual. In TOS it's pretty extreme, since at least one out of every three lines (pronouns make the involvement go up even more but won't show in the searches) were based around Shatner's character from the perspective of inside the writers' minds. ENT is little better. IMO the series could have been called The Adventures of Jonathon Archer and Captain Kirk Gets Laid and wouldn't have seemed unusual.


    I hope I explained the "captain" search.

    Just for further comparison. Few more searches from TNG:
    admiral 216
    captain 3280
    commander 1520
    lieutenant 665
    ensign 395


    As for LaForge vs Pulaski, you missed a line. LaForge and Geordi were independent searches. Pulaski is used more often for a line of dialog than Geordi, but LaForge occurred far more often than either in the transcripts. This is mostly because lines for Burton's character start with LAFORGE:. You could add the LaForge and Geordi counts together, but do know 7 lines using both would be double counted. :)

    LaForge 4590 (7.19%)
    Geordi 431 (0.68%)
    Pulaski 569 (0.89%)
     
  11. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ^Did you count the number of times Sisko was called commander or emissary?
     
  12. WarpCore

    WarpCore Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    In short, I can't the way I'm counting this with nothing but dumb searches. It doesn't differentiate between whom is being called commander, but those usages are smaller than expected in DS9 imo.

    DS9
    captain 815
    commander 801
    benjamin 240
    prophet 216
    emissary 115
    kai 74

    These searches are kind of fun.
    cardassia 745 (casdassian 619)
    bajor 616 (bajoran 365)
    earth 94


    Sorry to the OP for going so OT.
     
  13. xvicente

    xvicente Captain Captain

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    I think it's alright. Nobody like Archer anyway.
     
  14. gblews

    gblews Vice Admiral Admiral

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    :lol:
     
  15. Anika Hanson

    Anika Hanson Captain Captain

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    He's a blundering idiot. It came to me the other day that he is like George W Bush jnr.
     
  16. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    It's unfortunate but that's how he does come across at times. There is even some resemblance :lol:

    I'm thinking really, Starfleet chose their best astronaut for the job. Not their best diplomat. In Broken Bow it seems clear he has had little or no diplomatic experience. Starfleet somehow missed that this was going to be majorly important for exploring REAL people out there in the stars.. maybe they saw it is as 95% charting space?
     
  17. BigJake

    BigJake Vice Admiral Admiral

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    *smacks forehead*

    Thank you.