If you had the chance to re-do Enterprise in any way you want, how you would do it?
Re-doing Enterprise
- Thread starter Joe Washington
- Start date
Probably.
At it's heart, it is the single best concept for a Star Trek spin-off.
Then again the only thing I wasn't sold on, was the Temporal Cold War and that was gone two episodes into Season 4.
So I'd be tempted to just reintroduce it, and cherry-pick the good things to bring up an audience up to speed on.
At it's heart, it is the single best concept for a Star Trek spin-off.
Then again the only thing I wasn't sold on, was the Temporal Cold War and that was gone two episodes into Season 4.
So I'd be tempted to just reintroduce it, and cherry-pick the good things to bring up an audience up to speed on.
Gotta agree with a lot of what's been written above. The Temporal Cold War just didn't work, it wasn't interesting nor was it overly well executed. When you look at some of the great recurring characters we got such as Mudd, Q, Ro Laren and Brunt then Daniels just came across as boring and glib with no real chemistry with Bakula or anyone else.
I loved a lot of the concepts that we got such as the Vulcan arc, the Birth of the Federation, the Andorians and Tellerites - all this was awesome. A lot of it though was a rehash of stuff we'd seen before, we got the Borg, transporters, force-fields and the same sub-themes that have been running through the whole franchise for years, an example being the fact that Enterprise raises shields (sorry hull plating) and then can sustain 2 shots before she canna take no more.
So what would I change? I'd have made the ship even more claustrophobic, so very small corridors, a smaller bridge, lower ceilings, make it less well lit, more exposed circuitry and piping, make it feel like a prototype (I know why they didn't do this - they needed the space for movement and camera positioning). I'd have made space seem bigger, so much more distant shots of the ship (as in the ship basically a dot on the screen), to make space actually seem like a new and scary place.
I liked the idea of having at least 4 or 5 episodes on Earth with the launch of the ship and to establish more background to the show and cast (this could have helped the poorly developed Sato, Mayweather and Reed).
I'd have made them actually impressed with being out in deep space and actually impressed that they were approaching a new planet (I think we got one quick reaction shot in Strange New World, which was nice but should have been built more into the mentality of the show). They should have made the planets and solar systems seem big, everything was still way too accessible.
In terms of general atmosphere I really liked the early Next Generation season feel where it actually felt like the Enterprise was travelling where no one had gone before. This ambiance would have helped Enterprise a lot (and really helped Voyager IMO).
I loved a lot of the concepts that we got such as the Vulcan arc, the Birth of the Federation, the Andorians and Tellerites - all this was awesome. A lot of it though was a rehash of stuff we'd seen before, we got the Borg, transporters, force-fields and the same sub-themes that have been running through the whole franchise for years, an example being the fact that Enterprise raises shields (sorry hull plating) and then can sustain 2 shots before she canna take no more.
So what would I change? I'd have made the ship even more claustrophobic, so very small corridors, a smaller bridge, lower ceilings, make it less well lit, more exposed circuitry and piping, make it feel like a prototype (I know why they didn't do this - they needed the space for movement and camera positioning). I'd have made space seem bigger, so much more distant shots of the ship (as in the ship basically a dot on the screen), to make space actually seem like a new and scary place.
I liked the idea of having at least 4 or 5 episodes on Earth with the launch of the ship and to establish more background to the show and cast (this could have helped the poorly developed Sato, Mayweather and Reed).
I'd have made them actually impressed with being out in deep space and actually impressed that they were approaching a new planet (I think we got one quick reaction shot in Strange New World, which was nice but should have been built more into the mentality of the show). They should have made the planets and solar systems seem big, everything was still way too accessible.
In terms of general atmosphere I really liked the early Next Generation season feel where it actually felt like the Enterprise was travelling where no one had gone before. This ambiance would have helped Enterprise a lot (and really helped Voyager IMO).
I never had a problem with the ship being called Enterprise. I had problems with the ship being a ripoff of the Akira class from the 24th century, with a registry number that had already been used in VOY (NX-01A for the Dauntless), with the ship being a "Starfleet" vessel (albeit Earth Starfleet) when it could have been something more original like "Earth Space Navy" or something, and that the ship wouldn't have had such amenities as artificial gravity, shields, transporters, or visual communication, as per Spock in "Balance of Terror."
To be fair, the characters could have been more interesting had they been fleshed out a bit more, but I think they made many mistakes at the outset. I think they really needed a more multicultural cast to represent a united Earth (and I don't mean the stereotypical Brit or Asian.)
Honestly, this show shouldn't have been about exploration. It should have been about the formation of the Federation, which was it's original intent but was pretty much relegated to the final few episodes of the series.
I had no problems with Faith of the Heart. The only issue I had was when they decided to give it some silly syncopation later in the series.
Agreed. Although adding a futuristic element was CBS's mandate, they didn't have to create some half-assed TCW plot that they really didn't know anything about. That element could have been handled so much better.
Again, agreed, but that had more to do with the fact that they were using writers from VOY for the first season.
I loved the idea of the time war, but the execution left a lot to be desired. With forethought instead of contradictory bollocks, they could have had fans piecing together an intricate Trek future history glimpsed throughout the TCW stories.
With the hindsight of experience, I'm sorely tempted to say they should have done something like Trek XI did, and declare a new, anything-goes continuity from the start. The whole exploration angle of the first half of the series was based on always struck me as a bit weird, because haven't they got pretty wide-ranging (if not necessarily super-detailed) star maps from the Vulcans, who've been doing exploration of their own for centuries at least? By the time of TOS, I'm ready to believe that Kirk and Co. truly were blazing a path, but in the early days, surely they already knew the broad strokes of where the quadrant's solar systems and alien empires resided, even if there were strange planets and minor phenomena to fill in the details of here and there. (Which is exactly what they did do for those first two years, I suppose.)
With a Nero-like temporal reset, however, and the Vulcans drastically reduced, the whole Klingon/Romulan threats could have moved and beefed up, and we could have gotten an alternate-reality UFP formed by war in much the same way the World Wars sparked the League of Nations and UN. Not a very Roddenberry-ian notion, I know, but it could have given the series a badly-needed edge that even the Xindi arc barely managed to achieve.
With a Nero-like temporal reset, however, and the Vulcans drastically reduced, the whole Klingon/Romulan threats could have moved and beefed up, and we could have gotten an alternate-reality UFP formed by war in much the same way the World Wars sparked the League of Nations and UN. Not a very Roddenberry-ian notion, I know, but it could have given the series a badly-needed edge that even the Xindi arc barely managed to achieve.
I think the exploration angle was there simply because nobody really knew what this show was supposed to be about. Since the VOY writers were used to churning out planet-of-the-week standalones, that's what we ended up getting for the first two seasons.
By the time the third season rolled around and the producers realized they needed something different, enough people had already stopped watching that it was too late. As Lance said, had the show started from the get-go with a mysterious attack on Earth and a journey to find out who did it and what their motives were, then it probably would have piqued people's interests more.
By the time the third season rolled around and the producers realized they needed something different, enough people had already stopped watching that it was too late. As Lance said, had the show started from the get-go with a mysterious attack on Earth and a journey to find out who did it and what their motives were, then it probably would have piqued people's interests more.
CBS wasn't involved with that (or anything regarding Trek) until after ENT was cancelled.
The nature of a thread like this is based on fans like ourselves in the here-and-now, expressing their sentiments while agreeing that hindsight is 20-20.
Some things said above I agree with, others, no-so-much.
I did not mind the theme music or cast of characters at all. In fact, I really liked them. I could even look beyond the naming of the hero-ship Enterprise; not a biggie.
Here are things I was concerned about. Warning: many of these sentiments have been expressed before...
The show's look, and how it presented and used the Enterprise in situations, made it look too TNG-ish, like Sisko's Defiant without shields or the Enterprise-D with some missing size and technology. Very controversial from the start, and it conflicted with the idea that the NX-class starship was a brand-new thing, and the Enterprise being the prototype. A delicate, first-time-ever ship like that doesn't just woosh its way to escape peril just in the nick of time like the Millennium Falcon.
They needed to start out with a story that did not involve the Klingons. I would have favored "First Flight", to better establish the characters' histories and why the Enterprise came to be. And we needed more stories like this.
I agree on the Temporal Cold War. How Archer was able to combat time-travelers so easily made no sense. It all seemed so contrived. It also delayed the telling of the Romulan War story. That's the important story arc.
While I really enjoyed the basic makeup of the cast, and the premise of NX-01 being the first "warp five engine" starship from Earth to make it "out there", I had a basic problem with the characters stumbling around and making fools of themselves and the general atmosphere seemed a bit wooden. (Much like SPACE: 1999) This seemed to be in direct contrast to STARGATE SG-1, another space-travel show with Earthling characters daring to take the plunge and do things never done before. Only Jack O'Neill and Cam Mitchell and their crew had a lot more fun and that show's sense of humor made it easier to enjoy the adventure. Tracing a problem back to TNG, ENT seemed to lack a McCoy/Pulaski-like smartass, an essential ingredient in TOS and SG-1. "And then he gave me something that reminded me of the Seventies" ("Jolinar's Memories") was the kind of thing that made SG-1 fun to watch by both making the characters more human and making how they articulated their situation much more interesting.
What ENT, and indeed, all of Bermanian TREK, was missing was an overall creative agenda. Where was this show taking us? I'm not suggesting story arcs, even though these would be an interesting possibility. I'm talking about what the show was trying to say. I loved how we were presented with Archer and Trip was the pioneers who literally built the Warp 5 engine and the NX-class from the ground up, and how they represent the spearhead of Earth's ambition to burst out into deep space, with the Vulcans cautioning they weren't ready. But that's it? Surely there needed to be more about what this meant for the human race and the characters directly.
Berman and company did have some neat ideas on how to distinguish the NX-01 Enterprise from other Enterprises we had seen before. I love the set designs. They did a beautiful job showing that. But they really stumbled when they showed the Enterprise firing "photonic torpedoes", possibly the silliest double-talk ever in TREK. TOS virtually handed the answer to them on a silver platter in "Balance of Terror":
So... what have we established here? Earth (and presumably the Romulans) had at least some starships, but they were "primitive" next to TOS. And Spock called it a "conflict", not an all-out war. They only had "primitive atomic weapons" and capacity was limited to "no quarter, no captives". Subspace radio existed, but was still primitive and apparently much less reliable. (No viso-phone calls to headquarters, please.) The Goldstiens' 1980 "Spaceflight Chronology" also offered a clue: those ships used crude lasers and fusion torpedoes. Berman & company started to get this right, making the Enterprise's first encounter with the Romulans be a minefield, but then they screwed up. "Balance of Terror" indirectly suggested that much of the conflict would have to be more like piracy or a proxy war, with third parties stumbling into committing acts of violence or perhaps acts of deadly terror/sabotage/espionage. No holo-ships or proto-Warbirds necessary, at least not from the get-go. (XFozzboute did a better job, hindsight being 20-20, at showing us what a more plausible Warbird could look like.)
Introducing the Transporter mechanism to the late 22nd century was a dicey move as well. It seemed like no time at all and people were saved by the skin of their teeth in split-second beam-ups. If the technology is supposedly still new, they should not be able to do that.
As mentioned before, I liked Russell Watson's/Diane Warren's "Where My Heart Will Take Me". I actually saw this as a positive development. I was disappointed when TREK episodes stopped opening with a "space, the final frontier..." narrative. I thought it was an important tradition in the franchise. DS9 and VOY seemed to ignore that, and I was glad to see it brought back in the form of a song. Having said that, I wish they had not re-mixed it with more instruments. It sounded better in the show's first year. If they wanted to do something new with it, they should've hired Sheryl Crow to re-do it.
I liked what was done with the Andorians, Vulcans and Tellarites. We needed to see more friendly (or potentially friendly) characters like Shran that could evolve into allies.
There were amazing contradictions in the show. They had Warp 5 engines, artificial gravity, an early transporter, a navigational deflector dish, and the beginnings of photon(ic) torpedoes and wanna-be phasers. Yet they were still tinkering around with forcefields and used cable-"grapplers" instead of tractor-beams. This is just me, but it makes no sense to design the ship with the catamaran-like assemblies and all the swoopy Akira-prise curves and then try to pass her off as an early starship. There is an alternative drawing of what the studio artists envisioned the NX-01 to possibly look like without the catamarans, and with a crude secondary hull. If you look at the Starfleet Museum's artwork, there are sound ideas there, such as the Moskva, Gagarin, Hyperion and Lancaster. Any of these would've made a more interesting NX-01.
The only set I did not like on ENT was the engine room. It looked too much like someone steampunked the Enterprise-D's engine room.
Some things said above I agree with, others, no-so-much.
I did not mind the theme music or cast of characters at all. In fact, I really liked them. I could even look beyond the naming of the hero-ship Enterprise; not a biggie.
Here are things I was concerned about. Warning: many of these sentiments have been expressed before...
The show's look, and how it presented and used the Enterprise in situations, made it look too TNG-ish, like Sisko's Defiant without shields or the Enterprise-D with some missing size and technology. Very controversial from the start, and it conflicted with the idea that the NX-class starship was a brand-new thing, and the Enterprise being the prototype. A delicate, first-time-ever ship like that doesn't just woosh its way to escape peril just in the nick of time like the Millennium Falcon.
They needed to start out with a story that did not involve the Klingons. I would have favored "First Flight", to better establish the characters' histories and why the Enterprise came to be. And we needed more stories like this.
I agree on the Temporal Cold War. How Archer was able to combat time-travelers so easily made no sense. It all seemed so contrived. It also delayed the telling of the Romulan War story. That's the important story arc.
While I really enjoyed the basic makeup of the cast, and the premise of NX-01 being the first "warp five engine" starship from Earth to make it "out there", I had a basic problem with the characters stumbling around and making fools of themselves and the general atmosphere seemed a bit wooden. (Much like SPACE: 1999) This seemed to be in direct contrast to STARGATE SG-1, another space-travel show with Earthling characters daring to take the plunge and do things never done before. Only Jack O'Neill and Cam Mitchell and their crew had a lot more fun and that show's sense of humor made it easier to enjoy the adventure. Tracing a problem back to TNG, ENT seemed to lack a McCoy/Pulaski-like smartass, an essential ingredient in TOS and SG-1. "And then he gave me something that reminded me of the Seventies" ("Jolinar's Memories") was the kind of thing that made SG-1 fun to watch by both making the characters more human and making how they articulated their situation much more interesting.
What ENT, and indeed, all of Bermanian TREK, was missing was an overall creative agenda. Where was this show taking us? I'm not suggesting story arcs, even though these would be an interesting possibility. I'm talking about what the show was trying to say. I loved how we were presented with Archer and Trip was the pioneers who literally built the Warp 5 engine and the NX-class from the ground up, and how they represent the spearhead of Earth's ambition to burst out into deep space, with the Vulcans cautioning they weren't ready. But that's it? Surely there needed to be more about what this meant for the human race and the characters directly.
Berman and company did have some neat ideas on how to distinguish the NX-01 Enterprise from other Enterprises we had seen before. I love the set designs. They did a beautiful job showing that. But they really stumbled when they showed the Enterprise firing "photonic torpedoes", possibly the silliest double-talk ever in TREK. TOS virtually handed the answer to them on a silver platter in "Balance of Terror":
So... what have we established here? Earth (and presumably the Romulans) had at least some starships, but they were "primitive" next to TOS. And Spock called it a "conflict", not an all-out war. They only had "primitive atomic weapons" and capacity was limited to "no quarter, no captives". Subspace radio existed, but was still primitive and apparently much less reliable. (No viso-phone calls to headquarters, please.) The Goldstiens' 1980 "Spaceflight Chronology" also offered a clue: those ships used crude lasers and fusion torpedoes. Berman & company started to get this right, making the Enterprise's first encounter with the Romulans be a minefield, but then they screwed up. "Balance of Terror" indirectly suggested that much of the conflict would have to be more like piracy or a proxy war, with third parties stumbling into committing acts of violence or perhaps acts of deadly terror/sabotage/espionage. No holo-ships or proto-Warbirds necessary, at least not from the get-go. (XFozzboute did a better job, hindsight being 20-20, at showing us what a more plausible Warbird could look like.)
Introducing the Transporter mechanism to the late 22nd century was a dicey move as well. It seemed like no time at all and people were saved by the skin of their teeth in split-second beam-ups. If the technology is supposedly still new, they should not be able to do that.
As mentioned before, I liked Russell Watson's/Diane Warren's "Where My Heart Will Take Me". I actually saw this as a positive development. I was disappointed when TREK episodes stopped opening with a "space, the final frontier..." narrative. I thought it was an important tradition in the franchise. DS9 and VOY seemed to ignore that, and I was glad to see it brought back in the form of a song. Having said that, I wish they had not re-mixed it with more instruments. It sounded better in the show's first year. If they wanted to do something new with it, they should've hired Sheryl Crow to re-do it.
I liked what was done with the Andorians, Vulcans and Tellarites. We needed to see more friendly (or potentially friendly) characters like Shran that could evolve into allies.
There were amazing contradictions in the show. They had Warp 5 engines, artificial gravity, an early transporter, a navigational deflector dish, and the beginnings of photon(ic) torpedoes and wanna-be phasers. Yet they were still tinkering around with forcefields and used cable-"grapplers" instead of tractor-beams. This is just me, but it makes no sense to design the ship with the catamaran-like assemblies and all the swoopy Akira-prise curves and then try to pass her off as an early starship. There is an alternative drawing of what the studio artists envisioned the NX-01 to possibly look like without the catamarans, and with a crude secondary hull. If you look at the Starfleet Museum's artwork, there are sound ideas there, such as the Moskva, Gagarin, Hyperion and Lancaster. Any of these would've made a more interesting NX-01.
The only set I did not like on ENT was the engine room. It looked too much like someone steampunked the Enterprise-D's engine room.
My bad. I meant UPN.
More-so, that that, I have heard some fun fan theories that the series finale could be the culmination of the Temporal Cold War, resulting in Enterprise being lost in another time stream, essentially wiping them from history.
It sounds odd, or maybe it could work, but you have a build up of the TCW as events unfold in worse and worse moments, and the Enterprise crew can go back and stop it all, stop the attack on Earth, but they must sacrifice themselves to make the change.
Fun speculation, any way
1. Continue fleshing out the largely unexplored parts of Star Trek's backstory instead of dragging the 24th century into it. Exploring Earth's early relationships with Andorians and Tellarites was a good idea, and on the whole pretty well-executed, with interesting stories and characters. Deciding to do Borg and Ferengi episodes was pure laziness.
2. Get rid of whoever on the writing staff couldn't stop thinking like a horny 14-year-old boy. Underwear-clad officers rubbing each other down with decon gel? Cut it. The whole ludicrous Vulcan neuropressure subplot? Cut it. Archer's freudian slips, the dog peeing on a sacred tree, and Reed tittering about T'Pol having an "awfully nice bum"? Just plain embarrassing. And when T'Pol resigned her Vulcan commission, put her in a damn Starfleet uniform already.
2. Get rid of whoever on the writing staff couldn't stop thinking like a horny 14-year-old boy. Underwear-clad officers rubbing each other down with decon gel? Cut it. The whole ludicrous Vulcan neuropressure subplot? Cut it. Archer's freudian slips, the dog peeing on a sacred tree, and Reed tittering about T'Pol having an "awfully nice bum"? Just plain embarrassing. And when T'Pol resigned her Vulcan commission, put her in a damn Starfleet uniform already.
I think that was Braga's doing, but Dawn Ostroff at UPN definitely wanted the show to be "sexy," even though she really had no clue that "sexy" wasn't what the audience really wanted.
Agreed on both points. The cat-suited sex kitten thing was getting old even in 1989, if not '87.
Oh boy, I love topics like that XD
Let's see:
1) Replace Archer with a different character, or at least make Archer more competent/intelligent/tactful it seems a bit like irrationality and tactlessness was the standard characterization for humanity in Enterprise...
2) T'Pol gets better hair, perhaps identical to her mirror universe counterpart. Only because the Vulcans are "logical" doesn't mean they all need to have horrible hair. Also let's put her into either a Vulcan-looking tunic or a SF uniform.
3) Those gel rubbing scenes have to go
4) Expand the roles and characters of Reed, Mayweather and Hoshi, they were WAY more interesting than Archer and Trip.
5) Make the ship really primitive and dial the danger and isolation of space up to 11.
6) Bring Tran in as a main character as soon as possible.
7) NO. TEMPORAL. WAR. Stupid idea....
8) Slowly introduce species that we are familiar with (no Klingon running around a corn field in the Pilot)
9) Focus more on the creation of the Federation and possibly the Romulan war.
10) More things like the space station form the pilot
11) More exploration.
Let's see:
1) Replace Archer with a different character, or at least make Archer more competent/intelligent/tactful it seems a bit like irrationality and tactlessness was the standard characterization for humanity in Enterprise...
2) T'Pol gets better hair, perhaps identical to her mirror universe counterpart. Only because the Vulcans are "logical" doesn't mean they all need to have horrible hair. Also let's put her into either a Vulcan-looking tunic or a SF uniform.
3) Those gel rubbing scenes have to go
4) Expand the roles and characters of Reed, Mayweather and Hoshi, they were WAY more interesting than Archer and Trip.
5) Make the ship really primitive and dial the danger and isolation of space up to 11.
6) Bring Tran in as a main character as soon as possible.
7) NO. TEMPORAL. WAR. Stupid idea....
8) Slowly introduce species that we are familiar with (no Klingon running around a corn field in the Pilot)
9) Focus more on the creation of the Federation and possibly the Romulan war.
10) More things like the space station form the pilot
11) More exploration.
