I think its more that there was an unwillingness to make the distinction between United Earth Starfleet and Federation Starfleet. That goes back to establishing and fleshing out the concept of United Earth within Trek. As it went from being a part of the declaration in the New United Nations of the 2030s, to being adopted for use for the space probe agency a few years after First Contact, to being abolished as a concept altogether a decade later due to the post-atomic horror, to coming back into favour as a concept by the time Starfleet was founded in the 2130s, to being an actual political entity by the time the NX-01 launched. United Earth just was not at the forefront as it should have been for the series. Everything was too centralized with Starfleet. Various United Earth branches working together should have been the main idea. Even using UES – United Earth Ship – as a registry prefix could have helped differentiate the time period altogether from the rest of Trek and clearly establish what the show was about.
The whole cast except for Archer, T'pol and Trip were under utilized. Same thing happened in later seasons of Voyager when it became the Janeway, Seven and Doctor show. I thought the cast of Enterprise had the potential for a lot more and the show was poorer for not giving them more.
I thought it was too bad Dominic Keating an Linda Park and Anthony Montgomery weren't given more to do on the show and Doctor Phlox too.
Linda Park was one of the absolute best actors on the show -- secondly only to John Billingsley, IMO -- and she was criminally under-utilized. Worse than that: He was little more than Stepin Fetchit in space. Always servile, always smiling; the character was basically written as a walking anti-black stereotype. 100% agreed. I really like all these ideas -- something to make it clear that the idea of how to effectively run a starship did not just emerge fully-formed after the admiralty watched an old episode of Galaxy Quest or whatever. Something that makes it clear that the different departments and functions of the later Starfleet had to be developed through trial and error. Personally, I really don't like the idea that the folks on Earth had even imagined a need for something like "Starfleet Security" or "Starfleet Intelligence." If the 2150s United Earth Starfleet is just this space organization that's putting a starship out there into the galaxy for the first time, the idea of having a "Starfleet Intelligence" should be as alien to them as the idea of "NASA Intelligence" or "Canadian Space Agency Intelligence" is in real life. I would have preferred that. I don't really think Starfleet predates the Federation per se -- like, does the United States Navy pre-date the United States just because some of the states had their own navies before they united? "Starfleet" seems as generic a name to me as "Navy." I view the United Earth Starfleet as being a separate legal institution from the Federation Starfleet, and I consider it to be no more ancestral an organization than the Andorian Imperial Guard. But having said that, yeah, if I had been in charge, the United Earth Starfleet would have had a different name. Maybe, "United Earth Space Agency" or "United Earth Exploration Corps" or some such. 100%. This. This this this this this. ENT constantly undercut its own premise by depicting institutions that were too fully-formed already. This. This this this.
I loved Dominic Keating. He seemed to be a bit of a rogue and devilish in the pilot and the shuttlepod episode (t'pol has a nice bum) but in season 2 he was more uptight and a more uninteresting, by the book guy. Shame.
Dominic Keating has a new video up on Star Trek .com talking about what first episodes of Star trek he saw.
I've been rewatching early episodes and he is such a bore. It's all just "never be to careful" assume everything is hostile cliche crap
I've been looking at some of the older episodes myself and I thought there were some attempts to give him personality. Even in the pilot he had a nice scene with Mayweather where Reed even imitated Trip. And I liked how awkward it got when Reed mistook Hoshi's questions about what he liked to eat when she was really trying to find out a meal for his birthday. The idea of Reed being super straitlaced and unknownable wasn't a bad way to go, especially if we saw him loosen up more over the series. For me though, I would've then just stabbed the audience in the heart by having him be Section 31 or Terra Prime all along, then swing back around to have him redeem himself. It seems to me that the writing/character development fell by the wayside or became haphazard as the series went on, except for T'Pol and Trip, and Phlox just had the force or personality to wring out life from what little, or whatever, he was given. I also felt that Archer got some meaty stuff to work with in Seasons 3 & 4, but Reed, Sato, and Mayweather got lost in the shuffle.
Love Hoshi. Great characte r maybe underutilized, but Trek has never been an ensemble show with egality. I know TNG had poker games but there sure seemed to be a Big 2.5 (Pic, Data, Riker) and then the rest. Sepin Fechit can apply to Geordi pretty well. Nice affable guy, never finds love. I thought they were utilized in eNT well enough for Trek. Mayweather too ignored, as many ha e pointed out. When daughter and I made ourselves watch ENT through we would yell LINE! like Jon Lovitz' master thespian anytime Mayweather spoke. I liked Reed not being the typical, nice affable crew member.
The look she has when Phlox comes to check on her 'broken leg' in The Crossing shows how much of a talent she is! She can take a small part of an episode and just shine!
I know they wanted to move on from the Xindi storyline going in to season four, but there should have been more showing Hoshi recovering from her torture and manipulation at the hands of the Xindi. They mentioned it briefly once and it never came up again or seemed to have affected her.
There's an Enterprise novel where Hoshi is dealing with the aftermath of what happened to her after the Xindi arc. it's Rosetta by Dave Stern. It's one of my favorite Enterprise novels .
Having just rewatched Civilisation (S01,E09) I’m struck by how redundant Hoshi’s character became and how quickly that happened. In Broken Bow she’s practically strong-armed on to Enterprise under the auspice that she will be absolutely vital to the success of the NX-01’s mission. In Fight or Flight, her showcase episode, we see the nascent Universal Translator is something that only has a text interface and is about as reliable as Google Translate, but just seven episodes down the line the UT is working just fine. Well enough for Archer and T’Pol to separately converse in an alien tongue they only came into contact with 12 hours previously. Hell, well enough for Archer to hit on an indigenous space lady... It made me wonder, just halfway through the first season, what exactly do they even need Hoshi for? Another case of Braga and Berman imposing an arbitrary limitation on the capabilities of Starfleet technology only to handwave it away to expedite a story. That’s the main issue with Hoshi I think. She was created to fill the gap left by the UT, only for the writers to realise that was going to result in a lot of scenes where Archer and co. speak through her as a translator. On one side ‘alien language’ and on the other ‘what did they say?/tell them we say”. Whilst I agree that dramatically the above would quickly become tedious, there should have been another way. The character was created around a concept that was dumped or written around rather than expanded upon. From the moment Braga let the UT work just fine the character of Hoshi became deadwood.
The way that Hoshi was underutilised in the series…it makes me wish that it was her (and Mayweather) that transferred onto Columbia instead of Trip. At the very least, it would have shown that Hoshi had ambition. The series was already trended towards a TOS format. May as well write her character off, leaving her to guest appearances in potential future seasons, and have no name crewmen handle the UT.
If you take a look at say, Tos or Tng, the characters were for the most part fully formed at the beginning, not much "character Development" in the series. With Hoshi, they didn't have much lead time, so the idea was probably, well TOS had Uhura, so we need a communication officer. They set out a vague description of like, master of languages, can speak X amount, Ships communication officer, and resident translator. They got Linda Park and decided to fill in the details latter. Only that they found out that, except for the occasional use, most of the time she was used to push forward the B plots, and not really be used in "Communications" except for the occasional "hailing frequency's open Captain" or the occasional head nod. So yes she was under utilized, like most of the cast, and a good premise pretty much wasted on the "Same Ole Stuff" routine. Hoshi could have been better used as a first contact specialist, get to know the language, update the UT, find out the customs, etc. With the Vulcans, I think that a Universal Translator would have been one of the first things that they gave Earth, even the Space Boomers when they go to other worlds, so Hoshi's work would be kinda redundant in that regard, not like they went Far Far Away, beyond the range of any Vulcan ships travels, its all previously trodden territory. So a better use would be for her to research the Vulcan database on the planets that they might visit, and go down on Most teams as the "Ship Ambassador" to the new worlds. Have her go down, take the lead, inform the captain of what he's screwing up. And that's after giving the captain a briefing of what to expect at the next planet.
I think this says it better than I did. Like Mayweather, they created a concept without thinking much about the character.
I think the problem was that her character had no real purpose, if she has to translate everything aliens say the scenes move at a snail's pace which means the writer's won't have her do that and just have the aliens speak english most of the time which means all she gets to do is say "healing frequencies open". They should have made her the security officer instead of Malcolm moving him to the conn and making him the experienced boomer (a slightly older character than Mayweather would have been better for that imo). Mayweather should have been an engineer, they could have used a second regular character down there, Trip could have been his mentor.
It's a normal thing on a Star Trek series to shuffle off good characters played by competent actors to the sidelines. Linda Park takes her place alongside people like Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Marina Sirtis, Levar Burton, Robert Beltran and Garrett Wang.
Nichols and Takei were never part of the main cast, I don't think they were shuffled to the side, they were side characters all along.