I love the basic premise of a story that outlines multiple historical outcomes, and uses
time travel to illustrate how a few actions and a few people can tilt the balance
between prosperity and poverty. I hope, someday, someone does a show about this. When
they do, I hope the characters they create for telling this story will be compelling,
interesting, innovative role models that our children will want to emulate in their own
imaginations and adventures.
The most serious problem with Enterprise as a story--more serious than its development
refusing to coincide with hundreds of existing hours of pre-existing Trek--is that its
characters--all of them--have become uninteresting. Their range of emotions, of
applied intellect, of goal-seeking, of personal philosophy, and of behavior have been
developed into such a narrow bandwidth that they have all become inhuman. Nobody on
this ship presently acts like a person you'd want to spend five minutes with if you met
him or her on the street. This isn't entirely the fault of the actors--in frequent
cases, they truly have nothing to work with, and Scott Bakula especially appears to be
struggling to make something happen from nothing. And as if the writing team were
subconsciously crying for help, they actually craft episodes with titles that explain
their condition ("Dead Stop," "Detained," "Crash Landing," "A Night in Sickbay"), along
with plotlines that actually focus on the fact that their characters have become
uninteresting (e.g., the long, almost endless search for Reed's favorite food).
To me, tackling the dullness problem is more critical than tackling the continuity
problem, although continuity is a serious problem. Vektor's approach to resolving both
issues, however, would require the current incarnation of the cast to suddenly become
interesting enough for us viewers to want to be led through their long journey to
restore the timeline--interesting enough that we would no longer want or need for them
to be replaced or restored with characters from a different timeline. In short, for
our current cast to become equipped with the character tools they need for the feat of
replacing themselves with better characters, they would have to become better
characters and, in so doing, make moot the entire purpose of the plotline.
The fact that the current Enterprise characters are uninteresting, and that characters
from generally uninteresting and even wretchedly bad shows (Jordan Cavanaugh in
"Crossing Jordan," Vice Principal Guber from "Boston Public," to name a few) are far
more interesting, is inexcusable. I would think the first step to solving this problem
(replacing the producers) is long overdue... But once
that's done, whatever team is in place will have a very difficult mess to clean up.
