Apart from different color detailing, it doesn't look that different to me.
What are your opinions regarding Star Trek that are, shall we say, unorthodox?
Changed the nacelle pylons.
The pylons were the least of my problems with the design, haha.
Never been a fan of swept back pylons.
I like the SNW ship a lot. But yeah, I'd never have made the warp nacelle pylons swept back with the potato peeler gaps.
Most fugly alien ship: Galor class (Cardassian).
Very weirdly proportioned and ungainly looking.
Very weirdly proportioned and ungainly looking.
Well, in fairness, our friend Captain Esteban never actually ordered raising shields. He actually never even ordered evasive maneuvers either, just telling the helmsman to standby for evasive. So it may have been unshielded and basically sitting still at the time the Klingons fired.
Poor Esteban
I think the whole Eugenics War/WW3 backstory is both really dull and feels wrong for Star Trek. The "Eugenics Wars of the 1990s" worked as a throwaway line to serve a single plot in "Space Seed", but I wish it had never become such a foundational aspect of the setting.
When I watch any Star Trek that isn't explicitly bringing it up, I still just ignore the entire thing and take it as a world in which things got gradually better over the 21st and 22nd centuries.
When I watch any Star Trek that isn't explicitly bringing it up, I still just ignore the entire thing and take it as a world in which things got gradually better over the 21st and 22nd centuries.
How so? Things often have to get worse in order to get better with humans.
When you factor in First Contact and the Vulcan plot that runs into Enterprise, it seems more like a fluke - Cochrane and Sloane make a single warp flight and then Vulcans end up shepherding humans into the galactic stage (and somehow end up being part of a mostly-human-centric Federation anyway). And of course it's not even Cochrane and Sloane after the timeline change, it's Geordi and Riker appearing from the future.
But that aside, TOS in particular feels to me like a sketch of a world where 60s liberalism, and the subsequent 80s/90s "End of History" mood, continued to evolve into the 21st century and beyond, ushering in an age of global unity, human rights, and rapid technological progress. I think that's much more exciting as a proposal than the nuclear holocaust + Vulcan babysitting plotline that the Berman era solidified, and makes a much bolder statement about what our own world could be capable of.
I admit I wish the “aspirational future” didn’t have both an apocalypse and us getting helped up by aliens in it—but as elements in a science-fictional history, it’s not like they don’t make sense.
I don’t disagree. TOS as the world where 9/11 and its compounding effects never happened?
I actually think it's more inspirational the way it went, with humanity getting itself pretty much together and making all the progress they did in less than a century right after that last world war. Getting back up and being even better than before after being knocked down, as a civilization, is pretty much an underdog winning story. That speaks to many on so many levels.
It's why movies like ROCKY and THE KARATE KID and shows like COBRA KAI were so good and well loved. Everyone loves an underdog. And in the case of COBRA KAI with Johnny, who doesn't love a story about picking yourself up from the worst parts of yourself and becoming a better version of yourself?
ENT, in a way, was built on humanity redeeming itself. We even see Archer show a bit of growth in the pilot when he went from completely distrusting Vulcans due to their holding back of sharing information (they weren't really wrong to do that, but Archer wasn't really wrong to feel the way he did, either) to being open enough to start trusting T'Pol by the end of "BROKEN BOW".
It's why movies like ROCKY and THE KARATE KID and shows like COBRA KAI were so good and well loved. Everyone loves an underdog. And in the case of COBRA KAI with Johnny, who doesn't love a story about picking yourself up from the worst parts of yourself and becoming a better version of yourself?
ENT, in a way, was built on humanity redeeming itself. We even see Archer show a bit of growth in the pilot when he went from completely distrusting Vulcans due to their holding back of sharing information (they weren't really wrong to do that, but Archer wasn't really wrong to feel the way he did, either) to being open enough to start trusting T'Pol by the end of "BROKEN BOW".
Which it still does even with the Eugenics Wars. It's just that took an extreme moment to build away from the destruction.
From what I understand, the Earth descends into "the post-atomic horror", and the only thing that really reverses it is the warp flight (which occurs against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic barrenness) accidentally forcing Vulcan intervention.
The "only through mass tragedy/atrocity/loss of life can the future get better" idea never really landed as thematically compelling or emotionally convincing for me; I just don't think it's got much truth to it. I do actually quite like the Vulcans as reluctant babysitters plot point, but you could easily have that without the first-genocide, then-nukes context.
Oh, well, yeah. My criticism is with the TNG/First Contact/Enterprise backstory with the nuclear war then the Vulcan arrival. I don't mind the existence of a major war in the 1990s in TOS' backstory, especially since it doesn't seem to be treated as a pivotal moment that explicitly led to the situation we see in TOS (and apparently ended around 1996 anyway).
Thing is, the glimpse of the Post-Atomic Horror we see is from 2079 — sixteen years after the first contact in 2063.
No, it was a moment that started building towards something better when betterment was recognized not to be in a test tube. We also had the Saturn mission, the invention of warp and alien contact. It's all pivitol.
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