I really want to like ENT...

[TeutonicNights]

I kinda liked first season. ENT had so much potential...
I didn't mind Archer or any of the crew. I didn't mind the "flipped Akira" thingy. But what bothered me was

- a story needs a proper beginning and an end. Often, ENT stories lacked one or the other. And even in the better episodes like "The Andorian Incident", little was really happening (and the ending in that episode was way too brief).

- The TCW was so poorly thought out, I wonder why they didn't just can the idea, maybe bring it back much much later. There were no surprises here. Good time travelers vs. evil time travelers. And we knew from the start which was which. Pretty lame.

- Rommies, too little too late. Rommies should have been in the 1st season cliffhanger
Heck, you could have almost the same plot as season 3, RIGHT FROM THE START. Replace plotting Xindi council with plotting Romulan Senate.

- Earth, too little. It's always good to have a potential conflict on Earth to fall back on. Earth was just Admiral Forrest on the monitor. Why did we never see a human colony?
Did we even knew when Picard's ancestor led the Martian Revolt? Or when Colonel Green lived? Would it not have been great to include them in Enterprise?
They could have had a great set-up for a Maquis-like setting with Stewart making a cameo too.
Bringing in section 31 and at least coming up with something like Terra Prime was okay, but WAY too late.
I liked the freighter episodes. They gave at least a glimpse of what humans were doing in space.

-T'Pol. Why did they have to drug her up and stuff to make her bond with Trip. Spock's father married a human woman. Couldn't they come up with another solution?

 

[BillJ]

It was just a very hit or miss show.

Some weeks the writing was great, while others the acting was great. They never seemed to be great at the same time.

The Forgotten, Observer Effect, Similitude.

Tell me, would these episodes be badly written or badly acted?

Don't even remember The Forgotten. Similitude is vastly over-rated and the syrupy acting is way over the top and (as much as I love...) Observer Effect, Montgomery and Keating are so completely wooden in every single episode they're in I can't believe either were kept for all four seasons.

 

[commodore64]

Teutonic Nights, I thought you had some excellent points. I, and I like Enterprise, would agree with pretty much everything you wrote.

I don't know if I ever thought any of the acting was wooden. I did think Trip's crying jag in The Forgotten was over the top, mostly because I think by the time we got to that episode we completely understood that Trip's sister had died and that he was messed up over it (although I think they missed opportunities for small breakdowns - they told us too much he was grieving rather than show us). More than that, we just saw the captain and first officer lose it. They'd come unglued and hadn't been glued back together and the doctor is worried about the engineer? I think he's missing two key commanders.

And yet even with that over the top piece, I still think occasionally the actors made the wrong choice, but they were overwhelmingly qualified and did an excellent job with the material they were given. I doubt another troupe, even one with Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, would've done as well.

Wrong choices include:
* Archer's over-the-top anger, rather than silent, steely anger (which I think Bakula does great at)
* T'Pol's over-the-top emotion in some of season 4, where she's apparently more Vulcan (I didn't see it)

And Archer and T'Pol are my two favs.

 

[Glacial]

Show's great. The problem is, a lot of Trek fans have an episodic mentality, and don't get that the show was thought out in an arc (planned to be 7 years long, sadly abbreviated).

Archer, for example, grows the most. In the beginning, he's an overly-optimistic, vaguely racist hotshot test pilot put in charge of humanity's first deep-space exploration vessel and sent out on basically his own, disaster after disaster ensues for the next two years (especially repeatedly pissing off the Klingons, which leads to a century-plus of tension and outright war). Initially, he's not much of a leader at all, but over the course of the show he's forced to become good at it.

In the third season, we see him forced to become a military commander and diplomat, in the fourth season we see him becoming very good at being a diplomat.

He's becoming (inventing) the archetypical Starfleet captain -- leader, explorer, warrior, diplomat, all rolled into one. It just takes four years.

It's not an episodic show, like every other Trek show. It's a serial, and has to be watched and understood in that context. Did it have some awful episodes? Oh yes. But every Trek series has. It limped along for the first couple seasons with no clear direction, but the first couple seasons of all the post TOS series were pretty lame, if you ask me.

The big thing is "lol i've seen 3 episodes on seefuu and it sucks" means you've missed the entire show. I should know, because that's exactlywhat I did when ENT was on the air -- saw a couple episodes, yawned, turned the TV off forever. Then, in 2007, I borrowed the DVD sets, watched the whole show start-to-finish, and I'm hooked.

In fact, I'd say it's tied with TNG for my second-favorite series.

 

[Hopeful Romantic]

Nicely put, Glacial.

Welcome to the forum. Glad to hear you gave Enterprise another chance.

 

[Kegg]

Show's great. The problem is, a lot of Trek fans have an episodic mentality, and don't get that the show was thought out in an arc (planned to be 7 years long, sadly abbreviated).

Or we just honestly felt there were severe problems with the show. I'm a big fan of densely arced sci-fi series, but 'hey, arc' does not excuse the mediocre-to-awful quality of a large chunk of the second season in particular. You're also attributing more to design than was the case - S3 became arced because on-high decided the show needed arcs, and it shifted focus in S4 to becoming a very fanwanky show because Manny Coto was in charge and lead it in that direction (which, incidentally, I liked.)

I can understand why people like the series, but trust me, we didn't bail on it because we didn't 'get it.' Having Archer grow as a character doesn't really excuse his ridiculous gazelle speech, for example.

Yeah. I wanted to like ENT, but I did bail on it, which I never did with VOY (hey, I liked the Doctor). In retrospect the fourth season was a lot of fun, but one out of four just does not cut it.

 

[timelord1010]

You know it's funny that I used to hate Anthony Montgomery's acting on Enterprise but I watched him act on other shows and movies and I couldn't believe it was the same person. The same goes for everyone except the actress who plays Hoshi.
It had to be the directors or writing that hurt the characters because in other shows these actors put in good to great performances.

The writing staff (Berman and Braga) needed to take a break and bring new writers, Manny Coto came in too late.

Also, I agree with another post that said the Xindi should have been replaced with the Romulans and I think you could have gone further and had the TCW caused by future Romulans trying to change the past and eliminate the Federation by changing the outcome of the Earth Romulan war.

 

[TeutonicNights]

I think you could have gone further and had the TCW caused by future Romulans trying to change the past and eliminate the Federation by changing the outcome of the Earth Romulan war.

I would have liked the whole TCW to be some Romulan scheme.

 

[Glacial]

Or we just honestly felt there were severe problems with the show. I'm a big fan of densely arced sci-fi series, but 'hey, arc' does not excuse the mediocre-to-awful quality of a large chunk of the second season in particular. You're also attributing more to design than was the case - S3 became arced because on-high decided the show needed arcs, and it shifted focus in S4 to becoming a very fanwanky show because Manny Coto was in charge and lead it in that direction (which, incidentally, I liked.)

The idea was that the entire series was an arc showing the growth of Archer and T'Pol as characters from their respective beginning points (Broken Bow) into more Kirk and Spock-roles at the end of the show, and that was the idea from the start. It's why they went for the triumvirate character structure of TOS (Archer/T'Pol/Tucker-Phlox Kirk/Spock/McCoy) than the more ensemble casts of TNG-VOY.

The idea was, since they figured they had a guaranteed 7 years to work with, that they could do a massively character-based show, and have the characters actually fundamentally grow and change over the course of the series. The muted color tone of the entire series was a (dumb) decision by Berman, to "bring the characters to the forefront" (his words). Archer and T'Pol start out largely unlikeable, because they're supposed to grow into Kirk and Spock, which they do over the 4 years, unlike basically every other Trek show where the characters are fully-developed out of the box and never ever change for the entire series (DS9 the exception of course).

This was in retrospect a bad risk to take, given how sick most of us were of Trek at that point, meaning basically only the nerdcore fanbase was even watching, and they were all busy screaming on the Internet about how the fictional model spaceship looked 'wrong," and promising to boycott (though strangely up-to-date on what to complain about each new episode). Non-Trek fans weren't even giving it a chance. And then reality TV came along and a certain cash-strapped network realized it could be getting the same ratings at a tenth of the cost per episode by making World's Shiniest Objects, and it was bye-bye Enterprise. Oh well.

S3 became an arc within the overall series arc that had been going since the pilot, and S4 actually tried to become less more episodic to please the fanbase, who hadn't got the basic idea of the show.

But hey! Nobody says you have to like it. If you've got spare time, though, I heartily recommend torrenting up the DVDs and giving them a watch through, with the understanding of what they were trying to do -- a serial sci-fi adventure show that'd show the groundwork getting laid for TOS. It's an eye-opener.

 

[TeutonicNights]

Glacial,
so, in essence, you're saying people didn't like the show cuz they didn't "get" a development arc that never happened?
I don't see how Archer even remotely evolved into some Kirk type (nor do I think that would be cool). Nothing of the sort really happened in seasons 1&2 in my opinion. At least not believably.
He was presented as clumsy and naive in the beginning, yes. But also as someone who always does stuff right instinctively. Why not let him make big mistakes?
Why not have his suitability for the captain's chair questioned from time to time? That's potentially powerful stuff.

The thing about Archer growing into a diplomat sounds good, but he really was as good a diplomat in season one as in season four.

I mean I love Kaptin Kirk because he's such a badass hero type. But not every captain has to be.

What the show needed was conflict between the characters. On DS9 you had buddy relationships between main characters, and antagonism between others at the same time. Why could that not have worked on ENT?

 

[Sovay]

I second it being OP's loss! IMO it's a hell of a lot better than TNG (or "Cruise-Liner Enterprise" as I like to think of it, not that I like to think of it...)

 

[Anwar]

What the show needed was conflict between the characters. On DS9 you had buddy relationships between main characters, and antagonism between others at the same time. Why could that not have worked on ENT?

That's because a lot of the characters on DS9 were all of separate factions/organizations and not one grouping like Starfleet. That makes more sense for character conflict whereas people all of the same grouping makes less sense.

And yes, someone is sure to bring up the "TOS had lots of conflict between characters" but most of that was just McCoy being a racist, Spock being a hypocrite, an external source like a virus or alien creature, or some guest character from outside the crew.

 

[TeutonicNights]

Yeah.
I mean TNG worked very well without conflicts. I would have liked more conflict personally, but it's not what killed the show for me or anything.

That's why I said I like ENT'S first season. I think it was season two when I began getting the feeling the show was heading into the wrong direction. In season three I stopped caring what would happen next.

I felt the storylines they opened up in the beginning were promising. Vulcans that still had to evolve, Andorians as players, a TCW that still had some potential, freighter people, well-done standard eps like "Civilization", "First Flight".
Also, the Pilot. I loved it.

In season two I was really surprised they couldn't move those stories forward in an interesting way.
Season three was a complete waste in my view, while season four did a lot of things right.
If those three parters had been two-parters, theVulcan Arc and the Andorian arc could have been really good, but in my opinion there was way too much filler in those eps. And the dialogue was often really weak. Still, they had their moments.

Loved Iamd of course. It single-handedly kicks the DS9's MU arc's ass.

 

[DevilEyes]

What the show needed was conflict between the characters. On DS9 you had buddy relationships between main characters, and antagonism between others at the same time. Why could that not have worked on ENT?

That's because a lot of the characters on DS9 were all of separate factions/organizations and not one grouping like Starfleet. That makes more sense for character conflict whereas people all of the same grouping makes less sense.

And yes, someone is sure to bring up the "TOS had lots of conflict between characters" but most of that was just McCoy being a racist, Spock being a hypocrite, an external source like a virus or alien creature, or some guest character from outside the crew.

Or guest stars within the crew... Balance of Terror, The Galileo Seven...

People in Starfleet did not seem that 'evolved' in TOS.

 

[flemm]

I was pretty psyched to watch ENT from the beginning over the summer. I hadn't watched a significant amount of Trek for quite some time, and a friend had screened some favorites of his from different seasons of the show, which I enjoyed.

Season 1 was not great, but I was definitely intrigued enough to continue. But sweet mercy season two... I have never been so bored watching Trek. I could not continue.

I do intend to pick it up again, perhaps just starting with season three, as I understand that seasons 3 and 4 are a major improvement. However, the problem with ENT in season two isn't that there is some unfolding arc Trek fans are just unable to perceive or appreciate.

As a DS9 fan, I would have loved to see some arc, any arc unfolding. As a TNG fan, I would have settled for good individual episodes. But the problem with the show at that stage is that it is empty, uninspired, bland. There is just nothing there, despite some really good production decisions, such as getting rid of the talking know-it-all computer.

I'm glad it gets better, though, and I will have to go back to it when I next have some free time.

 

[Kegg]

The idea was that the entire series was an arc showing the growth of Archer and T'Pol as characters from their respective beginning points (Broken Bow) into more Kirk and Spock-roles at the end of the show, and that was the idea from the start. It's why they went for the triumvirate character structure of TOS (Archer/T'Pol/Tucker-Phlox Kirk/Spock/McCoy) than the more ensemble casts of TNG-VOY.

Believe me, I got that. I mean, it's actually very obvious - ENT is essentially a TOS remake that technically kinda isn't a TOS remake, with the characters having 1:1 to a TOS equivalent (although Phlox just seems to be a redone, non-sucking version of Neelix.)

This is something that occured to me when reading the original, leaked sheet of a casting call for this series - the one where Jon was still 'Jackson Archer'. It's TOS with McCoy as the engineer and Spock is a chick and Sulu and Uhura have traded races for the day.

It was just poorly handled and there was a lot of bad writing. Archer is simply not well concieved as a lead. The problem with the series isn't that Berman & Braga had this unique, ambituous vision we, the dumb hair-scracthing fans, didn't get.

The problem is they remade TOS as a washed-out, drier VOY with even more awkward sexuality and a generally poorer quality of episodes during the first two seasons, with more than a few severely sub-par stories and scripts. They got more ambituous later on, but they took a severe loss of viewership those years (including me) and it's not hard to infer why. Season two is for me still one of the weakest stretches of Star Trek ever - far more so than, say, TNG's similarly lackluster second season. At least that had a couple of solid, enduring gems in the rough sitting beside terrible garbage, ENT's best season two fare tends to be more on the scale of passable mediocrity.

Arcing a series =/= taking years to reach a point where it is any good. The truth is, B&B were completely spent: They'd been working on Star Trek since early TNG (from the very start, in Berman's case) and had been trying to recapture TNG's magic and ratings with VOY and ENT by largely repeating the formula.

By the time they were forced into a position where risks were taken, like season three (they were commanded by on high to create an arced season rather than having originally planned to do so), and then when Manny Coto came along with his excessively fanwanky season four (which I enjoyed but rest assured had little to do with B&B's original vision for the show) it was way, way too late.

I don't hate ENT, and I do appreciate that it tried to finally get out of the shadow of TNG - which is more than VOY ever did - but that's not the same as having this ambituous and complex view of letting the characters grow into heroes. You're honestly attributing TPTB with more foresight then they actually had (point of fact: They didn't know who Future Guy was. They would have eventually made up an identity, I'm sure.)

 

[flemm]

The problem with the series isn't that Berman & Braga had this unique, ambituous vision we, the dumb hair-scracthing fans, didn't get.

I think the problem conceptually, at least at the beginning, is that there seems to be this assumption that Trek is somehow automatically worthy of our attention because it is Trek. The first season and a half anyway is often self-reverential to the point where it is off-putting.

I'm thinking for example of the episode where Malcolm comes up with what he calls a "Reed-alert" while Trip goes to great lengths to adjust the Captain's chair to Archer's liking. The underlying assumption is that the viewers will see things activities as significant because they attach an inherent importance to Trek motifs like Red-alert and the Captain's Chair.

As far as I can tell, the show in fact needed to operate under the opposite assumption, that nobody watching the show knew or cared about any of these things at all.

 

[CDR6]

... the plain simple fact is that I can't. Maybe it's the personality void characters who seem like bland extras that happen to be mentioned in every episode. Maybe it's the lackluster episode plots (In a Mirror, Darkly aside). It's probably the fact that the ship is just an upside-down Akira class with a different color and a deflector in the saucer section.

Whatever it is, whenever I try to watch an episode of ENT, it just dosn't hold my attention like a particularly good ep of Voyager or TNG or TOS or DS9. I find myself flipping through my favorites, wondering if the latest page of my favorite webcomic's been uploaded, etc, etc.

Ultimately, what was otherwise a good concept was doomed to fail because of weak characters and weak episodes. I'm not trying to bash or be an asshole or whatever, I'm just stating my opinion.

I know what you mean, I just have a terrible time getting into Enterprise, I sort of look at it this way...

The blame-
It was pretty much the director and the “front office suits” who get the blame in my book. The dark-bummer bring you down trek, just doesn’t sell. That mishmash Star Trek parody we just saw at the theater proves that. People want to laugh and enjoy Star Trek not be brought down by it.

The ship-
I love the design of the ship, it’s the best since TOS, IMHO. Hell, I’m a real P-38 fan-boy so they got me easy with this design (hook, line, sinker and the first two eyelets on the rod)… The interior is another matter all together. Would have preferred something a bit more TOS-ish just for continuities’ sake. It was a bit more 24th century than I would have liked.

I read somewhere that there was a big bru-ha-ha over the ship and the suits wanted to just use the straight up Akria design. (Well, that proves they don’t give a rats behind about things Trek. Or just don’t care...either way) the designers and producers had to fight the front office all the way to get what we got. (Good work guys!)

The crew-
Archer was well done, what shows through, is the weight of command and how it bears down on him. T’Pol was the ships “honey”, when they want to show some skin they bring in T’Pol. Trip was good, very TOS-ish kind of character, all else follows.

Aliens et al-
Vulcans as heavies? (Gimmie a break), that’s as lame as some the tripe J.J. pulled.
That, and I was over Klingoned …

Stories-
Too dark, too tedious, too heavy... some good moments, but over all real lack luster. Instead of coming home and putting on the tube and being entertained by Star Trek, it was something heavy enough, that I have to “want” to watch it. Much the same as “The Patriot” or “We Were Soldiers”.

 

[Anwar]

Or guest stars within the crew... Balance of Terror, The Galileo Seven...

People in Starfleet did not seem that 'evolved' in TOS.

Actually they did that in TNG as well, people just tend to not remember those times.

 

[Glacial]

Glacial,
so, in essence, you're saying people didn't like the show cuz they didn't "get" a development arc that never happened?
I don't see how Archer even remotely evolved into some Kirk type (nor do I think that would be cool). Nothing of the sort really happened in seasons 1&2 in my opinion. At least not believably.
He was presented as clumsy and naive in the beginning, yes. But also as someone who always does stuff right instinctively. Why not let him make big mistakes?
Why not have his suitability for the captain's chair questioned from time to time? That's potentially powerful stuff.

Seasons 1 & 2 are about Archer & Co. blundering around, causing disaster after disaster after disaster. He's not much of a diplomat. He's constantly pissing everybody off, from the Klingons to the easily-offended guys I can't remember to the Vulcans, causing jailbreaks on neighboring powers' territories, etc. Sure he's got a good moral compass, but he's diplomatically incompetent and vastly overoptimistic, and manages to botch first contact with just about everybody. Are we watching the same show?

The thing about Archer growing into a diplomat sounds good, but he really was as good a diplomat in season one as in season four.
?

Er, in season 1 he was a disaster to anyone he touched, except for being someone neither the Vulcans nor Andorians reflexively hated, and thus giving Shran and Soval an excuse to negotiate a ceasefire.

In 3 he gains the depth, and manages to talk the hostile Xindi out of blowing up Earth, and in 4 he puts together the coalition of planets that will later turn into the UFP. With three mutually-antagonistic races that he gets to cooperate against the Romulan ships.

Honestly, if you don't see how the character of Archer grew and changed over the 4 years, you're deliberately trying not to.

T'Pol is of course much easier to chart -- racist condescending Vulcan to almost human at the end of the series.

It was just poorly handled and there was a lot of bad writing. Archer is simply not well concieved as a lead. The problem with the series isn't that Berman & Braga had this unique, ambituous vision we, the dumb hair-scracthing fans, didn't get.

There was indeed a lot of awful writing! But that's the same with any Trek series. Might I point you to the first season of TNG? Oy! But the idea again was the characters were to change over the course of the series. Archer in Season 1 was not supposed to be a good captain. Archer in Season 4 was. Hell, I remember Bakula saying that -- how he liked the sort of leader Archer was, but he loved the sort of leader Archer was going to become.

And, er, a lot of we dumb hair-scratching fans got it. And appreciated what they were going for. Sure they stepped on their own, er, shoelaces, a few times, but when you watch the whole show it was a really impressive thing they were going for.