So what killed Star Trek?

[Nerys Myk]

All of them have threats that challenge the future/present of the Trek Universe. Its kind of what movies are supposed to do.

"Shows up TOS"??? What does that even mean? That it makes TOS look bad?

Yes but if an event in Insurrection effected it's present, it wouldn't effect DS9 or Voyager's past. An event in Enterprise effects DS9 before it even starts.

Now as I say Abram's Trek does that. Vulcan's history rewrites a fair bit of TOS, TNG and Voyager.

Yes I think it does make TOS worse off in comparison. That things were so more advanced in TNG than TOS was to be expected (except the human like androids of course, they vanished after TOS!)

And as I say if Kirk is merely following in Archer's (his childhood hero, according to UK marketing) footsteps, rather than setting the trend, if his Enterprise is mearly named after another pioneer of the warp age it undermines him. IMO.

Any threat in a movie has an impact on TV shows, especially those taking place at the same time. In First Contact Earth has to survive Borg Free because it is Borg Free in DS9 and VOY. Worf cant be killed because he is on DS9. So any threat to Worf is moot. There is very little on Enterprise that changes what we know of TOS, TNG, DS9 or VOY. Hell, TOS contradicts it self more than ENT does.

How does Archer undermine Kirk in any way? Kirk is not the first man to captain a starship. The 1701 isn't the first spaceship called Enterprise. These are facts established in TOS and the movies. Kirk has people he looked up to and admired. People he thinks of as trailblazers and trendsetters. People in who's foot steps he followed. He very well might be the greatest captain of his generation, but there were great captains before Kirk. Again, this is established by TOS.

Kirk as a "superhero" is more a development of the movies. In TOS Kirk was proud of his ship and crew, as any captain should be. He was also a guy who was doing a job and trying to do it the best he could but was also just one of at least 12 guys doing that same job. Those 12 other guys might be doing as good or even a better job as Kirk. ( Okay a few kinda screwed up )

The 1701 its self is not a trailblazer. It's tech is all standard issue. Its on a mission that it shares with other ships. We cant conflate the fact TOS was the first Trek show with the ship or the crew of the 1701 being the first.

 

[BrownShatner]

People have mentioned the rehashed plots and foreheads-of-the-week. But I think there was fundamental issues with Berman Trek which made it obsolete.

Trek was trying too hard to be "all things to all people". One week it was an action adventure show, the next week a moral quandary, the next week it was a soap opera. That formula worked when there were only 6 channels of mostly general interest programming. But as the audience became fractured across hundreds of cable channels, Trek started to look incoherent.

I found it very difficult to tune in every week and watch Voy/Ent because I had no idea what I was going to get. So I went from a loyal viewer to someone who caught an episode here and there and changed channels if it wasn't interesting. A show like Law and Order might be formulaic, but at least you know exactly what it's going to be from week-to-week.

Also, Trek was over exposed in the late 1990s. In my area, the local UPN channel showed 2-4 hours of Star Trek per day. Twice daily TNG reruns, daily DS9 reruns, weekly new episodes of DS9 and VOY, and even TOS marathons on the weekends. At some point, people had seen it all and had enough. Fatigue.

 

[BrownShatner]

Didn't the sum total of episodes of DSN being the lone ST show on the air amount to something like 6 or 7 episodes. Of course DSN didn't get darker till later in it's run. It's 1st season was telling stories that for the most part could have been TNG episodes.

But if you want to mention DSN, DSN was fairly critically acclaimed so some would argue that it was simply weaker story telling in VOY when compared to DSN that alienated the viewer.

Naturally it's each to their own, for me overall I would rate DSN as very good, that isn't to say DSN didn't have it's poor episodes it did, but these were far outweighted by it's good/great/excellent episodes. Conversely I found the opposite to be true in VOY it had far too many poor/average episodes with only the occasionaly good/great/excelletn episodes. You tune in each week hoping that this week is the week VOY will live up to it's predessors.

In theory, VOY should have been far more accessible to the casual viewer than DS9. New planets, alien encounters, spaceship battles, etc. So I agree that VOY lost viewers primarily because of lousy execution, inconsistant plots and unsympathetic characters.

DS9, on the other hand, was quite impenetrable to the non-dedicated viewer. The show revolved around space politics and focused heavily on character interaction. Which is fine for people invested in the show, but it offered very little to draw viewers in. While the show wasn't always dark, superficially it was quite dry for most of its run. Its 'acclaim' came from a very narrow audience invested in space opera/soap opera Trek.

DS9 and VOY combined should have been able to build on the huge TNG audience which existed, but instead both chased away viewers. In my area I'm pretty sure the TNG reruns were doing better business than DS9/VOY new episodes.

 

[Skywalker]

How does Archer undermine Kirk in any way? Kirk is not the first man to captain a starship. The 1701 isn't the first spaceship called Enterprise. These are facts established in TOS and the movies. Kirk has people he looked up to and admired. People he thinks of as trailblazers and trendsetters. People in who's foot steps he followed. He very well might be the greatest captain of his generation, but there were great captains before Kirk. Again, this is established by TOS.

Kirk as a "superhero" is more a development of the movies. In TOS Kirk was proud of his ship and crew, as any captain should be. He was also a guy who was doing a job and trying to do it the best he could but was also just one of at least 12 guys doing that same job. Those 12 other guys might be doing as good or even a better job as Kirk. ( Okay a few kinda screwed up )

The 1701 its self is not a trailblazer. It's tech is all standard issue. Its on a mission that it shares with other ships. We cant conflate the fact TOS was the first Trek show with the ship or the crew of the 1701 being the first.

Thank you SO MUCH for saying all this. I completely agree with all of it. I'm tired of people treating Kirk, Spock, and company as if they're the end-all, be-all of Starfleet, and as if there had never been any great captains or great ships before Kirk and the 1701. Starfleet had existed for over a hundred years by the time Kirk took command of the Enterprise; I find it extremely hard to believe that nobody before him had ever accomplished anything worthwhile.

I've always been of the opinion that Captain Kirk was just one of many people who were out there exploring the galaxy and making it a better place. The hero worship of Kirk and turning the Enterprise into something more important than it was began with the movies and TNG--making the Enterprise the "flagship" and the "best in the fleet" and such. Disregarding Archer and the NX-01 for reasons like that is ridiculous and, honestly, more than a little petulant.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

DS9, on the other hand, was quite impenetrable to the non-dedicated viewer. The show revolved around space politics and focused heavily on character interaction. Which is fine for people invested in the show, but it offered very little to draw viewers in. While the show wasn't always dark, superficially it was quite dry for most of its run. Its 'acclaim' came from a very narrow audience invested in space opera/soap opera Trek.

Yet Lost attracted a large audience with an impenetrable serialized storyline that focused heavily on character interaction. Compared with DS9, which had many stand-alone episodes, Lost was more off-putting, being entirely serialized and having an even larger cast, yet it survived okay for six seasons in a broadcast environment that had gotten more hostile to complex storytelling since DS9 went off the air.

The problem with Star Trek is very simple: as entertainment options proliferated, people expected to get more of exactly what they want. The audience for everything has dropped. TNG debuted with an audience of 27M, a level that only the biggest mainstream hit shows get today. If TNG debuted today, it wouldn't get nearly that audience level.

I wouldn't expect Star Trek on TV today to get more than other nichey shows, like Falling Skies and The Walking Dead, which come in around 5-6M. And not being Earth based, Star Trek may not be able to expect even that.

What killed Star Trek was that the people in charge didn't recognize the larger trends in TV and adapt to changing circumstances by embracing the nichiness of Star Trek and adjusting both the content and the business model to fit the emerging new reality. And since the CW wouldn't have been interested in a male-skewing series like Star Trek, they would have had to find a new home even if they were doing everything else right.

How to adapt Star Trek to TV today is far from obvious, because there is no example of a successful space opera on TV. This may mean that space opera in general, not just Star Trek, cannot work on TV anymore. (Except for The Clone Wars, which shows that animated space opera can work just fine). I'm more optimistic than that, but trying to get any space opera to be successful on TV is not going to be a simple and obvious task.

 

[Nerys Myk]

How does Archer undermine Kirk in any way? Kirk is not the first man to captain a starship. The 1701 isn't the first spaceship called Enterprise. These are facts established in TOS and the movies. Kirk has people he looked up to and admired. People he thinks of as trailblazers and trendsetters. People in who's foot steps he followed. He very well might be the greatest captain of his generation, but there were great captains before Kirk. Again, this is established by TOS.

Kirk as a "superhero" is more a development of the movies. In TOS Kirk was proud of his ship and crew, as any captain should be. He was also a guy who was doing a job and trying to do it the best he could but was also just one of at least 12 guys doing that same job. Those 12 other guys might be doing as good or even a better job as Kirk. ( Okay a few kinda screwed up )

The 1701 its self is not a trailblazer. It's tech is all standard issue. Its on a mission that it shares with other ships. We cant conflate the fact TOS was the first Trek show with the ship or the crew of the 1701 being the first.

Thank you SO MUCH for saying all this. I completely agree with all of it. I'm tired of people treating Kirk, Spock, and company as if they're the end-all, be-all of Starfleet, and as if there had never been any great captains or great ships before Kirk and the 1701. Starfleet had existed for over a hundred years by the time Kirk took command of the Enterprise; I find it extremely hard to believe that nobody before him had ever accomplished anything worthwhile.

I've always been of the opinion that Captain Kirk was just one of many people who were out there exploring the galaxy and making it a better place. The hero worship of Kirk and turning the Enterprise into something more important than it was began with the movies and TNG--making the Enterprise the "flagship" and the "best in the fleet" and such. Disregarding Archer and the NX-01 for reasons like that is ridiculous and, honestly, more than a little petulant.

I often get the impression that some of these people have never seen TOS or if they have, they didn't pay attention.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

When watching ENT, I never had the feeling that events were really taking place in a future in which the technology was really more primitive than that of TNG. This was because the same tropes were used. They generally just downgraded the warp numbers, or did a string substitution (e.g. s/raise the shields/polarize the hull plating/g). I always had the perception that this was so because they were targeting a hypothetical audience who expected these tropes to be part and parcel of Star Trek, whatever its incarnation. I could even feel the push to get over the lack of a transporter as quickly as possible. The little detail of the rank pips told us from episode 1 that the intended audience was people broken into Star Trek by TNG, DS9, or VOY.

I have no idea what this issue of upstaging Kirk is. I just wish that ENT had been something other than a thinly disguised outgrowth of the TNG-DS9-VOY era.

Someone upthread said he or she wanted to see nuclear warheads. Hell yeah, that instead of s/photon torpedoes/photonic torpedoes/g. How about no analog of shields at all, where (high energy) laser (yes, LASER, remember The Cage?) hits are totally devastating? That would have made space battles much more dramatic. Since the Enterprise wouldn't have been able to survive more than a few direct hits, either the character of battles would have had to have been new and fresh, with brief encounters involving hit and run, and/or battles would have had to have been less frequent. Fewer battles would have forced the plots to revolve around and depend upon strong characters with compelling relationships even more. By the way, an example of an ENT episode that I really enjoyed was Horizon. Characters played a central role to that episode, and it even had a very exciting, brief, and decisive space battle (that could have easily been slightly tweaked to conform to what I said above).

I would have been happier if they had frozen the technology level for the whole series, without a working transporter, except maybe for cargo, and just simply ditched the whole presumption that the audience wanted to watch the show march towards familiar Star Trek. Star Trek is not supposed to be about technology anyway, but people, so they say. I don't need to see multiple episodes that address the development of the transporter. I might want to drop by a research station where the transporter is being developed for one episode, but I would have been OK with the ship leaving orbit, knowing that "someday" the transporter would be perfected, but still without one that can beam living people.

 

[Nerys Myk]

When watching ENT, I never had the feeling that events were really taking place in a future in which the technology was really more primitive than that of TNG. This was because the same tropes were used. They generally just downgraded the warp numbers, or did a string substitution (e.g. s/raise the shields/polarize the hull plating/g). I always had the perception that this was so because they were targeting a hypothetical audience who expected these tropes to be part and parcel of Star Trek, whatever its incarnation. I could even feel the push to get over the lack of a transporter as quickly as possible. The little detail of the rank pips told us from episode 1 that the intended audience was people broken into Star Trek by TNG, DS9, or VOY.

This true of all post TOS Trek. Was there really any difference in what we saw tech wise in TNG than what we saw in TOS? All they did was up the numbers. They didn't get anything new they just made it go to 11.

Someone upthread said he or she wanted to see nuclear warheads. Hell yeah, that instead of s/photon torpedoes/photonic torpedoes/g. How about no analog of shields at all, where laser (yes, LASER, remember The Cage?) hits are totally devastating? That would have made space battles much more dramatic. Since the Enterprise wouldn't have been able to survive more than a few direct hits, either the character of battles would have had to have been new and fresh, with brief encounters involving hit and run, and/or battles would have had to have been less frequent. Fewer battles would have forced the plots to revolve around and depend upon strong characters with compelling relationships even more. By the way, an example of an ENT episode that I really enjoyed was Horizon. Characters played a central role to that episode, and it even had a very exciting, brief, and decisive space battle (that could have easily been slightly tweaked to conform to what I said above).

Of course they did it because they are tropes associated with Trek. Part of what ENT was supposed to do was to show where these things came from, not show what it would be like without them.

The reason they dont use lasers in TOS is because a Laser couldn't do what the scripts needed them to do. So rather than be scientifically wrong, laser got retconned into phasers. They do not exist as weapons in the Trek Universe. Just as Vulcan was never conquered and the Enterprise always worked for the UFP Starfleet. Roll with the punches and the newest info is what's correct is how TOS worked. The encyclopediasts and puzzlemasters forget that.

Nukes dont seem very "futuristic". Too common place.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Part of what ENT was supposed to do was to show where these things came from

My point exactly. I'm floating this as precisely part of why ENT was not successful. My bet is that the average viewer cares not a whit where the stuff came from, and that a show whose evident mission is to show us where the stuff came from is doomed to marginalization.

 

[Rarewolf]

Any threat in a movie has an impact on TV shows, especially those taking place at the same time. In First Contact Earth has to survive Borg Free because it is Borg Free in DS9 and VOY. Worf cant be killed because he is on DS9. So any threat to Worf is moot
There is very little on Enterprise that changes what we know of TOS, TNG, DS9 or VOY. Hell, TOS contradicts it self more than ENT does.

Thats my point though. They couldn't make changes that would effect the other series. Their hands were tied.

They could have made changes in the TNG movies that effected the other series; in fact they did - Enterprise D destroyed in Generations - mentioned in DS9, and allowed Wolf to gp to DS9. Borg Queen - introduced in First Contact - came back in Voyager. They could - had they or Micheal wanted to - kill Worf; he just couldn't have been in DS9 in any stories after that. Timelines not altered.

With Vulcan gone It's already screwed up for NuTrek, if an actor wanted out they could kill them off.

The 1701 its self is not a trailblazer. It's tech is all standard issue. Its on a mission that it shares with other ships. We cant conflate the fact TOS was the first Trek show with the ship or the crew of the 1701 being the first.

NCC-1701A, B, C, D, E. No other ship or captain has that honour.

Thank you SO MUCH for saying all this. I completely agree with all of it. I'm tired of people treating Kirk, Spock, and company as if they're the end-all, be-all of Starfleet.

Get used to it; that's all there's going to be for the forseeable future. Now Kirk's saved the world before he even had his own command.

I doubt I've said anything that wasn't said before the show started. As it turned out the show wasn't for me, I've never had to try and make it conform and excuse all these things.

I often get the impression that some of these people have never seen TOS or if they have, they didn't pay attention.

I did see the movies before TOS, but I have seen every episode of TOS, TAS, TNG at least twice DS9, Voyager some only once.

To be honest though since Enterprise weaned me off I've hardly seen any episodic Star Trek. TNG-HD sounds promising though.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Part of what ENT was supposed to do was to show where these things came from

My point exactly. I'm floating this as precisely part of why ENT was not successful. My bet is that the average viewer cares not a whit where the stuff came from, and that a show whose evident mission is to show us where the stuff came from is doomed to marginalization.

It was only part of the premise. For the average viewer its not gonna mean much. Those bits were for the fans. The average viewer just wants interesting stories, characters and visuals. They aren't going care that about canon debates about laser vs phase pistols or if the torps are nukes. So those elements would have no impact on making the show "better" or ratings higher. And show really didn't spend much time on it. Throw away lines mostly.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Any threat in a movie has an impact on TV shows, especially those taking place at the same time. In First Contact Earth has to survive Borg Free because it is Borg Free in DS9 and VOY. Worf cant be killed because he is on DS9. So any threat to Worf is moot
There is very little on Enterprise that changes what we know of TOS, TNG, DS9 or VOY. Hell, TOS contradicts it self more than ENT does.

Thats my point though. They couldn't make changes that would effect the other series. Their hands were tied.

So which is it? They screwed up the future shows with their retconns or their hands were tied?

The show was about the crew of the NX-01 so the focus was on them, not the characters and events of the other shows set 200 years later. Their hands weren't tied in any significant way regarding the lifes of their characters and the events they could be part of.

They could have made changes in the TNG movies that effected the other series; in fact they did - Enterprise D destroyed in Generations - mentioned in DS9, and allowed Wolf to gp to DS9. Borg Queen - introduced in First Contact - came back in Voyager. They could - had they or Micheal wanted to - kill Worf; he just couldn't have been in DS9 in any stories after that. Timelines not altered.

Please, replacing the D with the E is a non-event. Same story different ship really. Worf could have gone to DS9 without the D crashing. Nothing about the crash made him go. Using the Borg Queen on Voyager isn't all that big of deal either. No different than Q or Spock showing up. Thats not an "Event" thats a character. Of course the original idea was to destroy the Defiant in FC, but the DS9 folks balked at that. They would have balked at killing Worf as well. Nor would the movies guys want Worf killed on DS9.

If their hands were tied, how could they effect the "timeline"? Its all fiction anyway. There is no "timeline". Just a collection of stories under the title "Star Trek".

The 1701 its self is not a trailblazer. It's tech is all standard issue. Its on a mission that it shares with other ships. We cant conflate the fact TOS was the first Trek show with the ship or the crew of the 1701 being the first.

NCC-1701A, B, C, D, E. No other ship or captain has that honour.

That you know of. Starfleet is big. The Yamoto was said to have registry number NCC-1305-E. Though the number speaks nothing to what the 1701 was when it was on active duty. A Constitution class ship, one of 12 (or 13). It wasn't a trailblazing design or a testbed. Its mission was typical not special.

Thank you SO MUCH for saying all this. I completely agree with all of it. I'm tired of people treating Kirk, Spock, and company as if they're the end-all, be-all of Starfleet.

Get used to it; that's all there's going to be for the forseeable future. Now Kirk's saved the world before he even had his own command.

Which means what in relationship to TOS and ENT? We all know that "all bets are off" in the movie franchise now,

I often get the impression that some of these people have never seen TOS or if they have, they didn't pay attention.

I did see the movies before TOS, but I have seen every episode of TOS, TAS, TNG at least twice DS9, Voyager some only once.

To be honest though since Enterprise weaned me off I've hardly seen any episodic Star Trek. TNG-HD sounds promising though.

But did you actually pay enough attention as to have an informed opinion about what TOS was about and get a grasp on its characters and themes? From what you've written I would say no.

 

[BrownShatner]

Yet Lost attracted a large audience with an impenetrable serialized storyline that focused heavily on character interaction. Compared with DS9, which had many stand-alone episodes, Lost was more off-putting, being entirely serialized and having an even larger cast, yet it survived okay for six seasons in a broadcast environment that had gotten more hostile to complex storytelling since DS9 went off the air.

I watched Lost very intermittently, about 3-4 times a year, and never in any particular order. I had no idea what was going on in with the broader storyline, and I never saw the resolution to the cliffhangers. Yet I found the show quite entertaining.

Why? The characters were distinct and engaging. You were constantly given bits-and-pieces of their backstories and could immediately identify with them. The plot scenarios were enticing and unique, you could jump right in and go along for the ride. And every episode of the show delivered similar drama.

Compare that to DS9, which showed space adventure one week and a soap opera the next. The characters could be very reserved and the conflicts were far more subtle. Much of the dialog was sci-fi babble. Without being critical of DS9 itself, the show was not nearly as accessible as Lost.

What killed Star Trek was that the people in charge didn't recognize the larger trends in TV and adapt to changing circumstances by embracing the nichiness of Star Trek and adjusting both the content and the business model to fit the emerging new reality. And since the CW wouldn't have been interested in a male-skewing series like Star Trek, they would have had to find a new home even if they were doing everything else right.

That I agree with. Trek was trying to appeal to too broad of an audience, everyone from teenage boys to middle-aged women, making the show seem schitzo and frustrating casual viewers.

The biggest failure of ENT was to not realize the general approach of VOY was failing and focus in on a core audience. It would have been the perfect opportunity to get back to the Action-Adventure episodic format of the Original Series. Instead, they ended up rehashing TNG themes for the umpteenth time while putting forth plot arcs which frankly weren't really all that engaging. By the time they 'fixed it', it was too late for Trek...

 

[MacLeod]

^There is nothing wrong with Subtle, we don't all need to be spoon feed

 

[Saquist]

So there's this poll over at the Trekmovie.com site which came with this article...

http://trekmovie.com/2011/08/11/connor-trinneer-enterprise-didnt-kill-star-trek-franchise/

Did Enterprise Kill Star Trek franchise on TV?

Yes (16%) 444 votes
Maybe (12%) 327 votes
No (72%) 2007 votes

August 21, 2011 @ 13.01 GMT

Total Votes: 2777

Usual straw poll stuff. But it has the virtue of taking the pulse of fandom, on a fairly neutral ground.


So it prompts an obvious question...




-

SGU KILLED STARGATE

ENTERPRISE DID NOT KILL STAR TREK
Was Enterprise bad....YES....
But....
It didn't kill Star Trek. Star Trek wasn't suffering from franchise fatigue. It was suffering from mediocrity. What made it unique in TOS and TNG became the stuff of AVERAGES. Seaquest, Stargate and Dr. Who mixed that same formula of exploration...

Babylon 5, Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda mix there own type in a better more awesome way upping the stakes in some places and falling short in others. But while real Drama Action went from X Files to 24, to Alias, to Roswell, to Heroes Trek with all those ridiculously bad films was still LOCKED in it's same formula repeating ad nauseum.

If they pull another 7 man cast on a ship going...(out there) you'll eventually get the same effect.

 

[Rarewolf]

So which is it? They screwed up the future shows with their retconns or their hands were tied?

Though the number speaks nothing to what the 1701 was when it was on active duty. A Constitution class ship, one of 12 (or 13). It wasn't a trailblazing design or a testbed. Its mission was typical not special.

But did you actually pay enough attention as to have an informed opinion about what TOS was about and get a grasp on its characters and themes? From what you've written I would say no.

I never said they screwed up the future shows. I said the trouble with a prequel is there are certain things they could not do, that it had limits.

I clearly missed all the episodes of the original series where other ships came to Kirk's rescue. Or heard about their exploits.

Besides - surely it would be a special ship; just by being named after Archer's?

As I said earlier you are happy to excuse any of these things since you enjoy the show, fine, I respect that. I've never had to make it all fit.

On the other hand I'm a major supporter of Dr Who audios, where they squeeze dozens of stories into gaps that never existed. But I enjoy them. I have twice as much Who and love every minute of it. Canon or not.

 

[CommanderRaytas]

The only Space Nazis I will accept are the Cardassians, and they hardly really qualify (because they went from stereotypical har-har Space Nazis to an awesomely developed species).

The ones in Enterprise were beyond silly. What was is with those guys speaking English with a fake German accent? People, either have them speaking real German with subtitles, or normal English, so we can pretend they're speaking German. Also, when saying something in German, please have native speakers say it, because believe it or not, people notice, and there's a world outside of planet America.

Why would the Nazis all talk to each other in anything but their native language, and use one all of them speak poorly? They wouldn't have done that. It's so stupid it makes me gag.

/Cardassian-sized rant. Again. Sorry.

What????? Its been standard practice in entertainment for decades to use all the techniques that you mention when using characters who dont speak the language the show/film is being shot in.

Not familar with suspension of disbelief? The Nazi were speaking to each other in their native language. We "hear" it in English because thats the language the show was produced in and the one the intended audience of the show speaks. Same as when we hear aliens speaking to each other. I doubt in private Klingons, Vulcans and Cardassians speak English to each other. But for the audience's convenience they do.

As complaints go, this one is pretty weak.

No, I know that. But they were speaking with a stupid accents. That's what annoys me. If they are supposed to be speaking German, then let them speak normal English and drop the accent. It's stupid.

 

[T'Girl]

Nukes dont seem very "futuristic". Too common place.

In Balance of Terror, a atomic weapon just about trashed the Enterprise, it did more damage than other, more "futuristic," weapons used against the ship during the series. Stargate made good use of nuclear weapons. Science fictions novels use them frequently, I'm current reading a Honor Harrington story, the nukes fly like rain drops in a summer shower.

A couple of large caliber gattling guns covering Archers starboard airlock would have worked too.

then let them speak normal English and drop the accent. It's stupid.

And that goes double for Malcolm.

 

[MrJ]

In my opinion, the answer to what killed Star Trek, using the 3 poll options available is a combination of all of the above and none of the above.

What killed the Star Trek movies is complicated. What killed the Star Trek TV shows is even more complicated.

Wrath of Khan is my favourite Trek movie but it established "The Formula". That bad guy with a doomsday device tries to do something bad formula, that was done to death in Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis and ST 2009. Wrath of Khan also proved that a Trek movie with a small budget could be a moderate success. Trek film makers and studio executives didn't ever risk putting large amounts of money into a Trek film after The Motion Picture once Wrath of Khan proved they could make money without having to spend lots of money. At least until Nemesis became a good example of the “Law of Diminishing Returns” and the big budget, big success Star Trek 2009 came out.


　
How the Trek TV series died started when TNG was ending and DS9 was starting. Around that time there weren't many other Sci-Fi shows on TV, nor were there many cable channels, allowing a first run syndicated show like TNG to survive and thrive. When DS9 was in it's first few seasons the TV landscape was changing, there were more shows like Earth Finale Conflict, Babylon 5, Hercules, Zena, The Outerlimits and eventually Farscape and Stargate. And more and more cable channels were being added making it harder and harder for DS9 to get ratings in syndication despite the fact that DS9, quality wise, was getting better and better as it went on.

When Voyager premiered it wasn't in cluttered first run syndication where it had to survive on it's own but on a Network where it could get advertised (Hurray!) a Network called UPN (D'oh!). Where I lived, Voyager and DS9 where shown on Wednesdays on two different channels at the exact same time! So DS9 and Voyager where literally competing against each other for ratings, DS9 in first run syndication, Voyager on UPN. DS9 got better as it went on, finishing as probably my favourite Star Trek series. Voyager just got worse as it went on, ending as my second least favourite Star Trek series.



　
I was born in 1983, I was raised as a Star Trek fan, I was watching TOS reruns before I can even really remember. I was watching TNG when it premiered when I was 4 years old. I have seen every episode of Star Trek from TOS to Voyager, (even though, I had to tape Voyager and watch it later because of the scheduling conflict with DS9). I will re-watch any rerun of TOS, TNG, and DS9 I can find, even episodes like Spocks Brain, Shades of Grey, and Profit and Lace. However, once was more than enough of Voyager for me and where I live now reruns of Enterprise aren’t even available, and that’s fine by me.



　
So, as bad as Voyager was when it ended, Enterprise was just as bad when it started. Enterprise continued down hill during it’s run. At some point during the second half of it’s first season I stopped caring if I even watched it. After watching almost every episode of Star Trek the night it was first shown since 1987, Enterprise got so bad I just didn’t care anymore if I saw an episode. By somewhere around the second season I stopped watching altogether.

I even remember the moment it happened. After watching the Episode where Archers dog spent a night in sickbay, the next episode was the one where the Akiraprise finds a planet where the rubber forehead wearing aliens who live there pump Deuterium from the ground as if it is oil. And they are having a spot of bother from some rather unpleasant Klingons. So Archer and crew helps the rubber forehead aliens fight the Klingons using a strategy that was used in the Mel Brooks classic “Blazing Saddles”. If this had been an episode of the A Team or Macgyver in the 80`s it wouldn’t have been too bad, but as an episode of Star Trek in the 21st century, it was total garbage. It was the point that after being a Trek fan my whole life, owning every trek movie on VHS then DVD (except Nemesis), playing every Trek video game, reading countless Trek books and watching every episode of Star Trek and every new episode since 1987, I gave up on a Star Trek series. I didn’t watch Enterprise’s third season, then I joined the Army and was without a TV for over a year.

When I heard Enterprise was cancelled my only response was “Good riddance”

A few years ago I saw some reruns of the third and fourth seasons of Enterprise and though they were better (especially the fourth season), than the first two it was an obvious example of “too little, too late.” Also, as bad as the Voyager finale was, the Enterprise finale was, without a doubt, the worst Star Trek series finale ever and one of the worst episodes ever, in general.



So did Enterprise kill the franchise? Not on it’s own, but it certainly helped.

Did Franchise fatigue kill the franchise? Not really, it was the general, gradual drop in quality in both the films and series that did it.

Unavailability, of only being on UPN? I don’t think so. Crap that is hard to find is still crap. UPN didn’t do the Franchise any favours though, especially when Voyager was on in the same timeslot the same day as DS9.
　

 

[Temis the Vorta]

What killed Star Trek was that the people in charge didn't recognize the larger trends in TV and adapt to changing circumstances by embracing the nichiness of Star Trek and adjusting both the content and the business model to fit the emerging new reality. And since the CW wouldn't have been interested in a male-skewing series like Star Trek, they would have had to find a new home even if they were doing everything else right.

That I agree with. Trek was trying to appeal to too broad of an audience, everyone from teenage boys to middle-aged women, making the show seem schitzo and frustrating casual viewers.

The biggest failure of ENT was to not realize the general approach of VOY was failing and focus in on a core audience. It would have been the perfect opportunity to get back to the Action-Adventure episodic format of the Original Series. Instead, they ended up rehashing TNG themes for the umpteenth time while putting forth plot arcs which frankly weren't really all that engaging. By the time they 'fixed it', it was too late for Trek...

They needed to find a core audience first. The UPN audience was no longer an option since UPN was being reformulated as the CW, which was designed to attract a young female audience. In theory, they might have tried making a Star Trek for that audience - the CW has shown some interest in space opera in recent years, so it's not a totally insane idea - but the odds of success would have been slim and the CW probably had other things on their mind than rolling the dice on an off-target series just as they were starting a risky new venture. So there was no way to salvage the franchise in the UPN-CW transition, and in the end, that is what killed Star Trek.

Nobody should assume the core audience for any series is Star Trek fans, because there is no Star Trek channel. You need a channel, and the core audience is the audience of that channel. Many Star Trek fans will already be watching that channel. Others will start watching that channel because of Star Trek. But the people who watch the channel, who aren't currently interested in Star Trek, are the ones you need to convert.

The basic identity of Star Trek - "fun and exciting action-adventure in space with a cast identifiable and attractive characters" - can be molded to fit many different channels.

Forget broadcast, that's gone too mass market for any sci fi. Even cop shows with sci fi window dressing struggle to survive.

Any cable channel will expect more serialization and more character-heavy drama than average for Star Trek, so the DS9 model will be the one to follow, with sex and especially violence ramped up to meet cable TV expectations.

Of cable channels, TNT is one of the more mainstream and non-nichey ones, and if Star Trek ended up there, it could prosper with the least amount of changes - it could still be partly episodic, not too violent, not much sex. On FX, it would have to be sexier, more violent and gritty. On AMC, it would have to be sexier, more violent, smarter and more arty. Take the AMC approach and triple it for Showtime or HBO. The Cartoon Network is a serious possibility but obviously it would have to be animated. Forget SyFy, they don't do sci fi anymore.