I do enjoy ENT very much.
Now saying that, I do wish it had some things differently. Some of these things they WANTED to do, but ENT was plagued with executive meddling, or otherwise it was just impractical.
I wish the ship was more cramped, more like a submarine. Apparently they toyed with the idea but it was too difficult to film. I think it would have gone a long way to making it feel less advanced.
I wish the NX-01 looked a bit different. I actually like the design, but the comparison to the Akira is undeniable. Real world, the executives like the Akira and literally just wanted them to use that. Doug Drexler fought them enough to get what we got. I wish the ship was able to be a bit more visually distinctive and perhaps a bit closer to the TOS look. (I LOVE NX-01's warp nacelles, though)
I wish that they had embraced being lower tech and just immediately throw in "Phase Cannons" and "Photonic Torpedoes". Use lasers, rail guns, and nukes. Don't have the transporter yet... or maybe make it an EXTREMELY prototype technology.
I’m sure that a primitive version of 22nd century Earth existed alongside what we saw. In ENT, we were only shown United Earth Starfleet, where everything is state-of-the-art , nothing ever malfunctions, refits and repairs only take a few months, and the crew are the best that humanity has to offer. Even for trauma, all they seemingly need to get over it is a prescription from a psychiatrist and get a boyfriend or girlfriend; counselors need not apply. The rest of Earth – generic Earth forces and the like - might not be so state of the art, and I do not see why they would need to be, as they aren’t venturing deep into uncharted space.
But if the writers aren’t going to show that side of 22nd century Earth though, with all its imperfections, best to leave it alone.
The early D7 was kind of a mistake, but I wish they could have made convincing earlier ship designs all around.
Even the D7 made sense in a way. But they poorly explained that it was a predecessor of the D7, when they could have simply said those were the Klingon Warbird mentioned in the premiere. Weak explanation for various contractions regarding continuity was always an issue in the show. When it would have been so simple to explain away.
T’POL: It’s a Klingon warbird. Kuro-class. Klingons are known to reuse certain starship designs should they attain glory in battle. This one is modelled off of a similarly designed warship called a D4 involved in a pair of first contacts. The first one a century ago, with the Ithenites. And more recently, with a species called the Orions, occurring several lightyears from the Rigel system.
ARCHER: This must be one of the warbirds the High Command warned us about.
T’POL :Luckily for us, this warbird tops out at warp 3.5.
ARCHER: Are you suggesting that we run, T’Pol?
T’POL: Considering our weapons are no match for their own, it would be logical.
The hill I WILL die on is that... "These are the Voyages" was not a bad episode, nor was it a bad finale in context. It was not just the finale of ENT. It was the end of 20 years of continuous Trek on TV. It was the end of the 90's Trek-era. I think it did a fine job of closing that out, and it made perfect sense it would end where the whole era began, in TNG. My only change is that rather than a holodeck simulation, rework it to include Q giving a final judgement on humans. Q sent Riker to these events for Q reasons, which led Q to close it out with deciding that humans are actually alright.
The concept was fine. It was just lazily done. Why they did not simply model their futures off of “Twilight” I’ll never understand. They had the random senior staff death down; they just swapped out Mayweather for Trip. Why not just go all in with the rest and show how everyone’s careers have progressed, at least?
Even for the TNG parts, why not have Riker and Troi in FC uniforms, while the rest of the crew in the background are wearing TNG and VOY uniforms and set it after NEM on a Galaxy class ship? Another thing I’ll never understand.
Q making an appearance would definitely been an interesting idea. But at the same time, the ideas weren’t the problem. It was the execution.
I cannot begin to express how much I object to finding an in-universe explanation for Star Trek's Eurocentric biases in its depiction of the future. If Star Trek is supposed to be an aspirational future, we should simply assume that Asia is just as well off as "the West" and that the proportion of Asians who survived is the same as anywhere else.
Well, for one, the same Star Trek that shows an aspirational future also says there are at least three nuclear conflicts before hand in the span on 170 years: the 1990s Eugenics War, WWIII and the Earth-Romulan war. I’m pretty sure no one aspires for nuclear war.
Next, the same SNW you cite also rectons WWIII as a conflict that partly occurred in Asia, since the Khanate that Khan ruled over would include nations across Asia, the heavily populated country of India among them, bringing it in line with TOS. Before SNW’s retcon, FC and TNG had their own retcon regarding the events described in TOS in that it was completely ambiguous that the conflict was ever in Asia. They simply said factions, implying that it was not necessarily nation-states at war, but different centralized entities. And that Asia was one of the places going through the post atomic horror. That’s it. FC and TNG approached the subject with coloblindness as well, with white drug addled soliders among Asians in a courtroom, and Lily's initial reaction to meeting Picard, Data and Beverly .
We also do not know much about how Earth recovered. Just that its far removed from the destructive excesses of 21st century capitalism. That in addition to disease and hunger, all conflicts have been settled for 40 years when the NX-01 launched. Earth’s culture seems heavily Americanized at the time of United Earth’s formation, possibly due to first contact considering both Reed and Sato lamenting the Vulcans landing in Montana instead of somewhere else on Earth, and even the freighters families met in ENT are oddly Americanized. And that the Soviet Union seems to have return by the time of TOS seeing as there’s a city named Leinigrad, meaning there is at least one Marxist-Leninist state on Earth.
I would also like to add there are likely colonies with plenty of Asians, if one considered that the early colonizers were Asian. TAS even implied that there were at least 10 Terra class space arks for this purpose. That’s at least one space ark per continent; based on content size, that’s two arks for Africa and three arks for Asia. Just because no Star Trek show ever showed these colonize doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
There was also a story idea, when TOS was still being developed, where the TOS crew would visit an Asian populated planet based off of the court of Genghis Khan. The planet was called Satunii.
And in beta canon, Ganjitsu is another Asian populated colony, which also happens to be a colony where Sulu grew up. We obviously never got to that in TOS and the TOS movies because there was never a heavily focus on Sulu. It was all Kirk, Spock and Bones, and occasionally Scotty.
I know there have been a lot of shortcoming with Asian representation, but I do not think the producers of Star Trek are prejudiced on purpose and intentionally ignore them. Maybe they just don’t want to get their cultural information wrong, like which happened with Chakotay and his heritage on VOY. Its was not that long ago that it was acceptable to say Orientals (i.e. the 1960s) in public, and nowadays its not. Its easy to see why writers would not want to risk used such dated language in Star Trek.
Please keep an open mind.
We have no idea whatsoever what the Eastern Coalition is, canonically. The canon has never once established that it was based in Asia. For all we know, "the Eastern Coalition" might have been faction based on the East Coast of North America after the Second U.S. Civil War.
While I am openminded that the ECON was not a uniformly Asian outfit and included Europeans and Americans in it, seeing as Lily nearly blew Picard away with a phaser and was resistant to Beverly to the point Lily had to be sedated. But I’m not going to assume that ECON was a American faction either. It could have been a global coalition of Augments for all we know, opposed to both America and Khan’s Khanate, and they all resided on the moon. And Lily’s encounter with Data might have interpreted by her, prior to going into shock, as her meeting with an Augment.
TPTB have always been mindful of presenting a conflict in Star Trek between China and America, not just in FC, but all the way back to TOS, where various quotes alluding to “Sino-Western troubles” were deleted from “The Corbomite Maneuver”. Feel free to look it up on MA.
I know people complain about the similarity of the NX-01 to the Akira, but is it unreasonable if the Akira was based on an older ship? I don't think the Constitution > Excelsior > Galaxy should be the only lineage
No, it’s believable, But there were opportunities to state that to the audience in the finale, and the various appearances of Daniels before that, and it was never done.
Its up to Lower Decks to address that now.
