^We know the broad strokes--who wins, the players--but the Xindi arc, the Romulan War, the road to the Federation all succeeded and/or would have been entertaining in filling in the details, new revelations and using pre-existing elements with new interesting spins.
If Enterprise launched with the Xindi saga...
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MeanJoePhaser
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Try first two episodes. I think Trek shows lose interest from the get go. Even Trek shows that a decent pilot usually followed with a weak second episode. You won't find "The Naked Now", "Past Prolouge", "Parallax", and "Fight of Flight" on many best episode lists.
There's tiresome excuses for this, the now worthless "Trek series don't get good until the third season" one...by third season Enterprise was all but finished. And "show hasn't found its footing yet", which again, is rubbish, because network shows get axed pretty quickly if they don't find their footing. "The actors aren't comfortable in their roles yet", would "24" have done well if Kiefer Sutherland half-heartedly lumbered his way through season 1?
They told us too much about all that stuff in other Trek shows for there to be any room for anything new or interesting, whereas with SW they left it so totally unknown aside from one or two sentences they were able to do all sorts of unexpected stuff.
That's why totally new things like the Xindi arc were the better idea, something no one's ever heard of and exploring that is better than just exploring stuff we already know in and out.
Besides, a "Birth of the Federation" type story would just be a B5 knock-off only not as interesting, and thanks to "Balance of Terror" there'd be nothing worth seeing in the Romulan war since they used "Atomic" (not nuclear) weapons and the two sides never met for anything meaning it'd be a vastly less interesting Dominion War.
Well let's just say I disagree.
We didn't know the Vulcans were so strident in the 22nd century. We didn't know T'Pau was a rebel of sorts or that someone else held Surak's katra or that Romulans infiltrated Vulcan society in the 22nd century or the turmoil on Vulcan between the HC/Syrannites or that the Romulans used remote controlled ships to attack and we knew next to nothing about Andorian or Tellarite culture that could be explored. Who knew Klingons experimented with human Augment DNA accounting for their smooth-headedness and how there are now two castes of Klingons which could have propelled storylines. We learned the Orion slaves really are the ones in charge.
Plus you don't know what became of the NX crew or what role they played. By adding Hernandez and Columbia you'd have another perspective. Throw in the proposed season five story ideas-no one can tell me how any of those would play out.
Well this argument doesn't hold up really either because one can argue that we already knew Earth wouldn't be destroyed, the future faction was lying and the Federation from what we know of it wouldn't destroy the Xindi, we knew Archer would need future evidence to sway the Xindi, we knew the future faction was wanting Earth destroyed because of its role in forming the Federation etc.
Once again it is about the little details and the "how" this played out and the extra layers or new spins the writers explored coupled with the audience simply wanting to see this in action.
Yeah, and nobody liked ANY of that stuff. They didn't care about the Vulcan/Romulan infiltration, they didn't care about the Andor-Vulcan thing, they didn't care about the Tellarites, they didn't care about the Orion women revelation, they didn't care about ANY of that stuff.
So why bother doing any of that stuff when you know already they're not gonna like any of it no matter what? All they cared about were fights with the Romulans and other nonsense.
Anwar I normally find that our opinions on a lot of things to be pretty much the same. However, here I have to strongly disagree.
Everything I read at the time and years later seemed to me that not just hardcore ENT fans but even those who hated ENT really loved season four and all of those story ideas. They kept saying if ENT had started out with these stories the series would still be on the air or they would say it was the best season of ENT or the best season of Trek since TOS etc.
Now while I think some of this is a bit exaggerated(I really enjoyed season four but do find it is overrated by many), you can't deny there was a new enthusiasm among fans about ENT becoming the prequel they always wanted by utilizing prequel appropriate species, topics, backstory etc.
With all respect, the fans were already ready to rip the series to shreds before the first episode was ever aired. They had unrealistic expectations (there's no way they could use "atomic" weapons as series weaponry) and refused to let of the stuff go that really wouldn't have helped the show regardless.
I stand by my argument that they couldn't do anything really new and unexpected, since the Canon-nazis would blow their tops over it even if they managed to do it without violating continuity with "This was never mentioned in later series so it couldn't have happened" even if it was a good story.
They wanted a continuity porno, not a TV show.
I stand by my argument that they couldn't do anything really new and unexpected, since the Canon-nazis would blow their tops over it even if they managed to do it without violating continuity with "This was never mentioned in later series so it couldn't have happened" even if it was a good story.
They wanted a continuity porno, not a TV show.
That ... really doesn't hold up as a reason. I mean, we had nuclear weapons in 1966, too, yet somehow atomic weapons were regarded as acceptable devices to use for the Earth-Romulan War. And this from writers who were well aware of nuclear weapons, as per the self-destruct bomb the Romulans had that episode.
It's not obvious why one would use atomic weapons rather than nuclear ones in the Earth-Romulan War, but then it wasn't obvious why they would when the episode aired. Yet, somehow, people were able to accept the notion of the Earth-Romulan War with atomic weaponry, so I don't see what's impossible about trusting the audience to accept it again.
(And for my Timo merit badge it could be there are side effects to nuclear weapons that atomic weapons don't have which are important in the era of early warp drives. It could be that neither side wanted to escalate the war past atomic weapons. It could be that atomic weapons in this context doesn't necessarily mean atomic bombs, which admittedly goes against the writer's intentions but not against what's actually on-screen. In short, if you believe the audience would run and panic at the notion of using atomic weapons in the 22nd century, a competent writer could without breaking a sweat produce a dozen justifications to answer any objections.)
It's not obvious why one would use atomic weapons rather than nuclear ones in the Earth-Romulan War, but then it wasn't obvious why they would when the episode aired. Yet, somehow, people were able to accept the notion of the Earth-Romulan War with atomic weaponry, so I don't see what's impossible about trusting the audience to accept it again.
(And for my Timo merit badge it could be there are side effects to nuclear weapons that atomic weapons don't have which are important in the era of early warp drives. It could be that neither side wanted to escalate the war past atomic weapons. It could be that atomic weapons in this context doesn't necessarily mean atomic bombs, which admittedly goes against the writer's intentions but not against what's actually on-screen. In short, if you believe the audience would run and panic at the notion of using atomic weapons in the 22nd century, a competent writer could without breaking a sweat produce a dozen justifications to answer any objections.)
Spock saying that "Atomic" weapons were the standard for that time simply shows that if you really want to be true to that you have to toss modern sensibilities out the window, since odds are we'd be using Fusion weapons by then, if not something more powerful.
Also, the effects would look uber-crappy for "atomic" weapons as compared to more modern Nuclear ones. We've been over this, to be totally true to what TOS said the show would be so restricted it wouldn't be worth making.
Also, the effects would look uber-crappy for "atomic" weapons as compared to more modern Nuclear ones. We've been over this, to be totally true to what TOS said the show would be so restricted it wouldn't be worth making.
Even as a well known fan of the Xindi arc (S3 was ENT's best, IMHO), they could not have started off the series with this. They might have been able to pull it off for S2 if they had compressed the character development we saw in S1 and S2 into just one season and cut out some of the redundancy we saw there (Suliban episodes, etc). S3 brought Trip/Archer/T'Pol into sharper focus, and made the show more about just these three and less a vehicle for an ensemble cast. I have always been of the opinion that these shows need to have anchors and not try to spread the viewers attention to thin among too many characters, and this may have held viewers to the show more strongly as time went on. Look at how interested people still are in the Trip/T'Pol relationship-it clearly worked for the show, and moving S3 up might have allowed this to happen sooner.
So, no, they could not have done the Xindi arc in S1, but probably could have pulled it off for S2, and I suspect it would have helped keep them on the air for longer afterwards.
So, no, they could not have done the Xindi arc in S1, but probably could have pulled it off for S2, and I suspect it would have helped keep them on the air for longer afterwards.
I'm sorry, it's quite late here and I'm afraid I'm not conscious enough at the moment to understand that. Care to elaborate? I'm just saying that for people to watch a show set 150 years from now and to see something less advanced that what we have today would be a mistake, no matter what technobabble explanation they could cook up.
All right. Your claim is, roughly speaking: ``People wouldn't accept a Romulan War show where they used atomic weapons because the special effects would be cheesy and they wouldn't accept using atomic weapons when there's nuclear weapons available now!'' Your argument for this is, roughly speaking: ``People wouldn't accept a Romulan War show where they used atomic weapons because the special effects would be cheesy and they wouldn't accept using atomic weapons when there's nuclear weapons available now!''
While this is, technically, a valid argument from your premises, it is not convincing to a person who does not believe one can pass judgement on special effects that haven't even been roughly imagined yet much less created, and it is not convincing to a person who notes that the audience did accept the claim that atomic weapons were used despite knowing that there were such things as nuclear weapons too.
And the form of an argument in which the proof of its claim is the statement of the claim as its axioms is a circular argument. These may be convincing if the object is to prove that an even number is one that is divisible by two, but it is not convincing when the argument is more than a question of definitions.
Back when "Balance of Terror" was written, most people DIDN'T know about nuclear weapons and "atomic" was more of a household term, so "atomic" was used in place of nuclear because the writer didn't think that nuclear weaponry would fully replace atomic weaponry within 10-20 years and as a result it left the ENT writers with the nasty situation of being true to that line and discarding modern sensibilities, or ditching that for more logical/present-day sensibilities and alienate the canon-nazis.
You just can't win.
You just can't win.
... meanwhile, in the real world, people were talking about nuclear weapons as early as 1950, and it got to be a really big bit of news from 1952 on. Tests of nuclear weapons were steady news ever onward, and a casual search of The New York Times archive reveals to me there was some story about nuclear weapons on average every eight days between 1950 and 1966. Of course, there'd be the occasional flare-up of press mentions, for example, during the election campaign in 1964 when the Davey Crockett tactical nuclear weapon was one of the many issues, or in late 1966 when Red China was testing its fifth nuclear weapon.
For comparison, by the way, in the same time frame ``quasar'' made The New York Times 39 times. Since the producers of Star Trek felt that quasar was familiar enough to be used as a plot point, I think it's just remotely possible they might think the audience had heard of something which had got mentioned 715 times.
For example, the producers of Star Trek thought that nuclear weapons were familiar enough terms to be used later on in ``Balance of Terror''. It's almost as if they were working on the assumption that atomic weapons were smaller bombs than nuclear ones were and that the audience would know one from the other, and that atomic weapons were less serious than the ones routinely deployed in the era of ``Balance of Terror''. And somehow the modern sensibilities of the audience were not offended.
You know, Nazi means something. When a group of people who think it's perfectly reasonable to do a 22nd century show in which atomic weapons are portrayed do manage to form a mass organization which overthrows the government, throws it into war against the combined economic might of the rest of the world, brings human and economic ruin to a continent, and sets about mass murder on a scale that the mind boggles to comprehend, then you can use it. It is otherwise not a useful term for describing people with whom you have exceedingly unimportant differences of opinion.
Fine fine, "Overly anal fans", I suppose after that last "yell at each other" session we all had enough of the C-N term.
Anyways, I don't know why the audience accepted "atomic" back then if they knew there were more powerful nuclear weapons, unless the audience didn't fully realize the difference between them back then, whilst for a modern audience "nuclear" is the more common term meaning if they DID use "Atomic" the audience would be "why are they using an obsolete term?". Using something like "Fusion weapons" would be more appropriate.
So it's an acceptable change (for the Production staff), whilst the real nutter fans won't accept this necessary change.
Then of course there's the bigger issue that they'd also reject anything and everything the staff did that wasn't explicitly referenced in TOS, no matter how good it was. Anything like the Vulcan-Andor war, the Romulan infiltration, etc. That's all got to go because TOS never referenced it so it MUST be canon violation.
Anyways, I don't know why the audience accepted "atomic" back then if they knew there were more powerful nuclear weapons, unless the audience didn't fully realize the difference between them back then, whilst for a modern audience "nuclear" is the more common term meaning if they DID use "Atomic" the audience would be "why are they using an obsolete term?". Using something like "Fusion weapons" would be more appropriate.
So it's an acceptable change (for the Production staff), whilst the real nutter fans won't accept this necessary change.
Then of course there's the bigger issue that they'd also reject anything and everything the staff did that wasn't explicitly referenced in TOS, no matter how good it was. Anything like the Vulcan-Andor war, the Romulan infiltration, etc. That's all got to go because TOS never referenced it so it MUST be canon violation.