OMG has it really been 8 years?

[TheSubCommander]

It just occured to me that this Monday 5/13/13 will be exactly 10 years since the first airing of "These are the Voyages." I saw this episode in first run, and have to say I was disappointed in that it was the last aired Star Trek episode to date. The plot itself was fine, but very non-finale like. I also felt the inclusion of TNG actors on a series finale sort of slighted the Enterprise actors. I felt that Terra Nova was the true finale of Enterprise, and that while TNG actors showing up in any other episode would have been welcome for me, the series finale was not the time to do it. But most of all, I was sad that this was the last Enterprise episode, and Enterprise fans missed out on the remaining 3 seasons left, traditionally speaking, anyway.


I have always felt that while there were things that could have been better on Enterprise, that it was certainly a good show, especially in comparison with most other TV shows at the time, and even now. The FX were probably the best of all the Trek Series. Personally, I think many people, were overly harsh towards Enterprise, and I liked all the characters. But that is how I feel, and I am curious what others also think.

So, where were you when it first aired?
Did you see it then or later on DVD or rerun?
Did you like it or hate it, and why?
Were you sad that Enterprise was cancelled early?
Are you surprised that the Earth-Romulan war was never depicted in the show, or in a miniseries following the conclusion of the show?
What would you have done differently with Enterprise as a whole?

 

[horatio83]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I am not so sure that the show would have actually worked in its fifth season. One problem of the fourth season was that the NX-01 stayed in Earth's neighbourhood and did not do any deep space exploration.
As much as I would have loved to see the Romulan War, it would have been tricky to handle. They would have had to either make a it a war of four species vs. one or to show how the Romulan succeeded in creating tension among the four species, attacked humankind and how the other three species only assisted them later. It can hardly be fought in deep space so how do the Romulans come so close to the future Federation core territory? Can you show an epic war in an interesting way while just two warp 5 vessels are in service?
The show would have had to ask some hard question and change much more than in the fourth season.

What I would have done differently? Not do the third season precisely because the Romulan War is already a long story-arc in the last two or three season.

 

[BillJ]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I think you're a year or two off (5/13/2005)...

 

[R. Star]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I hear frequent watchings of TATV shortens your lifetime by two years.

But alright, I'll bite to your original questions. When ENT originally aired I watched season 1 and part of season 2 before I just gave up on it in disgust. The writing was just bad to average at best, the characters just failed to engage me and it was just a pale imitation to TNG, DS9 and even VOY that was disappointing in that it didn't live up to -any- expectations.

I eventually did re watch it on Netflix a year or two ago, and made it through the entire series. Seeing the Augment arc with Brent Spiner on SyFy got me interested in it again and lack of Trek for so long softened me to the concept of giving Enterprise another chance. I'll still rate it as weak compared to all the other Trek series, but since there weren't any expectations attached I can't say I was disappointed. Seasons 3 and 4 actually had some good episodes too. Had they started out that strong in seasons 1 and 2, I expect they would've retained more of their audience. Granted every Trek series had a comparatively weak first season or two, the market is less forgiving towards that than it was in the 90's.

When I first heard Enterprise got cancelled, I wasn't surprised and just shrugged remarking that show sucked. In hindsight now, I wish there had been a fifth season, though I cringed at some of the ideas that were apparently being planned like having a Starfleet officer be the original Borg Queen. Though at least it probably wouldn't have ended up on the stupidity that was TATV. I honestly don't know what they were thinking.

As for what I would've like to have seen? Drop all that Temporal Cold War nonsense. Seriously, I don't know what Berman and Braga's deal with time travel is, but they'll go with nine bad time travel episodes just because they'll occasionally get one good one. I thought it was bad how often Voyager time traveled to the point where the guy charged with monitoring the timeline goes insane and wants to kill Janeway for how often she screwed with the timeline, but then Enterprise makes it their one major story arc. It's easier to travel in time than warp from point a to point b in Trek.

Also character development. Enterprise apparently tried to emulate the "big three" from TOS, in form of Archer, T'Pol and Tucker. Everyone else basically got shoved more and more into the background. But those three really don't carry the show well. Having the secondary cast appear and develop more regularly and having a strong support cast like DS9 would've gone a long way. Again, by the time all the characters really started to find their selves in seasons 3 and 4, the damage to the viewer base was already done. You can have a show about the first deep space exploration ship without them all being a bunch of bungling and inexperienced oafs like we saw in the first two seasons. When NASA landed on the moon, they planned the mission down to every detail. Archer just seemed content to go "screw planning" and ride by the seat of his pants. He can be a strong improviser in unexpected situations without being a parody that refuses to do -any- planning though.

To the Earth-Romulan war? I'm actually glad we didn't see that in a small way. It still remains a scary and vague threat that way. Plus yeah, it would seem Starfleet is a number of years away of having enough ships to wage an effective war anyways if they're only turning out 1 NX class every 3 years.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

ENT was the only Star Trek series that just never appealed to me. I tried more than a few times to get into it, but there were more things about the show I didn't like than things I did like and I finally gave up on it a little bit into the third season. I did get back into it (somewhat) during the fourth season and thought that it was getting into the things that I wanted to see in a TOS prequel just as the plug had been pulled.

It remains my least favorite Trek series, but my attitude towards it has softened from mild contempt to ambivalence over years.

As far as what I'd done differently if I was running it, I'd probably would have just set it 50 years earlier in time, steered totally clear of Klingons & Romulans, and probably would have the Andorians as the actual bad guys of the series. No TCW is without saying. And rather than have the Enterprise be the only ship of its kind out there, I would have shown that she's not and featured more stories involving other Starfleet vessels and Earthbases throughout Sector 001. I also would have rewritten (and renamed) T'Pol and Phlox as human characters but retained their personalities.

Archer would have been rewritten to be more amiable & level-headed to better suit Scott Bakula and Mayweather more dynamic to better suit Anthony Montgomery. Either that or recast both roles.

Drop all that Temporal Cold War nonsense. Seriously, I don't know what Berman and Braga's deal with time travel is...

The TCW wasn't something that Berman & Braga really wanted to do. The higher-ups wanted something post-VOY in the show so the TCW was what B&B came up with to satisfy them, but it was never something they truly had their hearts in, IMO. Had it been up to them, they probably never would have done the TCW and indeed dropped it like a bad habit after the third season (Manny Coto was the one that actually had to wrap the whole thing up early in the fourth season).

 

[gblews]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I think you're a year or two off (5/13/2005)...

Yep, it's only been 8 years. Ent didn't end in 2003.

 

[gblews]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I am not so sure that the show would have actually worked in its fifth season. One problem of the fourth season was that the NX-01 stayed in Earth's neighbourhood and did not do any deep space exploration.
As much as I would have loved to see the Romulan War, it would have been tricky to handle. They would have had to either make a it a war of four species vs. one or to show how the Romulan succeeded in creating tension among the four species, attacked humankind and how the other three species only assisted them later. It can hardly be fought in deep space so how do the Romulans come so close to the future Federation core territory? Can you show an epic war in an interesting way while just two warp 5 vessels are in service?
The show would have had to ask some hard question and change much more than in the fourth season.

I'm pretty sure but could be wrong, someone correct me if I am, that the TPTB announced sometime after the cancellation that the Romulan War would not have been the subject of season 5 of Ent.

 

[horatio83]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

True but I guess that there would have a slow build-up. There was already one story in the fourth season, the Babel three-parter, and my wild guess is that we would at least have seen another story in the fith season such that the (6th and) 7th season will be about the war.

 

[TheSubCommander]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I think you're a year or two off (5/13/2005)...

Oops! I guess you are right! I don't know why I thought it was 2003. Maybe I'm getting senile

If someone is able to change the title, please feel free. It would be appreciated.

Still, 8 years! Same questions apply.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I hated it when it first aired. Maybe I was overly harsh on it because I wanted so bad for it to be great. But the first two seasons were shit. I didn't like any of it until this year when I watched seasons three and four and enjoyed them.

There were just so many cringe episodes in the first two seasons. It was a show that took place in the 22nd century and the fourth episode had a holodeck. The second episode featured a woman figuring out an entire language, including vocabulary, by listening to it for a few hours. It went downhill from there, hitting its lowest valley when T'Pol taught a group of villagers that the best way to defend yourself from klingons is to duck backward twice then roll away.

Also the temporal cold war established that any 6th grader in the future can completely unmake history using the tools in his school desk, completely breaking any semblance of sanity in the Star Trek future.

The entire first two seasons of the series combined the worst of the forehead alien formula with pale misguided attempts to have the social relevance earlier incarnations of the series did, and to link with future precedents such as vulcan mindmelds, the prime directive and the Borg.

Then Manny Coto joined the writing staff and they remembered how to write, and the show got good.

 

[Goji]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

I graduated high school the year it went off the air (in fact its four seasons exactly align with my four years in high school) so I'm glad it's not quite been ten years just yet.

I watched and enjoyed the first two seasons when they were on the air. In fact I joined this board initially because I was excited by the first season finale. But when the show came back in the fall of '03, I had a scheduling conflict since I was taking night classes at a junior college. This was before I had access to anything like a DVR so I was having to time-delay recording with an old VHS machine, which was a pain and very unreliable. I did it for a couple weeks, then get seriously annoyed by the episode "Extinction" and gave up.

It was around that time that DS9 was getting released on DVD, which was more than scratching my Star Trek itch. I never returned to watching the show on television and in the years since its cancellation I sort of mentally grouped it together with Voyager, a show I actively dislike, as being not worth my time and ignored it, though outside of "A Night in Sickbay" and the aforementioned "Extinction" I don't think it ever bothered me as much as your average Voyager outing.

I got the DVDs earlier this year because I'd just about watched my DS9 and TOS discs to death in the past decade. It was either Enterprise or TNG, and I find TNG to be deadly boring outside of The Best of Both Worlds, so I stand by my decision. It's become my third favorite of the Star Trek shows and that's about where it's likely to stay.

 

[Mr Pointy Ears]

Re: OMG has it really been 10 years?

man it doesn't feel like it been 10 years since these are the voyages.