Sci-Fi Wire Report On "Enterprise"...

[emily_reich]

^ good to know i'm not the only 'shipper that just wants ANY kind of relationship

and yes, the avatar still cracks me up too... good to know that's not just me either

 

[Imzadi13]

Posted by Othello:
Cue the cheesy porno music baby!!!

bow wow chica chica bow wow

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Archer will get a little darker, a bit more driven in his mission to stop the Xindi. "The idea of being the peaceful 'We-come-in-friendship' [guy], ... that guy is gone," Bakula said.

Ironic, because under the circumstances, Archer would be fully justified in taking the talk-first, shoot-later approach to the Xindi. He doesn't know whether FG is trying to manipulate him into starting a war - he can't know. Is he really going to just take FG's word for it?

Maybe this is some kind of ham-handed attempt to de-wimp Archer. Sure, Archer needs to be driven, but he could be driven to try to determine the truth about the Xindi.

We already have the requsite shoot-firsters in the MACOs, Trip and prolly Reed. If Archer is gonna be a shoot-firster, too, we have a whole passel of characters who essentially have the same function in the plot. Good characters all have distinct functions. Otherwise, why bother having them around at all?

T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) will no longer be under the control of the Vulcan High Command and will begin to explore emotions and humanity.

They should just change her name to Seven and have done with it. Without the whole "issue" with the Vulcans - badly done as it was - T'Pol will lose her reason for even being on the series (other than for T&A). So her episodes will be just stupid T&A episodes where her boring exploration of her emotions will be a thinly-veiled excuse for sex.

Any possibility of her becoming a potentially interesting character is now gone. I wonder how long it will be before the recurring "T'Pol explores her emotions - again!" episodes will be a watchword for "I guess we're watching Smallville instead this week."

Trip (Connor Trinneer) will grieve for his sister and struggle to balance a need for revenge with his sense of duty to Starfleet. Seeking help from T'Pol, he may find himself more intimately involved with her than ever before.

And they call DS9 a soap opera.

Not that they'd necessarily be more interesting, but they'd start way out ahead of the Trek curve simply by having two such engaging, talented actors with chemistry involved this way. It would just about be a Trek first.

At the risk of agreeing with Dennis, I gotta agree. Trek has a terrible track record with "romance." DS9 did many things very well, but romance was not one of them. It was very Trek in that way.

The only sci-fi series that has ever depicted an interesting, hella-sexy, chemistry-laden romantic relationship is Farscape. Sci-fi series just seem to have terrible problems with this particular form of writing.

However, I am a tad skeptical that the Beebs will break Trek's romance losing streak, especially since they seem unaware that T'Pol could explore any emotion other than "lust." Does that even count as an emotion? I'm envisioning a Chak/Seven redux, or should I say, "reflux." In both cases, you have one decent actor (Ryan, Trinnear) and one sub-par one (Beltran, Blalock), and no particular reason to throw them together other than the fact that they are the designated hunk and hunkette.

 

[Imzadi13]

Posted by emily_reich:
^ good to know i'm not the only 'shipper that just wants ANY kind of relationship

and yes, the avatar still cracks me up too... good to know that's not just me either

you are definitely not alone

 

[Othello]

Posted by Imzadi13:

Posted by Othello:
Cue the cheesy porno music baby!!!

bow wow chica chica bow wow

 

[Nebel]

In the TV Guide Online website there's a report from the same press conference:

TREK TROUBLE: The crew of UPN's Enterprise were put on the defensive Tuesday at the Television Critics Assoc. press tour in Hollywood. At issue: Last season's dramatic ratings slide. "I don't think, creatively, we were doing anything wrong," huffed exec producer Brannon Braga. "It can be debated from many different angles whether there are problems with the show." That said, co-exec producer Rick Berman conceded that he and Braga decided to "ramp up the show" this season "to try to lure back some of our viewers." Asked whether Enterprise's struggles and the box office failure of Nemesis are proof that the franchise is on the decline, Berman said, "I don't think the franchise is in trouble."

How can we expect B&B to fix things if they believe there's nothing wrong with the show or with the franchise?

 

[emily_reich]

Posted by Nebel:

How can we expect B&B to fix things if they believe there's nothing wrong with the show or with the franchise?

well it's not like they're going to say "Well, you know, you're right. THe franchise sucks and so does our new show, Enterprise. I don't really know why anyone still watches it. I mean, we're in charge, after all. ::laughs at self::"

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Posted by Ptrope:
Besides that, it just strikes me as a really terrible message, one that this series in particular has been more guilty of than the rest and from the very beginning, that humanity is somehow the only really viable way to be.

Humanity is the only viable way that we know to be, and any other "message" is nonsense. Trek's "aliens" -- usually not even distinguished as "species", but as "peoples" or "races" in modern Trek -- are rarely anything other than human beings in funny hats with one emotional/character aspect somewhat exaggerated, and are engaging precisely to the extent that we identify with them as similar to us. If there was ever an instance in TOS where human beings came out on the short end of the stick vis-a-vis Vulcans or Klingons or other "humanoid aliens" it was momentary at most -- and most often only from Spock's POV.

TOS, more than any of the Treks that have followed (including "Enterprise") was about Americans Being Right In Space (which made an episode in which we were put in our place by the neighborhood God-like aliens, "Errand Of Mercy", remarkable and memorable).

The Horta ain't a monster not because it's an alien with its own ways and right to be different but because She's A Mommy!

Even the Borg had to come around to being jest folks in order to use them more than once; while using Picard as their mouthpiece in "The Best Of Both Worlds" was dramatically inspired it was also the camel's-nose-in-the-tent, the tacit recognition that the aliens have to look us in the eye and talk to us mano a mano in order to be useful.

You want real aliens on Trek, go for the pipecleaner critters who appear briefly at the conclusion of Catspaw or the Thingmaker Goop creatures of "Operation -- Annihilate". Not much precedent for drama there, really; juist your basic creepshow.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Posted by Nebel:
How can we expect B&B to fix things if they believe there's nothing wrong with the show or with the franchise?

You mean "if they don't admit it at the TV Critics Association press conference", don't you?

Sorry, but only one James Edward Olmos to a customer. We don't want the press kiddies to take this kind of thing for granted.

If they really believed that the show had no problems, they would not have made a single change in it. What's the subject of rather fruitless debate, until we see it, is what the sum of their efforts to fix the show's problems will be (insert the caveat that many of the changes are less directed toward improving the show than to attracting new attention to it).

 

[Nebel]

Posted by emily_reich:
well it's not like they're going to say "Well, you know, you're right. THe franchise sucks and so does our new show, Enterprise. I don't really know why anyone still watches it. I mean, we're in charge, after all. ::laughs at self::"

Ok, but they could at least say "We know the last movie was a fiasco and that we are loosing viewers on a daily basis, but we are working hard to fix things up and bring back our fans"



Yes, I know it will never happen.

 

[emily_reich]

Posted by Nebel:

Posted by emily_reich:
well it's not like they're going to say "Well, you know, you're right. THe franchise sucks and so does our new show, Enterprise. I don't really know why anyone still watches it. I mean, we're in charge, after all. ::laughs at self::"

Ok, but they could at least say "We know the last movie was a fiasco and that we are loosing viewers on a daily basis, but we are working hard to fix things up and bring back our fans"



Yes, I know it will never happen.

yeah... i would think that saying something negative about your OWN SHOW (warranted or otherwise) would be WAY worse than just trying to fix it and saying that it's fine... i mean, admitting defeat has got to be the worst thing you can do... besides, the media would have SO many articles saying "even the people behind it admit that trek is dead" and "trek is comin gto an end... just ask the producers" and that's not good for business.. too many people are obsessed with only watching the shows that "everyone else is watching" and then there's the people that believe everything magazines and stuff say.... either way, they would not watch ENT if those kind of articles came up.. they'd ewither think the show must be aweful or that they'd be teh only ones watching it.... either way they'd lose a LOT of viewers and not gain any more.....

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Posted by Nebel:

Ok, but they could at least say "We know the last movie was a fiasco and that we are loosing viewers on a daily basis, but we are working hard to fix things up and bring back our fans".

Why, to please the bashers?

 

[Ptrope]

Posted by Dennis Bailey:
Humanity is the only viable way that we know to be, and any other "message" is nonsense. Trek's "aliens" -- usually not even distinguished as "species", but as "peoples" or "races" in modern Trek -- are rarely anything other than human beings in funny hats with one emotional/character aspect somewhat exaggerated, and are engaging precisely to the extent that we identify with them as similar to us. If there was ever an instance in TOS where human beings came out on the short end of the stick vis-a-vis Vulcans or Klingons or other "humanoid aliens" it was momentary at most -- and most often only from Spock's POV.

TOS, more than any of the Treks that have followed (including "Enterprise") was about Americans Being Right In Space (which made an episode in which we were put in our place by the neighborhood God-like aliens, "Errand Of Mercy", remarkable and memorable).

The Horta ain't a monster not because it's an alien with its own ways and right to be different but because She's A Mommy!

Even the Borg had to come around to being jest folks in order to use them more than once; while using Picard as their mouthpiece in "The Best Of Both Worlds" was dramatically inspired it was also the camel's-nose-in-the-tent, the tacit recognition that the aliens have to look us in the eye and talk to us mano a mano in order to be useful.

You want real aliens on Trek, go for the pipecleaner critters who appear briefly at the conclusion of Catspaw or the Thingmaker Goop creatures of "Operation -- Annihilate". Not much precedent for drama there, really; juist your basic creepshow.

Dennis, where did your eloquence go? Usually, your arguments, even when they're straw-man, don't degenerate into Hee-Haw; you're not doing your position any favors by trying to make like a hick.

Why should the regular aliens be alien? Because they make the humans look human by doing so. Trek has an advantage over, say, NYPD Blue because the Blues are human (for the most part) and so the only way to write them is as variations on humanity. Trek can present humanity through either a microscope or a telescope, simply by utilizing alien characters as such. Particularly regular characters; notice that every example you used is for a one-time, or very short-term, plotline; there's not an ongoing character in the lot. If you want T'Pol to be a human Vulcan, make her a one-time aberration from the norm and then go back to your baseline. Spread out the curve until it flattens, and all you end up with is a mess of characters with no distinctions and no purpose. In essence, pretty close to what you've got on ENT.

I think that's where all the "wonder in space" went in B&B's grand & glorious "new vision." They don't know or don't care about what makes the element of wonder occur: experiencing something new and embracing it, instead of hammering every nail flush as they're doing. ENT is little more than Rednecks in Space.

How about a real discussion instead of patronizing twaddle, Dennis ... ?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Posted by Ptrope:
Dennis, where did your eloquence go? Usually, your arguments, even when they're straw-man, don't degenerate into Hee-Haw; you're not doing your position any favors by trying to make like a hick.

Cheap shot. Game over. Buh-bye.

 

[Ptrope]

Posted by Dennis Bailey:
Cheap shot. Game over. Buh-bye.

No cheap shot intended, Dennis. I honestly think that previous post lost its value by getting all hayseed ("... ain't a monster"; "...being jest folks"; "... pipecleaner critters" ??). You're obviously set on this particular direction for the characters, and that's great, but if you're going to try to argue your side of the point, it works a lot better if you don't also come across as patronizing, which that post did, in spades. Take offense at that, if you like, but all I was suggesting was that you stick to the point and not just write a "Nyaahh, nyaahh" post as 'proof.'

 

[Zane Gray]

More than a romance, I hope that we see a deeping of Trip and T'Pol's relationship as friends and collegues. It makes sense that Trip would seek her out for help in dealing with his emotions, as she's someone who struggles to repress her own daily. Conversely, helping Trip would allow T'Pol to explore her own feelings to some degree.

If a romance perhaps develops out of this later - a long-term, genuinely motivated one, then great... it it's written with some degree of maturity. But at least this lets us seem more of our characters emotional struggles.

It's confirmation that there's going to be (at last!) some continuing arc in terms of character emotional issues - something that's been lacking on this show. Trip is truly in pain over this and it's not just going to be given lip service in scripts.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Hmm. That's more of an ideal for living than a recipe for drama.

 

[Top41]

I have to disagree with those that say Trek doesn't do long-term romance well; I think they do it very well. IMO, it's a great aspect of Trek. It shows these people aren't all about business, or just out for a little nookie if they come across a cute alien on a planet. Not that there's anything wrong with that , but it's nice to see relationships between the characters develop and grow, and it's nice to see how the characters influence each other.

I'm glad to hear Trip and T'Pol will be growing closer. IMO, the chemistry between them has been there from day 1, and I'd like to see the writers take advantage of that. They've always been my favorite pairing.

Very glad to hear that Archer's going to toughen up this season! Looks like he will be changing, and growing into his role as captain.

 

[ZephyrCJW]

Actually, Miss Thang, your "stupid" example was pretty entertaining! they would'nt do half so bad keeping your plot in mine! (still laughing?

 

[Walter Sochack]

Posted by Dennis Bailey:
Humanity is the only viable way that we know to be, and any other "message" is nonsense.

Sorry, diversity overload. It seems that the inhabitants of Earth are just too varied and different for this statement to wash. Even if you just look at the show's target western audience there is a huge variation across political and religious ideologies. There is clearly more than one viable way to be human in the United States, not mentioning the world.

I just find it strange that a show like Red Dwarf can manage to tell a different message about what it is to be human (DNA was fun - what's so hot about being human?). Of course, their characters were distinctly more "human" then those on Enterprise

I can't say that I'm looking forward to Trip showing T'Pol where her humanity lies and which buttons she should press in order to make human sounds. I've seen this colonization bullshit before and I'm sick of it now. T'Pol is probably the strongest character on the show; for her to go through a "Who I Truly Am" discovery thanks to a resident white male, who knows what she needs because His Way is The Only Right Way, is a perfect way to destroy that character.

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