What are the major arguments against ENT by its Naysayers?

[Technobuilder]

I grew up watching TNG and then found DS9 and fell in love with it.

I guess my major problem with VOY (now that I've gone back and watched it a second time through) is that it never rose to meet the level set by DS9 in MY eyes. No season long story arcs, not a lot of character development, etc. but overall I think if you're a Star Trek fan, you can't write it off because there are quite a few very good episodes that make it worth it. Stand alones obviously since Voyager never really did an arc-based storytelling format, but still some very nice TREK in there.

So that brings me to ENT. (And probably the reason you're reading this post to begin with.)

I started watching ENT my freshman year of College and I was psyched. Granted, it wasn't what I was expecting in a sequel series, but this was the first Star Trek I was going to get to see on a week-to-week basis amongst other Trek Fans and then talk it over, etc. etc.

Needless to say, Enterprise nose-dived pretty quick amongst the group I was watching with and we ended up tuning out. Expectations are always a hard to meet especially amongst a group who all tend to of wanted different things in "their" new show.

I kept watching for a little while, but never really got that attached to it and missed most of the latter half of the first season and the majority of the second. (I only saw episodes sporadically.)

Randomly sometime later, the last 6 episodes of the 3rd season found its way to our Campus LAN network and having nothing better to do that semester (as I'd swtiched majors and had only 2 classes to occupy my time between playing 'Earth & Beyond' most of the day) I started watching again and enjoyed it for the most part... then I saw Space Nazis and didn't know wtf was going on.

Anyways, long story short (too late.) I caught almost all of the 4th season and really liked it. (Just in time to have the show cancelled on me. I guess it served me right, but it seemed like it was doing well.) Arc-based storytelling and lots of character moments, they'd cut down on all the "sexy" scenes like I'd remembered from the early seasons and it seemed like a fun show over all but one that took too long to find it's footing and ultimately died on the vine.

So flash forward to roughly 2 weeks ago and I'm rewatching the whole series (some epsiodes I've seeing for the very first time.) and overall, my general impression is that the first and second seasons are much better than I remembered. Maybe it's hind-sight, or just knowing that things eventually get moving, but I seemed to really enjoy it more than I thought I would.

I noticed that they'd started to focus more on Character-oriented stories over alien-of-the-week type stuff. Events carried over from episode to episode. Things were actually building outside of the A & B stories from week-to-week and would end up paying-off later.

It was great. (and admittedly a bit sad.)

So...

My question. (Why I always have to preface everything I'll never know.)

What are the major arguments against ENT as a series? I've always "heard" how bad it was, and how it made VOY look decent by comparison, but after re-evaluating VOY and taking my own memories into account, I just can't see those flying amongst anyone who actually watched the show with an open mind. (Admittedly, I'm not saying it's Shakespeare, but...)

Now I know this is the ENT forum, so of course the responses to this may be more favourable than not...

ex. ("What do you meanz!!!! ENT was the bestest series EVAR!!!!)

But I'm looking for some (if not unbiased) at least non-favored criticism. What are the arguments that the ENT haters are always throwing down, and what are the flaws you think those arguments are actually based upon?

Cause me, I'm thinking a lot of them are fans that just fell out of touch with it first-run and haven't bothered to give it a second look since.

Of course your mileage may vary.

 

[JiNX-01]

I hope it's not OT to start by saying I love Enterprise. And I've been here long enough to list some of the gripes:
Enterprise violates continuity.
Enterprise violates canon.
Archer sucked.
Trip sucked.
Reed sucked.
The guy that played Travis can't act.
The Temporal Cold War totally violates canon.
The Borg episode violates canon.
Archer is the "founder" of the Federation but he's never mentioned in "future" Trek, so it's not continuity.
T'Pol sucked.
T'Pol didn't suck, but her eyebrows were all wrong (and what was with the catsuit?).
The Ferengi episode was grotesque canon violation because we don't meet the species until the 24th century.
The stories had been done in other incarnations of Trek.
The stories were so original they didn't make any sense.
We hate reset buttons.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Elaborate questions that people ask...why are people so criteria happy?

As a former-hater...

1. The first 2 seasons were dreadfully dull and most plots were retreads from other Trek shows. I still think that, actually. It wasn't until the show was pretty much canned, season finale of season 2, that they let the show do its own thing. The first seasons of TNG look better because of how good the show got later. Same with Deep Space Nine.

2. The temporal cold war was stupid. I still think that. The fact "they" had no idea who future guy was cements it. It was just a half-assed attempt at a myth-arc.

3. Prequels are inherently bad idea, as they never measure up to what "comes after them". Too often rely on mining the future for plot ideas rather than being original. I still think that.

4. Most of the cast lacked charisma especially early on, either because of the actors or the writing. They tried the trio thing with Archer, T'Pol and Trip. Didn't quite work...Archer was actually the weak link, too passive, and the chief engineer shouldn't be on most away missions, anyway. It should the security chief or doctor.

1 is the most important. Voyager turned Trek into an utter bore. Enterprise needed to escape that, it did...but it took them too long.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Let's just hit the biggies:

1. The just-previous-to-the-Federation era begs for a storyline that tells us how the Federation was formed. The first three seasons ignored this, in favor of nothing particularly original or interesting, and those years were a lost opportunity.

2. It's not impossible to use temporal hijinks/time travel well in an ongoing story, but it's difficult to pull off well and the way the TCW was done - basically by withholding the rules of the game from the audience and just making up anything they wanted to - is not the way to do it. Unless we know something about who the players are, what they can and can't do, and what their goals are, it's impossible to become emotionally invested in the story and care about what happens, except at a very shallow, look-at-the-nice-splosions level.

3. Having flawed characters is a good thing, but be careful about their flaws. They should be things the audience can find understandable and forgivable in the situation, and compensated for by some big main competence.

Example of how to do it right: Luke Skywalker's flaws are that he's a naive, whiney, fairly annoying little farmboy. His compensating competences are that he has Jedi powers and the courage to use them. The flaws don't inhibit him from doing what he needs to, to make the story work and save the day, and the competences are a requirement of the story.

Example of how to do it wrong: Jonathan Archer is an emotionally immature idiot who shows poor judgment, yells and barges around the galaxy annoying aliens, who therefore tend to kick his ass a lot. His compensating competences are that he means well, seems nice when you get to know him and is nice to his dog. Since his job requires emotional maturity, good judgement, diplomacy and leadership skills, and the ability to avoid getting your ass kicked all the time, he's got exactly the wrong set of traits for his job. His compensating factors don't matter for his particular character so they don't compensate at all.

 

[AlanC9]

Well, Archer sometimes shows maturity, for example in "Cogenitor." I think they just found action-adventure plots are easy to deliver if the captain acts like that. Wasn't this an occasional TOS problem too.

 

[JiNX-01]

Let's just hit the biggies:

1. The just-previous-to-the-Federation era begs for a storyline that tells us how the Federation was formed. The first three seasons ignored this, in favor of nothing particularly original or interesting, and those years were a lost opportunity.

I didn't mind that the crew were stumbling around, sometimes making friends (Shran) sometimes screwing up (Vissians) before getting their space legs.
And there were indications in the first two seasons that Archer would be moving toward building alliances, etc.
-- In Fight or Flight, Archer puts his crew at risk (irresponsibly, IMO) to do right by the families of a group of Axanar who were killed.
-- The Andorian Incident/Shadows of P'Jem and Cease Fire clearly point Earth (and specifically Archer) in the direction of becoming a peacemaker and alliance builder in the region. This set-up alone -- the "immature" humans taking on the role of smoothing things over between the well-traveled Vulcans and Andorians -- does a good job of setting the stage for the "Romulan arc" in S4.

2. It's not impossible to use temporal hijinks/time travel well in an ongoing story, but it's difficult to pull off well and the way the TCW was done - basically by withholding the rules of the game from the audience and just making up anything they wanted to - is not the way to do it. Unless we know something about who the players are, what they can and can't do, and what their goals are, it's impossible to become emotionally invested in the story and care about what happens, except at a very shallow, look-at-the-nice-splosions level.

I agree with you that if we had to be stuck with a TCW, there should have been some exposition on the structure and players.

But my preference would have been to have no TCW and instead to have ENT episodes (not necessarily in arc form but perhaps occasionally) setting the stage for the Earth-Romulan wars, even if we never got to see them. It would have done an infinitely better job of connecting to all of the "future Trek" series.

3. Having flawed characters is a good thing, but be careful about their flaws. They should be things the audience can find understandable and forgivable in the situation, and compensated for by some big main competence.

Example of how to do it right: Luke Skywalker's flaws are that he's a naive, whiney, fairly annoying little farmboy. His compensating competences are that he has Jedi powers and the courage to use them. The flaws don't inhibit him from doing what he needs to, to make the story work and save the day, and the competences are a requirement of the story.

Example of how to do it wrong: Jonathan Archer is an emotionally immature idiot who shows poor judgment, yells and barges around the galaxy annoying aliens, who therefore tend to kick his ass a lot. His compensating competences are that he means well, seems nice when you get to know him and is nice to his dog. Since his job requires emotional maturity, good judgement, diplomacy and leadership skills, and the ability to avoid getting your ass kicked all the time, he's got exactly the wrong set of traits for his job. His compensating factors don't matter for his particular character so they don't compensate at all.

A magnificient job of clarifying the fatal problem with Archer's character and why it was so damned hard to like or sympathize with him (until season 3, anyway)!
I wish your post would fit in my sig!

 

[star]

I'll add my vote for the TCW sucking booty. It was pointless and annoying.

I'll also agree that real character development didn't start happening until the 3rd season. But I'll add that when I finally went back and watched the first two seasons, I did discover that they were better than I remembered. I stopped watching the show regularly early in the first season and would catch an episode once in a very great while. It wasn't until a friend suggested I check out the show again that I picked it up again: in the 3rd season.

Another thing that ENT-despisers say is that the fourth season was so much fan-boy wanking. Honestly, I thought that's when ENT was finally becoming the prequel that it was touted to be. Of course, the character development wasn't as intense as it was in the third season, but we were starting to see how we get from ENT to TOS.

And while I want to say that all of this was "too little too late" -- honestly, I think ENT's early cancellation had a bit to do with the fact that from TNG on, audiences were getting saturated with Trek. DS9 and VOY even overlapped and they were seven seasons each -- just like TNG. By the time ENT came around, our expectations were ridiculously high and after having been somewhat forgiving of TNG, DS9 & VOY for their less-than-stellar early seasons, the fans just weren't going to be that patient anymore. (Plus the saturation of sci-fi in general.) I won't mention how the show was insidiously under-promoted by UPN...

 

[The Sneeze Police]

Internet fans are strange animals. I liked ENT. I didn't care for DSN, but I never felt the need to rail about it. That being said, this is a place to discuss ENT which includes positive and negative criticism.

Others will have more complete lists, but...

"canon" violations

reused ship design

story retreads

I wonder if they had "fan-wanked" in season one and got the trekkie viewers appeased, things would have gone better. But prolly not.

 

[SFRabid]

... my general impression is that the first and second seasons are much better than I remembered. Maybe it's hind-sight, or just knowing that things eventually get moving, but I seemed to really enjoy it more than I thought I would.

I noticed that they'd started to focus more on Character-oriented stories over alien-of-the-week type stuff. Events carried over from episode to episode. Things were actually building outside of the A & B stories from week-to-week and would end up paying-off later.

...

I think this is the heart of the matter. Many of the complaints that people have against ENT could be stated when talking about TOS. There is a lot of bare skin, continuity problems and poor stories in TOS. But the characters in ENT really grow on you over time. The stories in the first two years did not hold viewers long enough to get into the characters.

If the seasons had been reversed I think Enterprise would have done much better. Season 4 would have grabbed the viewers, season 3 would lock them in for the long run, and then seasons 1 and 2 would have given them character based stories about characters they would then be attached to.

 

[Technobuilder]

A lot of the criticisms listed above seem to have arisen due to expectations and desires for the series which were not met when the series first started airing. (I remember feeling like that at the time myself in some ways.)

I'm still annoyed that the TCW never went anywhere, but that may be due less to how it was executed onscreen than to how it was slapped together from week-to-week offscreen. I'm always wary of those without a plan, and this always seemed like a slight by TPTB, but then again does the show (as it exists now) deserve the criticism I really want to dirrect at B&B for (what I feel was) mishandling it in the first place?

I don't know. Part of me wants to hold on to those same criticisms but then again part of me just wants to enjoy the good and forget the bad.

ENT is not a perfect series, but in reality none of the TREKs were/are.

I just tend to have my favorites and get annoyed by those who mistreat the overall idea of what I think "Star Trek" is in any of its subsequent incarnations. As long as they stay true to the ideals, (and I might be alone out on my branch in saying this but) I'll accept a hiccup here or a temporal incursion there in the canon as long as it's in the service of a good story.

The rest I'll just ignore.

Thanks for all of your responses, I just wanted a better understanding.

 

[Pensive]

I have heard just about every gripe there is, and the one I still find full of the most bullshit is "canon violations." FANON violations maybe but there were no blatant contradictions (Berman and Braga had been working on Trek for nigh 2 decades!)

 

[angie]

And berman never watched TOS...

 

[Pensive]

..not like they couldn't have gotten the eps on tape...

 

[Captain X]

I could go into them, but the most blatent continuity violations are internal. The most obvious of those is the confusion over when and how Henry Archer died. Every series has those though.

I know the problem I intially had when the series was first announced was that I knew the temptation would be too great for the people making it to basically ignore TOS (even if I'm not a big TOS fan), and I was worried they'd screw up the few things that actually had been established for the period of time the series was supposed to be set in. Right off the bat, the ship was based very closely on a 24th century design, the uniforms seemed serived from the TNG/DS9/VOY pattern and even used a similiar ranking system, and they were already using the name "Starfleet" for the name of the organization.

Whenever you do a prequel, there's always the temptation to do something in contradiction of what came before because it would look flashier, or for whatever reason - just look at the Star Wars prequels contrasted with the original trilogy.

Then as the series started, everything seemed geared toward making the series just like every other Star Trek that had come before it by giving the ship the first phasers, the first transporter, the first photon torpedoes, etc. And the temporal cold war, just compounded the problems really.

Those were and still are the problems I have with ENT without going into a whole bunch of detail.

 

[Nebusj]

Well, my major complaint --- although I think my feelings about the show are too complicated to be summarized as ``naysayer'' --- is that nothing happened the first two and a half years. And there wasn't enough cool stuff in general.

Continuity glitches and underlit sets and dubious plot or character choices can be excused and when the show is fun they will be, but when we're supposed to sit watching Archer and T'Pol and that other guy who sits around in front stuck in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport due to a snow storm ... I mean ... why are we rushing home to watch this?

Now, action, adventure, feats of derring-do, with a few tasty dollops of philosophy and a wink at the folks studying their Official Encyclopedias as they watch, that's the good stuff.

 

[Technobuilder]

^
Apologies, I had trouble coming up with a better term than naysayer.

 

[TEH BABA]

I think it would have been better to have a cast member play a character with a alchohol problem then trillium. That would be something nonscfi can relate to. Such as garabaldi or colonel tigh.

 

[Longinus]

To me Enterprise seemed like a huge missed opportunity. I really don't get why they made a prequel, if the different era is not really utilised. Most of the series could have just as easily been set on the 24th century, they even have most of the tech!

Also, Archer was a dick.

 

[Meat Tenderizer]

I think the major problem that many people have with Enterprise is that it didn't really take advantage of its unique situation. So much could have been done with the setting and time they were put it in. Instead TNG-style episodes were largely run during the first 2 seasons. A temporal cold war? I think a lot of people were tired of time travel already. But even that could have gone over well if it had been handled correctly. Too few episodes were done on the that long-running arc, and as a result I felt it dragged out.

Season 3 and 4 really did take some risks and do something new. I liked the Xindi arc. Season 4 was one the best seasons of Trek. This new direction came a little too late though, as Enterprise had already bled out too many fans. It's a shame though, as season 5 could have been spectacular.

 

[Captain X]

Eh, I disagree with you about the quality of Seasons 3 & 4. Both were better by comparison to the first two seasons, and most of VOY for that matter, but Season 3 had a number of weaknesses, like a drawn out plot, interruptions with stand-alone episodes that added nothing to that plot, knowledge that Earth would be just fine in later centuries, and the invention of a new group of aliens to put Earth at risk. I know some people think it was made of awesome, but with all due respect, since ENT was supposed to be a "Birth of the Federation" series, they really should've set things up for the Romulan War and followed through with it. The best aspect of Season 3 is the character development, but then there was also some development they really shouldn't have done, like T'Pol becoming a drug addict and Archer abandoning his post on some half-assed suicide mission.

I know some people just love Season 4, too, probably because of all the TOS references, but to be honest, I feel the majority was fanwank, and it was done at the expense of real character development. And I say "real" character development because all we really got was the contrived teenaged angst between Trip and T'Pol.

*sigh* I hate to say it, but ENT has aged very poorly for me.