What is your honest opinion of Enterprise?

[Captain Robert April]

Multiple timelines within multiple realities? Now, I'm afraid, you've lost me.

Look, the above has been a part of Star trek lore since City On The Edge Of Forever - as, before they beamed down and interacted with te Guardian, in their timeline, McCoy had NEVER traveled to the 1930ies....

YET!!

 

[CommanderRaytas]

Your logic is hurting my brain.

 

[xortex]

Did somebody mention experimantal French cinima? Or like watching the opera Carmen by George Bizet without the music. The music they had planned was god aweful. The ending credits music would have been much better if done right.
Braga is brilliant but lazy. He refuses to develop any of his concepts. Well, there are studs and there are mares in this life. GR was both.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Did you just call Gene Roddenberry a mare?

 

[xortex]

GR was a philosophical thinker who knew it wasn't enough just to have great ideas, you have to develop them.

 

[number6]

And like those who produced Trek after him, those ideas got developed on the job and evolved over time.
It's easy to look through a 45 year vaseline glaze and talk about what a genius deep thinker GR was and about his "vision," little realizing that what he did was on par with "smart" television shows did in the 60s. He was another guy who produced a show that developed a cult following. He's up there with Rod Serling and Joseph Stefano, or just slightly below.. I think giving him as much credit some fans seem to insist on giving does a profound disservice to the other creative minds who contributed to GR's vision. Fontana, Coon, Justman, Sturgeon, Black, Peebles, Pevney, Jefferies, Minor, Solow...just to name a few.

 

[number6]

And like those who produced Trek after him, those ideas got developed on the job and evolved over time.
It's easy to look through a 45 year vaseline glaze and talk about what a genius deep thinker GR was and about his "vision," little realizing that what he did was on par with "smart" television shows did in the 60s. He was another guy who produced a show that developed a cult following. He's up there with Rod Serling and Joseph Stefano, or just slightly below.. I think giving him as much credit some fans seem to insist on giving does a profound disservice to the other creative minds who contributed to GR's vision. Fontana, Coon, Justman, Sturgeon, Black, Peebles, Pevney, Jefferies, Minor, Solow...just to name a few.

 

[Captain Robert April]

An idea so profound, it merited being posted twice!

 

[xortex]

I give Solow all the credit.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I lean more towards Justman, Fontana, and Coon, although the essential ingredient was always GR giving little prods here and there to keep things on course.

Solow, on the other hand, was the studio guy, who was also drawing an NBC paycheck, who was there to make sure Crazy Gene didn't wind up destroying the studio and/or the network in the process of making his little space show.

 

[xortex]

I was only kidding. Justman was the money and schedualing man, but Wink of an Eye by Coon has to be my absolute least favorite. Scotty walking to the transporter room frozen was cartoonish. Maybe that was third season after GR left and Freiberger had no respect for it it seemed and was a joke. Luckily it was running itself by then. Why did Coon use a psudonym for 'Spectre of the Gun', one of my all time favorite? Lee Cronin?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Contractual obligations prevented him from using his real name (he'd already moved on to Universal to work on stuff), but considering what a hash they made of his scripts, he probably would've invoked his pseudonym anyway.

 

[xortex]

I made a mistake and corrected it. I meant 'Spectre of the Gun' which is one of my all time favorites still. Why wasn't Coon the showrunner and not that freak Fred Frieberger, and who appointed him? Wasn't Coon there a year or two already?

 

[Captain Robert April]

There were some major personal issues going on in Coon's life at the time. For a time, John Meridyth Lucas took over the line producing reins, but I'm guessing he didn't want the job.

On the surface, Fred Freiberger had an impressive resume (GR reportedly wanted him for the first season, but he was unavailable), but when you dig a bit deeper, it becomes apparent that every show he was involved with (at least up to that point), he was either with it for only one season, or he was there for the last season; eventually (mainly thanks to Star Trek) he got a reputation as a show killer. It wasn't until "Superboy" in the late 80s that he lasted more than one season on a show.

 

[xortex]

For someone who knew character so well, GR was no jugde of character - his Achilles heal - he loved and trusted everyone. Too bad. In that way he was still an innocent child/dreamer. He thought everybody was like him - sincere.

 

[Captain Robert April]

He didn't trust everyone (case in point: Solow), but he did tend to trust the wrong people.

 

[mic of orion]

Re: What is your honest opinion of Enterprise?
O love the show, loved, love and still think its a decent attempt at explaining early years.

I hated season 1-3, was watchable and half decent, there are few episodes i really liked, Civilization and Catwalk to name few, but overall seasons 1-3 weren't my favorite.

Season 4 was totally what made me really like enterprise, and felt really sad when show was canceled.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Okay, my honest opinion...

Seasons 1 and 2 are the same old, same old. Most of the time, it didn't really matter that this was a prequel, the stories could easily have been adapted to work on TNG or Voyager. Still, I like it - those first two seasons were solid (yet not exceptional) Trek. I do believe, though, that this is where the audience started leaving.

Season 3 was big, bold and fun. Great storytelling. But again, not much of a prequel - rather a reaction to 9/11. While I enjoyed it immensely, I was wondering when the show was going to live up to its promise of working towards the Federation we know and love from the 23rd and 24th century shows/movies. Many of those people still watching thought the same thing and tuned out.

I stuck with it, and season 4 is where we got the meat and taters. This is the show Enterprise should have been from day 1! Just perfect. Well, the budget constraints were noticeable in the fourth season - though this had both good effects (two- and three-part episodes, so that sets could be used for more than one show) and bad (synth soundtrack). The writing was top notch. If it had been like this from the start, it could have gone for seven years. (Well, there was still the oversaturation viewers might have felt after fourteen years and 526 episodes of 24th century Trek.)

 

[Reliant Robin]

I liked seasons 1 best, 2 and 3 about the same, and 4 the least, though it had some decent individual episodes (as well as two that I want to kill with fire and then kill the fire). Thing is, it never mattered to me whether Ent was a "proper" prequel or not, I was never so into TOS or TNG that those references meant a lot to me and I suspect most casual viewers were in the same position. I feel like fans of Enterprise the show often got short shrift in favour of fans of the wider Trek universe who didn't actually care much about Ent itself. I'd much rather have had good, coherent writing and characterisation and a bit of wobbly continuity than perfect continuity and the crew and cast themselves being afterthoughts.

 

[pimp]

In all honesty I think they kind of dragged the whole Xindy war far too long because it was the strength of the show so they basically milked it for too long because in my view having episodic show, then an arc story don't mix and they missed giving the viewer an answer to the whole temporal cold war and that mysterious guy - just think they had a good story to run with this rather than prolonging the Xindi conflict