Why does Enterprise get so much flak?

[LoneDragon]

It's one of my favorite of the series.
I love all the characters, especially Phlox.
Do I love Archer so much because I was a huge Quantum Leap fan when I was young?
T'Pol =

 

[Tosk]

For me it was the dull second tier characters, and the appaling 'good ep to bad ep' ratio.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

There was a second tier?

And that ratio abruptly reversed for the second half of the series.

 

[Skywalker]

A lot of it was overblown, but there are some legit criticisms. It was a little too samey (at least in the first two seasons) at a time when they really should have been more daring and more willing to break the mold. Though I think that a lot of the "problems" with ENT already existed in other Trek shows; for some reason people were more willing to overlook them in the earlier ones.

Oh, and people hated the ship. Not just the design, but the name. Apparently no ships before TOS could have been called Enterprise, and how dare TPTB think otherwise.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

ENT was too safe. They took very few chances with character creation and development, plots, etc. It didn't have the right feel of the first deep space explorers, more like TNG in a smaller ship (the exterior of NX-Class is pretty awful IMO, though the sets were pretty good).

The first two seasons were, on the whole, pretty weak. Things started to pick up with S3, where they did take a couple of risks and didn't do a VOY and rely on Janeway's reset button.

As for the characters:
- Archer bugs the hell out of me, he comes across as incompetent a lot of the time, whilst his Vulcan racism was just so forced it was cringy to watch
- T'Pol I'm really pretty ambivilant towards, she was alright, nothing stellar, but her Vulcan pout got bothersome after a while (one thing that does tick me off is why she wasn't in a proper uniform in S4)
- Tucker I liked, and not just because he's hot (major plus though), but he was definately very human and the loss of his sister gave him a nice little arc
- Reed is little more than a stereotypical stiffer-upper-lipped Englishman, which gets tired very quickly (why they never showed him and Hayes getting it on still baffles me--just look at the sexual tension!!!!)
- Sato was another alright character, the academic rookie, but she did have some growth, though her amnesia was pretty bad in S1 (in "Broken Bow" she doesn't seem to have a weapon even though she is rated with one, and when grabbed by Klingons just screams like a little girl although is loater revealed to be a martial artist)
- Mayweather was pointless, little more than an extra with a name (he was some eye candy though)
- Phlox was alright as well, with his interesting way to treat injuries and illnesses he can definately be called unique, though I could've done without knowing he's a nudist!

The way ENT should have gone should have been to "pick up" where DS9 left off (not literally of course). Set the series in 2161, just after the Romulan War, so they had to deal with all the hard work and problems caused by such a massive conflict, as well as the newly formed Federation with various aliens. Have the ship be the first collective assignment, so you have member races all working together on the same ship for the first time and just watch the sparks fly. There would be lots of potential for character conflict as well as some alien viewpoints, as they try and figure out the best way to live and work together. That way we could have had Shran from the very beginning!

 

[bullethead]

The big problem was that it came too soon after Voyager, so you could really see that the creative team was tapped out, especially when UPN shot down Braga's "Klingon attack - build Enterprise" first season arc for more TNG style planet of the week stuff. It didn't help that those executives alienated fans by making the NX-01 an Akira ripoff (although I've come to respect the design due to Doug Drexler's fantastic work on it) with period appropriate sets and all the familiar tech from the old shows. That just ruined most of the prequel feel, as did some of the absurd continuity gaffes. The Temporal Cold War was an interesting idea forced into the show by executive fiat and wasn't used well anyway.

 

[Mage]

Flat characters, simple plots, way to much emphasis on trying to be sexy, acting wasn't as good as it could have been.

Archer being incompetent made sense to me really. I mean, so fans complain that he wasn't experienced enough. HELLO!!! Earth's FIRST true warp-ship, the first ship to actually go out there. There isn't a captain in this new Starfleet that has the right amount of experience to deal with this kind of stuff.

 

[Relayer1]

For me, the premise was poor, I didn't want Bakula as captain (I don't like Quantum Leap), T'Pol was as big a cheap ploy as 7 of 9, most of the characters were unappealing, underdeveloped or wasted, the 'Future Guy' plot was awful AND tedious, the Suliban were dull, the Xindi arc was boring and there were just way too many just plain bad episodes.

Having said that, the theme didn't bother me, the crew did grow on me and season 4 was great !

 

[F. King Daniel]

Although Enterprise's first two seasons were mostly horrible, the same is true of TNG, DS9 and VOY too. It stayed too close to the TNG Formula(TM) in an era when television had moved on quite a bit. By the third season when much-needed change was implimented, it was too late and viewers didn't come back.

Oh, and of course for those for whom Trek was primarily about intricate inter-series continuity lining up perfectly, it was like a red hot poker up the ass.

 

[Takeru]

I didn't like Enterprise because it was the same old crap again, after the first few episodes every other episode felt like it could have happened on TNG or Voyager. They didn't tell new stories in a familiar, but different setting, they wrote the same stories they had written for 14 years and just replaced phaser with phase pistol and threw in "first warp 5 ship" every other episode.

I didn't like season 4 either, at that point the writer's didn't even try to make Enterprise its own show, it had become the TOS/TNG reference hour.

 

[SchwEnt]

There are the usual reasons already mentioned above.
I'll add a new one--

Before it got out of the gate, ENT faced a LOT of preconceptions from fans.

Being a prequel series, fans already had their own ideas about what a pre-TOS series should be like. This goes for the design of the ship, to the history of the future, to the technology depicted, to the types of characters, to the look of the sets, everything.

Every fan can imagine what it was like between our time and Kirk's era. When ENT showed up, right from the start, it was gonna piss off people with something they didn't get right (according to any given fan).

The people are too contemporary, the ship is wrong, the sets don't look right, the ship is too advanced, that's not how Star Fleet was started, this is wrong, that's not right, whatever.

Fans were already gonna have their own ideas about that 22nd century. ENT was never gonna please everybody about everything.

I see that as a unique problem for ENT that other ST series didn't face, where they were going forward and fans didn't "know" any better about what "should" be.

I guess some fans got pissed at the start about something ENT got wrong, and never stayed aboard.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Spot on. I was the ENT forum Moderator when the show launched and the obsessive fanboy whining was beyond earth orbit. It was also a feeding ground for trolls but the admins at the time were overly tolerant and let the trolling continue. I finally resigned from the board rather than rescind warnings for a most obnoxious individual. That individual was permabanned within 6 weeks after my departure.

As someone old enough to have seen much of TOS in first run, I found ENT to be very well conceived in its development of both technology and relationships, particularly the Human/Vulcan theme. ENT became my second favorite series, slightly behind TNG. Oh, and to further establish my outcast character, I loved the Faith of the Heart theme and its accompanying visuals.

 

[bullethead]

There are the usual reasons already mentioned above.
I'll add a new one--

Before it got out of the gate, ENT faced a LOT of preconceptions from fans.

Being a prequel series, fans already had their own ideas about what a pre-TOS series should be like. This goes for the design of the ship, to the history of the future, to the technology depicted, to the types of characters, to the look of the sets, everything.

I think that played a major factor too. The execs forcing the Akiraprise design and the same old tech into stories with a changed name (at best) certainly didn't help the show's perception issues. But I do think that Enterprise could have won over more people if the show's writing had been stronger.

 

[BillJ]

Quality is subjective, but the over-abundance of Trek isn't. There was just simply way too much of it and Enterprise came in at the end and at the height of audience burnout.

With some tweaks it could've been a really good series in my eyes but I think it still would've bled viewers.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Horrible scripts for the first 60% of the series.

Scripts so terrible and shitty that most people had quit watching before decent writing came in.

 

[ChristopherPike]

The seasons were too long by the time Enterprise came along. There are easily 13 shows a piece in those initial years, which could sustain the momentum expected by audiences today. An exciting premiere and episodes which build a few story arcs (to be continued later), before proving at least one of those has actually been building to something by the finale.

The problem is the filler material, required to bulk up a 26 show run and for Star Trek to be on most weeks a year... factoring in repeats during that time. Familiarity breeds contempt. Cut back and make people wait for quality. Put that extra bit of effort into making fewer stories perfect, rather than struggle through recycled TNG/Voyager ideas which even the writers must've known were straying from their prequel concept... but a episode was needed that week, so in it goes I guess.

60% crap I find to be a little harsh. I skip less ENT episodes than any other series, with the possible exception of DS9 (but even that has a handful of deathly dull outings every season).

Getting this show noticed for all the right reasons, getting it a better shot of success requires changing stuff. Enterprise somehow continues to polarise. Going through the series in order on Blu ray I doubt very much will suddenly make any difference. You'll get converts and you'll get an equal number who decide not to stick with it. If I were an executive introducing this show to a new audience, I'd remove episodes from each season that could've been (or indeed were already) done by another iteration, so that you're left with freshly distilled Enterprise. Do something radical like replace the song used in the title sequence, and don't stop there... thin out the reliance on Dennis McCarthy's scores - which tended to sound the same here as across TNG/DS9/VOY and replace them with exciting new compositions like that in "Regeneration" by Bryan Tyler. Use more electronic synth, in with the classical sounding orchestra. Then you start to make the show standout, feel fresh and different and well, alive.

 

[Anduril]

Made up fandom about what the series would be like doomed the show from the start. Add that to the close mindedness of most of the hardcore Trekkies really hurt the show. It's a shame that it really started to get going in seasons 3 and 4. We'll never know what could have been.

 

[Marsden]

Is it true or false that Enterprise was meant to be a "reboot" series and not really conform to previous continuity, but it would still have the same elements from the setting, like Vulcans and Warp drive?

I'm asking because I read that's why the first two seasons didn't have "Star Trek" in the title and the theme song was different, they tried to distance the show from previous shows, but by season 3 they gave up on that concept and it "never happened"

I haven't seen any of Enterprise, most of what I've heard outside of this forum was negative. I'm trying to be open minded about it before I see it for myself, someday.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The show was always intended as a prequel, but a few minor changes were made here and there (as there have been in every incarnation of Trek - for example Voyager's version of warp speed being far slower than what was previously established in TOS and TNG, despite them repeately calling it the fastest ship!), and using a bit of time travel to handwave some of those differences away.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Another thing I could've done without was rehashing all the same old species: Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi, Borg (wasn't it convenient Denobulans are "immune" to assimilation, and seriously how did 22nd century tech defeat them?).

They should have done more with the early UFP members and other races such as the Orions. Used species only touched on previously, without having an alien of the week baddie.