Why such poor continuity?

[pookha]

MattJC said:
Thanks. There's a blurb in T'Pol's entry at Memory Alpha that says that Mike Sussman wanted an episode in season to reveal that T'pol's father faked his death and he would be a Romulan agent.
That would make T'pol half-Romulan and it would shed light on her emotions more the blurb says.
There's no source quoted at article, but what are everyone's thoughts on that?

i just dont see it.
as far back as tos it was established there are biological differences between vulcans and romulans.
as much medical treatment and scans tpol went through it would have been discovered.

and she would have been aware of it.

i dont remember sussman ever seriously making the suggestion,
now he quiped about all kinds of things like soval being archer's father.

i do know some fans wanted it.

 

[gblews]

MattJC said:
In a potential season five episode, writer/producer Mike Sussman hoped to have T'Pol finally meet her father, and reveal to the audience that he was in fact a Romulan agent who had posed as a Vulcan officer prior to faking his own death. The suggestion that T'Pol was half-Romulan would have shed light on her affinity for humans as well as her interest in experimenting with emotions.


http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/T%27Pol#Background_Information

There's the exact quote. I'm not very good at explaining things.

I have serious doubts as to the veracity of this information. The article itself requests a citation for Sussman's quote.

I've read just about everything written in the mainstream press about the show for the last few years and I've never heard this mentioned.

As much as the debate about T'Pol's heritage has raged here, I think someone would have seen this quote by Mike Sussman and posted it.

Isn't Memory Alpha another of those sites that allows fans to edit articles? This sounds like someone's wishful thinking posted as fact.

 

[MattJC]

Yeah, I know there was no source quoted. I just thought maybe that this might be of interest with this discussion on T'pol and her emotions. Maybe Mr. Sussman could shed some light on this if he is still lurking around?

 

[number6]

So basically you made all that shit up and posted it, didn't you?

 

[commodore64]

MattJC said:
Thanks. There's a blurb in T'Pol's entry at Memory Alpha that says that Mike Sussman wanted an episode in season to reveal that T'pol's father faked his death and he would be a Romulan agent.
That would make T'pol half-Romulan and it would shed light on her emotions more the blurb says.
There's no source quoted at article, but what are everyone's thoughts on that?

That might deserve it's own thread. I think there had to be some explanation why T'Pol turned downright weird in season 4 - perhaps that's it. I'm not really in favor of that storyline though.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Kenobi said:

Nerys Myk said:That doesn't make sense to me. Vulcan emotional control comes from discipline and training not genetics.

I seem to recall that Vulcans actually do have some sort of biological component (has to be in the brain-area) that helps them control their emotions. I'm not sure when this was first revealed, but I do recall that it was mentioned in a Voyager episode. I'm pretty sure the one where Tuvok melded with Lon Suder and went psycho.

Only watched three seasons of Voyager. So I might have missed it. Though it would stand to reason that Romulans would have the same feature. They only divereged a few centuries ago.

 

[RandyS]

azzurri08 said:
Sorry RandyS, I realize that's your opinion but totally disagree with you. Trip was a great character in ENT, one of the best and Hoshi sucked. The episodes that featured her like "Exile"(S3) and "Vanishing Point"(S2) were definatley below average. Her character was ok but the stories about her were not done well.

Well, that's okay, and like you say, that's your opinion. But I think the reason Hoshi "sucked" (she didn't), was because we didn't see enough of her. That idiot Trip was too busy stealing everybody else's screen time.

 

[cooleddie74]

"Exile" held a lot of promise for Hoshi, but in the end it just wound up one of the Xindi arc/season's most boring episodes...another "alien kidnaps Starfleet officer under false pretenses" story that didn't work terribly well on the OTHER shows.

 

[RandyS]

cooleddie74 said:
"Exile" held a lot of promise for Hoshi, but in the end it just wound up one of the Xindi arc/season's most boring episodes...another "alien kidnaps Starfleet officer under false pretenses" story that didn't work terribly well on the OTHER shows.

True, but then that whole Xindi season was a waste anyway.

Hey, how about Hoshi in the mirror universe episodes? She was great in that, and the ending with her was both unexpected AND fun.

 

[Timo]

According to at least a couple of books, Saavik is half Vulcan, half Romulan. She struggled with her volatile Romulan half, at least at first, as she strove to live as a Vulcan.

Then again, the Saavik of the novels was also basically raised by wolves, and thus denied Vulcan upbringing and discipline. Her biology need not have factored into this much.

It was brave enough an attempt whenever the writers wanted to make Vulcan (un)emotionalism at least partially biological. They always risked making it too simplistic, though - which is why I am glad the writers of ENT never managed to settle on one biological explanation, but explored several.

With Spock, Sarek and Tuvok, we got great glimpses into what these guys would be like if not in control of their emotions. There were nuances to that, different personal demons for different characters. I found it somewhat disappointing that the emotions T'Pol ended up manifesting weren't more interesting and daring. The female sexuality thing in "Fusion" or "Bounty" was needlessly stereotypical, especially when none of the guys really had male sexuality as the overwhelming emotion. Tuvok was an angry man, Spock had security issues; Sarek wanted to radiate familial love. T'Pol could have been, say, a control freak or something when her emotional blocks fell - but the writers never chose a solid angle like that, settling for fuzzy "overall emotionality" and expression of sexuality instead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[mada101]

As a 40-year franchise written by so many different writers and under the leadership of different producers, Star Trek as a whole has a surprisingly tight continuity and literary universe. Enterprise, while bending a few things and, expectantly, making a few mistakes within its own inner workings, was no exception. Even in Season 1 and 2, there are some surprisingly subtle references to TOS and such (the bad guy aliens on 'Civilization', for example, were referenced by Kirk in 'The Changeling' as a race that was annihilated by the NOMAD probe).

If the new movie chooses to start afresh, I think ENT is a nice, if not stellar, addition to the original universe.

 

[azzurri08]

cooleddie74 said:
"Exile" held a lot of promise for Hoshi, but in the end it just wound up one of the Xindi arc/season's most boring episodes...another "alien kidnaps Starfleet officer under false pretenses" story that didn't work terribly well on the OTHER shows.

Agreed. Exile was one of the most boring shows of season 3 and hoshi's acting in it was not that good. However, Hoshi was better in the mirror episodes, not because she was "evil" but because she was more assertive, a trait that the regular Hoshi definatley needed.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Berman and Braga proved on VOY that they didn't care about continuity. Honestly I went into ENT expecting the same kind of amnesia that Janeway suffered to afflict Archer & crew, and sure enough...

Why didn't they care? Continuity takes effort. Easier just to be sloppy. Paycheck's the same either way, right?

I'm not convinced that they didn't have a vision. They did and they probably assumed that they had 7 years to do it.

If they had a vision, why wait to implement it? They work in TV, they should have known nothing is guaranteed.

But seriously, the usual culprit is the use of multiple writers who sometimes miscue what other writers have done.

Isn't it the showrunner's job to make sure the writers' ideas all synch up with each other? If the mistakes are so blatant that the audience notices, shouldn't someone who is paid to notice, do so? Nah, they didn't notice because they didn't give a shit.

For instance, when Borg are first introduced they don't assimilate people, only technology. Somewhere along the line that got miscued into Borg assimilating people (probably from the Picard-Borg episodes). The Ferengi were introduced as militants, but the fact that they were interested in a salvage operation was miscued by other writers into the Ferngi we now know as unscrupulous profiteers.

Those examples are improvements, so maybe they were just mistakes or maybe they were the "good" kind of mistake - not a mistake at all, but consciously ignoring something that didn't work so well in favor of something that works better. That is the kind of poor continuity I'm happy to embrace. If ENT only made "mistakes" like that, I wouldn't complain one bit.

 

[Anna Yolei]

Why didn't they care? Continuity takes effort. Easier just to be sloppy. Paycheck's the same either way, right?

And that right there is exactly why Trek went into the shitter.

Apathy.

When you're guaranteed (so they thought) seven seasons and many fans, including an alarming amount on this very board, accept the idea that Trek needs/deserves two seasons to warm up and get it's shit together, why would anyone feel any pressure to do better? Any other show to bleed out as many fas as every Trek series past DS9 did would have been axed a long time ago without the Trek label. Enterprise was UPN's flagship like VOY and neither was it in syndication.

Not that I begrudge B&B for continuing to work with something that gave them both a steady income, especially in Hollywood. And for all the epic (financial) fail of post DS9 Trek, Berman and Braga did play a big part into why Trek lasted as long as it did. But they were just so burnt out creatively, and it was pretty damn obvious by the time VOY and Enterprise rolled around that this was so. Is it any co-incidence that season two, which many say was the show's weakest link, had many episodes that were co-written by these two together?

Enterprise getting canceled after four seasons can serve as a warning to any future Trek showrunners about not taking Trek fans and their loyalty for granted. If nothing else, Enterprise can be good in Trek history for that much.

 

[commodore64]

Berman and Braga may not have had a lot of continuity, but neither did Coto. In fact most of the mistakes above are from the 4th season (otherwise known as: Forget the First Three Seasons, this is like TOS-lite Season or FFTS-TOSLite season).

 

[hammerhead]

I think you should just put it down to that great story device , the temporal cold war, can explain all the continuity issues!

 

[Nerys Myk]

I'm finding the definition of "poor continuity" to be rather weak. All TV show have flubs, mistakes and errors. From what I can tell ENTs is no worse than any other show. I'm seeing complaints about bad choices, repetitive plots and derivative plots, but not a whole lot about poor continuity.

 

[cooleddie74]

STAR WARS has only six movies with a little over 12 hours or so of airtime. And it has its share of continuity errors and WTF? moments as well.

 

[number6]

Nerys Myk said:
I'm finding the definition of "poor continuity" to be rather weak. All TV show have flubs, mistakes and errors. From what I can tell ENTs is no worse than any other show. I'm seeing complaints about bad choices, repetitive plots and derivative plots, but not a whole lot about poor continuity.

Agreed. Sure there are "fans" who didn't like some of the plot points and choices the writers made, but that doesn't mean the show had poor continuity or that canon wasn't considered or ignored.

 

[commodore64]

I'm a "fan" and I think it has poor continuity. I think I'm less likely to look at Boston Legal, for example, for painstaking canon and continuity. Enterprise is more of a serial as are most space operas (like old Flash Gordon, etc.).