Why was Enterprise received so poorly?
- Thread starter dcm
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If Berman and Braga had been actual Trek fans and had any sense, they'd have set this in-between the TOS films and TNG aboard the Enterprise-B. That's the only logical place for a prequel series that wouldn't damage the TOS continuity and would help to flesh out the pre-TNG decades. Hell, if B&B and the studio had any sense, an Enterprise-B series would have followed Generations and could have even dealt with the ship being lost for a time. The uniforms and sets were already in place from the films. First contact with some of the new TNG species and even the Tomed Incident (as addressed in the E-B novels) could have been among the series' highlights.
Brazil has been home to a sizable Japanese population since the late 19th century. Having Hoshi be Japanese Brazilian is something they absolutely could've done.
Torres was a Latina.
Beltran calls himself Latindo (Latin/Indigenous) but I googled that and he made up the word.
So it was time for another old white man.
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It’s never been denied that she isn’t, though. Her family was not explored in depth. We don’t even know the names of her siblings, and what their lives are like.
As something else they could have done, they could have also had Hoshi run away to Brazil to (briefly) marry her trans lover because Japan is too traditional for her, as a part of her backstory.
It wasn’t implausible, as Hoshi was kind of a queer coded character anyways (in the turbolift with Rajiin, and Archer’s fantasy with T’Pol and Hoshi in ANiS).
Considering that we’ve never met Archer’s mother, or any of his other family members, its still possible that he is Latino.
Or Asian.
But I think the idea of Archer being a fundamentally flawed character should have been far more important than what nationality he was. But that's not how he was portrayed.
Counterpoint: It is much harder to sell the idea, "The captain who came between Kirk and Picard -- the first one, not the second one -- right, this is from the prologue to that movie we released seven years ago with that guy from Ferris Bueller, remember him?" -- than it is to sell the idea, "The first captain, one hundred years before Kirk."
One of the problems with Star Trek: Enterprise is that while Jonathan Archer does have some fundamental flaws, the narrative consistently fails to recognize them as fundamental flaws. (Also those flaws render him so incompetent that it's impossible to believe a serious space agency would let the guy in.)
"Meet the captain that had to follow the legend of Kirk and learn that risk is part of the game, if you want to sit in that chair."
You may forget that this was like, 2002 not 2024.
Congratulations, you killed ENT even faster than it died in the original timeline.
They were going for kind of an old school NASA vibe with Enterprise.
Nothing screams Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong like a sassy latina!
He's done quite a bit of TV work, although he was also consistently doing movies at the time.
At the end of the day, he's an actor and its his job so, money talks.
But... I do agree that it was probably unlikely, and at the end of the day not worth it to even try. Even if they did get him, he would have been expensive.
I'm a fanatic, so of course I would love to see an Enterprise-B show but realistically, the vast majority of the TV watching public really didn't care. ENT did what Trek has been trying to for the past two decades and bank on TOS nostalgia.
To me, "watch the formation of Starfleet and the Federation!" sounds much more exciting than "watch the adventures that's just filling time between two legendary captains with the captain you kind of hated for being so inept in a movie you were lukewarm about".
Star Trek was doing that with TNG.
You mean same sex marriage which was legal in the Netherlands in 2001, plus Belgium and parts of Canada in 2003 and in Massachusetts in 2004. Not to mention all the queer characters across the media in the late ‘90s and early ’00. Including in the DS9 episode “Rejoined”? Including one such character played by Scott Bakula in American Beauty?
Its really not all that implausible for Hoshi to have been briefly married to her trans lesbian lover prior to the NX-01, especially if its an alien (ex. Rigellian or Trill) to make it more digestive for more conservative viewers.
If anything, my ideas would have saved the show, not kill it faster. And likely would have created an all-time classic episode.
And Star Trek does not care about that. You can be of any colour, and gender, any orientation, any religion, any creed, and still be considered on par with Armstrong and Aldrin. And no one will bat an eye.
That’s, like, the whole point of Star Trek.
Maybe now. But in 2001, I doubt he was that expensive. And he would have likely worked with the exact same cast in ENT, sans Bakula. And even then, a time travel episode to the mid-22nd century to meet Archer would have been better received than another WW2 episode at the time.
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The episode that resulted in mass complaints across the United States?
It's not implausible at all lore-wise. It's absolutely scandalous for early 2000's American TV.
Let's put this way, ENT "Unexpected" was considered to be a controversial episode...
I remember the 2000's very well. Slapping a "trans lesbian" label on something is a death sentence to the masses, an all time classic for a incredibly small portion of the population.
Hell, even TODAY, it could get met with resistance. Don't get me wrong, I certainly have no issue with it. For something produced today? Sure, do it! That's great. But back then? Outright lunacy.
From the same writers that wrote an AIDS allegory episode in 2003...
The universe in which Star Trek takes place doesn't care about that.
The corporation, studio, and executives that produce the works that make the universe... do.
Ruck was pretty consistently appearing in films. Bakula was working less than Ruck at the time. He had a reasonably big part in American Beauty, but otherwise he mostly doing bits here and there.
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I’m kind of wondering if I’d fallen into a parallel universe one morning or something, but lately I’ve been agreeing with much of what you say.
Keep it up, FH!
At very least, Hoshi being in a non-conventional marriage in the early 00s would have generated headlines and publicity.
Wasn't Malcolm originally meant to be gay, until they bottled out? Or is that just fan lore?
You mean like how “Plato’s Stepchildren resulted” in nasty complaints? Despite airing in a far more polarizing time than the late ’90s, or even now?
It’s absolutely scandalous for American tv…that already had a number on queer characters on tv, before everything had a label attached to it.
Even if that episode was not played for laughs, it still would have been considered controversial.
Then don’t slap the “trans lesbian” label on. That’s why you cloak the character as an alien.
Trills, like Dax, are allegories for pansexuality and trans people. And ENT already made allisions that Rigellians were non-binary back in *check notes* oh yeah, 2003. The audience just was not familiar with the label “non-binary” as a gender identity in 2003.
I’m aware of that.
The complaints over X-Men ’97, for acknowledging a character is “non-binary”. Even though it’s the same show as the ‘90s; they are being asked to think critically about a show from the ‘90s and that they did not use the label back then.
Which is a key difference between the late ‘90s/early ‘00s and now – we were not obsessed with labels back then.
I didn’t write that episode, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about here.
And the people that made the universe made a bizarre choice to tokenize some of its characters by the early ’00. When that just was not the direction Hollywood was going, even back then.
Had UPN taken the year long break from Star Trek that Berman wanted, they probably could have got Ruck to reprise the role of Harriman again.
Yes, he was. Keating said he even played him as gay.
The writers did nothing with it.
And in any case, they still had Chef to be the gay character.
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