Why was the 4th season so much better than the rest?
- Thread starter K'Toska
- Start date
Best not to think about how he gave them to the Klingons...
Never looking at that image the same way again.
Hey, 2takes, are you related to Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson?
No relation ... Though a very few others have also had fun with my "2takesfrakes" nick - too good a time. Occassionally, however, I have included the immortal phrase "- It Takes Two" in my signature, so that my nick's full potential may be realised ...
For me, the answer to that question is that the 4th season actually felt like a PREQUEL to TOS.
I liked the Xindi arc -- especially a MULTI-racial alien empire (all other Trek empires seemed to be monoracial),....but that arc would have made a lot more sense in Voyager.
Now, it's been a while since i saw Enterprise (does it ever get to syndication??), but if Manny Coto had been there form the get-go..i think the series would have been a whole lot better...and the "fan wak" would've been spread out more, i think
I liked the Xindi arc -- especially a MULTI-racial alien empire (all other Trek empires seemed to be monoracial),....but that arc would have made a lot more sense in Voyager.
Now, it's been a while since i saw Enterprise (does it ever get to syndication??), but if Manny Coto had been there form the get-go..i think the series would have been a whole lot better...and the "fan wak" would've been spread out more, i think
Manny Coto wasn't solely responsible for Season Four, as if Rick Berman were somehow out of the picture. Everything continued to go by Rick and if he had a problem with anything, he was still very much in a position to do something about it. But the so-called "Fan Wanking" of ENTERPRISE's last season was mainly due to the fact of ... "what else can you do?" The show had gone through all of this drama regarding staying on the air another season, but everybody knew it was over.
They certainly weren't going to do a lesser job than they'd done before, because of that ... everybody on the show's professional. But many behind the scenes are also rabid fans of the franchise and had been associated with STAR TREK for over 20 years, some of them. It's kind of surprising, what their ideas on STAR TREK actually were, though. How I've always seen STAR TREK doesn't really coincide with how they presented these historic first steps of the Federation and all that. I don't know ... take all that "Fan Wanking" out and the writing for the Final Season seems kind of flat, to me, often times ...
They certainly weren't going to do a lesser job than they'd done before, because of that ... everybody on the show's professional. But many behind the scenes are also rabid fans of the franchise and had been associated with STAR TREK for over 20 years, some of them. It's kind of surprising, what their ideas on STAR TREK actually were, though. How I've always seen STAR TREK doesn't really coincide with how they presented these historic first steps of the Federation and all that. I don't know ... take all that "Fan Wanking" out and the writing for the Final Season seems kind of flat, to me, often times ...
Not to me. While there was elements of the fourth season I really liked, much of it felt like some sort of fan fiction writer suddenly lead the writers room.
Early Brannon and Braga had slowly been building Earth's import and how it became the bridging foundation to the federation starting all the way back to the first season.
And clearly the Xindi aspect didn't help (even if its easily the best season of the show) in that it featured almost nothing that had any elements of TOS in it. But that wasn't something that writers ever, ever planned on doing.
But season 4, just felt like lets throw everything into the mix of anything that was ever part of trek (with a lot of it being nothing related to TOS, or any events that would naturally predate TOS). Klingon's with smooth foreheads, check. Mirror universe, check. Romulan's, Check. Section 31, check. Orion, check. Augments, check.
Very little of season 4 actually makes that much sense to the story of Enterprise. Augments, Section 31, Klingon foreheads, Alternate Universe storytelling that has no impact on "enterprise" Universe.
I mean even pushing a color palette that was used in TOS, that made no sense at all to the time frame Enterprise was in, when it actually took the much more somber colors of the the first pilot.
If it wasn't for the Vulcan storyline (even with the most over the top painful performance ever given for a vulcan ruining almost every scene he is in), the Andorran Tellerite arc, and the attempted start and failure for a league of Federated worlds, are really the only parts of season 4 that have anything to do with material appropriate for Enterprise, and part of its world building.
Season Four is seriously, seriously over rated. If I could remove 4 episodes from seasons 1 and 2, I would easily prefer those seasons to season 4.
Good points, but who are you accusing of bad acting in the Vulcan arc? If it's fan-fave Soval, you may not make it out of this thread alive!
Technically true, but he was content to leave it alone (except for the truly bestial "love letter to the fans" known as TATV).
That's actually not true. They were well into pre-production for Season 5, including plans for the refit, the Kzinti episode, returning to the Mirror Universe, and more.
Why not? It certainly helps explain why Klingons and Humans weren't exactly BFF in TOS. Let's be honest, 31 did the Empire dirty...no way around that.
Ok, I'll grant you that one...but it was so dang gooooood I'm prepared to overlook it.
Everything involving the Romulans was a huge part of the "setting up the Federation" storyline, as well as getting the Vulcans off their "pointy-eared fascists" kick and starting them down the path towards being the Vulcans we knew from the 2260s.
And why are they "irrelevant" to TOS? How much of their dirty deals contributed to the status quo from Kirk's time? Just because we never saw 31's hand in it (except maybe once "The Enterprise Incident").
Again, what by definition makes them "irrelevant? Had they been able to finish a full 7 seasons, I'm sure there were plans to weave them more tightly to the story.
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>>SNORT!!!<<
Season 4 is not good because of all the fanwank and the massive TOS homage but in spite of it. It is good because it is set in Earth's neighbourhood and because it explores what the first steps out there mean for humankind. For example the series finale (I pretend that These are the Voyages does not exist) does explore xenophobia.
It might also be worthwhile to point out that the last season is akin to what Berman suggested before the show started, to set the first season on Earth. So it is a bit dubious to play this Coto good guy vs. Berman&Braga bad guys game. Risk aversion of the powers that be was the far larger factor than Berman&Braga's creative shortcomings.
I think people on the whole enjoyed the change from 1 episode "do this and move on next week" to having mini arcs of 2-3 episodes. I think by this time having singular episodes without having too much impact on future episodes had become "out of fashion"
I figured, they knew they were going to get cancelled so they stopped trying to pander and started telling the stories they actually wanted to.
I was thinking the same thing, eyeresist! But I decided I'd give the benefit of the doubt and assume that mswood was referring to Robert Foxworth as V'Las. Though, my theory on that is that V'Las was more emotional because he was actually Romulan - though I don't know if Foxworth was intending to play it that way!
