Err I hate to be the underuducated one here but whats up with ST:enterprise? It can't be that bad can it? I mean I am kind of a fan of ST (but not a trekkie)
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Err I hate to be the underuducated one here but whats up with ST:enterprise? It can't be that bad can it? I mean I am kind of a fan of ST (but not a trekkie)
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It has its virtues. For example, it makes Star Trek Voyager look good in comparison. Jolene Blalock makes Jerry Ryan seem like a skilled actress. Porthos out-acts the entire human cast.Originally Posted by Sever
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Are you saying that you think it's bad and are at a loss to explain why or that you've been reading these threads and are curious as to why we find it so bad?
If it's the first, (rubbing hands together) well....
Plot
The concept of the ship to be the first to explore new worlds and seeking out crap is good. However, it has been executed badly. The Creators' idea of exploration constitutes roaming around aimlessly until they stumble across some trouble. There appears to be no specific mission. They just gave Archer a ship a told him to do what he likes with it. We do know quite a bit about what lies within a hundred or so light years of Earth, so it was possible for the Creators to plot a mission profile through those things, doing the exploring thang. It would be a mission, with set objectives, and along the way, they would get into trouble.
The idea of pioneering new technology is also good. However, we get the usual brand of invincible ship that is sparkling with a new coat of paint at the beginning of each episode. They did that all the time on Voyager and it sucked as a result.
The series is composed of mostly alien-of-the-week episodes, featuring the usual ugly gruff-voiced brutes in tight leather outfits, made to look even uglier by having a Michael Westmore patty stuck on their foreheads. Supposedly, the whole temporal cold war sub plot has been worked out from the beginning but it only features about once or twice a season.
They seem incapable of looking after continuity, not just within series, but setting it in the Star Trek Universe as well. They have already turned the Pon Farr from a deeply awkward, secretive, personal issue into dinner time conversation. They have ignored the facts about the Ferengi, the Borg, the Romulans, the Tribbles and the Regulan Blood Worms.
Characters
Archer: Scott Bakula was Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap. It is because of this that we are at a loss to explain why he is so bad here. Primarily is his ongoing offense to pig life (hamming it up). Archer is also written as an overgrown teenager with no maturity, responsability or humility. The phrase 'We're making history with every light year' is used so often they even recognise it on the series itself. It shows how Archer is not interested in exploration, in science, in developing new technology to further our development, he just wants to be first so he can be seen to be first. That's all that matters to him.
Writing
The problem is that any episode comes off instantly as dull and boring, even when you think the episode should be enjoyable. Most episodes end with a reset button, which makes everything out to be alright and Archer to be the hero, even when it is blatantly apparent that he's inept.
For a more scathing, but interesting and funny review, episode by episode, see this site.
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I thought Jeri Ryan was pretty good, when the episode was well written. ('The Gift', 'One', 'Drone', 'Infinite Regress', 'Body and Soul')
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I have to second Glom on this one. Jeri Ryan made Seven a bearable character. Despite Seven of Nine being put in as eye candy, Ryan gave a somewhat one dimensional character more depth. (Of course, it didn't hurt that one of the producers saw to it that Seven got more than ample opportunity to grow.) But I also freely admit to having actually enjoyed Voyager so maybe my opinion is colored. Enterprise on the other hand seems to be everything that was wrong with Voyager, magnified.
(In my defense, as of late - and after much reading - I am less amorous towards Voyager because of the gaffes committed by the writers and producers.)
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Although, at least on Enterprise, they don't solve their problems every week with technobabble.
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That's the point; Jolene Blalock can't act even given a well-written Enterprise episode.
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good sight
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i'm going to go out on a limb here and say give enterprise another season before you throw the whole thing away. i recently went back and started watching voyager again...while season one was vital to putting them in the delta quadrant and bringing the two crews to peace with each other, the acting and the writing were definitely not at their best. season two was better, but it wasn't until season four (maybe the end of three) that it really came into its own.
in that light i say give enterprise time to grow, and let the writers/producers look over these type of forums to see what people want. patience may just pay off someday :wink: .
of course, those who complain about the various past series...i'm not going to change your mind. i s'pose this is more for those who did and are impatient with enterprise.
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The problem is it is the same people over and over again writing the scripts. They are getting tired and just reusing the same cliche stuff with added sex and graphics. The show can easily become much better if they just get new writers for a bit. Just to try out.
Personally i liie a good amount of Voyager. The last few seasons i truthfully liied. (Yes i said it, what are you going to do about it? :-) ). DS9 was the exact opposite. I loved it from the begining and then it got really bad really fast once it got all religious.
It all depends on the writers. It seems that B&B are listening to the fans and actually doing something with the show other than just rampling about the quadrant doing nuthing really.
One of the gripes we have is that there is no real plot for the series. TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager all had a overall plot. Can you even hint at what Enterprise's is?
ok i will step off of my shoebox for now. :-)
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Here's the plot:
Hey Captain! Yeah you! We've got a top of the line hotrod of a ship here! Enjoy! Bye-bye!
:roll:
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That's what I've been saying.
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>>However, we get the usual brand of
invincible ship that is sparkling with a new coat of paint at the beginning of each episode.
They did that all the time on Voyager and it sucked as a result.<<
That's what really bugged me about Voyager. I mean, this ship is supposed to be thousands of light years away from any Federation outposts. It spent seven years trying to get home, encountering hostile races, dangerous anomalies, and the ever more impotent Borg, and yet despite all that, it returns to Earth looking exactly the same as when it left. Surely it should have been a bit more battered, or at least bear evidence of modification.
In the episode Scorpion, Voyager gains some Borg technology that makes it quite a formidable weapon. Yet, two episodes later, the modifications are gone. Why take them off? I think the battered Voyager seen in Year of Hell should have been what Voyager looked like by the time it got home.
And why are the witers so obsessed with Time travel? The timeline in Voyager has been messed around with so much I'm surprised all of history hasn't fallen apart!
And now Enterprise has found a TARDIS as well, although they called it a Suliban time ship. Still, everyone who's ever seen Doctor Who recognised it as a TARDIS.
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In 'The Cloud' [VOY], Janeway demonstrated a reluctance to use photon torpedoes because of their limited supply. After that, there was no more concern of limitation.
In 'Ex Post Facto' [VOY], Janeway threatened to go all terrorist when aliens captured one of their shuttlecraft. Afterwards, they sacrifice them without concern and even find the resources to build a mecha-shuttle.
In 'Elogium' [VOY], Harry Kim mentions how he used his replicator rations on his new clarinet rather than on food. Later in the series, no-one seems to care about using the replicators.
The one thing that excited me about Voyager was the journey to get home. But within a few episodes, they got completely bored the problems of conserving supplies and dealing with damage and instead decided to focus on temporal anomalies. It would have been nice continuity to have permanent damage that they would have to deal with and adapt to.
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Absolutely, Glom, couldn't agree more.
In Year of Hell, they have an encounter with one hostile space empire, and Voyager is completely destroyed before the Big Red Reset Button (TM) is pressed at the end and that timeline is erased.
For the rest of the series, whatever damage and problems they face in one episode are forgotten about in the next! In an environment where you cannot limp back to a starbase for repair after an unexpected violent encounter, Voyager should have been in quite a sorry state by the end of the series, especially after repeatedly running into the Borg (Incidentally, does anyone else wonder how the Borg are repeatedly unable to deal with one small Federation ship when, in TNG, one cube was capable of decimating Starfleet?!). Instead, the only thing it lost was crewmembers!
Star Trek is being compared in some circles now to Doctor Who during the 80s, in that the fact that the same people have been in charge of it for too long is starting to show on screen and make the programme stale and uninteresting. Change the production crew and get some new writers and it just might pick up.
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The trouble is not in the concept for the series; both Voyager and Enterprise had very interesting premises, but the whole point of those were lost through mismanagement. There are a zillion stories possible from the get-go, but both series seem to want to be TNG-with-a-new-cast. It beats me - is it so much work to truly start anew, or is it just the usual fear of losing viewers:roll: at work?
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Impotent???I think you meant omnipotent. But, I see what you mean. They were used too often, to the point where they just didn't seem that scary anymore. And don't even mention the Enterprise episode where they encountered the Borg. From a technological and continuity standpoint, that episode made no sense whatsoever.
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I agree entirely, Astrosmurf.
Both Enterprise and Voyager had great premises.
Voyager could have been a great epic about this small mismatched crew on a small ship having to struggle with limited resources to get home while their ship slowly erodes away.
By the end of the series, we want to see the ship held together with duct tape. Instead, what was at first a small scout vessel, becomes a rival to a Galaxy class starship. The ship is supposed to be weakened, not become stronger.
Enterprise is all about pioneering space exploration. With technology that proves to be imperfect because it's new, they have to be innovative to be able to accomplish the mission objectives. Failiure to do so would be an advantage to political opponents of the program and may risk Archer's life work and that of his father being cancelled.
Instead, Archer is too busy being concerned with how his portrait in the history books will look rather than the success of the program for its own sake. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any program. Enterprise's mission appears to consist of being on a mission. There are no objectives, nothing planned to be gained. It roams around aimlessly.
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No, Shade, I definitely meant impotent. Each time Voyager encounters tham they seem less and less capable or threatening. In The Best of Both Worlds, one Borg cube decimates the fleet, destroying 39 ships outright and severely damaging the Enterprise before being stopped at the eleventh hour.
In Voyager, Scorpion was their last great appearance, as they were forced into an alliance that remained unsteady throughout the two episodes. After that, they just got less and less effective, until Janeway could go into the heart of Borg space in the bloody Delta Flyer and emerge unscathed from a pursuit inside a transwarp conduit lasting two minutes with continuous fire from a Borg vessel, or enter a nebula containing 47 cubes in the finale without so much as a scratch, even with that ludicrous armour and 'transphasic torpedoes.'
And in Unimatrix zero, it suddenly turns out that there's a really easy way to avoid complete assimilation, and that the implants can be removed quite easily as soon as they return to Voyager (which seems completely unscathed by its attack on a tactical cube)!
As a matter of fact, I thought the Enterprise episode with the Borg in it worked very well, even though I was dismayed that they should bring the Borg into the series at all. Each now series brings a chance to do something new, especially in the case of Voyager and Enterprise. Instead we have Voyager repeatedly running into the Borg, and Klingons and Romulans all over Enterprise.
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It could be argued that the Borg got a terrible seeing-to at the hands of Species 8472 and that kicked the props out from their society.
VOY Season 3, Ep# 68: "Scorpion Part I"
TORRES: We've analyzed the Borg's tactical database. They refer to these new aliens as Species 8472.
TUVOK: Over the past 5 months, the Borg have been attacked by them on at least a dozen occasions. Each time, they were defeated ... swiftly.Assuming each of the 12 or so attacks had a similar effect, this implies that the Borg have lost almost 100 planets, 3,744 cubes and 55.5 million drones. Its also stated that the Borg are within weeks of total defeat. Now, the rate of 8472 attacks appears to be about one every ten days., implying another six or seven attacks will do for them completely. That means the 100 planets etc must represent at least half their total resources. That, in turn suggests, they were so smashed up by the 8472 attacks that their society could not recover and was headed down the plughole anyway,VOY Season 3, Ep# 69: "Scorpion Part II"
BORG V.O.: Species 8472 has penetrated Matrix 010, Grid 19. 8 planets destroyed. 312 vessels disabled. Four million six hundred twenty one Borg eliminated.
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So is Species 8472 going to eventually be "the threat" to the Federation for the next star trek series?
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I don't know whether to run and scream or just simply throw-up!
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Hopefully there won't be another one. With a little luck "Enterprise" will be axed either half way through the coming series or, at worst, at its end and the whole franchise will be put to bed. Its outlived its time and is just the same old tired ideas rehashed over and over again. It's in urgent need of the services of Dr Kevorkian.
Perhaps we could have one last episode in which Jerry Ryan wakes up in modern-day Dallas, Tx and goes to the bathroom to find Scott Bakula having a shower. Gee, it was all just a dream......
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Stuart:
The whole point of the Borg collective is that they recover quickly. In Q Who? the Enterprise successfully damages 25% of the Borg cube. Hours later, the cube is fully functional. In The Best of Both Worlds, Shelby describes projections that suggest a Borg cube could continue to function effectively even if 78% of it was inoperable.
Now, in Voyager, Unimatrix One, the hub of the collective, is seen to have escaped largely undamaged by 8472's attack. Also, any Borg vessel not attacked should still be 100% operational, as for that matter should any cube not actually destroyed, given the rate of repair we know the Borg to be capable of. They have no trouble whatsoever in assimilating an entire race in hours in Dark Frontier.
In any case, Voyager should not be a match for a Borg Cube. In the teaser sequence for Dark Frontier, Janeway describes Voyager as being able to match the firepower of a small Borg scout vessel. A cube is vast, yet Voyager can escape unscathed from multiple encounters with several cubes.
Imagine you are a single scout ship at sea, in a war. Your enemy is on the verge of defeat. If you ran into a destroyer, you would still have reason to be afraid, because that destroyer should still be able to pick off a scoutship without even breaking a sweat. If you encounter a fleet of them intent on destroying you, you will not emerge alive. Whatever state the enemy is in overall, the crew of that ship will still know how to destroy you.
Voyager's repeated encounters with Borg vessels are rather like that, in that there is no way she should survive unscathed apart from some minor damage which can easily be repaired before the next encounter, because the cube still vastly outclasses her in power and size.
The other thing that bugged me about the Borg encounter in Endgame was the total lack of reference to the Borg civil war started in Unimatrix Zero. This was such a major development at the start of the final season that the fact that it went unremarked later is rather unforgivable.
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Lets have a look at this.
Note that important comment at the end. The Borg cube is not 20 percent destroyed; 20 percent of the cube has been damaged. Big, big difference. No sign of how widespread that damage is; it could be superficial. Probably is; StarFleet weapons are puny compared with modern (ie 2003-vintage) firepower. Starfleet projections are likely to be wrong - they don't realize how feeble their weaponry is (if they did, their ships would carry 16 inch L50 naval rifles, not phasers) so they grotesquely overestimate the damage they doNG Season 2, Ep# 42: "Q Who?"
PICARD: With whatever force you need, terminate that beam ... fire!
(The E-D blows a hole in the cube)
DATA: The tractor beam has released.
RIKER: Damage report.
WORF: Sections twenty-seven, twenty-eight and twenty-nine on Decks four, five and six destroyed.
PICARD: Casualties?
WORF: Eighteen were in those sections and are missing.
RIKER: They couldn't have survived it.
DATA: A force field is maintaining hull integrity.
PICARD: What is the condition of their ship?
WORF: They have sustained damage to twenty percent of their vessel. Life support minimal.
Actually we don't know that since the basis is an unknown amount of damage to start with.Now, in Voyager, Unimatrix One, the hub of the collective, is seen to have escaped largely undamaged by 8472's attack. Also, any Borg vessel not attacked should still be 100% operational, as for that matter should any cube not actually destroyed, given the rate of repair we know the Borg to be capable of.
Again, not quite - they absorb the survivors of an entire race. Again, big difference. Obviously most of the race in question had been wiped out because they were totally incapable fo fighting (May heaven have mercy on the Borg if they landed on Earth today - 3ID or the Marines would wipe the floor with them).They have no trouble whatsoever in assimilating an entire race in hours in Dark Frontier.
Borg gunnery is appalling, its even worse than Starfleets (and that's saying something). Escaping from their wild random firing shouldn't be too hard.In any case, Voyager should not be a match for a Borg Cube. In the teaser sequence for Dark Frontier, Janeway describes Voyager as being able to match the firepower of a small Borg scout vessel. A cube is vast, yet Voyager can escape unscathed from multiple encounters with several cubes.
Battle off Samar, October 1944. Three US destroyers took on the entire Japanese Navy (slight exageration but not much) and held them off for over an hour. (Pause for tribute to Hoel, Heerman and Johnston) while the carriers they were protecting got clear. The three destroyers couldn't evade because they had to stand and fight while the ships they were protecting made their escape. Nevertheless, they survived for a startling period of time. These things are never predictable.Imagine you are a single scout ship at sea, in a war. Your enemy is on the verge of defeat. If you ran into a destroyer, you would still have reason to be afraid, because that destroyer should still be able to pick off a scoutship without even breaking a sweat. If you encounter a fleet of them intent on destroying you, you will not emerge alive. Whatever state the enemy is in overall, the crew of that ship will still know how to destroy you.
This is a fair point; however, I would point out that civil war and other effects are signs of the Borg empire being in terminal decline. The explanation that makes sense is that the war with 8472 did so much damage to them that their highly-centralized society can't take the strain.The other thing that bugged me about the Borg encounter in Endgame was the total lack of reference to the Borg civil war started in Unimatrix Zero. This was such a major development at the start of the final season that the fact that it went unremarked later is rather unforgivable.
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Let's see what we have:
TOS: "To seek out new life and new civilizations . . . . "
Yup! They did a good job at that. They were visiting new planets almost every episode.
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TNG: At the end of the first episode, they were to venture into unexplored territory. Umm...did this happen? I can count the number of planets they actually visited on two, maybe even only one, hand. The number of new civilizations or life they actually encountered can be definantly counted on one. How come they were always involved in final negotiations with previously encountered worlds when their mission was to be exploring new territory?
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DS9: The refuge for outcast aliens.
(BTW, Why wasn't the Enterprise, the flag ship of the fleet, in the final battle, anyway?)
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Voyager: "I am woman, hear me roar!"
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Enterprise: Boys and their toys.
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As Astrosmurf said, Voyager and Enterprise, while having more specific premises, are essentially NextGen with a different crew.
NextGen was, by all admissions, a rehash of Classic. That was fine because it was twenty years later. New era, new everything, fine.
Since then, Star Trek has been airing non stop. Rehashes of Classic and NextGen are not acceptable. The follow-on series must be distinctive. Complain all you want about Deep Space Nine, but it was most certainly distinctive.
Voyager had the distinctive premise and naused it up.
Enterprise was, by all admissions, a return to the premise of Classic and NextGen in that it was supposed to deal with pioneering exploration. But in saying that, it gave the series a distinctive premise in that it was tasked with the exploration game specifically. Classic and NextGen were far more open ended, devoid of any actual premise beyond that of a slogan. Enterprise was supposed to turn that vague fanfare into something specific and therefore something distinctive.
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Considering that its distinctive premise was "Gilligan's Island in space", I'm not surprised it got naused up.
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Voyager could have been more along the lines of Apollo 13 had the writers been able to carry it through, but instead, it was indeed more like Gilligan's Island, which may work in a sitcom, but in the case of Voyager we had hoped for something more.
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The question is: Will the next series (if there will be a next series) be better without B&B? Will paramount allow a change in pace/style/acting/characters?
I dopn't think so. I think that they are afraid to change the polt to much for fear of a horrible series.
Persoanlly i would not mind another DS9 without the religious part of the last few seasons. I liked that show alot in the begining.
I don't think the federation is the way to go. Maybe a series about the maquis (sp?). Or a series mainly taking the point of another race. The federation is getting to tired and rigid in its ways. Imagine the plot points available if the show centered on the rebellion. You cna even set it in the past and go throught the history of the rebellion. Then you can have famous cameos from most of the series since they all had some part in the rebellion.
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I agree with what you say about voyager and how they just threww all the rules away near the end for ratrings. They at the begining had a very limited supply of torpedoes left, yet in the last season it seemed like they would use it to start a campfire. It is like the professor on Giligans island talking about how they have to conserve batteries on a t.v. and then keeping it on 24 hours a day.
The same thing that happened to the Borg happened tto the Klingons and the Romulans in TOS and TNG respectifully. In both series they were races to be feared, but as we got more familiar with them they got weaker and weaker.
The Romulan warbird (really big one) is supposed to easily outpower a galaxy class, yet they seem to fear the Enterprise almost all the time.
With a membership of hundreds if not thousands of planets of equal or greater technology to humans, why dosn't the Federation build thousands of ships? They only have a few dozen it seems that have any use at all. And usually only send one ship at a time into battle.
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