And now a word about Enterprise.
This Star Trek for the Dawson’s Creek set is just not doing it for me. When it began, I was inexplicably willing to give it a chance, despite the 7 years preceding it when Voyager taxed my patience and brain cells. So, when the first episode of Enterprise flickered into existence, I watched. I enjoyed the eye candy of Scott Bakula, Connor Trineer, and Anthony Montgomery. I let the Vulcan in the cat suit slide, since I was begging for more underwear shots of the guys. But I began to realize that this show was little more than the sum of it’s trappings. In two seasons, we’ve had only a handful of episodes that were somewhat true to the Star Trek concept of wrapping serious social commentary in a sci-fi blanket. Instead, we’re getting a combination of pointless action and supreme boredom, with Klingons thrown in.
Here’s a show that is set at the beginning of the Star Trek saga, at a time when the Federation hasn’t been established. It’s run roughshod over 36 years of continuity. Didn’t they realize when they created this show that they would have a difficult job to navigate that continuity? Rather than work hard to craft a clever, enlightening, and yes, sexy and adventuresome series, they’ve caved in to lazy formulaic writing and the introduction of characters from the future continuity in order to gain eyeballs.
One of the major plot points in the original Star Trek was the first contact with the Klingons, which resulted in war and significant changes to the way the Federation does this sort of thing. But history was re-written in the very first episode of Enterprise when a Klingon crash lands on Earth and in the space of a few days, Captain Archer in his Warp 5 ship return him all the way to the Klingon Council chambers. That’s a fast ship. [Don’t get me started with the whole notion of distance in the Star Trek universe – like, how Voyager was moving constantly toward Earth, but familiar enemies kept showing up again and again – don’t they ever leave them behind, or were they going in circles? Anyway.]
Last night, Enterprise encountered the Borg. I’m sick of the Borg. Here we are in the 22nd century, with incredible new worlds to explore, and the writers are still giving us Borg and Klingons. I can’t tell you what happened in the episode because I was so incredibly bored with the whole thing that my attention wandered constantly.
Now the producers are hawking a new direction for the show – basically, making it much more violent and confrontational as the crew of the Enterprise morphs from sexy but naive explorers to hot military hunks eager for vengeance. They’re also adding “young, arrogant commandos”. If they don’t have their shirts off, I’m not watching.
I miss Deep Space Nine.
