TV: The Failure of “Star Trek: Enterprise”
By stephanie - Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
This may be a funny thing for a long-time fan of Star Trek to say, but here goes:
Let Star Trek die. Let it rest in peace. Let it die a noble death before it gets any worse.
LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) said it best: “Star Trek coming to an end is long overdue. They ran it into the ground and made so much Star Trek that it ceased to be special. If they bring this back before a decade is out I will get a high-powered weapon and start picking off studio executives.”
Amen.
I used to love Star Trek. Back before there was a SciFi Channel, pretty much all you had was Star Trek. Those were innocent days, really.
In the original Star Trek, everything was Technicolor. We had an old-fashioned country doctor, a Scottish engineer named “Scottie,” and an alien complete with pointy ears.
In the Next Generation, things had evolved to a late 80s bland earth tone color scheme, but the cheese was still there. We had a talking android named “Data” (what a cliche of a name). A blind man who needed a clumsy visor (we all called it a “banana clip”) instead of eye implants. And don’t forget Deanna Troi looking ever so concerned, with her ridiculously tight outfits and heaving bosoms.
The Next Generation evolved to become a pretty darn good show, after a somewhat lame and embarrassing start. From there, we moved on to Deep Space Nine (which also started off rocky and got to be fantastic at the end) and then Voyager.
By the time we’d hit Voyager, however, we had a zillion movies and nowhere else to go. Voyager started to settle in to a very predictable, programmatic groove. After a while, even the dialogue seemed to come straight from a Star Trek recipe book. Trek had stopped being fun.
Voyager had its good moments (most notably, the Year of Hell series of episodes), and Seven of Nine almost singlehandedly saved it, following Deanna Troi’s lead with her heaving bosoms, but replacing the cloying concern with icy sternness.
But it just wasn’t breaking new ground. That show, if I recall, got cancelled short of its planned seven years, so the Powers That Were could bring us Enterprise.
“Star Trek: Enterprise” was doomed from the start, however. They just got it all wrong. If you are going to start a Trek series out before Kirk and Spock, then why not bring back what made the original Trek fun? Starting with some freakin’ color uniforms for starters.
The whole production, from the bland set design to the bland characters, was just waiting to die from the get-go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Scott Bakula. And hot muscular Trip practically getting it on with heaving bosomed T’Pol right in the first episode, with their steamy decontamination scene, was highly promising. But pretty soon, Enterprise got bogged down in what made typical episodes of Voyager a yawn-fest.
It just got too formulaic. The writers had watched too much Trek, and had gotten too mired in Star Trek language and mythology to do anything interesting.
Don’t get me wrong…Enterprise was still entertaining, and it seemed (as it went on) that some story arcs were developing. Unfortunately, I never hung in there that far. I have just seen too many away missions, too many conversations with the captain, too many scenes of the not-so-human character (Spock, Data, Odo, Seven of Nine, and T’Pol) trying to find their friggin’ humanity.
Trek might have flipped things around and actually put a human in an alien environment – rather than the alien trying to be human, how about the human trying to be alien? That might of been interesting…whooooops…I forgot. That was done. That was “Farscape.”
So farewell, Star Trek. It’s time for you to go. Thank you for paving the way for mainstream TV shows such as “Invasion” and Sci-Fi Channel’s “Stargate” and “Battlestar Galactica.”
I will not shed a tear. There will always be “The Wrath of Khan” on DVD. Always.
KHAAAAAN!!!!!!!!
March 24th, 2006 at 2:17 am
I’ve been saying that since Deep Space 9.
Star Trek is tired. It needs a rest.
Just like Battlestar Galactica, they can put it away for some years and then revamp it to be interesting and exciting again.
But they didn’t and they brought out Voyager (not bad, but still tired) and Enterprise (very tired).
They should have just let the Star Trek franchise just quietly fade away instead of getting canceled.
Of course, getting canceled is how the original series ended. So I guess we have come full circle.
March 24th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
So here’s the deal…
What made the release of Star Trek TMP so exciting was the wait…
TNG was taken off the air and within 6 months we had Generations. They really should have gone into a 2 year hiatus between the end of TNG and the film, but they didn’t.
Enterprise wasn’t all that bad, but to many liberties were taken not to stick with Trek chronology…the Klingons should have been made to look as they did in TOS.
This is my 2 cents for what it is worth.
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