Oops. I meant Enterprise. Thanks for catching that. Fixed.
I’ve only seen the first seasons of Enterprise. I know they were finally going to try for a different feel with Season 3, but after a couple of episodes, it still felt the same to me, so I bailed.
As to the first two seasons: The theme song was certainly different. I liked the approach of trying to bridge our current technology with a world before Star Fleet, before Kirk. But the actual episodes didn’t bear that out. In the first two seasons at least, the stories still felt like they were in the same TNG/VOY mold. At first it looked like they were going to not rely on the Transporter as a clutch, but then there was an emergency, and they used the Transporter as a clutch.
Maybe I need to give it another shot with the distance of time. After all, as a viewer, I was also just coming off years of TNG/DS9/VOY in a row, so maybe I was just as fatigued as the creators of the show with Star Trek. Maybe I can appreciate the differences more now.
My second round of Enterprise, which I never finished when it was running, made me like Enterprise less. If I never heard the word Xindi again, it will be too soon. To me it felt like it wasn’t a part of anything. Like it would borrow the same plots and wind up with almost the exact same kind of episodes from the earlier series but never really had it’s on rhythm. I mean it’s like they wanted to explain everything we saw in the previous series that would soon be it’s future but at the same time kind ruin it, like introducing the Borg decades before they were “introduced” in TNG
I know it’s all a matter of POV. I lump TNG, VOY and DS9 in the same universe, same continuity and same feel although different approaches plotwise. TOS is in the same continuity but it’s just different. Enterprise didn’t know what it wanted to be. You have the reboots and now you have whatever the hell STD is trying to do which I feel we may never really know because it could very collapse under the weight of not a failure in the series but CBS’ experimental business model.
Enterprise was shit because they were doing a prequel but at the same time trying to continue the story of Star Trek, going all into time travel, bad time travel stories. Once they actually decided to do proper prequel stuff, it was fine.
This, I hope it works, Star Trek has been away from TV for too long, and the movies appear to be stalling, we did get 1.5 good movies out of the reboot, so, not too bad, but I miss having good Star Trek on TV.
Enterprise had some really good characters, and not just the main crew either. I mean Soval, Admiral Maxwell, Commander Shran… I mean a really nice mix of allies who were also adversaries… it was the plotting that sucked. Oh yeah and the T’Pol taking hits off emotions was weird too.
Haha! See, I didn’t hate the temporal cold war stuff. And the rest of Enterprise was pretty decent. Some really awesome spots, and some bad-ish ones, but every single one of the different shows had some bad stuff in it. But to me Enterprise always felt a lot more cowboy-ish, more shooting from the hip while they go out into this big expanse of space for the first time. And I liked the visual style, the ship, the uniforms, special effects etc. Not my favorite series, but I’d rank Voyager below Enterprise in the overall list of them.
Going back to the reboot or not discussion, I can understand why some people choose to view TNG as a reboot. Obviously, it’s not technically a reboot in the sense that TNG wasn’t a break from the old series with recasted characters. It is, however, a soft reboot of the franchise in that it’s essentially the same theme of “explorers in space” with the same aliens and archetypes brought into the 1990-2000’s. DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise belong in the same era of Trek.
JJ’s Trek is - and this is my only concession to its cleverness - a simultaneously soft and hard reboot. It’s got all the OG characters recasted and the timeline gets reset, but thanks to scifi gobbledygook, die-hards get to keep their faith because JJ’s Trek takes place in an alternate universe. All that time-jumping paradox nonsense in Trek finally paid off! You even get OG Spock virtually passing the torch to new Spock just to drive the point home.
Discovery seems to exist in some weird halfway point. It’s technically part of the old Trek and TNG timeline, but it’s got the look and Klingons from JJ Trek. It’s not a soft or hard reboot.
Oh good, I’m not alone. TNG is by far my favorite, and DS9 is solidly second, but I’d put Enterprise third. I really liked Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer, thought that character did a good job walking the line between Kirk and Picard.
I’ve watched every episode of TNG, DS9 and Enterprise at least 2-3 times over the years. I watched all of Voyager once. I don’t think it’s as bad as a lot of people say, but there are some really awful bits to it. Neelix is like the Star Trek equivalent of Jar Jar and should have been blown out an airlock in the pilot. Same for Kes. Tim Russell isn’t a bad actor, but have they EVER given a more than half assed explanation of the whole black Vulcan thing? I mean it’s fine, whatever. But suddenly there’s one black Vulcan when we’ve never seen one before or since? Didn’t they say he was part of a clan of Vulcans that have a different skin tone? Why don’t we ever see any of them anymore? That’s really weird…
The Adventures of Captain Proton were awesome! Haha. One of the better Holodeck bits I thought.
I really liked it too, particularly when combined with the visuals showing mankinds progress toward the stars. I thought the opening did a very good job breaking from previous Trek series to really emphasize the sense that we were in an earlier era:
The thing is though, they all have bad episodes. I went back and watched Season One of TNG and a lot of it was awful. Definitely agree that Neelix was annoying though. TNG did have poor Will Wheaton though.
