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Star Trek: Enterprise Premieres Tonight
Ankou writes: "'Enterprise' premieres tonight on UPN. Scott Backula, you may remember him in as the lead role of 'Quantum Leap', plays Jon Archer the captain of the NX-01 which is the Enterprise predating the NCC-1701 and Captain Kirk by almost 150 years. It even takes place before the whole United Federation of Planets came about! This series will prove to be a more rougher, blue-collared version of star travel than the picture portrayed by Kirk and Picard, i.e. crew wear baseball caps and their captain is a regular 'Joe' kind of guy (possibly why they chose Scott Backula as the lead role). Only time will tell if this series will last, be the judge for yourself and see it tonight, Sep 26, on UPN at 8/7 central." I discovered last weekend that I stopped getting UPN. Who knows when, since I've never needed it before. So I will be missing it, and crying in chair, while mumbling curses directed at my cable provider.
This should prove to be a good series, tailored towards fans of Babylon 5 and the like. First post!
Anyone notice that the commercials for this thing are less and less Star Trek and more and more Lexx meets Farscape.
Wow, we got something first!
Seriously, though... I watched the 2 hour premier last night, and I will say this - It was pretty darn good. They have done an excellent job of "dumbing down" the technology, and the cast is pretty interesting. Combine that with the promis of some good-ol space violence, and you've got a winner.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
I argue the story of Star Trek: The Original Series is not about Kirk, it's about Spock. And from my perspective, Spock is a superhero. He can read minds. He's stronger than the average human. He has extreme intelligence and knowledge. Spock's abilities quite frequently solve the episode's problem.
Similarly Star Trek: The Next Generation has Data, even stronger than Spock. Deep Space Nine has the shapeshifter Odo. Odo is not quite as impressive as Data, so notice that Paramount has to make emergency repairs midway in the show bringing back the character of Worf, now the unbeatable fighting knight-equivalent. And Bashir has to be souped up to have extreme intelligence.
With Star Trek I The Motion Picture, Wesley in The Next Generation, and Sisko in Deep Space Nine, Paramount establishes quite a string of humans becoming gods/prophets.
And then there's Voyager. The Data character is degraded into the balding holographic Doctor. Kes is the female Wesley who eventually becomes a godlike being, only she's too wimpy to do anything before she leaves. The series is teetering on collapse when Paramount finally makes the sensible decision to return to the roots and bring in a new superhero, 7 of 9. Once again we have a figure who is stronger than the average human, knows more, and is struggling to deal with emotions.
I am frustrated by what seems to be an endless repeating cycle where Paramount continues to deny the essence of the show as being about superheroes, lets the series tank a couple of years, and then finally rescues the show by increasing the powers of the characters. I think that the claim of many fans that it takes a few years for the writers to get acclimated is a myth. The writers aren't given the raw materials to work with to produce entertaining superhero stories for the first few years, then they are authorized to use good materials, then the episodes improve. They could write a thousand stories about Harry Kim or Tom Paris or whatever vanilla characters they want and never find a groove. It's strictly a decision from above when the series is to improve, and that decision is simply whether to soup up the characters as superheroes.
As UPN was saved by adding the World Wrestling Federation's Smackdown to their lineup, maybe they can learn what makes this show successful. It's called by the wrestling fans BOOKING. Yes, it is the responsibility of the owner/promoter to make decisions to hype one wrestler over another, to promote certain wrestlers above all others for long stretches of time. The World Wrestling Federation the past two decades has been carried first by the character of Hulk Hogan, then Stone Cold Steve Austin, and now The Rock. Perhaps with careful booking in the future it will be Kurt Angle or HHH.
There is already another niche where people who are sort of ordinary interact in a tension-filled extraordinary situation. It's called reality television. It's Survivor, Big Brother, etc. Star Trek can't match that, Star Trek doesn't pretend to be giving ordinary people off the street a shot at fame and fortune. Star Trek has to create its fantasies in a different way. It has to be booked in a different fashion, to emphasize certain characters as superheroes.
Don't get me wrong: I'll still be glued to the b00b-tube tonight; I always give things a shot. I'm just worried that it won't live up to expectations.
We wear baseball caps in the US Air Force. Usually, each squadron (sometimes group or directorate, if the Sqd is small) has their own cap, with their patch on it. I would suppose that Starfleet would be a derivative of the USAF, so it does make sense.
We don't wear them indoors, though.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
on startrek.com It looks like this episode will be the first contact of the humans and the Klingon Empire. There is great tension in the video clip between Archer and the human commanders and the Vulcans who believe the humans aren't ready for interstellar diplomacy yet. They will obviously be proven right and the war with the Klingons will ensue as a result of Archer's actions.
I'm looking forward to watching the episode which relates what Jean-Luc Picard later referred to as "A poorly handled first contact [which] led to decades of war with the Klingon Empire."(said in a episode where Riker and a couple of other under-cover agents investigating a planet that is a candidate for contact were discovered, don't remember the episode name, but it was a decent one)
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Well, that was the interesting thing about the guy, in Quantum Leap, while he was a normal kinda guy, he also was very intelligent too. (Making him identifiable to geeks and jocks at the same time) Hopefully his Enterprise character will be similar, otherwise its just boring.
In most sci-fi worlds Spacecraft are always deemed as Navy. Look at the recent out in space movies/books:
wing commander
The reality disfunction
starship troopers
and many more that i cannot get my sleep deprived brain to think about.
Personaly I always thought of it as old saliors sailed useing the stars, now they sail to them. So for me useing naval terms in space is cool...
as long as there isnt a combined sea to space movie...that could get confusing.
Adam Sane sanity is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
Okay, I'm not the most objective individual on this subject, and I really didn't like the direction Trek went after Gene died, and the odds are, if you didn't like Voyager or DS9, you won't like Enterprise, because it's the same creative team.
However, before we premiered Next Generation, we were dismissed pretty much out of hand before anyone had seen a single episode...and we ended up running for 10 years, not sucking most of the time, IMHO.
So I'll be watching, excited as hell that there's new Trek on TV, and hoping against hope that it doesn't suck.
I'm not too familiar with the Star Trek universe but I enjoy watching the various shows now and then. One thing I have learned is that Vulcans have a pretty long lifespan. IE, Mr. Tuvok from Voyager also served under Sulu from a couple human generations ago.
My question is this: since Vulcans live so long, is there any chance that Mr. Spock could make a cameo appearance on Enterprise? I have no idea how old Mr. Spock is, so I could be way off base.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The Star Trek universe is the reflection of our
universe, with science fiction props to
illuminate understanding of ourselves. The 35 years
of shows- more like 45 if you include the initial
scripts and lifetime of the fifth series- span at
least three cultural generations of Americans:
The pre-boomers, the baby boomer yuppies, and now
the GenX. The show has always focused on 30-something
adults of the era it was filmed.
The orignal trek series was like "Combat in Space"
or the generation of the baby boomers. They even
made fun of boomer culture like hippies and
peacniks in some of the episodes. The pre-boomers
were conventional, pro-establishment types.
The second and third series, New Generation and
Deep Space Nine, were "Yuppies in Space" or pure
baby boomer. The main characters were educated,
priviledged and aloof. The fourth series, Voyager, was
transitional with late-boomer officers and a GenX junior crew.
The independence of the latter was a source of conflict in the show.
Andromeda is the first all-GenX sci-fi show.
GenX'ers are more creative and independent and
fully tech savy. I presume the fifth Trek series
will be another GenX series.
Not too long ago, a fellow Trekker and I discussed the prospect of a series based 150 years BTOS (before The Original Series), and we we both dicouraged when we saw our first view of the NX-01 -- clearly much more advanced-looking than even the post-refit NCC-1701 of Star Trek -- The Motion Picture.
I vaguely recall seeing now and again in a series espisode or movie some passing references to earlier, pre-Constitution-class Enterprises, all the way back to the USN aircraft carrier and beyond. Some of those designs, while not terribly inspiring visually, still conveyed a sense of foraying into the unfamiliar.
Coming from an earlier, less technologically sophisticated era, the ship should have looked less rather than more streamlined and fluid, even a bit clunky, conveying visually the idea of less advanced starship design in the earlier era. The production-design people have gotten this basic concept completely backwards. To make an analogy in terms of US naval warships, it's as if somebody wanted to make a movie about the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, but lacking any pre-World-War-II battleships because they'd all been sunk at Pearl Harbor or scrapped at the end of the war, the movie's producers used an ultramodern Aegis guided-missile cruiser as a stand-in and hoped nobody would notice or care.
By violating the canon, the series' producers have made a conscious fundamental goof with the biggest visual element of the series, presumably just to have some cooler eye candy. Maybe they'll suck in a younger generation of viewers this way, but to my mind, they've forgotten to "dance with them that brung'em," as we used to put it in Texas. And that kind of egregiously flawed decision making on such a basic, early choice gives me little reason to expect the other aspects of the series to be any better than a rehash of other Star Trekism.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
What do you expect? We've pretty much progressed further in the thirty years since ST:TOS than they thought we would in three hundred years. Prime example: They didn't have the concept of LEDs or computer monitors back then. Hence, lots of switches, dials and chaser lights for feedback. Ooops. Also, ST:TOS was low-budget. Roddenberry wanted a film projecter behind each of the screens ringing the bridge, for cool animated readouts and library computer accesses. Until he found out a) that 12 projectors required, by union contract, 12 projectionists and b) how much one projectionist cost, let alone 12. Ooops.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
- Space = a 3D Ocean
- Planet = land masses
- Stations = Outposts
- Capital "launching" ships=Aircraft Carriers
- Large Spacecraft="ships of the line"
- the runabouts, fighters, etc. correspond to PT-Boats and launched fighter aircraft, and finally
- Photon torpedoes = Explosive ordinance (torpedoes or large shells, phasers = bullet type weapons
Put all the ships together and you have a fleet, (for example the USA's Atlantic Fleet, based mainly out of NYNY and Norfolk, VA, or the USA's Pacific Fleet, based out of Pearl Harbor, San Diego & Seattle). This is different from the USAF where the divisions are more by the mission of a particular type of aircraft, i.e SAC = Strategic Air Command, MAC = Military Airlift Command & TAC = Tactical Air Command, etc.the medium in which things travel, battles take place, etc.
Things that you go to for whatever reason,{trade, conquest, negotiating, R&R, etc.}
Smaller, strategically placed defensive or trade locations (DS-9, Babylon 5, etc.)
Not so much on the Star Trek Series, but Galactica, Star Wars, some on B5)
For example NCC-1701A = Constellation Class Cruiser, NCC-1701D= Galaxy Class Cruiser although they probably more closely fit the current definition & capabilities of a battleship, Voyager might be the rough equivalent of a small cruiser or large frigate, DS-9's Defiant is probably most like a Destroyer, but if equipped w/Cloaking technology becomes an attack submarine,
There are probably a dozen more analogues, but you get the idea.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Heh heh...and we got to see the the sexy vulcan chick and the engineer slather cold, wet, slippery de-contamination gel on each other 1st too...woo hoo! (judjing from T'Pol's umm..."thermometers"...it must've been cold...heh heh)...but I digress...
Interestingly enough, it seems to be a tradition to show Star Trek shows a day in advance in Canada...
When the original series was first played, the CBC received and broadcast their print of each episode one day prior to it's debut in the US. Subsequent series were syndicated and shown on various other independent networks and stations, sometimes a day in advance. I remember DS9 and Voyager in particular being shown here the day before it was on a US station.
When STNG first came out, I thought it would be cool to have a series showing what it would be like to be a rookie at the lowest rank on the Enterprise. Stuff like replicators that didn't always work right: "I wanted a Gornburger, not this Klingon worm crap.". Or low resolution holodecks. Or "Do I smell burning ham - or did Kirk singe himself again? Hey, what's with this red uniform?"
For my background, I never enjoyed the original series, and found TNG much improved after Gene passed away and the Berman team took over.
The intro song has, for the first time, WORDS! This was startling and disappointing, until I found myself liking the song. Anyone heard it before?
We are provided with a glipse of post-First Contact politics. This includes a growing resentment of the Vulcans for with-holding technology and a passionate desire to be atonomous as a sepecies. This is especially evident after an accidental first contact with the Klingons. The Vulcans themselves appear to be a bit "off", in that they are not as 'emotionless' and they are obvious manipulators of the human leaders.
New technology abounds in the form of phasers, transporters, medical supplies and other things I can't recall.
The new ship is rushed into a mission early into the episode, and this quickly scuttles what up to that point was helpful character and relationship development.
I enjoyed seeing the new set and costumes. The camera views the character much closer in than the previous series, likely b/c the feeling of smaller quarters is desired. I enjoyed seeing a necktie for once in a star trek series (that wasn't from the hologram or time-travelling mission).
The plot was usual star trek, with 1st act that includes intro of Conflict #1, the external conflict; Conflict #2, the internal conflict; and quite often including last night Conflict #3, the Bigger Picture slash sure to be a recurring Conflict; followed by a partial resolution of conflicts which quickly becomes much much worse (the 1 step forward, 2 steps back plot); then acts of heroism, technological wonder, and unexplained scientific/human ingenuity makes everything better, or at least mostly better.
Other noteworthy bits:
The discovery of the ship's "sweet spot", which I hoped would lead to a committed explanation of artificial gravity
Stopping on (planet began with R, I think this is where Troy and Riker spent a weekend, or something like that?). Sort of an underground brothel/strip club.
The intro of the Suliban race, a shapeshifting race that appears to be the worker bees for a Temporal Cold War
The Klingon homeworld, called Chronos... why? Did I miss something during TNG and DS9? How is it that the Klingons can live without electricity, but can still fly at high warp speed.
Anyway, Enjoy the pilot,
Dennis
My son (who joined the Navy three months ago) told me this amusing tidbit he learned about the services: The Navy has more planes than the Air Force; the Army has more boats than the Navy. Go figure.
I couldn't agree more. Like the t-shirt sez, "Space: No cute robots, no friendly aliens, no holodecks, NO MERCY!"
It had its share of first season flaws, but they were much fewer and far between than the first seasons of ANY of the Trek series. The characters were also fleshed out much more, and the series as a whole displayed far superior storytelling.
I tend to favor darker plots, and some episodes of Space were disturbingly grim. These also tended to be the episodes where the show really shined.
Besides, Vansen was a babe (Co-ed bunks? Works for me!) and the fighters looked totally badass.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Well, so far the opening was rather good, with hte exception of the music. I was not sure if I was suposed to pull out my old Poison World Tour shirt, and light my lighter, or head to Audiogalaxy and download one of the old ones to play over it. I always sort of liked the fact that the opening songs had not lyrics. hopefully this was just for the premier.
Justin
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0