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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.
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
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
What have you heard that makes you think this is tailored towards fans of B5?
Are you saying that there is a basic preplanned story line that they are going to follow? I'm hoping that's what you are saying. I've not heard anything like that about it, but I've not looked much either.
B5 taught me to love the "story arc". Before that I'd just watched sci-fi shows as a series of things that happened. How I watch sci-fi hoping that each episode will be part of a larger whole. Nothing as detailed as B5 has come along that I know of, but it has had an influence. Farscape, for example, has a nice continuing story that, while not planned out to the extent that B5 was, does seem to have a general direction each season.
Oddly enough, Buffy and Angel both have this same kind of "seasonal arc" which I've come to enjoy so much.
--Ty
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.
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.
Of course it is. A lot of great Space Opera is.
Spock and Data are pikers compared to Kim Kinnison, and the ones who've gained "godlike power" all leave the series.
Sisko's "power" is hearing voices in his head, but even that makes him a step above the average man.
But isn't that the point? From Gilgamesh to Robin Hood to Dartagnan to Michael Knight, western literature is about heroes. It always has been, and the best of it still continues to be.
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.
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