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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.
at least not here in St. Louis...Our local "we run anything we want, but claim to be WB" network has Enterprise debuting Saturday...they also have rights to run other "UPN" shows, like WWF Smackdown...
How Jaded Are You?
There is a pretty favorable review in USAToday that mentions among other things that this crew is a little weary of new items such as "Phase Pistols" and "Transporters"....It gets 3 stars out of 4.
Can someone tell me why this did not get picked up by a more respectful network?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
That means more useless argument between nerds.
...and yet by belittleing us in this fourm you've partaken and become one of us.
welcome!
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
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.
there is a 1 in 10 chance this show won't survive because the hordes of Trekkies have nothing new to watch. It won't even matter if it's good.
Then why didn't they get Tom Arnold?
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Um, Starfleet is obviously a derivative of the Navy... Think about it.
- StarFLEET (Like a fleet of ships)
- Ensign, LT (j.g.), LT, LT CDR, CDR, CAPT, ADM, etc.
- "Engineering" (there are no "engineering" spaces on aircraft)
- The process of naming ships individually is a Navy thing. Individual aircraft aren't named. (compare the USS Enterprise, NX-01 with the USS Enterprise, CV-65)
And so on and so forth... just watch most any Trek show and you'll get the idea.
To a certain extent, you're right. Star Trek is about the heroes doing things that are impossible in our reality.
But what's happened in the last 20 years is that heroes have turned from "people who can do anything and never get hurt", to "people who are like you and me but pull it through just barely".
Who's more exciting - Indiana Jones, who gets the crap kicked out of him for 75% of the movie, then starts kicking ass, or to watch Superman shrug off bullets or never get hurt? I'll take Dr. Jones any day of the week (and twice on Sundays).
So I'm actually applauding Paramounts change of direction to more "ordinary" people who will become more than human through their trials and experiences.
Just as long as they never need the Girdle....
Of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Excellent point! The Internet is global, so clearly people posting on Slashdot should only talk about issues which affect people in all countries. Obviously, since nobody in Europe's ever heard of Star Trek (an American television show, for those of you wondering), we should never talk about that again. Unfortunately, nobody in the Congo cares about privacy issues on the Internet, so I guess we can't talk about that either. Heck, I guess this is the end of Slashdot.
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Actually, the B-2 bombers are named. Probablu because they're as expensive as a ship.
We can hope -- though I doubt it. Besides the blue alien in the cat suit I've seen in the commercials, I doubt that Paramount will do much to match the main attraction of the other shows. Sex is important (7of9) but if that's going to be it pr0n is a better use of my time.
Farscape, Lexx, Earth: Final Conflict, and B5 have a progression from episode to episode. None of the Treks have, except for an attempt with DS9 that really could have been stronger.
Here's a clue for Paramount; make us care about the major characters, kill one/some of them off, and then keep them dead .
Is this necessary? Nope. Yet, of each of the shows above, only Lexx -- an un-ST like show if there ever was -- hasn't killed off a major character perminately. If they aren't even going to try to get beyond the ST formula, I'd hope that they wouldn't even try.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
At least it's not a beret.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The opening credits weigh in at 26MB, but it's worth it! Almost brought a tear to my eye... http://www.enterpriseuk.tv/e-media/series/index.as p
Download it here
With all due respect, I have to disagree. The episode where Jadzia Dax has a tryst with Kurzon Dax's ex-wife was a deep and significant exploration of my need to watch hot alien chicks making out.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Nice idea, but I always thought that Star Trek (the entire franchise) in all of it's incarnations, was about teamwork . It's always been about people coming together to get the job done. Regardless of color, creed, religion, etc. This is what I always loved about it. The super hero's you speak of were all flawed in some way and could not get the job done without the entire team. Everyone contributed.
Spock (my personal favorite) had superior strength and intellect, but at times he was too logical. This was his "achilles heel". Data, was much the same.
Capt.'s Kirk, Picard, and Janeway (pardon me forgetting the DS9 captain's name...didn't really watch it) were the leaders that pulled together the strengths of the team to get the job done, often in the most harrowing of circumstances.
So, I think you are right about the hero part, just not the super hero part. All of the characters were hero's in their own way. They all braved the "unknown" and faced their worst fears.
This is heroism.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
"Captain, the enemy vessel is firing again! Shields buckling!"
"Captain, the enemy commander is hailing us. He demands our immediate surrender."
"Captain?"
"Captain?!"
"...Oh boy."
or to watch Superman shrug off bullets or never get hurt
And then to watch him duck when the throw they gun at him. Why was that?
:)
--Ty
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
I'm really willing to give this series a chance. I don't think Voyager was "horrible" like a lot of people do, though it certainly wasn't as great as Next Gen or even DS9. Does anybody beleive that if this show gets canceled, there will be a massive fan mail campain like there was when the orginal series was on the chopping board? I don't think there will be.
The inheiriters to Gene's vision get two more chances to save Star Trek from destruction. The first is the "Enterprise" series, and the second is the new upcoming movie. Fortunatly for them, the next movie is an even-numbered one (odd-numbered trek movies have been cursed since the first one, while even numbered ones are great).
One bad omen: Some of the promotional ads for "Enterprise" are using some pop crap for background music. Star Trek has a perfectly good composer, Jerry Goldsmith, who is as good as Star War's John Williams. They really ought to USE HIM! When "Enterprise" comes on, and I hear the opening credits being sung by N'Sync, I will shut off the TV, rip the tape out of the VCR, and burn it (the tape, not the VCR . . . on second thought, the VCR goes, too).
Not a typewriter
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
I have employed the following method to varying degrees of success. I suggest to CT and anyone else who needs broadcast stations to simply unfold a paper clip and jam it in the coaxial pin hole. On a regular analog television you'll be able to get strong local stations if you aren't within heavy walls. A lengthy bit of wire also works. I don't know if slashdot's very proprietor would be willing to lower himself to the paper clips, but hey...
On 9/11 in the big library at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities I at least got sound as the news rolled in.
--hongpong.com
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.
Remember, too, the other series currently under development -- Star Trek: People Hut.
My group is working with the Paramount trek development group -- so some of this is subject to change -- but we're aiming 'People Hut' at folks who (unlike the original poster) believes that Star Trek is about people crammed in a small, metallic space -- a space within "deep space," you might say. We do, at any rate.
Anyway, we're also currently brainstorming and working with the Roddenberry tech-dev wing at Paramount, but People Hut -- tentatively -- is set to premier in 2004. We're thinking about taking a group of unemployed air traffic controllers -- the ones fired by Reagan about 20 years ago -- who have all sorts of dreams and longings for deep space.
People Hut, literally, would start in the living room of one the unemployed controllers and would focus in on the lives of these folks as they get closer to building their own little ship. (Sort of like 'Salvage One' from a long time ago -- you remember that? With Andy Griffith? And the girl that was in 'Escape from Witch Mountain'? They built a ship that looked like a thimble with a balloon on it and then zoomed off for various missions.)
Anyway, our 'ST:PH' would chronicle the lives of these dreamers. The ups and the downs of family life -- what it would mean, in other words, to be a dreamer in the era of the Reaganomics -- and how those dreams impact everyone emotionally.
Eventually they would christen their Sunday evening meeting the 'People Hut' where anyone -- not just unemployed air traffic controllers -- would come and chat about hopes, dreams, and deep space.
One guy -- we're not sure who -- wins the lottery in Michigan (this is pre-Power Ball, remember) and then realizes that, at long last, his dreams have a bit of financial backing behind them.
(We're thinking the lottery pay out would be around 12-15 million -- enough to build a ship and possibly hire some then-hot-shot Soviet scientists to defect and investigate various means of plasma transport -- the stuff that the Soviets were rumored to be working on before the break-up of the USSR.)
Probably midway through the first season they'll launch the People Hut -- PH001 -- and go on a few adventures. Maybe check out the moon a little bit more -- pick up some of the trash left behind by the previous lunar missions -- and really try to clean things up. ST:PH -- if all goes according to plan -- will have a strong socio-economic context.
If anyone is interested, I can detail a couple more advantures. Remember, lots of this is still under development. No green lights yet. Robert Downey, Jr is tentatively slated to play Captain O'Malley -- a grizzed Irish guy who invested his entire life in air-traffic control.
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.
Does it begin with Scott Bakula "leaping" into the body of a starship captain, only to be confronted by a screaming Klingon and sighing "Oh boy"?
I love it. See Star Trek in all it's forms is really a peice of art. Normal shows aren't because at the end of the show everyone talks and they've basically all see the same movie. The interpretation will be identical. True art gets interpreted differently by each individual viewer based on something inside the viewer that the piece of art speaks to. I've heard the interpretation of Star Trek described as "Self, EGO, ID (Freud)", "the three stooges", "racism", "team work (the three muskateers)", "hero worship", "morality play", "wwf".... I think it's hilarious how many different ways people can interpret and read things into the Star Trek franchise. Of course there are the people who can't just leave things at entertainment value and who must always search for "the deeper meaning". And of course sometimes there is a purposeful "deeper meaning".
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Who says? We know the US wasn't completely destroyed, and in "The Voyage Home" Kirk doesn't say "I'm from North America", he says "I'm from Iowa."
:> )
But that doesn't nessaccarily mean anything. A united Germany citizen, a soviet East German, a pre WWII german citizen and a pre german unification Prussian could have all said "I'm from Berlin". It wouldn't mean the idea of prussian nationality would be relevant in 2001.
There may be a United Earth, but the US would certainly have been a major player in creating it, and a major source of it's early funding.
Thats just ego talking. The US could have been shattered into multiple warring states and had several of them break and reunite between the start of the alternate Star Trek time line and the start of the federation. Its like a British citizen durring colonial times contemplating the idea of a future UN like body and saying "The British Empire would certainly be a major player in creating it and a major source of its funding...." not thinking that by the time such a thing came to pass, large chunks of what they now think of as the British Empire would never dream of calling themselves Brits. (though they would still say "I'm from Pennsylvania".
I should really be doing something more constructive with my brain....
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
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-->
WIRED: Star Trek: Bakula to the Future
Scripps/Howard: Operation: Enterprise
The San Francisco Examiner: Living in the now
New York Daily News: Bakula's Bold New 'Enterprise'
Also, MAXIM's cover girl this month is Jolene Blalock, who plays Vulcan Sub Commander T'Pol. Presumably this is the same T'Pol that in ST:TOS Amok Time oversees Spock's Pon Farr ceremony. Many of the Trek fan site are speculating on just how long it will be before her character experiences the Pon Farr with no Vulcan males around and only Capt. Archer present to address her needs.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Here is an earlier copy of this same post by another user.
I am amazaed that the /. community is so quick to mod up repeat posts like this while at the same time jumping all over the editors if a story goes up twice. At least the editors aren't repeating stuff on purpose.
Maybe we should all be on the lookout for the next Star Trek story to go up. We can race to see who can copy and paste this superhero post the fastest and earn precious karma. It could be a "superhero first post" contest.
Of course, maybe the post is GPL'ed, in which case this reuse is all ok. :)
Lasers Controlled Games!
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?"
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
Amusingly, the real Aegis missile cruiser design was originally criticized on the grounds that it didn't have enough weapons showing. Aegis ships use a vertical launch system, nothing of which is visible except a small hatch on the deck. No bristling missile launchers like USSR ships of that era. Members of Congress actually berated the Navy about this.
The same thing happened with submarines in the 1950s. There was considerable resistance to building submarines that looked like bland cylinders. Nautilus, the first nuclear sub, still had a destroyerlike deck. All later US Navy subs, though, were dull, boring, but effective tubes.
In battleships, the most attractive design ever was the streamlined Yamato of WWII. The designers claimed that the streamlining was to keep the shock waves from the 18-inch guns from damaging the ship. The Yamato, like most WWII battleships, didn't accomplish much militarily, and was sunk by aircraft in 1945.
Once a technology is far enough along that
a broad range of workable designs are possible,
there's no obvious correlation between a finished-looking design and when the artifact was built.
Look at rockets. The V-2 was the most nicely shaped rocket ever built. Since then, rockets are almost always simple tubes. But look at the Space Shuttle at launch, the wierdest collection of big shapes ever to fly.
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
If you're still blacked out (as in Holland, MI -- sorry Rob), I'd suggest contacting all the local stations that carry a lot of syndicated content. That sort of agitation is rather appropriate -- the first Star Trek series lasted an extra season because of it.
Not that I really care about "Enterprise". I seem to be the only slashdotter who realizes that this will be a dud. Same "creative" team as Voyager, even more potential for logic-free stories. (The bad guys are time travellers, for crissakes! Every time the writers get stuck, they'll declare a pardox.) But it is essential that all America should witness Buffy's return from the dead!
...Roddenberry penned lyrics for the original them, although they were not used.
For good reason.
The lyrics are as follows:
The Vogons may have something to worry about.
Edith Keeler Must Die