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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.
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.
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
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.
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"?
DAMN IT!
Mod this down if you will, but this is *NOT* the FIFTH Trek series.. this is the *SIXTH* trek series.
You can see the episode guide of Star Trek: The Animated Series here.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
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.
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
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!