Slashdot Mirror
Enterprise Season Premiere Tonight
l0key432 writes "Enterprise, Star Trek's fifth series, begins its second season on UPN tonight at 8pm/7pm central with the episode Shockwave Part II, airing just before the series premier of the new 'The Twilight Zone' show at 9pm/8pm central. Shockwave II is the conclusion to last season's season-ending cliff-hanger, and additional info can be found at this page(possible spoilers!) on StarTrek.com." Of course with my luck, it'll be pre-empted by some sporting event.
So if you haven't seen it, someone else here probably has. So you don't want to read on if you want to avoid spoilers.
So essentially ... SPOILER ALERT(!!) for this whole story.
Great premise, likeable characters and good actors.
It got off to a great start. The Broken Bow was easily the best of the Trek pilots.
So what's the problem? It almost seems as if the producers want Enteprise to ASPIRE to be as mediocre as Voyager was.
It's stuck in that "nothing can change week to week" mentality that Paramount has long imposed on Trek. Worse, it's not even particularly bad like Voyager was early on... it's just... there. More often then not, it's not good or bad. Just something I could care less about.
The Temporal Cold War is at least a step in the right direction, even if I think they've removed too much of the mystery from it. Compare "Future Guy's" appearance in the pilot to what it was in the finale. Initially, you couldn't tell anything about him and there was that cool distortion effect. Now, he looks like a guy dressed in stage black.
Sullick and Daniels are a little too black & white. I wished they could've pretened for more than a fraction of an episode that the Suliban might actually be the good guys. Or that there were no good guys in this fight.
But the fact that they have an continuing, if infrequently returned to, storyline is a positive step. Having *consistant* internal continuity is generally a good thing for a show. It's an incentive to watch, when done properly.
As it is, I generally don't care about Enterprise.
One of the major problems with Enterprise is that TIME TRAVEL SUCKS. It's been completely overdone, BADLY, particularly on Trek, and I for one am not going to watch any more time travel eps.
Because they're ALL THE SAME EPISODE: crew encounters time wedgie. Crew solves time wedgie puzzle. Time returns to normal. Teenage son lies to a cute girl at school to impress her, but gets found out and learns an important lesson about honesty. Roll credits.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I thought that was one of the most thought-provoking pieces of sci-fi to hit television in a long time.
For those unfamiliar with the plot (spoilers ahead):
I found it to be a fascinating insight into the moral responsibilities that they faced: Cure the sick, leaving them to continue their subjugation of a developing species, or allow nature to take its course while doing what they could to ease suffering.
P.S. No, I did not have the whole thing memorized. I did a bit of web surfing to get the names of the species and some plot specifics.
Have you noticed that since Gene Roddenberry's death the franchise has truly suffered?
Sure, the showrunners bristled at Gene's humanist view and various objections to darker themes - but sure enough, since his death the franchise has continually become less-and-less "beloved."
There are so many elements that ignore Roddenberry's view in Enterprise that I wonder if it is the first show that is hardly "Star Trek" at all?
What's amusing is that the end result of all this moralizing is the Prime Directive. Under that philosophy, the Federation is allowed to help a race provided that their civilization has crossed the arbitrary line of developing warp technology. If the race hasn't quite made it there, then it's just too damn bad for them. Post-warp civilizations' destiny is apparently impervious to interference.
It reminds me of the strict ethical codes that medical researchers must obey with respect to research animals. When performing experiments on a mouse, for instance, there are strict guidelines one must follow to insure that the animal is treated humanely. If that same mouse jumps off the table and runs out of the room, it immediately becomes "vermin", and you could pluck its legs off one at a time with impunity.
That's the type of "rule-book" ethics that Star Trek loves. It always irritates me the way Trek episodes always justify their characters actions and make them seem heroic-- there's a token amount of reget, but not enough to get them down. It always struck me that a lot of these episodes should really end with the main characters lying around in a drunken stupor and contemplating suicide.
This is a very nice way to put it. It doesn't quite capture my utter moral abhorrence of the episode's conclusion, though.
To me, the moral of the episode was "Because I disagree with these people's politics, they all deserve to die." And in particular, Phlox's dialogue about how the ruling race being genetically predisposed towards the disease that was killing them amounted to some kind of genetic destiny was utterly chilling. To me, it's the secular humanist equivalent of "God told me you have to die."
If I were Archer, I would have suspended Phlox's medical licence immediately, ordered him to give over the cure, and launched a court-martial inquiry back home to determine his ongoing fitness to practice medicine. (Practice it somewhere else, that is, because he would never practice medicine on my crew again.)
On the other hand, this is from the same franchise that put nurseries on warships, so expecting any kind of moral consciousness from them is probably an exercise in futility.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Or, you can do what I did, which was scrap Charter, buy DishNetwork, and sign up for the superstation package, which consists of the UPN stations in NY and Boston and the WB stations in NY, Denver and LA. This provides two benefits: (1) I get to watch Enterprise and Buffy with the rest of the country, and (2) I never have to worry about KPLR preempting Angel and Smallville for Blues hockey. The only drawback is having two stations that advertise themselves as "WB 11".
Nothing for 6-digit uids?