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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.
Hopefully something tragic will happen and they will have to enter the decontamination room and spread goo on each other again!!!!
No I didnt spell check this post...
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.
Since the television stations in my country haven't even made effort to air the first season this year,
I'll keep an eye out for it on alt.binaries.multimedia.startrek and alt.binaries.startrek , thanks to the people there I've been able to follow the first season.
It's already been broadcast in the east coast.
;-) just having a little fun.
Sorry about the spoiler.
"Your" right! How typically arrogant and imperialist of us. As Americans, we must be especially conscious of our status as the lone superpower and make efforts to avoid imposing announcements about our TV schedule on other cultures.
If you are wondering where the archetypal "searching for humanity" character is on this show, it is reportedly Captain Archer's dog Porthos.
After having his brain advanced 1,000,000 dog years, Porthos will become an ensign and have to grapple with an Earth that does not grant individual freedoms to dogs. Look for episode "Man's Best Friend" where Porthos is deemed the propery of Starfleet and Archer must argue that Porthos deserves to makes his own choices.
Farnell the electronic component suppliers have taken it on themselves to bring the people of Earth into an age of interstellar travel early by having started to stock Dilithium Crystals. If you go to the Farnell site, select the UK site, then the Online Catalogue, Electronic components and finally Crystals, you can see them.
Unfortunately they seem to be out of stock right now if you were thinking of building your own Warp engine.
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.
Unless of course the editors meant premiere which is the first public performance of something. Nahhh.
Time Travel.
Wesley.
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?
I hardly think it's morally correct to deny a race the cure to their genetic disease in favor of what might happen thousands or even millions of years in the future. To me it's the same moral question as "Does the end justify the means?" --- should one do something that seems wrong in the present in order to promote a future good?
Besides, on a more practical note, I think it would have made for more interesting character development later in the series if Archer had taken the opposite opinion and stuck to his moral guns, even if that meant a rift developed between him and Phlox. It would be fun to see the captain and the doctor at each other's throats!
We tend to forget that people involved with a specific popular thing have a perspsective bigger than that one thing. I don't know if Roddenberry would personally like Enterprise, but I'm certain he would judge it first as a television show and second as Star Trek. After all, he was a veteran writer, director and producer who did plenty of television other than Star Trek. I bet Gene would think pretty well of Enterprise as television, and would certainly allow that this one is somebody else's baby.
In Episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scrathcy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something?
...I'll field this one!
Here's a spoiler... You will die a lonely man.
Did you notice how much better TNG got after he died? Did you notice that Roddenberry was egomaniac who claimed he had every good idea? Read Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" for a strongly opinionated (from Harlan? No way!) and documented (Harlan kept track? No way!) counter-view of "The Great Bird of the Galaxy."
IMHO, the episode Shuttlepod One was one of the best Star Trek episodes I've ever seen.
Basically Reed and Trip are on a shuttlepod out in the middle of nowhere and it looks like the Enterprise has been destroyed. The pod is damaged and they have a very limited amount of air left. And they are light years away from anything.
It was Sci-Fi at it's best, a human drama between Trip's completely irrational hope (although deep down he knows the truth) and Reed's attempt to prepare for their pending deaths. They deal with things like whether or not to be comfortable and just accept death or be miserable and squeeze out a few more hours.
I'll take one of those episodes over 10 technobabble shows anyday.
Brian Ellenberger
Ah, finally, a Star Trek character I can identify with -- a drunken engineer.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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?