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Rick Berman: Enterprise May Not Suck Next Year
Steve Krutzler writes "Star Trek producer Rick Berman has made his latest comments in a new interview with a British magazine and he says the season finale of Enterprise ("The Expanse") will begin to change the ultimate mission of the show for the better: 'I think our final episode of the season is going to be quite startling because we're going to do a cliffhanger that will put a new twist on the series as it enters its third year.'"
Oh, give it up. It's over. End this soap opera. Don't try to save it. Be like Buffy; she knows when to quit.
Hot gel-showering hot chicks aside.. I kinda like the series. I do think a "change of direction" would be an improvement though.. you can only go so far in space with that naive "we're from earth.. please don't kill us" thing. Maybe they'll develop some better weapons and grow some larger space nuts too!.. and MAYBE... just MAYBE... we'll get the scoop on this whole Klingon forehead thing.. No ridges... Ridges... That's a choice in potato chips, not aliens dammit!
chown -R us
Voyager had one of those season finales every year and the show just kept getting better and better!
paintball
... Rick Berman, Executive Producer of the Star Trek(r)(tm)(c) franchise is announcing his retirement from creative control of Star Trek...
C'mon guys... It won't stop sucking until Berman is out of the driver's seat. He doesn't know how to do anything truly creative. He was Roddenberry's financials guy, for crissake, not the creative pillar behind the series.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
There are many nasty things you can say about Rick Berman: lousy writer, assumes audience consists of morons, rips off actors and writers, etc. But even if he had none of these issues, he'd have no hope of producing a watchable SF series. 'Cause he has no idea what SF is.
He thinks SF is all about the Gee Whiz Factor. Fancy effects, pretentious pseudo-science, lots of gadgets. That's why he abandoned the Picard/Sisko/Janeway thread: it was getting to hard to top himself with fancier and sillier gadgets and effects. So he goes back a couple centuries, where he can derive GWF from the "this is where it came from" element.
Real SF has nothing to do with the GWF. It's about playing with ideas, fiddling with them, seeing where they will go. That's why Star Trek developed a serious following in the first place.
Enterprise has pro forma "ideas" of course. But they're lame, silly, invented by retarded people who don't even know Junior High science.
Ironically, absence of the GWF is also why Stargate SG1 is doing so well. Which is really weird, because the premise of SG1 has got to be the silliest ever. (The USAF is secretly involved in intergalactic exploration and warfare? Yeah, right.) But the better SG1 episodes do what Star Trek used to do -- find interesting ideas and use them to tell simple interesting stories.
Bah, Berman has fell victim of the conservative trekkies. There are a lot of people who already like Enterprise. And majority of the people who like Enterprise are a "new breed" (IMO) of Star Trek fans (such as myself) who have never seen Star Trek before, but like this series.
The reason I like Enterprise is because it's more "humble". There really isn't a prerequisite to the show, so I was able to be introduced to "Star Trek" just as the crew (staff) of the show is. It's less technical and deals more with the human experience. (Like Voyager) I heard that people dislike the intro, but I think it works very well. It keeps up the "human"/"humble" theme. Even though the orchestra openings are good, I don't think there's a problem with the opening song (Faith of the Heart). (BTW, if you want to see what the Orchestra version would of been like, a "leaked" recording is here*.)
Now that I got into Enterprise, I've also started watching Voyager nightly, and now TNG on the "New TNN" and I'm having a new appreciation for Star Trek as a really good collection of shows, instead of the stereotype "geek" show that I used to make fun of.
Anyways, I hope they don't mess up the series. The last few episodes ("Stigma" & "Canamar") have been pretty good, "Stigma" went on about the politics of an AIDS-like disease among the Vulkcans (via Mind Meld). Though, they should of done something like that years ago.
I'll keep watching.
Do you remember when Enterprise was first introduced? We were promised it would be "Star Trek with phasers". In other words, lots of action, less "character development" episodes and other slow topics.
That recent "Stigma" episode (T'Pol has mind-meld disease) was as far from "Star Trek with phasers" as you can get. On the other hand, that recent "Canamar" epsiode (Con Air, in space) was pretty cool.
Here is the best hope for the series: Berman and Pillar have stopped writing all the episodes. Every time I watch Enterprise, I make careful note of who wrote the episode. The whole first season was purely written by Berman and Pillar. Recently, we have had a string of episodes written by other writers.
If they want to make us happy, they ought to get some scripts from actual SF authors. How about John E. Stith, David Weber, or Catherine Asaro? (I draw the line at Piers Anthony, though...)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Watch DS9. One of the reasons it's so great is that towards the end of the show, they understood that they needed plot arcs to keep it interesting.
No, that's not really what Star Trek needs to become relevant. Remember that the original Star Trek did just fine with almost nothing but individual episodes that didn't really connect to each other. But that series had writers willing to write intelligently and take chances. None of the new series have really had that. They have to be sanitized, inoffensive, familiar. When is the last time an episode of Star Trek really took a chance, made a bold stand on something? That's just not what Star Trek is about anymore.
Babylon 5 was the show that sacrificed its episode-by-episode pleasure in favor of a lengthy story arc, and it got away with it because its creator really knew what he was doing. The long story arcs in Deep Space Nine and, to a lesser extent, Voyager were embarrassing because they lacked continuity, forethought, and dramatic integrity, exactly what J. Michael Straczynski brought to Babylon 5. Note I'm not saying Babylon 5 was perfect--it wasn't. But it did this better than Star Trek ever has because it was its entire purpose for being. The Star Trek writers don't know how to do this.
And they shouldn't need to. They need to be true to the precepts that Roddenberry built the show on. But they don't want to do that, because he's dead and Berman is in charge. And with every new "innovation," he buries Star Trek further and further. It's sad, but it's the way it is.
It might be time to put Star Trek to bed. Babylon 5 was the first revolution. What's the next one? I think we're ready.
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
Star Trek is like Windows. They have run out of ideas and just keep recylying old ones. And like in Star Trek, people are becoming aware of it.
We already have T'Pol. She is filling the niche that 7 of 9 filled in Voyager.
Jeri Ryan played a woman in a tight jumpsuit that played a character that didn't quite catch on to humanities finer points like emotions and social interaction.
Jolene Blalock is a woman in a tight jumpsuit that plays a character that doesn't quite catch on to humanities finer points like emotions and social interaction.
- "The Andorian Incident": The transporter is new and not guaranteed to work. By taking hostages, the Andorians have already forfeited their lives, but rather than beaming them out, an away party is beamed in.
- "Cold Front": Near the end, Archer has a phaser on Silik, yet does not kill him.
- "Fortunate Son": The Enterprise away team is under fire from the freighter crew. They could have had their opponents beamed out or heavy weapons beamed in--on the gripping hand, neither option would be necessary if Starfleet Academy could find non-Stormtrooper marksmanship instructors.
Conclusion: The protagonists' survival is attributable solely to their being characters in the Star Trek universe. Were they nonfictional, they wouldn't last five minutes in a firefight.