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.'"

Comments

The only way they can go is up....

[tktk]

Of all my friends who are Star Trek fans, none of them watch. I know of only one person who regularly watches Enterprise and she traditionally skips this type of show.

Sure, it's not a representative sample but from what I see Enterprise just doesn't appeal to its expected audience.

There's no justice in this world.

[goat_of_wisdom]

They kill off Firefly halfway through the first season but let Enterprise go on for three years. Shheesh.

What about Q ?

[loom]

Well I guess it would be interesting to feature Q in Enterprise... Because that could happen, given that Q is this wildcard characters that they can use anytime ... but maybe it's just me being nostalgic of "All Good Things..." :)

Re:Save us from Berman

[topologist]

I agree with you about Voyager (I gave up after seeing a few random supposedly "good" episodes), but it's quite clear you never really watched DS9. It had some of the best Trek episodes ever ("The Visitor", "Far beyond the stars", "hard time" etc.), and was quite engrossing because it abandoned the "restore to status quo at the end of each episode" formula. IMO, the best of DS9 was on par with or better than almost all of TNG (which I liked most of the time - "The inner light" was perhaps the best Trek episode ever, along with "the visitor"). I saw a couple of episodes of Enterprise from the first season ("dear doctor" because it was recommended by a friend, and I thought it was awful and amoral), and I honestly have no idea what the creators of that show are trying to do. Nemesis was utterly banal and plot-free, and it wasn't even consistent with what we saw in TNG. Unless there's a new show, preferably set perhaps another 200 years in the future of TNG/DS9, with someone like Leonard Nimoy at the helm, I think we've seen the end of Trek. Star Trek 196?-200[3-4] R.I.P.

Re:Rick Berman Needs to GO

[Psiren]

Then again, I didn't see the whole episode, so I don't know *quite* how plausible the whole thing was.

The episode you're referring to is Trials and Tribbulations. Although they pretty much skipped over the time traveling part of it, the episode as a whole was one of the best imho. It has a lot of good humour (Worf's "We don't talk about it!", referring to the ridgeless Klingons of Kirk's era), and the effects were just superb. The scene where O'Brien and Bashir were in the lineup, with Kirk having a go at them all was just fantastic. The blending of old and new footage was the best I've ever seen. I'm a big fan of DS9, and this is a prime exmaple of why.

Re:Borg

[TheRaven64]

When the Borg were introduced, they were the perfect villain for a capitalist society. They were a 100% communist society where the state (hive) mattered but the individual didn't. Add to this their technological superiority to the extent that one of their ships could knock out most of the federation fleet. Defeating them by turning their own philosophy of 'the individual is not important' against them was pure genius on the part of the writers.

Then came First Contact. What a travesty. Oh look, the Borg aren't really communists, they're actually a capitalist society taken to it's illogical conclusion (from 'the individual matters' to 'only one individual matters'). They became yet another comic book villain. Wonderful. Like we need more of them . Oh, and the fact that torpedoes fired from a high technology ship at a ground emplacement seemed to have about as much explosive force as hand grenades was just ludicrous. I'd go on, but if I stopped to pick holes in First Contact I'd be here all week. Q was a competent villain, omnipotent but not particularly evil. The Borg were original before First Contact. The Dominion? Oh look, another empire, how exciting. Species 8472? Another empire, vaguely interesting since they could defeat the Borg, and it took the doctor almost a whole week to design a super weapon to destroy them. The Cabal? Oh look, another empire...

Enterprise fails for a number of reasons.

1. They have to pitch technology above what we have now by about 50-100 years (I assume a World War III would reduce the tech level of a civilisation), below TOS. Since a number of things in TOS are feasible now, this is quite difficult.
2. They lack continuity with the other series'. If first contact with the Ferengi was Picard on the Stargazer, then we should not be seeing them 200 years earlier. There are a large number of races which appear peripherally in the other series' and don't have their history mentioned at all. Why not use some of them? Why invent new species' like the Suliban who are either going to all die during the series, or leave a glaring continuity hole at the end?
3. A prequel really wasn't the correct thing to do. When the Time Ship Aeon appeared in Voyager I thought that this would be a great setting for a new spin-off. After a few more episodes in the same line I felt convinced. Then Enterprise came out, with the 'Temporal Cold War' which seems to be trying to do this, but as a back story, not as a series premiss. And failing, I might add.
4. Their story lines are cliche. A few episodes (Ceasefire springs to mind) are so obvious you can work out what's going to happen before the opening credits.

I'm going to continue watching Enterprise for the same reason I watched Andromeda up to Season 3. I honestly can't believe that something with so much potential can be as bad as the evidence suggests.

How to save the show

[Monkelectric]

The only way star trek could possibly hope to become relavant is to do what they loathe the most --

Make it a drama with contiguous episodes. We need mutli-season plot arcs, and an over-arching theme.

How many star trek episodes have you watched where they discover some AMAZING new technology (new weapons, new technology, new energy source etc.), possibly even something that alters the reality of the show (afterlife, alternate realities, etc) and then that development is NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN ?

Think about the big shows right now -- Sopranos, The Shield, West Wing, Buffy, Farscape etc... All dramas, no episdoes where everything is resolved in 44 minutes.

One of the worst abuses EVER was in Enterprise, when they found out one of the crewman was FROM THE FUTURE and that there was a time "cold war". They didnt mention it again for like 6 episodes ... they just kept flying to different planets to talk to aliens ...

Why don't they wanna have a Drama? The show is much more difficult to repeat, much more difficult to write for, and much more difficult to produce. However, in exchange for this they get -- loyal fans --.

Re:How to save the show

[TheLoneDanger]

I too have spent a lot of time thinking on this exact same concept (though I wouldn't tie the series to one ship, as they should be able to call upon or take whatever they need). But there's no chance in Hell of it ever happening. The Star Trek series is now run by people afraid of offending anyone at all.

The closest thing I can think of for them to do with Enterprise is to have them screw up. I can't remember seeing even one morally ambiguous situation from this series, and it's boring me to death. That episode where the Enterprise crew helped some fuel farmers or something run off Klingon bullies, with absolutely no one getting hurt despite booby traps and phaser/disruptor fire? It was so limp. It was essentially 'bullies are bad'. Well, no shit.

The Enterprise crew needs to screw up terribly. Someone should die because of them. They should go somewhere with all their self-righteous crap and totally screw up another civilization because they don't understand, and they can't learn to understand in 44 minutes.

The Next Generation wasn't controversial, but it had some morally ambiguous moments, like when Picard left a planet to suffer from withdrawal symptoms because the Prime Directive said not to and he figured they would be better off in the end. Enterprise needs something like this, because I never get the sense that the crew is getting the shocks that would challenge them to really think and mature as characters. And frankly, if there are characters that are going nowhere (like Harry Kim from Voyager, I haven't been able to sit through enough episodes of Enterprise for an example from that) kill them off and try bringing in something new. Is there anyone that doesn't think killing off Tasha Yar and increasing the profile of Worf was good?

....I must be missing something.

[MortisUmbra]

I wasn't even aware it "sucked". I do think it attracts a much more mainstream audience, as I pretty much detest MOST of the previous ST series that have been on TV, with the errant episode here or there drawing my attention.

DS9 , so good it should not be classed a Trek show

[tomwhore]

Something I wrote for e2 makes sense here-

I have to take several of the points against DS9 on right here and now.

# The hero or heroic group does not have to make a physical journey so much as a spiritual or experience based one. Go back and reread Jospeh Campell's Hero With A Thousand Faces or The Power of Myth. Time and time again little minds always equate the heroic call to journey as a travel based journey. Space is only one dimension of experience. Go read Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) for more on experience and expansion thereof.

# DS9 the station may have "sat" there but the characters in it moved across time, space and experience.While other Trek show characters simply mouthed the required catch phrases ("make it so" "blah blah blah logical" "I cana change the laws of phsyics") DS9 characters had to grow, had to expand, had to come into conflict not just with the swirling universe around them but the swirling turmoil in their own selves.

Once again we are hitting on the narrow minded ideas of what makes a Star Trek Production good.

# Besides the many great topics hit on by WolfDaddy take a look at how they dealt with the issue of Race. Many times the plot of a show or arc of shows had to do about a characters race and the conflicts they have in being that race.

The Captian himself has to come to grips with this in the alternate flash back universe of Benny, the black science fiction writer living in the middle of the 20th century.

# DS9 also looked under other unseemly issues that most of the other Trek shows glossed over. In the other Trek shows the Federation were a group of happy content citizens whose every basic need is catered to. In DS9 we finally see the cracks in the Federations shiny armor. People are still fsked up, people are still people rather than holier than thou walking talking good will ambassadors.

I can see where many die hard Trek fans would find this a bad thing. They were happy knowing they were part of a just and right thinking future and here DS9 comes along to tell them all is not as it seems.

Have you ever been to a movie house full of die hard Trek fans? Watch and listen to them. They will cheer as certain catch phrases are used, start citing chapter and verse detailed factoids as to way such and such cant be happening ,

"well in the third season shows 23 it was clearly shown that Sub Commander Thalls second half sister was on that planet when it was destroyed by speices 776523 and so that character can not be in this movie because that would cause a rip in the space time continuity"

and will have this warm happy glow on their faces no matter how bad the movie or show was. Why? Compare and contrast the audience in a Jimmy Swagart revival or in the audience of any evangelical church gathering. See something interesting? I knew you would.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[TheMadFishmonger]

Why do all the screens have to be flat(?) screen monitors?

Because LCDs don't scan like CRTs, thus you don't have the same problems filming them. LCDs are more cost effective in TV or film due to reduced post-production work. They've really revolutionized sci-fi consoles and displays since you don't have to matte them in post. Woo-hah.