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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.'"
Microsoft: Windows may not suck next year
KNW
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.
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.
When talking about why ST: Nemesis was a failure Rich Berman (basically the head of all things Star Trek) said that opening between Harry Potter 2 and The Two Towers was tough on the film (70 Million to make only took in 43 Million in the US). I'd say to Rick, paying to watch such a bad movie was tough on the audience. The reason Nemeses failed was that it was BAD, both the story and directing.
...oh no that's in the interview too!!!
I DO like Enterprise but after reading the article to find out that the Borg are going to be in an upcoming episode. I feel sick.
Paramont please fire Berman and replace him with someone who does not rehash old ideas and thinks they are exiting story lines. It took are huge letter campaign to get ST from Paramount/Gulf-Western/Desi-Lu's closet to the Big Screen. Anyone want to write to "Impeach Berman" ?
What's next have a new young helm officer named James T. Kirk?
"I don't really want to get specific about it, but we're not talking about a tiny change. We're talking about a change that is going to, to some degree, alter our mission"
Maybe Archer will change into a woman, he's touchy feely enough already.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
They kill off Firefly halfway through the first season but let Enterprise go on for three years. Shheesh.
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
Said in the paper today its Bill Shatners birthday 2day, hes 72(yipes!). Happy... Birthday!, Captain.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I really wanna hear from CleverNickName
And screw the political sidestepping of the issue. Wil, how would _YOU_ fix it? WWWWD? Inquiring minds want to know!
Don't make me get my dueling glove.
best web host ever
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...
Archer wakes up with Suzanne Pleshette in his cozy bed. We realize the whole thing has been a dream and Archer is really a balding Chicago psychologist.
Time travellers from the future reveal that future Trek series will suck just as badly. In a last ditch effort to save Enterprise, the crew must travel back in time and assassinate Rick Berman.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Scene:
Enterprise Bridge. Archer occupies the captain's chair, his crew working busily around him. Archer suddenly sits bolt upright, and then sags as if exhausted.
Archer: I feel a great disturbance in the force.
Crew: The whaa?
My guess would be that they've finished the Saliban so its only natural to work on the next nemesis of the galactic peace, Piraq.
They're getting older though... It'd be "Star Trek: Seniors in Space". Although ST has been shit since DS9, I mean... Come on, It's ben way too much ficussed on "character building", I want some action too. I'm sure that even in the future normal human arrogance, greed and innate hostility still remain. Coupled with big-ass spaceships, this SHOULD make an excellent combo. Instead, we're getting to see how Sisco governs a space station with mentally incapable crew, a less annoying incarnation of Wesley Crusher and Silly Putty as a security officer, with the supporting cast of the one and only non-hostile Cardassian and a derelict Ferengi whose brother has the Ferengi equivalent of Down syndrom. Yay.
I'm not even going to mention Voyager. Come on, dealing with the Borg to attack another, even more powerful species and STILL win, with a ship that's build for long range exploration/scouting. I mean, Picard had his ass kicked by the Borg and that was the fcking FLAGSHIP. Also, Janeway is an idiot. "Oh no, we're 75 years away from home! Instead of the quickest route home, we'll visit every little cloud of dust we see and seriously ruin any culture we come across! Tally-ho!"
No more Star Trek for me, I'll miss Shatner and his magically ripped shirts, along with Patrick Stewart and his shiny dome...
Hate me!
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..." :)
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.
I've all but given up on Enterprise, it's even worse the Voyager. No, not the show. The fact that now that UPN runs the show, there's not enough episodes.
They play rerun after rerun during the season. I can understand one or two, for a holiday or something.. I've gotten to the point where I assume it's going to be another rerun.
How do they think this is good for the show? Especially considering the show is 2 seasons old, there's not a lot of old episodes to show.
I think the fourth episode of Enterprise was a rerun of the second.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Actual cliffhangers considered by Paramount:
Sorry, that was one was added by me.
The best TV-watching decision I've made all year was deleting Enterprise from my list of TiVo Season Passes. I'm a huge DS9 fan (still rewatching episodes as they air), I watched every episode of the other series (well, I missed a few Voyagers, I think you understand), but I can't believe people are still watching Enterprise.
The Slashdot story I'm waiting to hear is that Terry Nation's Survivors is coming out on DVD. Terry Nation was a science fiction script writer who could actually write.
I can't stand it. I tried to watch it when it started but the opening theme music is so freaking painful that I am forced to change channels or just turn the tv off in shock.
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.
T'pol and Archer have a baby together - and it's Kirk
He's already destroyed star trek and he's digging an even deeper hole for himself (to soon be filled with molten lead).
Enterprise has already broken the star trek timeline so many times that it's just not funny anymore. The plot lines are cheesy rip-offs and hold no future for the show.
I bet his idea of "quite startling" is "implied nudity" and "cliffhanger" is "predictable ending" and "new twist" is "old and abused nonsense."
Well, maybe for the first season or two. And it definitely was not typical trek wherein you had one episode that could stand fairly well on it's own. DS9 got to be a very good political soap opera, and I mean that as a compliment - you'd think being based on a space station would be limitting, but it explored whole new areas of trek that had never been done before - how starfleet runs, how the federation conducts diplomacy, how religion and advanced science may not be totally different. On the original series and TNG you knew who the good guys were. On DS9, you just had guys, and sometimes they were good, and sometimes they wern't.
The tradeoff is you pretty much had to watch it every week for it to make sense and play well, but that's not exactly unique to that show (West Wing comes to mind.)
As for Enterprise, I would probably watch it if it wasn't in the same timeslot as West Wing.
As for Berman, he's an idiot. The studio stuck a studio guy in what is a creative man's job. He's trying to make Trek work by doing what worked for Trek before, not realizing that worked for Trek before was doing something that Trek had never done.
The Borg wern't cool because they're the Borg. The Borg were cool because they were something Trek had never seen. Like Tribbles and evil copies of main characters from a parallel dimension, they're only good for so many episodes.
paintball
The title should read:
"Rick Berman: Enterprise may not suck next year, but it probably still will."
Sorry for the mixup.
paintball
I'm talking about mixing in some suspense and drama with the sci-fi/speculative fiction.
Kill some characters off. Make the ones that don't change. Have a plot that lasts. The soft-porn sections are (let's be honest) nice, but I'd trade them for a plot.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I have serious doubts that John de Lancie would reprise his role as the "Q". I saw him at a convention once (yeah, I was a Trekkie geek) and he was truly a complete asshole. He downplays his role as "Q" because he wants to be recognized for his other work in various soaps like Days of our Lives and things like that. IMO a totally egomaniacal jerk who doesn't appreciate Trek fans at all. If Berman and company wanted to use a "Q" character, I think they'd do well to just cast someone entirely different. After all, there wasn't just one "Q" (de Lancie), but a whole "race" of them if you recall.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I think the whole status of the franchise can be summed up with the opening theme for Enterprise. Hands down, people hate that song. Sure, there may be one or two fans, but for the most part, it sucks.
When asked about the backlash brought on by the atrocious theme, Rick Berman's response was "I like it". That there, to me, is the whole problem. Berman doesn't give a shit about what anyone else thinks. If he likes it, good to go. And, since Berman has shitty taste and doesn't know the first thing about Trek, we're stuck with substandard crap.
Bring on 7 of 9!
She, with her big boobs and tight jumpsuit, managed to improve the ratings of Voyager so much (and disgusted me enough to stop watching it) that it kept going for years.
So, bring in a crossover with her and the show will do fine. Of course, it will stop being believable, but who cares if you can see a nice chick with big booms in a jumpsuit?
bash$
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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 --.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
The problem with Enterprise is that the basis is time travel and crummy technology. It was doomed from the start. Both of these plot devices force the writers to cheat, back peddle, and generally create unbelievable plots. The best thing the writers can do is to assume a good enough ship, ditch the time travel arch, and concentrate on character development and other basics of good story telling.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd argue the whole temporal war subplot is a big clue that the universe that Archer and co. inhabit is not the same universe that begets classic Star Trek, TNG, DS9, and Voyager.
If they bring the Borg into it, that'll be the final straw - we're talking about a parallel timeline... maybe one spawned after the crew of the Enterprise E (and their Borg hitchikers) interfere with Cochrane and first contact. Remember, the Queen was trying to contact the Borg of that era - who's to say she didn't succeed?
Anyways, that's how I treat Enterprise - as a non-canonical spinoff. Makes it much easier to accept all these anachronisms they keep introducing.
Nevermind that they had never been heard of prior to the last season of The Next Generation, and nevermind that Voyager already tried to ret-con it so that Seven of Nine's parents actually knew about them prior to the events of "The Best of Both Worlds," and nevermind that each successive appearance of the Borg in TV and film has made them less interesting, but can the writers come up with no better ideas? Even after the Borg were introduced in The Next Generation, the writers kept trying new things and didn't rely on them. Deep Space Nine's Dominion plotline was dramatically insulting, but they found a way to deal with non-Borg life. Voyager I can understand, since that show took place a long way away from the Federation, but... but... Enterprise?!?
Mr. Berman, hear this: If you have to rely on the Borg to make your show interesting, you need new writers! And quick!
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
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.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
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
Here's what's going to happen:
Young James Tiberius Kirk is rescued from a giant space rat or something. They let him drive the ship for a little bit, but Wesley Crusher visits from the future, and convinces Kirk that it's a really really bad idea, so Kirk leaves the ship to train as an Iron Chef (Iron Klingon). The entire timeline is changed, except for Wesley, who now travels in a battered blue police box, and is thus immune from the changes he has wrought.
In the meantime, when the Klingons attack Earth after trying Kirk's attempt to cook gagh, and a Vulcan shuttle transporting young Sarek crashlands onto the Picard vineyards, killing the entire family. Just to play it safe. The bistro in New Orleans where Sisko came from can stay. Good restaurants in New Orleans are surprisingly hard to find.
Finally, young Checkov discovers that he has psychic powers, and the rest of Starfleet travels off to meet the Minbari.
OK, we could only wish. But the ultimate problem with what Star Trek has evolved (devolved?) into is that the producers don't actually have a story to tell. They have episodes, and a made-by-committee chronowar goulash to hold it all together. They just don't get it. They need a continuing story, where you can't get everything if you miss a couple of episodes.
They also need to start killing off redshirts. No one on the crew has died so far (at least on the episodes I've watched). I want to see Crewman Jones choke to death on space pollen. I want to see a crew member shipped home because of genetic damage caused by routine exposure to the Warp V engine. I want to see some sacrifice here, space people.
I wanna see them complete f*ck up an undeveloped world trying to do good, resulting in the creation of the Prime Directive. It's got to be bloody, and horrible. I want to see them drop off on an unsuspecting planet that really nice scientist who thinks that the Nazis could have been a good idea - but he's really just an evil Nazi bastard like all of them are and secretly went there to create the Fourth Reich in all its glory. [want an alternate universe story? Starfleet vs. Nazis armed by the Klingons].
AND, they need to drop all of their useful crutches, that means:
1. No holo-anything. Not even holo-trinkets from Vulcan.
2. No transporter malfunctions that result in anything other than painful and irreversable death.
3. No mirror-universe
4. No mirrors - let's play it safe here.
5. No Borg
6. No Q. OK, maybe Q, but they can't remember ANY of it at the end of the episode.
7. No time travel chrono war. Have it all resolved in a very special episode with special guest stars Wil Wheaton and John DeLancie.
8. No decon gel. Let's get real, folks. Just let them have space-sex, and we'll get all the fan service we want. Just give us an honest space-erotic massage, and I'll be happy.
Need a plot? War with the Klingons. War with the Romulans. Peace protestors at home. Vulcan and French disapproval of Starfleet military intervention.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
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.
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.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Archer:
tall man with glass jaw
why do you talk so strangely?
your father watches
Hoshi:
sad little Hoshi
Universal Translator
her only lover
Mayweather:
silent, empty chair
what is my function, captain?
the captain hears not
Tucker:
banjo pickin' boy
leave space before she bites you
on your redneck ass
Reed:
they are all your foes
you're only course, sacrifice
serve the greater good
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Enterprise sucks for the same reason that The Young Indiana Jones sucked, it is little more than a vehicle for left-wing politically correct propaganda. The producers behind Young Indiana Jones seemed to believe that using special effects to make it look like they were filming in exotic places would actually make people want to watch despite the fact that the show itself was little more than a gimick to push PC. Enterprise seems to rely on Ms. Spocks cleavage for the same purpose. Personally I like the little asian translator girl better, but neither is enough to make me want to watch the show. A perfect example of the shows purpose as propaganda can be seen in the "AIDS awareness" episode called Stigma. The details of this can be seen here:
http://www.trektoday.com/news/010203_03.shtml
I don't know about you, but I've been aware of AIDS for almost 20 years now and I don't need Rick Berman and company to tell me about it.
It would be so nice if the producers understood that stories that are little more than contrivances and vehicles for political and social propaganda aren't something that people are going to relate to. The sad thing is, the people behind this program probably don't even realize what they're doing. Hollywood is so intellectually inbred that they probably believe the programs they're creating will actually resonate with audiences. While these shows might resonate with the people behind the camera, out here in the real world they come accross as a steaming pile of PC.
The job of television programming is to entertain. It is NOT the job of television programming to propagandize. Whenever the people behind a program become deluded into believing that they can use the show to push whatever social or political ideology they subscribe to, the quality invariably suffers.
Part of what makes Farscape so great is that the show doesn't have an agenda beyond entertaining its audience. It makes me wonder if the fact that it is an US/Australian production has anything to do with that. Did the producers have to leave the country before they could make a decent show? What role did its lack of preachiness play in USA network's decision to cancel it? If you ask me, they cancelled it because it makes the rest of their lineup look like a bad joke. I'm almost afraid to see what its replacement, Tremors, is going to be like. How can one create a sustained story line from such a simplistic plot as people running away from underground monsters? Its good enough for an action movie, but hardly something that makes for a weekly TV show.
I can't really complain though since I almost never watch TV. Farscape and Stargate are about the only things I make an effort to watch on a regular basis, and now that Farscape has been killed off I suspect I won't even bother to tune in for Stargate.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This sounds like a good way to buy into the series. Unfortunately, deciding it's a parallel universe doesn't help me to ignore the hackneyed writing. Considering the number of Trek fans out there, and assuming there are some in the movie/television industry, why can't they bring in some GOOD writers?
Whatever bad things might be said about Voyager, and to a slightly lesser extent DS9, at least they tried to take things into different directions at times. For all its faults, Voyager was a starfleet vessel with no contact with starfleet (until near the end) and a non-starfleet crew - at least an interesting concept that was only ruined by the apparent insistence on letting that ship get by too easily, IMO. DS9 showed that the Federation isn't pure goodness and light (for example, by showing starfleeters at their worst while in a "real" war as opposed to capital ships throwing broadsides at each other) and brought religion into the mix.
What fresh ideas has Enterprise given us? I haven't noticed any myself (a temporal "cold war" just seems dumb, especially the way they've handled it). Good Lord, they even made the first officer VULCAN - the antithesis of originality. Enterprise, to me, is Rick Berman trying to do ST:TNG again - and not the good episodes...more like the first season of TNG which was filled with rip-offs from the original series.
Ah well, I shouldnt be saying anything at all since I'm not watching it anymore (the last three episodes before they started reruns again finally convinced me they had nothing original). I'll take a look at Enterprise again in two years or so, assuming it's still on, and see if it's managed to become interesting. That method worked for me on DS9.
- Tossing in the Defiant will fix Deep Space Nine because now they can get off the station (well, they could with the runabouts too, but those weren't cool enough)
- Tossing in Worf will fix Deep Space Nine because now we'll have Klingons, and Klingons R Kool
- Tossing in a big multi-year bunch of B5-envy will fix Deep Space Nine because we didn't know what this show was supposed to be about in the first place, and the Bajoran/Cardassian thing is getting boring.
- Tossing in Seven of Nine and killing off Kes will fix Voyager because Borg R Bitchin' and you can never have too much of them
- Jumping 10 years closer to home will fix Voyager because everything we've set up with the Kayzon and the plague and stuff just isn't working
Sigh. I believe anime term for this kind of viewer abuse by a long-running series is "Tenchi Restart Money-Grab". It's obnoxious, and nobody should be falling for it anymore.- "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.You mean they're finally going to change the theme song?
and the Vulcan is a poor man's 7 of 9.
If Jolene Blalock is a poor man's Jeri Ryan, I want to be the most penniless pauper in the world.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Perhaps Berman is finally resigning! That would improve the show no end!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Let's face some basic facts, kids.
SciFi on the TV/big screen is nearly dead. Why? Well, it's not lack of plotlines or new stories.
There are literally thousands of scifi books out there with original plotlines.
It's because Hollywood execs are braindead. They don't want to take risks anymore.
They are not willing to take risks because these shows cost money. Whoa. Duh.
It's all about ratings, beancounters and return on the dollar.
Where's the modern Roddenberry when we need him?
Jackson seems close...
Herder of Catz
The Pied Piper was an amateur.
SG-1 has gone downhill in the past few years. SciFi has been rerunning all the episodes at a frantic rate so I've gotten the chance to compare new against old. (if it weren't for TiVo, I wouldn't be able to keep up).
StarGate has all but dropped the mythology and the integration of sci fi and ancient civilization stuff... In past years, they were able to weave an incredible tale based on facts of Egyptian Mythology. Recently, they have pretty much forgotten this stuff. The cliffhanger this year has the opportunity to bring that back though.
We jump to the year 2258, 10 years after the Earth-Klingon war. Earth is enjoying a period of peace, albeit a fragile one.
A coalition of governments, led by the humans, have constructed a space station, let's call it Beladon 6. It is located in nuetral territory orbiting a planet called Eksilop 2.
The purpose of this station is to provide a place for humans and aliens to work out their differences in peace. It's a home away from home for diplomats, officers, wanderers, business people and others.
Jonathan Archer is put in charge of the station, at the request of the Klingons, which is kinda strange.
By the end of 2258, nothing is the same any more. The Klingon ambassador names Volann, has put herself into some sort of cacoon, and a mysterious alien presence has made an appearance. These aliens appear to be immensely more powerful than any other race around.
We then jump ahead to 2259, where captain Archer has, mercifully, been reassigned to duty on the Klingon homeworld. Strangely, the series seems to improve considerably after that. To replace him is captain Sherinnian, a war hero of the Earth-Klingon war.
About this time, Volann comes out of her cocoon and is a human-Klingon hybrid named Torres (no relation). We also meet a species called the Suliban who use technological means to simulate the effects of magic. We learn in a spin-off series of books that they were created by the mystery race to be weapons.
Sherinnian and Volann fall in love, get married and have a child, but who really cares about that crap anyway.
The mysterious alien race send an agent to speak to all the ambassadors on the station. Along with him are invisible members of the alien race, who we later find out has a name so long we could never pronounce it, so we just call them species 8472 (again, no relation).
Aaaanyway...
Sherinnian leads a coalition of the will... no, an army of light... no, a FEDERATION!, in a war against species 8472. We finally beat them by not fighting at all (don't ask), but we later find out that they had dark allies serving them that are just as dangerous, called the Borg. We'll be dealing with them for a LONG time.
There's also some crap a few seasons down the road about people with telepathic abilities, and Berman and Braga expertly set up a war between them and mundanes for the NEXT Star Trek series, which should start some time around Enterprise' fifth season.
Hmmmm... this all sounds kinda familiar actually...
Don't worry... at the end, Q shows up, resets the timeline and Enterprise goes back to sucking hairy moose cock again.
All I keep watching for is the slim hope that one of Hoshi's tits will pop out during a gel scene and the editors and censors will miss it.
God this show sucks!
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Well, never one to keep my opinions to myself, I hereby bravely head in to the breach.
Until Enterprise came along, I hated Star Trek. I didn't find ANY of it entertaining, from TOS, DS9, and whatever else was out there. I gave every new series a shot because it was considered the 'geek-correct' thing to do. For years I hid my shame, and hid my disdain for ST.... No longer!
Yes, you read that right - I'm a geek, I hate Star Trek, and love enterprise... Mod away!
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Rick:
"I think our final episode of the season is going to be quite startling because we're going to do a cliffhanger"
Mullet:
"Um, Rick, what series season finale doesn't end with a cliffhanger?"
Rick:
"We're talking about a change that is going to, to some degree, alter our mission and, to some degree, change the tone of the series"
Mullet:
Oh, I see. So we're moving away from seeking out new life and exploring new civilizations now? Gotcha. Good call. That was overrated anyway."
Rick:
"The Expanse" will continue a Klingon story arc beginning in "Judgment" and also introduce an attack on planet Earth
Mullet:
"Ah yes... I heard about that VERY SIGNIFIGANT EVENT from the other Trek series... Yes, so memorable it wasn't mentioned by anybody before this series... Very sneaky. You should get a +1 Insightful."
Rick:
"One of [the last four episodes] is going to be a fascinating Borg encounter," he told the mag. "Which is interesting in that Starfleet had never heard of the Borg before Picard. So we have managed to deal with that in what I feel is a very interesting fashion."
Mullet:
"The Borg! Wow! Wait, let me guess-- The crew will A) Forget of their existance by the end of the ep or B) Not recognize them as Borg and feel their presence so insignificant as not to report it in the chain of command thereby filling Picard with COMPLETE surprise three centuries later when he encounters them. Like the Ferrengi. I'm sensing a trend here, Rick."
Rick:
"We've discussed everything from a young 'Sarek' to 'Q' [John de Lancie] to 'Kirk' [William Shatner]."
Mullet:
"I understand, Rick. That's kinda what happens when you have the creative genious of a rock. Gotta fall back on something, and far be it from me to suggest that something be original..."
You know, I can already see it... By the time Rick is done with this series, it's going to look like it's been through a blender on frappe'. It will be like the Star Trek V or Highlander 2 of the trek series-- Universally maligned and disowned. Many will pretend such a mistake simply never existed. The Borg? Serek? Q?! As if the time travel crutch weren't enough, you have to rape all of the other series for their creativity as well? Somebody picked AT RANDOM with absolutely no directing experience from the Slashdot crowd could do a better job than this spider monkey... I move we file Intent of Assination. All in favor?
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