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Enterprise Getting New Aliens, Hairdos, Weapons
Steve Krutzler writes "The news about Enterprise's radical "new direction" for its third season is going mainstream on May 10th in TV Guide. Rick Berman reveals that the season finale will bring about major changes in the struggling Star Trek series for next year including new aliens, new weapons, new hairdos and a mission he calls a Star Trek "first."" I've felt like the show has been slipping all season, so here's hoping.
Shouldn't Trek get it's own topic icon?
On a side note, I'm willing to give the "new" show a try. The last couple episodes have been pretty good, and it looks like they are making some sort of an effort to address falling ratings and concerns. Of course, if the "new direction" turns out to be a trip straight South, I would bet that Enterprise won't see a 4th season.
I just wish that in terms of production values: 1) They ditch the catsuit for T'Pol. No real Vulcan would dress like that...it's degrading. 2) They would spend a bit more time designing makeup. Bumpy foreheads don't cut it anymore and make the show look quite cheap. 3) The music needs to be a lot more thematic and bombastic. It's been slightly better lately but like the makeup, "sonic wallpaper" doesn't cut it. Give us dramatic, emotional music!
-James
"Just somehow bring the Borg into an episode. That'll sell it. Oh wait, they're already doing that.... "
Even if this ep bombs, there's still some potential here. (Note: I'll never forgive Voyager for pussifying the Borg.)
What this episode proves (assuming a rumor I read is true...) is that Enterprise takes place after the Enterprise-E visited Earth in First Contact. There are a few ramifications here. This closes up most of the continuity holes that people keep bitching about, which means that Enterprise isn't locked any particular chain of events. Earth could go into a bloody war with the Vulcans.
The potential here is that the future of the Federation could be rewritten. Anybody remember "Yesterday's Enterprise" where the Enterprise-C jumped into the future and altered the timeline?
Even more interesting, what if we're watching the chain of events that caused the Federation to behave more like an Empire in the paralell universe that Kirk found himself in due to a transporter accident?
In any case, it's up to to the B&B team to actually make good use of this. I'm not ready to bet money yet. I can say, though, that last night's episode had a rather startling ending. If that's a sign of things to come, then we might start to see DS9's style of drama percolating up to Enterprise. That'd be a welcome evolution for this series. It is a little on the sterile side.
"Derp de derp."
I do think the Borg have been done to death. They were at their best in Next Generation, and I still give props to whoever thought them up in the first place. Definitely one of the most original sci-fi enemies ever.
I couldn't stand their portrayal in First Contact (the idea of self-aware Borg queens will never sit with me) but at least they retained the menace they kept from Next Generation. Voyager was where they were finally ruined for me; they appeared in a disproportionate number of episodes, becoming less and less menacing, almost comical. This isn't something that has to happen as one grows more familiar with an enemy.
Now in Enterprise, the Borg are showing up yet again, and the audience is already way ahead of the game. I'd like to think that the writers are cleverly establishing the Borg as a hidden, secret determinant of much of humankind's history, with connections and impacts deeper than most realize. I'd like to think that, because it's either that or they've simply run out of ideas.
The coolest voice ever.
God, yeah....Berman's idea of a different culture is one with an opressed third gender? Woah! That's innovation! And there's a male and female of the species and they're married? Unbelievable....
I've thought (and still do) that Enterprise had the most potential since TNG, which I rather enjoyed most times. The biggest mistakes have been a) trying to hard to shoehorn foreshadowing of every bloody event in the future into the show, b) slavishly obeying the "resolve in one episode" law (I'm very surprised that Berman's talking about going with a longer story arc - he's said in more than one interview that that was a bad and stupid idea), c) worrying way too much about consistency with the rest of the ST universe.
Theoretically, they were trying to branch out a bit, bring in some new audience to the show. And frankly, the whole ST universe needs a good shaking up. It really wouldn't have hurt them a lot to pay lip service to continuity, but ignore it when it made the story better.
Oh, yeah, and fire Berman. Get someone in there who can write a story without resorting to travel to other timelines.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I agree with those saying there's been no imagination in coming up with new Star Trek series. They are all carbon copies of each other, with the possible exception of DS9.
In the vein of different Star Trek stories, has anyone read the novel(s) "The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh?" It's in two parts, and I'm impatiently waiting for the second to appear in paperback.
I know this is just slightly off-topic, but I must talk about it!
The story (obviously) follows the life of Khan. However, in an absolute stroke of genius, the writer also included the character of Gary Seven, the mysterious alien-bred human introduced in the original series. The episode was clearly being set up to be spun off, but never did.
As I said before, I think that putting Gary Seven and Khan on the same stage (or rather, realizing that they would have been contemporaries) was a stroke of genius. They're both genetically enhanced, but with completely opposite political and personal ideologies.You could not ask for two men more perfectly crafted to oppose each other in a dramatic conflict.
Gary Seven was sent to Earth to quietly pull strings and guide world events for the betterment of the human race. Khan actually has similar motives, but intends to fix the world by forcibly taking control of everything. He's not the obsessed villain of ST:TWOK (not yet, anyway), and he's a thoroughly believable character.
It's amazing that the stage, the plot, and the characters for this story could all emerge by accident! When you realize they were on the same planet at the same time, you realize they must have butted heads.
Make a miniseries of this, I say. I'd be all over it.
BTW, if you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. There's a little bit of gratuitous reference-dropping, but I have nothing else bad to say about it. Read it!
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I agree that there is a potential for history to be rewritten, but I think the "Yesterday's Enterprise" episode would be a bad example. In the time travel scenarios in the original Star Trek and the The Next Generation, we've been seeing self reenforcing loops in time.
Take "Yesterday's Enterprise". If the Enterprise-D had never helped the Enterprise-C in the "original" timeline, wouldn't the C have been destroyed? They were on the verge of destruction before they went forward in time. My understanding was that history had never really been rewritten, except for the short span of time where the "C" had gone into the future. When the "C" went back, they eventually caused the Klingon-Federation peace treaty and the normal timeline was made possible. Nothing the "C" did has caused the normal timeline to be any different from our perspective. Any evidence of Tasha Yar existing in the past was erased as far as the Federation knew until Sela Yar made her appearance later.
Also, in the "Voyage Home", the Enterprise crew didn't make any changes to the past that we'd be aware of. A couple of whales and a whale researcher disappeared. Kirk sold off his pair of glasses, which he later re-acquired as antiques. Scotty gave away transparent aluminum technology, but then points out that maybe the guy he gave it to was recorded as the inventor anyway.
And in "First Contact", we don't really know that history turned out to be any different than the way the Next Generation crew had originally perceived it. There hasn't (yet) been any evidence of it. Cochrane did everything they remembered him doing. And in all the cases where they divulged the future to Cochrane, it might have made him do all the things they remembered him to have done.
The only case I remember of a non-sustaining loop in time was that TNG episode where the Enterprise-D kept getting destroyed until Data figured out what message to send back to get them out of the loop. That might establish the possibility in Trekdom that history can be rewritten. All that Star Trek series might just be one iteration of that non-sustaining loop.
That would be really lame of B&B to do this. But I wouldn't put it past them. They've already demonstrated that they have little regard for Roddenberry's work. Hasn't Braga been quoted as saying that he didn't like the original Star Trek series? Honestly, if those guys want to rejuvinate Star Trek they don't need to rewrite Star Trek history. They could try sticking to the spirit of Star Trek instead of just recycling old plots and techonobabble. How often did the original Star Trek revisit planets or mention the events of previous episodes? Star Trek 2 might have been the first time that's happened.
But I'm not saying that every episode should be independant. Babylon 5's strength was that hardly anything happened in an episode that wasn't important later on. But even Babylon 5 had a introduction, middle, and conclusion. It was like a novel told over 5 years. But there was a real ending, and the ending had signficance. But Star Trek just drags on now. If B&B want creative freedom, maybe they shouldn't have made a show that occurs between First Contact and the original Star Trek. Haven't we explored Vulcans to death by now? It was interesting the first time around with Spock, and probably because he was only half Vulcan.
Even if this ep bombs, there's still some potential here. (Note: I'll never forgive Voyager for pussifying the Borg.)
Dude, Voyager didn't pussify the Borg -- Next Gen did it.
Remember when we first saw them, and they were all bad ass? They were adjusting their shields for different phaser frequencies and stuff?
Then there was that whole Locutus thing . . . man, that sucked for us.
But through it all, the Borg were kicking ass, and not even bothering to take names . . . until some last-season Next Gen episode (forgive me or not knowing the title) where all it took to kill a Borg was popping the little tube out of its face.
What?!
From certain death for all humans, to falling down in a spray of liquid nitrogen just like that?
Worst. Screwing up of a cool bad guy. EVER.