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'Star Trek: Enterprise' Cancelled?
Tycoon Guy writes "There seems to be no avoiding it this season: TrekToday is reporting that the Enterprise production crew has been told they will all be fired in March, after completing filming on another four episodes. If true, that leaves only very little time to participate in the Save Enterprise campaign. But even if Enterprise is cancelled, all may not be lost: Rick Berman said today he's working on a new Trek feature film that will have "a larger scope and budget" than ever."
I think I'm not alone in saying this, but if Rick Berman were to show up on my porch selling Star Trek cookies, I think I'd still slam the door in his face.
I'm sick of having the next "Trek thing" shoved in front of me as though I'm supposed to care. Enough already.
Who'd a thunk that "Star Trek" at this time would be a dead horse, and "Battlestar Galactica" would be hot?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I need to emphasize the parent. He is dead on.
As a Star Trek fan, call me a trekkie, trekker, whatever(and no I don't dress like a klingon), who's watched the original series, TNG, DS9, Voyager, this man(Berman), has simply destroyed this franchise.
I hope they cancel this show for good and Berman never works with sci-fi again. The man has no idea what he's doing. The storylines are so bad high school seniors can come up with better storylines.
Let some FRESH ideas from some FRESH new people make it to the screen/TV.
IIRC UPN moved enterprise to friday (from its original wednesday) up against the much stronger (in that slot) stargate. This means that Sci fi fans are competing on which show they will watch, as opposed to being able to easily watch *both* which would ensure better rating for the now much less crappy Enterprise.
Instead of dragging out ideas that were rejected for TNG, DS9, and Voyager (and we all know of more than a few stinkers that made it there anyways), they should just stop making the stuff for a while. Give the fans a chance to hunger again. Then, perhaps in 2009 or so, crank up the machine and have at it again.
But, as long as there's a buck to be bled out of the franchise, they'll probably instead just keep cranking out crap. That's a truism in our vertically integrated Hollywood these days. Heck, /.ers might like to pick on them, but the fact is that you don't even need B & B to ruin it anymore...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I know everyone loves to bash Berman, but to be honest, the problem isn't him. Rather, after twenty seasons of Star Trek, pretty much every plot had already been exhausted. If you think he was the first to recycle material, well- how many times did the crew get "trapped" in a holodeck world in ST:TNG?
There's a reason many call it Soap In Space. It's been formulaic and recycled for almost twenty years. The real problem is that the whole ST formula has completely worn out to the extent that no Vulcan sexiness will bring it back.
Please help metamoderate.
for the plotline comparing Vulcans to homosexuals.
You know...how the "bad intolerant Vulcans" wanted to oppress a minor group of Vulcans who couldn't help the fact that they could mind meld...they were just born that way!
The analogy was as clever as a knock knock joke as as obvious as a Mack truck sitting in your living room. It blew hundreds of episodes of Vulcan lore and mythology for a poor imitation of the Trek of years past.
Let's take a look at how the real Trek series handled controversial issues. TOS has the half-black/half-whites fighting the half-white/half-blacks. Still a classic and balls out the most in-your-face episode about racism I think I've seen in sci-fi. You could put the most inbred confederate-flag-waving Klan member down in front of that episode and he'd be the one who laughs and says what a ridiculous notion is was.
TNG was I think the first to tackle the issue of homosexuality where Riker visits that unisex planet and discovers that sometimes people are born with a sex, and have to hide it. The unisex angle was reallly smart because even a conserative Christian could understand what it would be like if they were stripped of their sexual identify (especially since they are very big on enforcing sexual identity, girls dress/act one way, boy's another). Even at a time where gay rights issues were barely on the map, that episode raised a very valid what-if that applied to any viewer.
DS9, while making it an obvious pandering to ratings by scheduling the episode during sweeps, also I think did good work with the Jax/lesbian episode. The issue was touched on earlier when Beverly Crusher fell in love with the first Trill/symbiote on a TNG episode, but at the end when the symbiote was put in a female host, it was a sad end to the relationship. DS9 took the other direction, where Jax still felt love despite the change and had a relationship with a woman. I don't know if this was the first lesbian kiss on television or not...but it wsa definitely something that riled people up. Still a little pandering tho...I mean, the symbiote could have just as easily been in an older less attractive female host...
Back to Enterprise. All Berman/Braga did was take the most generic tale of gay oppression and replace all instances of the word "people" with "Vulcan" and "sex" with "mind meld".
Somehow, I don't see this episode as becoming the theme song for the gay rights movement. What it did too was take all of the nobility and enlightenment of the previous four seasons worth of Vulcans and flush it down the toilet. The Vulcans who showed up on Earth back in First Contact were supposed to be these enlighted souls who had unified their planet after decades of war, who had turned away from emotion that let to nothing but conflict and embraced pure logic, who had conquered space and really owned the galaxy as far as it had been explorered.
Now, thanks to Berman/Braga, the Vulcan's are no better than humans, there's civil war, people getting high on emotions, racism/meldism, leaders using terrorism as a pretext for wiping out followers of another religion (cough cough, gee I wonder what analogy that is)
It's enough to make Sarak role in his future grave and make any Trek fan vomit in disgust. If there's anything that Trek fans would consider sacriledge, I have to believe it's turning the Vulcans into the squabbling mess that Enterprise depicts.
I'd rather watch a series that followed the life and times of the Voyager Borg kids than watch a single episode of Enterprise.
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Enterprise has a really good cast, but the format or even the Star Trek genre is just stale and tired right now.
A popular theme here seems to be that Star Trek is worn out, tired, needs rest.
This is ridiculous. You got a space ship and an infinite universe, and you can't think of any original story lines? This is simply poor writing. Bring in good people and Star Trek could change tomorrow.
Lets see...
Voyager was about a ship lost in space, evading aliens and trying to get back to earth.
Battlestar Galactica is about...err..a ship lost in space, evading aliens and trying to get back to earth.
The reason only one of those sucks is the writing, producing, directing.
I know everyone loves to bash Berman, but to be honest, the problem isn't him.
You're confusing "honest" with misinformed/delusional.
I've been a Berman hater since 1991. Why? Because of a magazine article I have where he explains all that he thinks that is wrong with Star Trek. He basically lists all the reason why Star Trek became a phenomenon instead of a forgotten low-budget campy sci-fi show.
He hates the humanist message.
He hates the bridge cammaraderie.
He hates the para-military Starfleet mainly in charge of commercial space travel, exploration and self defense.
He hates the techno-eutopia of earth.
He hates the idea that humanity could grow and become better than it is now.
He hates the entire message that Gene Roddenberry gave us.
He then described how he thought Star Trek should be, and you know what it was? Exactly what the first 3 years of Enterprise was: Darker, lower tech, on-ship conflicts, etc.
When Gene Roddenberry died, they had a bust of him made. That bust was in Rick Berman's office, with a blindfold and earplugs on, because he damn well knew that Gene would not approve of what he was doing to his creation.
And you know what? The fans don't approve either, the commercial partners don't approve, the ratings don't approve.
The only reason his endaevours haven't COMPLETELY tanked is because of the recognizable brand-name. He's been riding the inertia of Star Trek's past quality, but he's been making nothing but crap since.
Rick Berman must die. Nothing short of this will save Star Trek: It's in the hands of am egomaniac who's been twisting something beloved by generations of sci-fi fans into his lame, insipid vision.
Had he made these shows from scratch instead of abusing a known setting, he would never had made it past a single season.
You can't take the sky from me...