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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."
This season was much improved, and much closer to fans' original expectations. I'm afraid Sci-Fi's decision to move Stargate an hour earlier against it pretty much cemented the cancellation, though.
Note that's not actually a denial that the show is about to be cancelled, however, so let's proceed assuming that it is on the chopping block. Can't say I'd be too surprised by that -- once Enterprise got in the Friday night timeslot-'o-doom, it was definately on the road to rerunville. Oh well. Ever since I got my TiVO, I've come to view watching TV as having X amount of time each week to sit and veg with the shows I like, and frankly I can use the extra time to spend on more deserving shows.
Enterprise got quite a bit better the last two seasons, but it never actually got very good. In a lot of ways, it's like watching a clumsy kid playing sports or President Bush giving a speech -- you know they're going to screw up, so each minute that they don't is like a little victory. Given that, it's hard for me to imagine that there are actually people looking to save the series. I mean, why?
At least they waited until Battlestar Galactica got started up -- now there's a show I actually look forward to. Frankly, Enterprise only stayed on my viewing schedule into season 3 because I was too lazy to remove the series record from my TiVO.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Enterprise was actually getting pretty good - better than some seasons of the other series in fact. I know I kept watching it. Of course it had the prequel-with-better-looking-technology-than-the-se quel problem and a few difficulties fitting in with accepted ST history ,but when there's so much of it, it't pretty impossible to be consistent with everything. I will certainly be joining this campaign.
I am trolling
I was even going to do a version of their theme-song telling them it was time to lay it down for a while.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If you havent watched season 4 yet, go and watch a few episodes. It is great especally after manny coto took over. It is mostly 3 part arcs which have tons of good story and character development. Topics covered include the future vulcans, foundation of the federation, romulan war, kingon ridges. I think had it been like this since the beginning, it would be a very beloved series. It would be bad to cut it just when it strted getting good.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Yeah, that Transporter episode was pretty bad. It's gotten to the point where the producers and writers are having people like Brent Spiner guest star on it in an effort to save the show, but it ain't working. Last season was pretty good, I thought. But this season isn't going so well. The disjointed single episode thing just doesn't carry me as well as a season-long plot. It doesn't help matters that the last few Star Trek series rely on gimmicks to pull them along. Voyager had the Borg (lots and lots and lots of Borg), and Enterprise has lots of time travel. Bah. At least on DS9 you could go to Quark's and get hammered if an episode was starting to suck.
Personally, I thought the Xindi storyline was quite good.
Then this awful, awful storyline on Soong's mutants or whatever. Almost too painful to watch. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
Then the Vulcan thing - pretty good again. But, alas, that storyline seems to have come to a somewhat abrupt close.
I haven't seen the latest episode. Tivo tells me it's about transporter technology or something. I wish they could have extended the Vulcan thing, I think there is some good stuff to explore there.
I just think the show has been uneven, not horrible, when you average the good and the bad you kind of end up on the good side of "meh." I am "Berman agnostic" - quite honestly I don't know or care why people hate him so. I enjoy what I enjoy and I think it will be too bad if Enterprise dies, and I certainly think there is more ground to explore in the Stark Trek future.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I will certainly miss Enterprise... It was always a fun glimpse into star trek history.
That being said, with the new Battle Star Galactica series out I guess I won't miss it as much. BSG is head and sholders above Enterprise in terms of writing, acting and effects.
It seems like the last few Star Trek series (DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) have been constantly pushing to be more "gritty" and "real" than the previous series, BSG trumps them all in this respect.
For a setting with so much potential and so many interesting ideas, the current caretakers have done poorly by Roddenberry's legacy.
What legacy? Roddenberry never did anything especially impressive. The original series' strength was the writers he managed to get (and who've publicly grumbled about how much credit he took for the things they did). His premise wasn't especially original, and he failed to actually come up with a consistent backstory to the series, which is why there were so many continuity errors and ambiguities.
The next generation's success was also due to the writers (and the design department). The less he had to do with it the better it got. The show's best seasons appeared after he died.
If you feed this man, he'll just keep coming back. He'll keep coming back, raping our childhoods and messing with our memories of a great Star Trek series and a pretty good Next Generation series. After that it's all been crap to include the killing of Captain Kirk in the most asinine nonheroic way possible. He doesn't deserve another penny from any of us to continue sucking dry Rodenberry's ideas and legacy. Don't go away mad Rick Berman, just freaking go away.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I have really fond memories of watching the original Star Trek way back in 1967-1968. I wanted to enjoy Enterprise. I really hoped they'd explore all the loose threads such as whatever caused the creation of the Prime Directive and First Contact with different alien cultures.
But I just got sick and tired of the stupid time travel stories. They travel back to the 1970's to play 'Starsky & Hutch' with aliens! He travels back to WWII to fight Nazi aliens! That was sooo disappointing.
They had a whole galaxy to explore and instead they wanted to remake the old Time Tunnel series! So I turned off the tv.
I expect Berman's big idea for a movie is just another time travel episode.
It would be a shame to cancel Enterprise at this point, because this is the first season it has actually been watchable. The three-part story arc on genetic enhancements featuring Brent Spiner was especially enjoyable (because of and in spite of Brent Spiner's presence), as was the story arc involving Vulcan politics and religious turmoil. Imagine that, a thoughtful Trek show! I hate to say it, but this is the best sci-fi show on TV right now, as Stargate SG1 has floundered so far this season.
If he isn't, I will. Only a true fanboy would attempt to claim that the first two seasons of TNG were anything but dreck. We thank them for starting the ball rolling but I'd prefer to go back and watch the worse episodes of the orginial Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers than rewatch the best of the first two seasons of TNG.
I think your review has proven the thesis that it's a better show than Star Trek Enterprise.
It had some GOOD episodes, the writers showed some promise and the show probably stands a good chance of being canceled now that the writing has taken a downward turn. As a result, we won't have to put up with the years of promos that Enterprise has subjected us to, and will have a reduced risk of running across it while chanel surfing.
And the good episodes even give it a decent viewer base to rely on should the writers rally and resume writing decent material.
All of these are advantages Enterprise never had. Poor writing, an excessive reliance on bad plot devices, and an inability to maintain any kind of internal consistency or continuity, let alone continuity with the other shows.
That, and on BSG, the hot chicks could actually act, and even make their characters somewhat convincing.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Maybe if we sold enough of them we could fund our own series!
The idea of a Klingon-centric series seems fairly popular.
Set at the point soon after Klingons join the Federation, two human Starfleet cadets are assigned to a Klingon ship. It would be the ultimate culture clash.
Klingons have a wide appeal, such as football and wrestling fans.
Table-ized A.I.
I gave up on Enterprise halfway into the first season. I enjoyed Star Trek V'ger when I stopped thinking of it as Star Trek. I gave up on DS9 when it turned into a Bajoran soap opera, but the turning point to suck came in Star Trek the Next Generation when they had that retarded episode, Force of Nature, that warp drive was wearing out the fabric of spacetime. I think they ignored it after a while, the way they ignored the Organians after the first Klingon episode in classic Trek. Doctor Flox is even more annoying that Neelix. So killing Enterprise would be a mercy. Though I think they could save the show by having Six of Nine hot oil wrestle with T'Pol in a remake of "Gamesters of Triskelion" using time travel to grab competitors. I'd wager 30 quatloos on that.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Rick Berman is scum.
A friend of mine who is a certain well know West Coast fazine fan once ended up at a party where Berman was at, and talk about a glory hog. He actually was confused that she did want his autograph...
Berman is a cancer in the Star Trek universe, and the sooner he is removed, the better for Trek. I mean, there is a good reason that Majel Barrett (Gene Roddenbury's wife) has had very little to do with Trek since Next Gen....
Now, getting JMS to take over Trek...that is as you said, too sensable, so it would never happen. [sigh]
Ack, now people will think I am a Media fan...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Everybody likes to bash Rick Berman, but people conveniently forget just how week TNG was until Berman pried it from Roddenberry's cold, dead fingers.
Season 1 of The Next Generation was beyond awful.
Season 2 was almost good.
Season 3 was when it became worth watching, when Dr. Crusher was brought back (in spite of Roddenberry's strong objections), and more and more control of the show was being passed to Rick Berman.
He's also one of the guys behind the stealing of B5's ideas to create DS9, which was probably the best of all five Trek shows.
Sure, everything he's touched since then has been terrible, but the franchise he destroyed is one which he helped build.
Credit where credit's due, that's all I'm sayin'.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
They lost me in the second season. The abominable way they handled the Vulcans, the ludicrous Temporal crapola, even bringing in the %#$^! Borg (like that card wasn't overplayed with Voyageer). Bad scripts, crappy actors, totally blowing the enormous possibilities of a pre-TOS series, it deserves cancellation.
What's really pathetic is that people are trying to mount another Save-the-Trek campaign. This isn't like saving TOS after its brilliant second. This is putting a rotten bastardization out of its misery.
Now Universal wants to do it right, they'll resist any urge to put on a show in the next few years. Instead, they'll look for new writers and producers, totally scrub the decks of every idiot that had any involvement in Enterprise, come up with a good episode-based show (no story arcs at all for the first season, let the viewers get used to the characters) and then, in three or four years begin production again.
I personally am very afraid that Enterprise may have fatally damaged the whole franchise, which at one time seemed quite capable of surviving disasters like Star Trek V. If they let the turds who produced and wrote Enterprise have a movie-sized budget, then they'll have a failure that will probably kill it.
So, set fire to the sets, fire anybody who so much as dotted and "i" or crossed a "t" on an Enterprise script and don't let them anywhere near a Star Trek-related development session of any kind, wait three or four years and start again.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I thought this season was top notch so far.
I think Scott Bakula makes an excellent captain for the show. My biggest complaint is how some (all?) of the episodes have become mirrored controversial topics of today. All the cloning and intolerance of this and that... whatever. I'm sick of political correctness propaganda.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
You have two similar shows, they can't resist putting them in conflicting time slots
I'm convinced that this will happen into the forseeable future, because of the view networks have on the target audience of Sci-Fi shows. This thinking is as follows
Friday nights are prime party hours right?
People at parties aren't watching TV.
Nerds don't go to parties.
Therefore, all programming that appeals to nerds gets slapped into the friday night timeslot, while shows with broad demographics across the norm audience go in throughout the week.
Farscape? Check
Stargate? Check.
Enterprise? Check that
Firefly? Doublecheck.
This is just recent history too. I noticed this trend many many moons ago.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
because I missed the UPN Wednesday showing. That was only season 1, and a few parts of season 2. I watched through episode 13, and then a few through episode 22. That was back when Suprnova only took 5 seconds to pull up a page of torrents. Also, I think that was before Cox started offering UPN in my area; slowass fucks!
I'm not looking to specifically harsh anyone's gig here; I'm just calling it like I see it. It's just not the same without Gene being able to call up the episode writers/producers and ask "What the Fuck, Chuck?!". Gene was totally notorious about doing that, you know. Like Bill Cosby calling Eddie Murphy, sometimes he would just call up people and discuss the entire fucking universe for several hours on a Sunday evening. I heard rumors of him flying out to someone's house because they hung up on him, but that was back during the Undiscovered Country "For Gene" aftermath.
Honestly, I don't know if Meyer or Zimmerman have ever flown a B-17, or if B-17's even have a god damn thing to do with good episodes. All I know is I stopped watching after the first couple in season 2.
Morality 10%, ethics 10%, social structure 50%, politics 20%, and tits 10%.
I think that was the winning combo. Also, we need people cussing every once in a while. It's no big deal if the Limey does his "bloody" thing, because America wasn't in all those fucking wars that England got itself into. I think the engineer guy (Trapp?) could probably cut loose with some "hell" and "damnits", every now and then. We're not talking tit stickers on Superbowl Sunday, here; just a little bit of humanity in the mix. Minus the FCC Puritanism, that is. Maybe Enterprise just needs a few years off whilest we fucking do something about the prudes in the Whitehouse.
Didn't the Canadians burn that thing down one time?
You REALLY need to check out the top rated episodes towards the last 2-3 years of TNG. There are some amazing writers that really put out some wonderful episodes. (Tapestry (ep 141), Inner Light (ep 125), and a few others.) I'd argue that some of the TNG space-time episodes weren't bad. (They were much unlike the usual "go back to the past and fix history".) One of DS9's best episodes was a time travel episode (Trials And Tribble-ations). (Don't hate the plot device, hate the writer...)
Yeah, I'm more of TOS fanatic, but DS9 was my next favorite (seasons 3 to finale). (Of course, they did suffer from holodeck syndrome.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The person who posted the story should have RTFA:
http://www.saveenterprise.com/sfxrumor.htm
I quote:
Popular British Science Fiction Magazine reported Enterprise set crew being fired in March.
According to SFX, supposed set spy "Trekspy" who works on Enterprise's set is due to be out of a job by March. "Trekspy" may be out of a job, but our sources confirm that this is NOT due to Enterprise being cancelled.
Our source say although UPN can pull the plug on the show anytime, the current plan on the set is to continue through the planned 22 episodes this season. The article is correct in that the last episode of the season (episode 22) will conclude principle photography in early March.
Manny Coto has also told TrekToday "It's another inane rumour. Right now, the crew is building the sets for episodes 20-21, which I'm writing. Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] are writing episode 22, which is going to be fantastic!"
You're a tougher man than I. They lost me in the first.
The abominable way they handled the Vulcans,
Fixed. T'Pol's "disease" is gone, and the Vulcans have rediscovered Kohlinar. The council is gone, replaced by what will eventually turn into the 'modern' Vulcan. The Forge was portrayed as it has been presented in the books.
the ludicrous Temporal crapola,
They slammed that to the side and got the *hell* rid of it at the beginning of the season. The new writers seem to despise the "Temporal war".
even bringing in the %#$^! Borg (like that card wasn't overplayed with Voyageer).
Totally gone. Zero Next Gen and beyond aliens. We do have the Orions (complete with the slave trade), a growing Klingon breakdown (to lead to the Klingon war?) and they carry the Vulcans and Andorians. In the Orion slave camps, you could also spot Tellarites in the background. Cutesy "a special episode" stuff is gone - story arcs are three episodes, and take place in pre-TOS time and conclude at the end.
Bad scripts, crappy actors, totally blowing the enormous possibilities of a pre-TOS series, it deserves cancellation.
And this season, they have seriously overhauled the show. I wouldn't watch the first seasons on DVD if they were a gift. This season, I'll happily buy. It's now the asskicking, green alien chicks and Vulcan alien mysticism of TOS with better effects, not the inbred self-referential repetitive crap of the beginning of the series.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Here's one plot I'd like to see. Remember in TOS the Klingons looked like humans with a little makeup. Then in TNG the Klingons looked like professional wrestlers with big hair behind the crab shell on their forehead. They even had a time travel episode where the TNG crew were on the space station with Kirk and the tribbles and they didn't recognize the Klingons. Riker asked Worf ''What happened?'' and Worf said ''We don't speak of it.''
Write a story arc for Enterprise where the Klingons try to genetically engineer their whole race to be super warriors. Build part of the plot on a racial war between almost human appearing Klingons versus the professional wrestler, butt ugly Klingons. The big ugly Klingons do a Rwanda style genocide and wipe out the human appearing Klingons and rewrite their whole history to make it appear they were the original Klingons.
Of course it's too late to do that now.