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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.
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?
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.
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.
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!"
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
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