Slashdot Mirror
'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."
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 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.
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.
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.