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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."
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.
to all three fans.
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 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
Sure... Blame the crew and not B and B. What Paramount needs to do if they want Star Trek to come back is to fire those two jokers. They had such a great opportunity to write out the founding of the Federation, The Romulan War...etc all events we know to have happened... But they just had had had to mess it up with time travel.
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.
No!
I. See. Four. Episodes!
-EvilMagnus
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."
Enterprise, the Reality show.
A house full of goofy retards who dress and act like ST characters and pretend to have a real life.
Go ahead mod me, I got more.
Agreed. One of the things that was starting to annoy me with the Star Trek series was that the story was being lost to technology. With each new season, they continued to progress so quickly with technology that they could not keep consistency in their universe. When I first heard of it, I looked at Enterprise as a burst of fresh air. Yes, we knew what was going to happen (mostly), but that would just allow us to get more into the characters and the world around them. Instead, they added advanced technology and disrupted the universe.
Why do so many TV show and movie makers think that Sci-Fi is exclusively about technology? Good Sci-Fi uses the technology as a backdrop to character development and asking interesting questions. Technology is a vehicle not the destination.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Ah yes, but remember Rick Berman made them. The moment you went to bite said cookie a tachion beam would strike the tasty morsel causing a time rift. You'd have the raw incredients of sugar, hydrogenated palm oil, colour and flavour dripping on your chin. Then you'd have to defeat the Borg (again) to get the cookie back to its baked state.
Trolling is a art,
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
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
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.
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...
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.