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Could TNG Stunt Casting Save 'Enterprise'?
Tycoon Guy writes "It seems Star Trek: Enterprise isn't about to go down without a fight. TrekToday is reporting that Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis will guest-star on the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, to reprise their Next Generation roles of William T. Riker and Deanna Troi. Hello stunt casting! The news has been confirmed on Sirtis' official fan site."
Please, no. Just let it get cancelled and go the way of the dodo like it should!
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Does anyone really care? I'm sorry but with Battlestar Galactica reinventing the science fiction genre in the same fashion the Sopranos did to the gangster genre - it's hard to watch anything Trek related. It's the visual equivalent of listening to Cyndi Lauper records from the '80s - you can't believe people ever liked the stuff when you look at it with some hindsight.
Plus, IMHO, most science fiction is really science-themed fantasy. I enjoy the Stargate shows most times (with all the light beings and whatnots) but I don't really count it is SciFiction. Trek was true SCIFI but after years and years of prostituting its original ideas for meagre ratings - there is nothing but a shell. I mean how many Borg related episodes did they drag out for sweeps? It's like gay marriage and abortion to republicans - whenever they wanted to get attention they would drag out the Borg! I'm sure the last Enterprise episode will feature a half-vulcan/half-borg Picard with large breasts.
-_-
Much as I wouldn't mind seeing Frakes and Sirtis in action again, it would only be because for nostalgia's sake. When your show becomes characterized by this kind of hysterical desperation, it's a pretty good sign you should just let it die.
TNG and DS9 were at the top of their repective games in their later seasons -- they just got better and better, IMHO. Neither shows needed this kind of nonsense to shore them up for another handful of weary episodes. If Enterprise doesn't have enough momentum to propel it after all this time, then it's just plain out of gas, and stunt casting is not going to save it.
Especially when I, as a not-so-fanatical Star Trek watcher, can probably tell you the plot of this episode right now. Picard and Troi, on board the Titan on a diplomatic mission to Head-Ridge VII, run into a subspace anomaly and are transported back in time, and must deal with the cultural and technological gaps while...zzz...
I'd advise letting Enterprise, and Trek, rest in peace for another few years while it still has some dignity, but unfortunately that moment is already long past (for me, the last of TNG's dignity departed with the introduction of Retarded Data in Nemesis). I guess now the best we can hope for is that these sorts of decisions don't bury the franchise altogether.
Can't they just let it fade away instead of making everyone HATE it.
moo.
So... their strategy to save a show which suffers from incredibly poor casting, is to bring two of the previous generation's casting gaffes.
I can't think of two more expendible characters from TNG (After wesley crusher of course) than Riker and Troi.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Despite the fact that this is probably the last season being abandoned on a Friday night ... I think Enterprise is finally hitting its groove. I know everyone has their opinion, but while it isn't comparable to the very best of DS9 or even TNG, its certainly miles ahead of Voyager in terms of quality. I don't think its the casting that's necessarily weak - but probably more the characters. Still, TNG didn't have characters as good as TOS ... and DS9 was weaker than TNG until they brought Worf aboard. It took Avery Brooks until probably Season 3 or 4 to really start getting into Sisko ... he wasn't like Patrick Stewart who had a great screen presence almost from the beginning (sorry, it took me a while to get used to the bald captain :) ). Voyager never .. NEVER had good characters .. at least the new series has Hoshi :) And really there isn't anyone groan inducing like Neelix (which is strange - because the doctor kind of reminds me of him - just not annoying) or Nog from DS9 or Wesley (sorry Wil .. still think *you're* cool) from TNG.
... go back and watch enterprise lately .. I think they are doing a great job. Not as good as it could be, and certainly not as "cool" (now the in thing is to be anti Star Trek) as Battlestar (now that we decided not to kill anyone for a female Starbuck and human cylons) or Stargate (but not Atlantis, because thats NOT cool in the eyes of the SF culture police) ... but they are making it entertaining at least ...
Seriously
I'd like to see a time travel moratorium in scifi. Unless the writer can improve on the one of the existing time travel stories or invent a new one then maybe they should just stay away.
There is a reason all the good time travel stories are short stories: time travel is destructive to structure, a short story can sustain that weakness and even make it part of the mood, a novel or long story cannot.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Stargate and Battlestar Galactica are the premier scifi shows on today. I'll admit, the last couple of seasons of Stargate have really been reaching beyond the original storyline, but not in a bad way. I firmly believe Richard Dean Anderson is the primary reason why that show doesn't suck. Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, is extremely watchable. The realism, subtle plotlines, the intensity of some of the characters (Cmdr Adama)...it just all adds up to a great show. I agree that Star Trek needs some time off; movies included. If it ever is to return, a new set of writers and directors will have to take the helm and come up with something new/different/better/that doesn't suck.
I watched a coupla episodes here and there...and the damn Vulcan chick was always getting her tits out on the slightest pretext.
Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE TITS.
But I know where to get pr0n when I wanna look at them, thank you very much Star Trek.
When tits and ass becomes a major selling point
of a show it's just demeaning to the viewers and kinda sad.
Some issue with the Battlestar Galactica remake. Having cute girls on the show is cool, but give them better roles than serving as eye candy, damnit.
I think that B5 (and Farscape to a lesser extent) really showed that season-long story arcs work much better than the classic Trek planet-of-the-week format.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Actually, I find that time travel /can/ be a useful literary tool. However, it is so poorly used a lot of times that it has a sour taste in its mouth. I did write a short story (it could have easily been brought to the scale needed for a novel) around time travel, but the story still focused on the characters and their development rather than the travel itself. It is a tool, not a means to an end.
I mean honestly, what sort of weird story involves two women working together on a project learning the secrets of a buried device (which later is the time travel device), and the main character finds out the other woman who has been lost in time with her was actually herself attempting to break the loop? I tried it, and it worked for the story, but the story wasn't all about time travel and its effects on humanity, but rather the possibility of uncertainity in reality one person in particular faces when confronted with it.
The good casting decisions have agents who won't let them on Enterprise.
paintball
[naive 3rd world country fanboy mode]
Oh no, you mean Farscape got CANCELED ?
Damn you, Salazaaaar !
[/sarcasm]
Now, seriously, if you want to compare acting between Enterprise, Stargate and Farscape - please, DO NOT make the mistake of comparing the acting skills of the cast with the contents of the script. The Berman&Braga team surely spelled "doom" all over the Gene R. legacy...
Or heck, compare the acting in 1st season of TNG with the last season of TNG - you can surely see a drastic improvement.
Anyway, Scott Bakula has had his acting "skills" brushed up significantly in "Quantum Leap" (he kind of first but got better), and is pretty convincing as Captain of the Enterprise, even much earlier "into the show" as Patrick Stewart was able to do it in TNG (it took him almost 2 seasons to stop acting "Gurney Hallecky" - and don't get me started on "Life Force").
However, I don't get how you can claim the acting in Farscape could have been ahead of the acting in Stargate ? Again, we're back to the "script contents" vs "acting quality" dilemma... although the scripts in Farscape didn't strike me as revolutionary either.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Time travel was used to good effect in Babylon 5. They even had part of the time travel arc in the 1st season and revisited it, in the other timeframe, in the 3rd(?) season.
That single instance of time travel was an essential element to the entire mythology of Babylon 5. StarTrek, of course, uses it as a cheap plot gimic.
No, no, no, no, no.
No.
I think that the number one thing they need to do right now for Enterprise is to 'cat script | grep temporal' For every word about time travel that shows up, you get to beat the writers with a 2x4. They abused time and time travel so horribly it's beyond reason. The Voyager two-part 'year of hell' was hard to believe, but Enterprise made it look downright quaint.
Okay, an occasional foray into time travel is cool. An entire season based on a 'temporal cold war' it is a sign that the idea factory has burnt to the ground.
Just my $.02...
I've given the show multiple chances so far.
I have to admit that I was against the idea of a prequel to start with. It just seemed like the Berman/Braga team saw that George Lucas made a financial (if not artistic) success of the idea and therefore decided it was worth copying. I watched the pilot anyway, but gave up about halfway through. Now, Trek pilots are classically weak, but this one was just boring. Like Voyager on Sominex.
So I waited a while. I still didn't like the whole prequel idea, didn't like the fact that the tech seemed to be more advanced than the first TOS pilot, and wasn't that impressed by the cheesy technological substitutions for stuff from chronologically subsequent eras of Trek like "polarized hull plating" and "protein resequencers." (Now of course the obvious reason is that "The Cage" was 1966 and "Broken Bow" was 2001, but how do they go from "phase pistols" to "laser pistols" back to "phasers?" Why does the Romulan ship look like it belongs in the 24th century with the similarly-styled D'Deridex rather than the 22nd? But I digress.)
So when an anticipated "event" episode that all the reviewers said was good came up, I tuned in. I did this with the Borg episode. How cute, they managed to work one of the the most recognizable Trek villains in and made all sorts of in-jokey references while leaving the principal cast in the dark as to what they had just encountered! I did this again with the first Xindi episode, when half of Florida got taken out. The terrorist metaphor and somber mood just seemed forced to me, like they were groping for something to write into the script.
I did this again for the last Xindi episode. That was pretty neat, even though Archer's action-hero stint left me cold. The Death Star ripoff was kinda cool, and seeing the CGI P-51s was neat even though I knew the twist was coming, but the alien Nazi thing was just blah. I didn't really care how that turned out, fearing similar convolution to the concealment of the Borg and the intro of the Xindi. Since then I've tuned in once more, to the Augment episodes with Brent Spiner. He was kinda cool (my mom even walked into the room and exclaimed, "It's Data!") but the actors playing the Augments (who had to carry much of the story) kinda sucked. It was partly what they had to work with. The most memorable thing, to me, was that it was the first time I had heard the word "bitch" in what was ostensibly a Star Trek episode. Ooh, edgy.
That being said, I have to respect Manny Coto for tying in old plot elements. It looks like the next hyped "event" episode will be the Mirror Universe one, and I may tune in for the "ooh-ahh" of a CGI battle damaged Constitution-class. But the TrekToday preview I saw made a point of noting how much more aggressive and backstabbing the mirror Archer would be. Big whoop. Another problem I've had with the show is that Scott Bakula seems to have lost his acting talent since "Quantum Leap." All the Archer performances I've seen come off as wooden, and I have no reason to believe this won't be the same.
Another point in Enterprise's favor is the awesome special effects that trump just about anything else in Trek, but SFX do not a show make. Without characters to fly all them nifty ships in a convincing manner, it ain't worth much. A lot of people have cited the addition of Worf to DS9 as something similar to the Enterprise gimmick castings, but think about what they did with Worf on DS9. He got married, got captured and thrown in a POW camp, met Martok and joined his House, watched his wife die, and at the end of it all wound up a diplomat instead of a warrior. Tell me, is Arik Soong gonna be back, ever? Are Riker and Troi going to be stranded in the 22nd century and join the NX-01 crew, and thus explore new situations we haven't seen their characters in before? Hell, is any of this gonna happen with the already-established Enterprise characters as a result of these castings? Somehow, I doubt it.
This comment is already way too long, but I'm also gonna h
While it has its flaws, I would say Stargate is one of the hardest science fiction shows in history.
The reason why is because it's progressive. If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG. ST:TOS. Quantum Leap (other than Sam regaining his memory). Seven Days. And on and on and on. It's all fantasy - the actors have a magic box or two and roam the universe or timeline without really changing anything.
Stargate is one of the few shows that shows progression. The Tori'i were clueless in the first few episodes (after Teal'c joined them). But their hard work introduced them to the Toik'ra, gave them naquida generators, introduced us to the Asgard, bootstrapped the development of our own fighters, allowed us to run the Prometheus, got us advanced engines from a grateful Asgard, and on and on and on.
Have they had missteps? Sure. Are they on the verge of having so many goodies that they run the risk of having the rabid viewer ask "why didn't they use the gozmotron from the 3rd season?" In fact they've turned that to their advantage - after a few seasons those goodies are reintroduced in a natural manner. The "safe" bullets are used for training. The virtual reality pods are used for training and planning.
Sometimes the science is hokey, but you have a very real sense that they're trying to figure things out and often get it wrong. But they keep at it until they succeed.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Great, with their show about to be cancelled, they will try to save it by jumping the shark. No other Star Trek series mentioned the temporal cold war, so there is no reason for Riker and Troi to go back to Archer's time.
How ya like dat?
"On the other hand, this is a blatant attempt to appeal to TNG's popularity to save what has been an otherwise horrible series."
Or it's a blatant attempt to show the effects the temporal cold war will have on the future like they've done already with the Enterprise-J.
I realize it's popular opinion here to hate Enterprise, but geez, give them a little credit.
"Derp de derp."
I am not a fanboy about the old star trek, and I've definitely seen more episodes of TNG. Even so, practically every episode of TNG reminds me either of an episode of ToS or a previous episode of TNG :P
I attribute the success of the Trek shows thusly: ToS was an excellent sci-fi show, but would also have been a great show no matter what the setting had been. It looks pretty melodramatic by modern standards but is so well acted that it feels somehow right. Corny, but right. The plots were relatively original, although I half recall an old saying about how there are only [approximately] 7 original ideas in existence and only three of them were being made into Hollywood movies. TV is the same thing except that a series forces you to meander or fall into a rut. And, of course, there's the sex appeal. It's not television without it. TNG had some excellent acting, but much more entirely unconvincing stuff, and because they had more technology available spent more time technowanking. DS9 was new and went into darker territory, which kept it going pretty well, and Voyager had chicks with nice tits and a captain with a whiskey voice; Trek gets to every demographic eventually. Enterprise is darker still, is even more overt about selling sci-fi with sex, and involves more threats to humanity. In other words, they've just been upping the ante all along, and I think it's been a fairly natural progression.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Were you watching?
Lots of people who tuned out on Voyager after the first two (horrible) seasons. Seem prone to criticise the last two seasons as well.
Which is unfortunate.
Just wondering if you actually saw them at all.
You're saying that DS9 had more than five good seasons? I really don't think I can agree, there. As to Enterprise, it's had its ups and downs, but I don't think it's time to leave it for dead just yet.
Firefly was the only SciFi TV with some innovations at all in the past few years.
As much as I liked Firefly, it was essentially just Blake's Seven in the Wild West.
Media SF is never innovative; at best it repeats ideas that literary SF tried out a decade before -- BSG, for example, is combining the original series, MilSF and Vernor Vinge.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
"Trek is, and has been, about the future"
No, trek is about the past. Specifically, the technocratic science-utopia ideals of the 1950s, the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s, the 1980s liberal ideal of an greed-free moneyless society so utterly purged of "isms" that they've become inconcievable.
SF has always been about the present day as seen through a distorting lens. Trek was no exception.
And then, it painted itself into a corner. Typical left-utopia problem: nowhere to go, nothing to do, no hope of rising above equality except in science, arts, or the military. Effectively Trek disproved itsself. The only society-changing message it can send anymore is "avoid this".
They tried to keep it running on momentum, but Trek without a message, without reflections of reality, is just a dull and dated SF show.
RIP