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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."
the show will still suck.
unless they stop travelling through time. and get the regular actors to learn how to act....
Wow, am I the only one who likes Enterprise, and hates Battle Star in any incarnation? One hot andriod is no enough for me to get interested in Battle Star!
I sense a deep feeling of forboding...
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
The new Galactica is really good, despite my initial misgivings about it -- but it bears no resemblance to Trek at all. Trek is, and has been, about the future, humanity's place in it, and how we will deal with all the issues that make up being human -- with some rubber monsters thrown in. It's "Wagon Train to the Stars" with some Utopian elements added in.
Galactica is essentially a bleak war movie in space. There is none of the technophilia that Trek so prominently features, and the emphasis is on finding and killing an implacable, deadly enemy. It's dark, it's gritty, and very entertaining, but comparing it with Trek is compeltely apples and oranges to me. Nothing against Galactica, but I like a little optimism in my visions of the future sometimes.
I could watch a few more seasons of Galactica, but it seems like it's playing most of its cards in the first season. If Galactica is the "new face" of sci-fi, I think it will get pretty boring pretty quickly.
Voyager finished it's seven season run (as did Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation).
Enterprise is the first series running the risk of being cut short (which would be unfortunate with Manny Coto now steering the show in a much more fun and interesting direction this season-- if you tuned out during the first 3 seasons, you should tune in and give it a shot).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I'm no BSG fanboy, but it has a hell of a lot more going for it than shaky camera moves. BSG feels much grittier partly because of the cinematography, but also because the writers don't suck, the setting and mood are completely different, and the acting and backstory are quite intense. I wouldn't say that they reinvented the genre, but it is frankly some of the best space opera I've seen. period. I don't say that a lot, and I used to be a major TNG fanboy.
:)
The writing in BSG refuses to let the technology get in the way. On Voyager, it was always a damned alient of the week using the particle of the week. On BSG, it's a story about the people, how they interact, how they respond to extraordinary stresses, etc. Star Trek always claimed to be that, but then Geordy saved the day with a fancy modification to the main deflector dish.
BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
That said... I don't watch much TV anymore, so there may be other shows I've been missing that are very impressive. I've been reading a lot lately. much better than any space opera TV show.
Maybe thats because there wasn't much else to do? Its hard to come up with 30 stories a year that aren't repeats or copies of someone else's stories.
The origial Trek did push difficult issues such as birth control, eugenics and racial issues. Kirk kissing Uhura was a major risk for TV in the late 1960's
I know it's splitting hairs and all but the emphasis on Galactica isn't on finding and killing an implacable, deadly enemy. It's about running like hell from them.
I do agree with you though that multiple seasons of no hope would get pretty tough to watch. At this point it's seemingly correct as the story goes IMO. It "fits". I'm just hoping that when the time comes to move the story along the producers realize it and do so. For now though I'm digging it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I agree.
I think most of the "let it die!" crowd has either never seen the third season - IMHO one of the best seasons of any scifi show, ever, including any single season of Farscape - or is so obsessed with continuity that any deviation from the previously established universe is heresy.
Well, how crappy, bland, and predictable do you think the show would be if everything went exactly as foretold? It'd be a challenge to get a single decent season out of that setup. And I do agree that neither of the first two seasons, where they tried this formula, were particularly good.
Rather than looking at the downside of the lack of continuity, consider the upside - there's now a possibilty for an "alternate" future, where the temporal war has changed things. Will this wind up being for the better or worse? Who knows!
DON'T TAKE THE TREK UNIVERSE TOO SERIOUSLY. When you get your panties in a wad anytime creative liberties are taken, you'll lead a very unpleasant life in your parents' basement.
OK, rant over. Flame on.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Funny story. The series pilot (a 3-hour movie that was run in December 2003 as a miniseries, and later edited down and run on NBC as a movie-of-the-week) is out on DVD now, and it comes with a commentary track. The writer, Ron Moore, is on the track, and he talks about the one part of the pilot that he really, really regrets.
I don't know if you've seen it, but at one point Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama uses a set of electric pulse generators to send out a big burst of radiation in order to cover the refugees' escape from a cylon attack. In the commentary, Moore says that he hated putting that kind of technobabble bullshit into his script, but he'd written himself into a corner and that the jargon was the only practical way out of it.
But he did poke some fun at himself along the way. After Apollo gave his wordy, jargony, meaningless speech to one of the other characters, her slightly glazed-over reply was, "The lesson here is not to ask follow-up questions."
I thought it was a good line at the time. Now that I know the story behind it, I think it's brilliant.
Well, sort of. "Star Trek" was pretty superficial for the most part. There were exceptions, yes, but in general they dealt with Big Issues in a very shallow way. Take the episode where they tried to decide whether Data had civil rights. It was a very one-sided hour of TV. Well written, nicely acted, and extremely entertaining, but it was very one-sided. The question was, "Does Data have rights?" and the answer was, "Yes," and then they spent the final three acts proving it. "Galactica," by contrast, tends to keep the Big Issues fuzzy. There are no answers, no resolutions.
Funny you should mention "The Next Generation," though. In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family." Other episodes like "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "All Good Things" were very good, but in my opinion they're not really on the same level as the four I named.
What those four episodes I named all have in common is that they've got nothing to do with spaceships or phasers or Romulans. They're about characters. "Darmok" is the story of two characters who don't speak the same language. "The Inner Light" is about a man who loses his memory. "The Perfect Mate" is about impossible love, and "Family" is about how a man recovers from an unimaginably traumatic experience. Any one of those would have made a great drama without any science-fiction aspect to it at all.
I think that's the kind of writing that we see on "Galactica" every week. It's complex and nuanced and, in a way, hair-tearingly frustrating, because there are no answers. Take last week's (US-aired) episode for instance. Is Tom Zarek a terrorist or a prisoner of conscience? We don't know, because the writers don't tell us. We're not allowed to know, because which one he is isn't important. What's important is how people react to the situation he creates. Or last week's "33." Why 33 minutes? We never find out, not ever, not even by the end of the first season. I can see where some people would be annoyed by that kind of laser-beam focus on what's important to the story. Personally, I really like it.
Have Riker and Troi in the present (well, the present for them at least - TNG time) and have them researching or learning about something that happened during Enterprise's time period and show it with the enterprise crew in flashbacks or something.
That way you can get the guest appearances without having to come up with a complete cheese story.
Kinda like how they got Starbuck into Galactica 1980!
Either that or have them be guest stars but in different roles or something.
Your comment made me think of the opening of "Water" with Boomer sitting in a room dripping wet and not knowing how she got that way. It opens just on her fingers, with the water dripping off, then you get to see more of the situation, bit by bit. Nice stuff. Definitely not typical TV grade.
Alright, so riddle me this:
I "skimmed" a lot of DS9. And I mean A LOT. The first two seasons weren't that great... some episodes were down to Enterprise-level. I finally got back into it around the time the Dominion and Worf started to figure in heavily (what do you know, gimmicks that worked!). Even then, I didn't watch every week. There was quite a bit of Dominion War stuff I missed... but I could still come in, watch a single episode, and walk away entertained, even though they were part of an overall arc. Now, going back and being able to watch those arcs in sequence greatly enhances the entertainment value, I will agree. But individual episodes of Enterprise still leave me cold. If they had nifty massive space battles, or strong standalone character pieces like "In The Pale Moonlight," I might get pulled in. The entire point of my above post was that I have watched all the stuff that was supposed to pull me in, AND IT DIDN'T WORK. Call me obstinate, but I still don't like it. I use the DS9 comparison so heavily here because that was the only Trek series up till now to heavily employ the concept of the story arc. TOS, TNG, and Voyager all were mostly standalone episodes with the occasional interseason cliffhanger.
Now, about characterization. That's all well and good that they're learning how to be a starship crew. It's obvious that Archer can't have the "ultraslick" personality of Picard. But what I get from Archer is the aloofness of Sisko with an occasional dash of the brashness of Kirk. Not too terribly exciting.
Also, if they're just now learning to be a starship crew, doesn't that ignore previous efforts at space travel, even in the pre-Enterprise continuity? I mean, I'm sure our current space shuttle crews could handle something like NX-01 with a minimum of fuss. Wasn't part of the point of having a cramped vessel of limited capability such as NX-01 to make links between Star Trek and contemporary cramped, limited space technology?
There are also established space crews by the time of Enterprise. What about the cargo crews that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) Trip Tucker's family is part of? Wouldn't it be just a snazzy upgrade in technology for them? I mean sure, they have new devices like the transporter to get used to, but other than that, NX-01 could be a freighter with bigger engines. To me, it seems like the spit-and-polish crew of the other Treks, but with supposedly more primitive tech. It would be much more interesting if we saw the crew as trying to become more regimented from the more loose, informal cargo crew culture. Instead, they've basically already got the military discipline so there's little there to develop. I'm not suggesting Star Trek: Redneck Rampage, although that would be pretty damned funny. But I still don't think the series is showing the development of a starship crew that it's supposed to, if so much of the baseline stuff is already in place and we're just watching some running fanboy injoke about the development of the technology.
Also, if there's some decrease in available talent between now and the 22nd century, can we explore why that is? Maybe it's due to the after-effects of World War III, which were barely touched upon in First Contact. It'd be nice to explore that (and I don't mean through the Vulcans being condescending to warlike, primitive humans angle, that just serves to draw a sharper dichotomy between Enterprise and established Trek).
I don't think there's *ever* been a science fiction television program with a cast this skilled.
You haven't seen Firefly.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
One of the things DS9 did much better than both earlier and later ST series is flesh out other races
No, it fleshed out the Ferengi really. One of my biggest peeves with the Star Trek franchise is how one dimensional all the races are. It basicallly took single aspects of the human race and made other races utterly single-minded in that aspect.
The Klingons see glorious death in battle as their highest ideal, something they've been breeding for for thousands of years. Don't ask me how the hell they managed to become a spacefaring race, because it seems that wimpy occupations like scientists, bakers, and librarians are simply not allowed. These occupations are absolutely necessary to any civilization.
The Ferengi, I can dig the greed thing. That *almost* makes sense. But they probably exterminate their unemployed. Or worse, sell them at a markup.
The Vulcans have their logic, to the exclusion of all else. Too bad creative thinking is required for science...
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
The dominion... they seek... dominion... over everthing... Mmmkay.
But the humans? What do the humans believe in? Well, nothing it seems. And as the franchise got older, it seemed to get worse and worse that way. In TNG, everyone was perfect and boring. Or flat and featureless, take your pick. We apparently still had an emotion or two, but mostly it seems that we'd completely stopped bothering with art and music, since the most modern thing anyone listened to was jazz, the most modern drama anyone was interested in was Shakespeare, and the only pictures to be seen anywhere were drawn by an android. Noone's religious, noone drinks, and noone is unemployed. It's like we're all turning into Vulcans or something.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert