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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."
How about they just do it the old fashioned way and revive the series by reversing polarity and firing anion thrusters to create a temporary wormhole that can act as a gateway to the ratings.
No... That didn't work at all for Voyager...
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.
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 : )
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!
Apparently, the last scene in this episode is a shot of 'The Fonze' donning water skiis.
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
Are you implying the dodo deserved it?
...DeForest Kelley, and I'll be impressed.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Maybe they'll come through the same wormhole that allows Geordi to host Reading Rainbow.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I have to disagree with that.
I'm not a Star Trek fan nor have I seen all of the movies.
I don't know all of the character names in any of the shows. In fact I hardly can recall the names of the main characters.
However, out of all of the TV shows that I have given a shot, including the other Star Trek series when they ran, I really enjoy Enterprise.
It is one of two shows that I try to watch every week and would hate to see it die off.
Out of all the crap that they try to shovel down our throats on national television, Star Trek is most certainly a relief from it.
If you look at the bolded text - this is why the show is tanking - Non - fans are starting to dig it, and the fans were told to sit down and shut up.
That's why the neilsen ratings are teh crap, and they have to jump the great white every fifteen minutes in the show.
Had they not gone with the stupid premise of being a prequel, and outstanding cast could of done Oh so much, unfortunately, they were saddled with berman and Braga - the "ren and stimpy" of the star trek world.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
How about instead they ditch those two, save all that money and instead spend it on a 45 minute long lesbian scene between t'pol and hoshi, no not some crappy kid-safe scene, a proper late-night special, go beyond the final frontier, the next generation, boldly! and it could even involve some elaborate time-travel scenario where they must get completely naked or else risk being stranded in a half-way dimension. Now tell me seriously that this episode won't get viewers?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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
The dodo was bloated, and had numerous security vulnerabilities.
[Enterprise 1 set vanishes, replaced by empty holodeck]
Riker: [taps badge] Riker to bridge. Captain, the runaway holodeck virus has been destroyed.
Picard (heard through communicator): Very good Number One. Mr. Crusher, ahead warp 5.
Troi: How are you feeling?
Riker: Hungry. For a hot fudge sundae. In your quarters.
Troi: [knowing smile]
Theme music up, Enterprise D goes into warp. Roll credits.
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
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.
I pity da fool who goes to da Delta Quadrant!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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).
Kirk wasn't a flat character - just acted that way!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."