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Enterprise Finale Airing Tonight
Tycoon Guy writes "Be sure to tune in to UPN tonight, where they're going to show the 'true finale' of Enterprise with the episode Terra Prime, followed by the post-season coda, These Are The Voyages. The latter will feature appearances by Troi, Riker, and a completely CGI Enterprise-D."
I have been a long time devotee of ST:TNG. I, like many others, never got involved with Enterprise. And from what I hear, that's a shame, as by all accounts, the show has really become much better toward the end. I do admit I had very high hopes to begin with, but found it stilted and uninteresting during the first four episodes and gave up. But I know I won't be alone watching the finale just to get a glimpse of "new" ST:TNG cast action and the familiar Enterprise-D, no matter how brief.
This will be the first time in almost two decades that a first-run Star Trek hasn't been on TV...the end of an era. Here's hoping that the Star Trek franchise can be revived at some point, even better.
Poor Scott Bakula. He was so brilliant on Quantum Leap, but Enterprise just sort of floundered in the shadow of its predecessors.
At least this show will get a proper ending and avoid the Farscape treatment.
You must be joking.
It was Sisko by a long shot. He wasn't afraid to disipline people that needed it.
>
> Who's the creative genium behind that one?
Data: The creative "genium", as you put it, appears to be the source of the problem.
Troi: Yes, Data. And I'm getting a senation of bad scriptwriting and an utter lack of focus, Captain.
Picard: Worf, target all weapons on the temporal rift and fire!
Riker: Berman and Braga will finally get thier just desserts.
Worf: I couldn't agree more. Firing.
Wesley: I'm not touching this thread with a ten-foot warp nacelle. If our weapons can hit them the 20th century, Paramount's lawyers can damn well hit us.
what most Sci-Fi still hasn't. That is that writing and telling a good story is still the most important element. They've gotten it right this season, but it was too late to save it.
Given the setting of this series, the logical place to start in the story was getting Earth established in the space of the era, meeting other species, forging alliances, making enemies, forming the beginnings of the Federation, etc. This is exactly what they've done this season and it's been brilliant. Had they started this way, the show would still be on the air.
But no, for the first two seasons we had Andy Griffith in space (yes it really was THAT boring), and then they had to trot out such over the top monstrosities as a war through time and huge insect aliens that wanted to annihilate earth. It didn't help that they broke continuity a lot with the other series (introducing the Borg, etc.). This is not the Trek that the fans came for and many of them left, never to return. Unfortunate but it reinforces one of the basic requirements of any fictional narrative that many people still don't grasp. If the story isn't compelling it won't be a success. Given the past success of Trek, you can't just slap the name on any piece of work and expect that alone to carry you.
But he DID hold a Captain's rank.
Picard: Accomplished Shakesprean Actor
Sisko: Threatened, or performed, violent action on omnipotent superdimensional beings regularly.
Winner: Sisko, because he clangs when he walks.
As groundbreaking as the original series was, it was still based on '60s concepts of how the future would look. Even the later series, which did a great job trying to keep continuity with the original, had a few huge problems to overcome. One of the best episodes ever, DS9's reprise of "Trouble With Tribbles" had to contend with the fact that the original Klingons looked more like Ming the Merciless than they looked like "modern Klingons" with the riged forehead and larger muscles. There was no way to reconcile that, so they just had Warf say "We Klingons do not talk about it." How could Enterprise possibly make technology that looked more advanced than ours, but less advanced than the original? (Maybe they could have it look like current military technology, which already looks pretty high tech--HUD's and virtual controls on a multifunction touch screen--you know, like they used in later star treks, but more "today looking" so it naturally looks less advanced.)
btw, I never watched Enterprise, I was already tired of the Star Trek universe by then (a few episodes of STV did that for me) but I hear that some of the actresses were pretty hot.
More music, fewer hits
I always looked at it thusly, to say who was the better captain goes like this - "If I had to choose which captain? If I was serving on the ship - I'll take Picard, if I had a choice which captain I'd be? Kirk - all the way...."
As for the series final of "enterpoop"?
Waiter? I'll take a pitcher of Pan galactic gargle blasters and a funnel..
and make that two lemons on the brick please...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The Mirror universe was clever, but I wished they'd put as much energy into the rest of the series. It was a brilliant premise and they botched it from the start.
The right use of the mirror episode would have been to pull a Dallas and just erase the entire series by admitting that all the preceding episodes were the mirror version. They could have a version of T'Pol enter and find herself horrified to see that there's a universe where she's just a sex object with emotions and pointy ears and not a regular crew member, a scientist, and a practicing emotionless vulcan. Then they wouldn't have to worry how they were going to link up all the temporal inconsistencies with the subsequent series either. We could have gone back with the good guys to our universe and lived happily ever after.What I liked about the original premise of the Enterprise series was the notion of putting some humor and adventure back into Star Trek. For as much as TNG was brilliant, it suffered in the end because it appears they had no more places where no man had gone before, and they turned inward to the mental. A lot of us think Space is about new starts, things that don't always work, a chance to rebuild and make up for past mistakes, etc. Here was a series where transporters didn't quite work, the universal translator wasn't debugged, people were not experienced diplomats, and there was a big chance of things going wrong, sometimes comedically and sometimes tragically.
It was to be a show about real adventure and uncertainty, showing how hard it was surviving in Space before the invention of the red shirt for expendible crewmen. Maybe with characters that came and went on shorter timelines than the whole series, if that's even possible in modern television qua business. My generation grew up with Star Trek to teach us about optimism and hope for the future. Those are things people needed to get the Space program going. But recently, we panic in real life when the space program loses even one life. That's not realistic. We need Star Trek to be brave enough to teach us that good lives will be lost, and that this is acceptable. I think we are losing that sense, and insisting on a completely planned experience both in real life and on the show.
Other than venue, the show has mostly just converged on the same old formula, made worse only by intensive pushes for a love story with T'Pol and the need to constantly be pushing to undress her, just as killed Lt. Yar's hope for being an equal. Yar's only really good episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and it's probably not a coincidence that she had to be dead to do it. I grew up on the original series and loved its characters, but sad as it was, I really thought it a genius stroke to kill a main character in one of the movies (you know which one, but I'm trying not to spoil it). I thought "Yes! Finally we know they're playing for keeps. Now the uncertainty will be real..." This was to be a show about uncertainty, but it didn't deliver.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
IMHO Terry Ferrel is way hotter than Jeri Ryan. But then, I prefer exotic natural beauties over silicone-enhanced bleach-blonde barbie dolls.
Besides, Jeri Ryan is a prude.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Huh? The writing on DS-9 was fantastic. But yeah, Voyager was 100% cheese.
/. are just ads for BSG which while very good is not Star Trek, period. So it is no more relevant in the context of ST than Star Wars, or bloody Firefly or Buffy, etc.
Enterprise was always decent and in the last season, really good.
Most of the comments on Enterprise stories on
My personal opinion is that it wasn't the writers that killed Enterprise, but too many of the actual fans gave up on it too early. Come on-- TNG totally sucked when it first started, but picked up as it went on. DS-9 was the only series to really get off to a running start. Watch the first few episodes -- these guys knew their characters, and the writers in general knew where they were going.
-- John.
Sisko punching Q upside the head was the highlight of Season One!
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