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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.
I was wondering why all of our evening shift IT guys called in sick.
Turk: Let's play Steak. J.D.: What? Turk: Steak. The 1st person to finish their steak is the winner of Steak. -Scrubs
Sadly enough, I've gotten into loud arguments about whether Picard or Kirk was the better captain. It's a symptom of my horrible geekdom. For those of you wondering, by the way, it's Picard.
Why do they have to cancel a fantastic show like this when there is so much drivel on television. This show was refreshing in its character depth and unique take on human colonization of space. I really enjoyed the sneak preview of the upcoming movie.
Huh? Enterprise? Meh. I thought we were talking about Firefly. HEY! Maybe the last episode will be a daring holodeck thriller featuring 19th century villians! I hope Whoopie has a guest appearance.
Sam leaps into the Enterprise D as Commander Riker and must save the relationship between him and Troi
:)
Oh wait..that was the good show with Scott Bakula
At the end of the episode, after he has resolved the problems facing "Enterprise", he will warp through time and space and reappear as George in Seinfeld and attempt to get the series started again. [Obligatory]
I see where you're coming from. But still, to make the set of Enterprise look less sophisticated than the Original Series would require them drawing on the walls with crayons or perhaps using vacuum tubes.
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.
"It's dead, Jim."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I agree that Picard was a better captain than Kirk, but there is a lot about star trek that bugged me, not the least of which was that Capt. Jelicho and Cmdr. Data were better captains than either of them. (Riker complained to Jelicho he was being too hard on the crew. HELLO! You were at war, Riker! It's not Jelicho's fault Picard never ran battle readiness drills.) Data was the victim of starfleet's basic pro-human bias. (Ever wonder why starfleet was topheavy with humans instead of the much longer lived vulcans?) It really galled me when Troi was promoted over Data. I wasn't even aware that she was an officer, I thought she was a civilian contractor (but she donned a uniform in later shows).
And another thing, Troi sure was hot, but God, I hated the way she abused Worf. "A Klingon does NOT [do X]!" "Well, I'm not a Klingon, but I know I would feel [feeling Y] if I were confronted with [situation Z] [and I think you damn well better change your behavior and act more like me by doing X even though I'm not a Klingon, or I will make a recommendation to Capt. Picard to include this "deficiency" in your officer's fitness report]." Which invariably concludes with Worf changing his behaviour to be more like a human-betazoid hybrid than the Klingon he is.
Sorry about that. Thanks for letting me vent my hyper-critical warp core.
More music, fewer hits
I'm with you on that one. Back when I was a young infantry officer in the Army, the three other lieutenants in my company and I used to get together at our CO's house to watch the latest Next Generation episode.
We would get into blistering arguments about the leadership styles of Picard and Kirk. Two of the guys came down in favor of Kirk, and three of us (including our boss, the CO), though Picard was a better leader. We actually had extensive discussions about it, comparing their actions on various episodes to examples from the Army's leadership manuals, books we'd read about leadership, and our own real-world examples.
A few months after these regular Trek sessions started, we were deployed to a rather remote part of Somalia. The CO asked his wife to record and send episodes, even though being a light infantry company we deployed with no real luxury items. Sure enough, several weeks after arriving in Somalia, we received a tape with two episodes. By then a heavy engineer unit had colocated with us, and we were able to phinagle a couple of hours on their TV late one night between patrols.
Strange though it may sound, that night spent watching Trek with a generator humming loudly outside in the hot Somali air was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life.
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Replace "Klingon" with "man", and "human-betazoid hybrid" with "woman" in the above statement, and you've got a stereotypical heterosexual relationship.
*BEEP*
*BEEP*
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
____
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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.
Here's what I didn't like about it: There's all this really amazing stuff going on at Earth. Humans have just learned they're not alone. They've just received technology that basically makes economics impotent, as well as technology that allows them to spread throughout the galaxy.
What do they do? Go far, far away from Earth! Nobody cares about politics or other stuff. There's a species with three genders we've never heard of! There's a temporal cold war! How about making contact with the Romulans? Nobody wants to watch things about how people deal with life-changing events.
The last season has really picked up. The idea of Terra Prime is excellent. If they had run with this idea from the beginning, maybe they'd have a seven year run like TNG.
Obligatory: Berman and Braga killed it.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Brzt. Does Not Compute.
Andy Griffith's like a lot of other classic TV -- if you watch it now next to the latest crop of new sitcoms, you realize how well-written the thing was. Each episode's basically a little one-act play, and it's pretty tight writing. It's basically superior to Enterprise in the traits you're talking about, despite no story arc from episode to episode. That would explain why people still remember favorite episodes of Andy Griffith decades after its run ended, whereas Enterprise is dying of neglect despite a colossal built-in audience.
TV used to do so much better with character actors than it does now. The Mary Tyler Moore show wasn't episode after episode of "Mary goes on another date," you know? (Ted, Murray, Lou Grant, Sue Ellen, Rhoda, Phyllis, Georgette.)Heck, "Leave It to Beaver" looks like a friggin' Pulitzer Prize-winning play next to Voyager or Enterprise, and the cast of regulars was more interesting, despite them all being whitebread suburbanites.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"Sadly enough, I've gotten into loud arguments about whether Picard or Kirk was the better captain."
*sigh*
There'll never be a Slashdot: The Next Generation.
"Derp de derp."
For the past I dunno, 4 weeks it's been replaced with some sort of game in which players hit a ball will a stick.
See the two-hour premire episode of ST Deep Space 9. It explains this game.
Tag lost or not installed.
Picard is a wimp. Kirk is a man's man.
Picard trys to go by the Prime Directive, even if it means misery for people on the planet. Kirk always violated it, because he put the good fortune of others ahead of a buerocratic/pollitical idea.
Picard always tries to get out of fighting, if possible, tries to reason with Klingons, etc. Kirk knows that he has an edge in fighting, and that Klingons, etc won't listen to reason anyway.
Picard always is concerned for the safety of his crew, and never has the engineer exceed safety regulations. Kirk knows that his engineer is smart enough to exceed safety regulations without endangering the crew.
Picard is a prude, doesn't have many girlfriends. Kirk has a woman on every planet, and apparently spread his seed across the galaxy.
Picard does not know how to fight, someone stronger than him can easily take him out. When faced with a genetically engineered madman with ten times his strength, Kirk evened the odds with a pipe.
Picard is bald, even in the future there is no cure for baldness. Kirk lost some hair, but was smart enough to join the hair club for men or wear a toupee.
Picard crashed his ship due to his mismanagement. Kirk set his ship to self destruct so the Klingons wouldn't get it, and it would take some Klingons out when it blew up.
Kirk gave his own life to save Picard and the universe. Picard couldn't even save himself from his own clone, without having one of his crew (Data) sacrifice his life, because Picard is too much of a wimp.
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