I avoided watching this for 20 (!) years, because the reviews were ambivalent. But it's really fun. It's not awesome, like the Kirk/Spock series, but it's also (thus far) not excessively moralizing like TNG.
This is the only Star Trek (for me) that captures the wonder of the original series. The writing isn't great, but that was never a thing with Star Trek. They're also a bit kinetic, say, with discovering new Warp-Civilizations.
I also really appreciate that the crew is basically white, except for one black guy that's not blackity-black.
Even the chicks are fine. The writing for the Asian chick is a bit insipid, but it accurately reflects the chick version of the 'hero's journey'.
Unfortunately, they've introduced Time Travel, so I guess a few of the episodes are going to be tedious.
Dealing with Space Time Continuum issues multiple times in a PREQUEL series (where they already have to go out of their way to make the tech look worse) just feels like a cop-out for lack of imagination.
Time travel in a series starring Quantum Leap...
I'm sure the guy who suggested that in the writers room is looking back at it saying "I'm retarded?"
He does, and so do the writers/producers who took over after he left. If I remember correctly, this was also due to studio interference, who wanted another "angle" and prevented the production staff from telling the story they wanted to tell. The DVDs for the show are quite interesting, as a lot of the extra content and interviews explore the failings of the show (kinda odd). The people responsible for the time war angle left at the end of season 3 (I think), which left the show on the alien Nazi time traveler cliffhanger season finale (LOL), which was quickly and unceremoniously wrapped up and never visited again in season 4 (under the direction of the new writers/producers).
One thing I sincerely miss with streaming services and digital-only downloads; the DVD extras..
I try to stick to physical media as much as possible. It's the superior form of content, especially with how much they're changing or removing stuff in real time. The only benefit to non-physical media is the convenience. I'd rather not sell my soul for convenience.
Don't mock Jimmy!
Not sure if anybody else got the joke...
Not to mention introducing alien species that we never see again after this, such as the Suliban and Xyrillians.
I'll give it credit for actually giving a satisfactory answer to the Klingon Forehead Problem near the end, though, as well as my favorite Mirror Universe episodes of the entire franchise, "In a Mirror, Darkly" parts 1 and 2.
The species thing isn't too far removed from how often Star Trek's played up small but powerful empires that in the end, almost never actually appear at any point in TNG, DS9, or Voyager.
The Tellarites and Andorians for example were fairly prominent in a TOS episode, indicating that they were major players within the Federation (Journey to Babel). Then of course there's the Tholians and the Gorn Hegemony.
If anything, Enterprise managed to bridge the gap in some ways by reintroducing some of these former cast offs and giving them some new life and attention.
That was a stupid and terrible answer, they'd have been best to just ignore it. The mirror eps were straight fire, though.
Indeed. There's even a scene later in the series where the characters sort of allude to how unpopular the whole "temporal cold war" concept was.
I want to know more. I've watched ENT several times and don't remember this.
https://youtu.be/PZMEvkuE-6w?si=44N5Hi5lr2RDqBPU&t=16
Obviously, in this scene Archer's supposed to be sick of it because of how much pain, stress, danger, agony, etc the whole affair's caused and how he wants nothing to do with it ever again.
Still, I think there was a subtle hint in there indicating that the writers were tired of it and wanted nothing to do with that plot element ever again. It was specifically the producers that had been insistent on the whole temporal cold war thing in the first place, and the writers had to try to force it into the plot for two years, no matter how stupid or annoying it was to begin with.
Thanks fren.
I enjoyed it. Not my favorite trek but I liked the series
What's your favourite trek? Mine's the original one, because Kirk/Spock/Bones/Scottie were such lovingly played characters.
The big 'issues' in Star Trek were never my thing, although I suppose that's usually why it's so beloved.
As an aside -- you should check out Shatner's skit on Saturday Night Live from about 30 years ago. It's hilarious.
TOS, TNG and DS9 are all equally good for different reasons IMO. Voyageur is next then Enterprise and everything else is bad.
Original series is my favorite but I enjoy all through Enterprise and have a number of Star Trek books now.
The one where he told fans to get a life? Yea that was funny
There was a lot of resentment towards Enterprise at the time because it was perceived as a reboot of the series and abandonment of the TNG/DS9/VOY lore.
I quite enjoyed it. For me, season three is the best out of the series. The cast do a fine job, but honestly the episodes with Jeffrey Combs shows what a great actor he was for the franchise.
Season 4 fell off a bit and culminated with the utter disaster of the series finale. The final episode is absolutely worth skipping.
I've watched everything Star Trek and Enterprise was also the last thing I watched. I just finished it for the first time literally a month ago. When I was younger I avoided it because I thought the starting theme music was too gay.
Enterprise got a lot of decent reviews but riding off the coattails of DS9 and TNG with a complete 180 in theme was already going to be difficult. DS9/TNG has just nailed a winning formula and the next Star Trek abandoned it basically so a lot of Trek fans were upset. People at the time wanted something along the lines of TNG/DS9 but a little different, not something as different as Enterprise.
Overall, I enjoyed Enterprise. It's worth a watch. I didn't think Enterprise did anything exceptionally well and nothing was too memorable about it but it was still enjoyable. If you're enjoying it only 18 Episodes in then you'll definitely start to enjoy it more. The last 2 seasons were probably the best and I thought the first half of season 1 overutilized some themes as they were still trying to find a groove.
I have heard that people literally hate the theme song, and by extension the entire series. It seems strange to judge an entire show on something so trivial, but it's a complaint I see often when the show is brought up. That and how much people hated the final episode- which seems to be something so many shows get wrong.
I think it started out slowly and didn't find its groove till the end, but if you watch the first couple seasons of TNG or DS9, you'll see the same thing. The first season of TNG is a excruciating, as you can almost feel them stumbling while trying to figure out what each character's personality should be.
I think the show suffered from a form of fan service: "we've got to show the Borg", Let's find a way to work in Data's creator", etc., but at the same time, those were some interesting and fun episodes.
Given the prequel setting and how they worked in so many references to the previous shows, it almost feels like some sort of retrospective send off to Star Trek, which now seems appropriate as pretty much everything in the franchise since then has been trash.
The first season for really bad for way too many shoutouts to future Star Trek stuff. They toned it down later on though and made it seem less forced which was better.
All Treks except DS9 started very shaky imo as you pointed out but Enterprise was essentially riding off the coattails of DS9 so people at the time had less patience for bad starts. Compared to TOS, the TNG+DS9 era really advanced the technology in the Trek universe and the high-tech was fun. Enterprise went backwards where there was less tech which was not exciting for Science Fiction viewers. Then combined with the opening theme which in itself seemed the very opposite of progressive (it sounds like some sort of Christian Rock song... Faith to believe, lmao) it just seemed to be all the wrong messaging.
I listened to the first five notes of the theme song... and have never listened to it again.
I liked it overall. The show drops off hard in the last season. There are a run of episodes, I think it's in season 3 where it's VERY serialized. Like each episode starting where the previous left off. Was interesting and fast-paced for a Star Trek show.
For me it's in order of overall best to worst: DS9 > TOS > Enterprise > TNG > The Orville (honorable mention) > Voyager > Picard > Strange New Worlds > Discovery
The latter two shouldn't even be labeled Star Trek. Picard is awful, just not quite as pathetic as Discovery/SNW I rate TNG lower than Enterprise, because simply by volume there are more TNG episodes I dislike or get bored watching, than there were in Enterprise.
I'd rate TOS higher than DS9 if there were a full AI remaster or overhaul or something to make it less dated looking. Please no remake or reboot, current day would absolutely gut it.
No thank you. They redid all of the exterior shots with CGI for the Blu-ray release, and it's jarring when compared to the scenes with actors. At least they had the decency to give you the choice between watching that version or the one filmed with little models.
I think we have to accept media as a product of its time, especially science fiction. There's really no way to "modernize" a show where they are feeding physical cards into a computer to program it without reshooting the whole thing, and then it wouldn't be TOS anymore.
There's a version of TOS in HD with re-done special effects. I assume they have new scans of the film because they don't seem to have the usual flaws of upscaling. The re-done effects are much better than the originals (probably) but I am not familiar enough to say. They do have a cheap CGI look to them though, particularly the ship models. Regardless I am enjoying watching them through, in order, for the first time.
Enterprise better than TNG is bold but I agree with the rest of your list, except I wouldn't count Picard as Star Trek either.
Picard Season 3 is supposed to be better, but I couldn't even work up the energy to watch it after the absolute train wrecks that constituted the first two seasons.
Star Trek and Star Wars have both been ruined by current day production teams that don't understand the charm of the original at all and probably hate it if they do.
Frankly, because once it does fall off it falls off hard and you'll wonder why you keep watching. I don't think I ever finished the series.
Pretty much this. I've tried watching it through a couple times, and it is genuinely enjoyable with likeable characters and some interesting plots, but it does go downhill to the point that it's just not very fun anymore. It feels like they were starting to experiment with grand narratives, but were still stuck in the serialized mindset of the older series, and never really hit a good balance between the two. Over all I'd certainly recommend watching it for as long as you enjoy it.
The only Star Trek to ever successfully blend the two was arguably DS9, and even then it wasn't on purpose I think. That was a consequence of the show runners demanding more Gul Dukat since he was such a popular character.
Man, what a great character. The slow shift from "foe but sometimes uneasy ally" to pawn of the Dominion ala Vichy France and then crazy cult leader was quite a ride. I thought it was unintentional, but I always kind of felt sorry for him.
He and Garak were the best parts of the show. I also liked what they did with Nog; pivoting from a stereotypical greedy and shitty little ferengi into a Starfleet officer was great. Especially given how boring Jake's growth into a "journalist" was.
Unfortunately, I never felt that Benjamin Sisko was very interesting. He had pretty much none of the gravitas that Picard had. Even Janeway pulled off being a commander and authority figure better than he did.
That was episode one. That's why the tepid reviews.
The fact that something of that ilk continues to the final episode is why it is loved, but scornfully so.
Had it just been a show of exploration with no funking up the timeline it would be praised higher than it is. But we all still secretly long for more of it - it had some excellent moments.
It's called 'Enterprise' but the ship is a rust bucket with pea shooters. It's unimpressive in every conceivable way and most of the ship-to-ship conflicts become exercises in teeth-gritting.
It may have been a throwback to the 'foregone' days of Starfleet but there was nothing satisfying about seeing that decrepit vessel deploy its pea shooters to fire its pew-pew lasers.
The CGI was also noticeably lacking and could not measure up to the Defiant or even Voyager. And most of the interpersonal ship dynamics were eye-rollingly bad.
It came across as a cheap, budget project.
That's part of the core concept of the show though: this isn't the mighty Federation, a powerful political entity with an armada of top of the line spacecraft. It's earth, a relatively unimportant planet taking its first steps into the universe
If you're familiar with aviation history, the US didn't build a single fighter plane in World War 1, and all of its fighters were borrowed from France (like how the Vulcans are the keepers of knowledge and technology in Enterprise).
Contrast that with the Korean War-era and later where the US is now the undisputed master of military aviation, with the exception of the mysterious and inscrutable Soviets (a role filled by the Klingons in TOS).
I'll grant you that the execution was somewhat lacking, but I found the concept interesting, with enough historical analogs that it was believable.
The concept was fine, the execution was laughably bad. The non-traditional casting for the Vulcans and Romulans was also grating.
Enterprise had a log of potential- and then it turned into a 9/11 allegory.
I enjoyed it, too. The retcon stuff did made me wince, though. (Klingon forehead... disease?)
Most of that enjoyment evaporated with that temporal cold war stuff and the Xindi. Nothing about those last two seasons is even remotely memorable for me except for the two In the Mirror Darkly episodes right at the end of the series.
"A Night in Sickbay" crippled the series. Viewers dropped sharply after it showed.
SPOILER
Is that cause of the Archer T'Pol "romance" thing?
Archer-T'pol romance.... ugh, that's going to be hard to take.
It was OK if you just think of it as a stand alone/parallel world series
The moment I heard the opening credits music, I was out.
Star Trek's soundtrack shouldn't be Aerosmith.
Rod Stewart. It grows on you.
Is this a bad troll?
If you were really around 20 years ago and into Trek, you’d know full well that people knew (and were proved correct) that a prequel series just wouldn’t mesh with looking pre-TOS as that show was so dated production wise.
And lo, we had impossible journeys to Kronos, Ferengi, Borg, wallpaper music and “hull plating at 60%”… all had marks of a burned out franchise that needed a rest and change of creatives.
Definitely a bad troll.
Nah, not a troll. I used to watch TOS in syndication from about 1978-1990, usually with my dad -- an engineer who started teaching to support the family. But I was never a Trek Guy.
To be honest, the 'fandom' stuff never meant anything to me. I grew up in a small town, so no one cared too much about TV shows -- we usually just went outside. Now I like things like FMA:Brotherhood, but at my age I'm not going to go to Comic Con or anything like that.
Thus far they've mentioned the Ferengi once, and the Borg haven't come up.
The moralizing is in keeping with TOS, but without the histrionics of Picard.
The Ferangi shouldn't pop up until TNG when Picard makes first contact. But I vaguely remember ferangi popping up in Enterprise somehow.
There is an episode with the Ferengi in ENT. It is fansevice twice over (the ladies get naked). There's probably some excuse explaining how nobody meets them until TNG but it's been years since I watched.