Enterprise, wibbly wobbly timey wimey Star Trek.

ThomasjServo

15244 Posts

December 28 2015 18:14 GMT

GL getting this out of your head, it is more insidious than an ear worm, it is ear glitter.

With the announcement of the new Trek Series coming to a screen near you in the not too distant future, I caught the Trek bug again. That being the case, I opted to start the last trek series I had not touched at all: Enterprise.With this I imagine I'll be rounding out my year and change long run of Star Trek blogs, unless I decide to go back and watch the original series again. For the uninitiated Enterprise is chronologically the first Star Trek series taking place even before TOS; it is really meant to be humanity's first jaunt into deep space and first time kicking ass and taking names. I thought we'd start with a similar format to my previous Voyager blog, and take it from there. Copious amounts of spoilers will follow, and big shout out to KadaverBB for being a sounding wall as I meander through this series.

It's been a long road getting from TNG to here, it's been long time, but the end of season 4 is finally near.

The Ship

The NX-01 Enterprise was the first Warp 5 (barely) ship launched by humanity and having come to this ship last of all the other Enterprises in Star Trek the first adjective that comes to mind is quaint. No shields, no food replicator and the damn thing can limp to Warp 5, I say limp because that isn't like a cruising speed for this ship, it is the 50m dash.

Look at all the TVs and wall mounted Dell Monitors!

Alright, so their hands were tied a bit. We have to stay inline with the fact that the TOS ship was supposed to be more advanced if I am cutting them slack. Keypads and the like abound, there is a single transport platform (which most people are afraid to use, so shuttlepod trips are the way to go)

They did stay in the fine tradition of rather dopey looking shuttles, though didn't manage to top the shuttle Pike from TNG. Yes, that is a two person shuttle that was only ever shown once on TNG. Poor Admiral Pike.

What stands out most about the NX01 to me, was that they were willing to beat the ever loving shit out of it, and by they, I mean the show runners and the crew. The only person who likes to beat up ships named Enterprise more is JJ Abrams. With all the abuse the ship takes, I did form a sort of underdog bond with the NX01 Enterprise. It runs into fights like a little brother trying to wrestle with his older brother though where the little brother would have been pinned deus Ex Machina has the old girl's back.

The Crew

As I've been hashing over my thoughts on the crew with KadaverBB, and on the whole I think they are a fair bunch, but like all crews some characters are either objectively better or just more fleshed out than others. The helmsman, Mayweather, for example is white noise incarnate, save for his one episode and whenever he needs to present to help more interesting crew people get in/out of a jam (mostly in, though I suppose he is a rather unsung hero story-wise considering he is the pilot).

Reed, the tactical officer, is a a dial tone as well. That being said he is good at letting us know when weapons are down. That is a good thing because it happens a lot.

T'pol and Trip, the first officer and Chief Engineer respectively are the most interesting crewmen on Enterprise. Falling into the tropes of Vulcan science officer/first office and Engineer with an accent, they are pretty much the only characters that have fleshed out backstories or in which we are made to have some kind of vested interest. Phlox engenders himself to you as viewer by virtue of the character's charm otherwise Hoshi, Reed, and Mayweather only serve as plot devices. That being said, Hoshi plays an incrementally more interesting role as the Com Office. Seeing as the Universal Translator is far from perfect in this series, especially early on, it can be fun to see her have to wade through translations rather than having the UT work perfectly all the time.

Phlox continues in the tradition of strong medical officer characters. This being the first Denobulan you see, what backstory we get is as interesting as his course of treatments. Phlox's menagerie of creatures to treat wounds, infections and what have you make him stand out as a frontier kind of doctor with just the right dash of crazy.

I could have done without finding out Denobulans do this as a defense response in S4 though

It may well be that as the show was cut at four seasons, I get this sense of abbreviation regarding the crew. It has been a year or so since I was neck deep in TNG or DS9, but each had a lot more time to create interest and add meat to the senior staff.

The Captain

What to say about Archer, I'll put myself out there and say that I think Archer is more of a Captain than Janeway. I don't think that is a huge leap in the minds of most Trek fans, Scott Bakula does an excellent job transitioning from the naivete and optimism of the first season to competent-ish warship captain, to crazy to struggling to process the choices he has been made to make; that is where he really shines as a captain. No other trek captain went out into deep space as ill equipped ship wise and in actual experience in deep space as Archer, and I think that he handled it masterfully as an actor.

There have been times where I was watching Archer and straight up thought that the man was losing it,. I think the setting for the series was a blessing and a curse for the character.I think that given one or two more seasons, he could have moved out of the bottom half of Trek Captains if the people writing the plot had the attention span to stick to it.

+ Show Spoiler +

The Enemies

This is where things get all wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. Now I don't mean to shit on time travel as a concept in Trek, I'm all about saving the whales and Scotty making transparaent aluminium in the past, but let's go over the basics we have so far to make our Star Trek series:

The two races acting on behalf of the villains are the Suliban, and the Xindi, the former bearing an undeniable resemblance to Floam, the latter being 5 distinct species (Insectoid, Arboreal, Aquatic, Reptilian, and Primates. I would think the Arboreals would be primates too, but they don't go into specifics) of Xindi. While I love the Xindi in terms of design, and the character Degra in particular is very strong, whoever sketched out the story for Enterprise had some serious issues with structuring.

Unlike Voyager's antagonists, Enterprise's enemies can feel very real and present but too similar. Suliban are basically guns for hire, trading inconveniencing Enterprise for Genetic Modifications, while the Xindi are unknowingly being manipulated. Making the real enemies, those transdimensional aliens that we only see a handful of times before they lose their footing in our reality a poor substitute considering how much time was spent building up the Xindi.

The manipulators of the Xindi looking like aliens on some fucked, alien version of Touched by an Angel.

The Suliban seem to only intermittently give a shit about Enterprise; only bothering to try and affect our would be heroes seemingly if it is convenient.

"Sir, we have the human vessel on long range scans" -Suliban Crewman

"Well it would be rude to not pop in and say hello".-SIlik

I hesitate to even file the Xindi in the enemy category, but there isn't a really good place considering they fill those shoes for so long even if we as the viewer get to peek behind the curtain and see that they have their doubts as well.

As I write this, Brent Spiner (Data) just made his appearance as a baddie, so I'll hold my final judgement, but Enterprise seems to have had so many good ideas that when executed, were too conflated to do anything other than jerk the audience around abruptly from place to place. Late season 3, just before the ending of the season had the longest string of amazing episodes of Trek I could actually recall. It was everything I wanted in a Trek series with none of the inexplicable asides to pad the episode count and then we have to wrap up the temporal cold war plot line with Nazi aliens on the Eastern Seaboard of the US.

I wish I was joking. Not to mention, dude looks like he belongs in Buffy.

Regardless, season 4 seems to be starting with a clean slate, so I am hopeful that it closes out with its chin held high. We're teed up to touch on the Eugenics Wars, one of my favorite parts of Star Trek, and have Spiner to get us there at least part of the way. By the end, I think I'll be able to dial in a solid run of episodes that cut out the plot mixing, and short attention span, and come up with something excellent. Until then, I just have to see how data is manipulating humans after the Eugenics Wars.

Thanks for the read as always.

Zealos

United Kingdom3576 Posts

December 29 2015 12:34 GMT

I dunno, I watched it as a kid and loved it, but since revisiting it I found that the captain, especially in the early episodes, just seems like a stroppy kid when things go wrong, or people argue with him. He's not the best captain humanity could offer for the first deep - space ship IMO

ThomasjServo

15244 Posts

December 29 2015 13:10 GMT

On December 29 2015 21:34 Zealos wrote:
I dunno, I watched it as a kid and loved it, but since revisiting it I found that the captain, especially in the early episodes, just seems like a stroppy kid when things go wrong, or people argue with him. He's not the best captain humanity could offer for the first deep - space ship IMO

I could well be giving him too much credit, but I totally read his interpretation as him trying to show the Vulcans, "Hey, we're going to be friends with everyone. You'll see, I'll show you how much everyone will love humanity at first contact."

I don't disagree with your interpretation though, I think that is part of the charm. Starfleet is figuring its shit out, like they didn't even have tactical alerts sorted out or a lot of the processes you take for granted in later series; it all feeds into that how green everyone in Starfleet is/was. I think having Scott doing a Picard impression would have been strange, but you are definitely right that there had to be someone else in Starfleet with a more even keel.

Deleted User 135096

3624 Posts

December 29 2015 14:58 GMT

the whole "vulcans held us back, waaaaa" was a tad overplayed.

ThomasjServo

15244 Posts

December 29 2015 15:12 GMT

On December 29 2015 23:58 wo1fwood wrote:
the whole "vulcans held us back, waaaaa" was a tad overplayed.

Season one it was extremely heavy handed like Archer needed the Vulcan High Command's permission to wipe his own ass. The further they get away from it, and then looping back to local drama in S4 though, I think it very inadvertently sets up some fun drama.

I almost shut off the first season because of it though.

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