STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE 5/26/'04 "Zero Hour" (1 Viewer)

[Peter McM]

Just remember, guys--Star Trek, for many of us, is a lot like sex: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good!

 

[Gordon St Pierre]

I'm with Bob & Tony ..I've liked Enterprise from the time it started ..This season especially (very Good )..But can't be bothered with these threads because they are totally crapped on (IMO) every week by the same people ..I find it funny its considered "con" views in an Enterprise thread but the same comments on any other subject would be Thread craps plain & simple

No big deal now anyway until next season ...can't wait

 

[Mohsen Sadeghi]

Agreed. In any other thread, be it about a movie or TV show, people are often reminded that it is not OK to comment on something that they have not actually seen. Apparently thread-crappers have immunity when it comes to Enterprise simply because a moderator is backing them up. Quite pathetic if you ask me.

 

[JamesED]

I'm enjoying the season, but the threads give me a good laugh. I honestly don't think the shows that bad. Outside of Adult Swim, this is the only show I catch every week. The weak acting and stories still beat canned, awkward NBC laughter or any recent episode of the Simpsons.

 

[BrianBr]

This is exactly the reason I do not participate in this forum. Too many people saying negative things about episodes before they air and people getting looked down upon for liking the show.

my 2 cents... and the way things look... I probably won't be participating much in the future either. :frowning:

-Brian

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Not until next season anyway.

I think that the problem isn't the show, but the nay-sayers that seem to expect more and more from Trek every year.

Have any of you asked yourself that maybe you have just had enough Trek - like you've grown past it and no longer need to see it? You know, like Seseme St. or Capt. Kangaroo.

The thread about the Cannes Festival got stopped because no one had seen Moore's film yet. Ok, I won't go past there except to ask how fair that was if anyone had any comments on any of the other winners.

Here's to another 4 seasons of Enterprise, and to a good finale for this season! Cheers!

Glenn

 

[Jason Seaver]

Nah, it just seems that way because even if we expect the same, we get less and less.

 

[Mark C.]

I don't get it. The show is damned even before it airs. Let's remember something folks: it's only television.

 

[Brent Hutto]

I really looked forward to Enterprise in the weeks leading up to the airing of the pilot episode. Then I watched the pilot and I really enjoyed it. The first season was a bit uneven but I figured the show would improve with time and reach a peak along about the third or fourth season much like Star Trek: The Next Generation.

By the end of the second season I had all but given up on hoping for improvement. The whole Suliban/Time Travel thing got sooo tiresome. It seemed that the gratuitous shower scenes and shirtless men and women in skimpy outfits became more frequent. There were several episodes that my wife watched (she likes Enterprise much more than I do) that I didn't see more than a scene or two of.

The early portions of this season were pretty much more of the same. Magic reset buttons, cheesy titillation, idiot plotting. And of course the in-your-face derivativeness of the whole "sneak attack kills seven million" start to the season. But somewhere along the line, I actually got caught up in the story arc. I quit skipping episodes. I was a little shaken by scenes such as when Degra was murdered.
In other words, Enterprise right now is a better show than it was a year ago.

I've also recently watched a couple repeats of ST:TNG and it seems that perhaps maybe memory is too kind to old TV shows. Of course I have my favorite episodes of that series but week in and week out it was slow moving, talky, stagey, repetitive and slow moving (yes, I said it twice on purpose). There were some damned boring episodes of ST:TNG as well as a few that were as stupidly plotted as anything we've seen on Enterprise. And don't get me started on Voyager. It was never very good, although a couple of the characters were fun. Once they got to the "Tuvix" episode they were trying to address issues that were far beyond what the writers were capable of handling. After the episode when Paris and Janeway turned into giant lizards, became Adam and Eve for an entire planet and then switched back again by the magic reset button...well, let's just say I was no longer watching by the time Jeri Ryan's proto-T'pol arrived on the scene in her high heels.

Enterprise right now, end of season three has better production values and at least equal writing as compared to anything on Voyager or 90% of ST:TNG. I can't address DS9 since I've only seen a handful of its episodes.

Is Enterprise as well written and acted as Babylon 5? Of course not. But there were a few weak episodes of that series that weren't as compelling as these last couple episodes of Enterprise.

Is Enterprise as interesting and fun to watch as Stargate:SG1? Not even close. But then again I think SG1 is the current gold standard for SF programming on television.

Will I watch season four of Enterprise? Probably not since our local UPN station is going away some time in the next year. But if I can watch it without extraordinary efforts of importing tapes from somewhere I'll watch most of the episodes and just turn it off when the occasional howlingly bad writing makes it not worth the trouble.

As for Jason and Jack and the other broken records, whatever floats their boat. I'm not sure that Enterprise is worth the trouble of otherwise valued contributors to this forum sounding like idiots but it seems to stick in their craw for some reason. If I didn't watch the show, I wouldn't be participating in every single thread with Enterprise in the title. It's a mystery why that option isn't available to some people.

 

[Jason Seaver]

I can't authoritatively disagree with this, since I quit watching about a month ago (it may have made a nigh-miraculous recovery, which I doubt for reasons I'll explain below) and post in these threads just in terms of the health of the franchise. The reason I quit watching is that Enterprise was not a better show than it had been a year previously, and was apparently emphasizing the things I most disliked during the season's final month.

Enterprise's strength had been in taking a more nuts-and-bolts approach to exploration than other shows. It featured language barriers, spacesuits, people uneasy with new technology like the transporter. Space was a dangerous place, but it was believably dangerous, with solutions that sounded right. I applauded this, because it seemed like the show's creators had recognized their weaknesses and found ways to avoid indulging them.

And then the Xindi attacked the Earth. Put aside that this is a complete idiot plot, that if you're plotting a massive sneak attack, the last thing you'd want to do is test your weapon on the planet you intend to attack. It immediately led to the Delphic expance, where B&B suddenly felt free to pull out more idiotic "anomolies" which could only be held at bay by coating the ship with unobtainium... So what? How is this more interesting than the stories they'd been doing which had some small amount of science or groundedness to them? It's not.

Then there came the changes to the story structure. Rather than telling a new and interesting story every week, they opted stretch one story out for several weeks. This can be great if you've got an interesting story, but Enterprise didn't, in part because of the idiot plot mentioned above, but also because... Well, I've heard a couple folks got killed last week. So what? At what point were any of the Xindi or MACOs actually interesting? The show already had more characters than they knew what to do with, and the new ones were just taking up space and runtime.

A lot of posts arguing in favor of the new, allegedly-improved Enterprise seem to be saying that increased serialization is in and of itself a positive, that the stories are inherently more interesting because they take several weeks to tell. I've found, at least in this instance, that this can backfire; that when all you've got to look forward to is more of a story that wasn't compelling to start, there's no need to keep up, and you might as well cut your losses. And it makes me angry, because this Xindi thing is like a cancer eating Enterprise from the inside, turning a show I once found to be a return to form into possibly the worst Trek yet (which is saying something with Voyager and The Final Frontier running around). It's strayed from the franchise's traditional strengths of strong, self-contained stories built around interesting ideas, but hasn't done so well enough to stand up as its own thing like DS9 has.

 

[Jack Briggs]

Well, what Jason said. Agreed.



An opinion to which you're entitled -- except for the name-calling, which is frowned upon here at HTF. But I'm in a decent mood today, and we'll let that pass.

 

[Andy_Bu]

I have absolutely no problems with people who watch an episode and then comment on it, be it pro or con.

I don't care what people preconceived notions are concerning the current or passed season of Enterprise, assuming they actually watched it.

However, it seems quite embarassing to me for people to come into a thread EVERY week, to state how they have only watched one or two episodes all year and then continue to lump criticism into a thread about a show that has not even debuted yet. I know people think they are funny by making fools of themselves, but its childish at best, completely annoying at worst.

Personally, I did not like seasons 1 or 2 and only wound up watching season 3 because of the continuing story arc and have been happy with my decision. Its not B5 or Farscape, but its certainly good enough to make sure I have a season pass set.

Andy

 

[Brent Hutto]

Jack,

I know from other contexts that you and Jason aren't at all like the impression one would get from your posts on these Enterprise threads. I tried to make that clear in my original wording. The thing I don't understand is why this one particular topic induces such silly-sounding insults (toward the show and everything associated with it) from a few people.

I know that I have my own hot-button issues and that discussions of them tend to result in my saying things that don't really make sense. I'd rather avoid those topics than give the appearance that I'm unable to engage in reasonable discussion.

 

[Brent Hutto]

Jason,

I don't mean to disparage the production values of Next Generation. But compare the talky writing, static staging and funereal pacing of that show to even ST:TOS a generation earlier and it suffers in comparison. I think that my earlier impressions of ST:TNG were in fact skewed by the excellent production values and I overlooked the structural weakness of the series and especially its weaker episodes.

Regarding the (IMHO) recent improvements in Enterprise, I wouldn't characterize it as a miraculous recovery. For me there have always been occasional episodes that are fun to watch and have a minimum of cringe-inducing least common denominator fluff. From late in S1 through the early part of S3 those good episodes alternated with crappy episodes that just had nothing worthwhile to contribute.

What the Xindi arc has done this season is to provide at least some justification for some of the episodes that would be too weak to stand on their own. There are still some very good episodes (the one with the spoiler I alluded to previously was one) and they tend to alternate with episodes that at least provide a little plot development for the longer arc even if that's all they have to offer.

The bottom line for me has been that I feel like I'm watching a somewhat flawed telling of a story that actually has some heft to it. Unlike the Suliban and "Temporal Cold War" crap that they made up as they went along, the B&B team either planned this one out rationally or at least did a good enough job to fake me into believing they did.

It sounds like you prefer stand-alone episodes for their own sake and that it takes something at the B5 or DS9 level of structure to make a longer arc worthwhile. I apparently have the opposite bias. I like following a longer story and just ask that the individual episodes be of decent quality on average (i.e. the good eps outnumber the real clunkers).

 

[Jason Seaver]

I'd like to say I'm not terribly biased in either direction, although I do find myself watching a lot more of the done-in-one police procedurals than ongoing stories nowadays. It's not the structure, per se, although I'm only half-joking when I say that serialization is a technique by which lazy writers create a single story using the resources more industrious ones create ten. Also, on those rare occasions when Without A Trace has a bad episode, I can have reasonable confidence that it will be better next week because they can start afresh; a serial program is by its nature more likely to be an extension of what stank this week.

But I do love the serials, too; some of my favorite shows are the most serialized (24, Gilmore Girls). However, I do expect that when a story is serialized, the individual units, whether they be TV episodes, comics, movies, or novels, should be satisfactory. They don't necessarily have to stand on their own (although that's always nice), but they should be more than a fragment.

 

[Kevin Hewell]

I think one of the things that ENT has gotten right all along is that it doesn't fall back on the tired reset button. This is something that plagued TNG and to a much greater extent, VOY. DS9 avoided this and much of that had to do with the serialized nature of the show. ENT, even before it started its arc, has avoided the "reset button" solution.

 

[TheLongshot]

Well, I've been one who has watched most of this season's episodes, and while it may be 'better', it is by no means great. If this season 1) had not been Trek and 2) had been a first season, I might say that the series had potential. But, now we are in the third season. Some characters still haven't gotten more than a token amount of character development (Mayweather, Hoshi). There hasn't yet been one episode of this series that I'd call "classic", that I'd want to see again at some point. Hell, Voyager managed a few of those.

Worst of all, this season has totally abandoned all of the premises that this show was built on. The whole Suliban plotline went away (hell, Daniels didn't even bring it up when he visited.), the whole thing with the Vulcans, and the formation of the Federation have all gone away for the time being. All for a plotline that feels like a sidestory.

Maybe in the end, they can tie the end of this season up, and it ends up being worth more than it currently seems, but the writing this season doesn't give me that confidence. It isn't terribly clever.

Jason

 

[Jack Briggs]

Well, one thing's for certain: We're at 38 posts and two pages -- and none of us has seen the episode yet! (That's the way it will remain for me; I'm fully respectful of Jason's "enjoy, suckers" comments when it comes to the "writing" credit this evening's episode has.

 

[Kwang Suh]

While I wouldn't say that Enterprise is the best Trek I've ever seen, it's been better than Voyager by a long shot (IMHO). At least enough for me to want to watch it.

Considering that the recent ST series usually suck in their first two seasons, this could be a good sign.

Too bad about the ratings though. Could spell doom next year.

 

[Eric_Connelly]

Hey where did Enterprise I go?

I turned on the TV and thought I was watching "V"