The Star Trek Enterprise appreciation and Season 4 discussion thread (this one's for the fans). (1 Viewer)

[Mark Maltais]

I aggree with BLALOCK, this was appalling. She's been pretty outspoken the whole time on this series and she was right, good for her! I'm a big fan of TNG but this was in insult to both the fans and to the cast of Enterprise.

MADE NO SENSE...

T'Pol in the kitchen with chef, pouring her heart out???

Trip totally out of character on his suicide thing???

The pegasus storyline (which I liked in TNG), but hated here. They try to squeeze Riker (about 30 pounds heavier) and Troi (20 pounds easy) back into their roles? Why not just have them on Enterprise E, or Riker as Captain on something else..would have made more sense.

After the cast read this script they should have got together and said "WTF we're not doing this, write it again MORONS!!!" I mean what would happen to them? They already got their pink slips.

I hope paramount gets a lot of hate mail and they get the hint to never let these two idiots (B&B) anywhere near trek again!

 

[Jim Dalton]

What a complete bastardization!

Not only did it ruin the original TNG episode concerning The Pegasus, but I didn't buy the Riker/Troi storyline at all! They looked older (and fatter) and this story did not mesh well with the Pegasus story at all.

In short, this episode was an absolute disgrace.

My wife was very upset after the show ended because of this, but I wanted to "digest" it a little more before commenting.

Now that I had a chance to sleep on it, I have to say that although I have been VERY forgiving of Enterprise in the past, that is no longer the case.

For the most part, I agree with the Boston Herald article:



So, there you go B&B. You killed the franchise and yet, I'm sure you're patting yourself on the back for doing such a wonderful job.

No doubt you two bozos were on watch when the Titanic hit the icerberg, too!

 

[Ric Easton]

I'll be damned if I can figure out the connection between Riker's problems and the holodeck program he was playing.

Basically the episode took place 6 years after the previous episode...(all seen thru flashbacks in the Enterprise-D's Holodeck) and there was apparently little character development in those six years. The episode that preceeded it, (Terra Prime) left me with a feeling of hope for the future of our characters (mainly Trip and T'pol), the series finale obliterated that.

A lost opportunity and a real shame. Wonder what Manny Coto thought of B&B's last contribution to the franchise?

Let's hope it was another in the long line of holodeck malfunctions.

Ric

 

[Bill Williams]

If anyone should have had a chance to properly do the final episode, it should have been Manny Coto. I've been going back over the first ENT episodes on the S1 DVD, and B&B's hands were all over every single story that they scripted and/or co-wrote the stories for. No wonder some of those early episodes absolutely sucked! And to hear Rick Berman say on the commentaries, "We really tried hard to maintain the continuity with the previous series..." - Sweet cream on an ice cream cone! Who in the blue world is he kidding?

And I agree, they should have done the Riker/Troi scenes to a very bare minimum, one scene at most with them looking at a recording on the Titan and saying, "Look where all this got us." But for them to dominate half of the final episode and push the ENT cast to the background, with no resolutions to other subplots from ENT's four-year run, I'm still shaking my head at it all...

 

[PhilipG]

With that quote in mind, I have to admit I enjoyed the final episode (shock! the sky is falling!).

For some weird reason, for the past couple of weeks I had a feeling they'd kill off Trip in the finale. I don't visit any Trek news/spoiler sites, but it seemed like the direction they'd take. After all, Trip was probably the only member of the crew that all the fans genuinely liked, or felt any empathy for. Okay: Porthos too. If they killed off Travis - or even Archer - we'd have all shrugged (or worse: laughed).

So that particular piece of emotional manipulation didn't ruin the story for me, and I got to enjoy the episode on its merits (and yes, it did have some). The Pegasus was one of my favourite TNG episodes. I'm actually glad they tied the Treks together like they did. Frakes was excellent as "Chef" - and much better than Shatner would have been. Thank Goodness we didn't get to hear Archer make that speech - it would have been overkill, and inappropriate under the circumstances (they made exactly the right choice to show his conversation with T'Pol instead). Finally: Jeffrey Combs. Legend. Next series, make the man a regular.

The only really duff part of the episode for me was Bakula's awful delivery of the last line.

 

[Michael Harris]

God, I don't even know where to begin, but I'll try.

"Terra Prime" was pretty good. The ending with T'pol and Trip was very touching. Phlox, as always, really was an emotional center to the episode. Having Elizabeth die, while sad, was in keeping with the Trek canon since Spock was to be the first Vulcan/human hybrid. At least it was made known that such a hybrid was possible. If the series had to end, it should have ended here since the seeds of the Federation were established.

Which leads me to

"These are the Voyages". What a kick in the balls. I didn't know whether I was watching a crappy episode of TNG or "Enterprise". As a story, I could not figure out exactly the moral problem that Riker was trying to solve by the holodeck simulation. How was dropping the dime on the Admiral's criminal cover-up of the Pegasus incident be the same as the actions taken leading to Trip's death. There was absolutely nothing similar in the situations.

As an episode of "Enterprise", it was just another one off episode which just happens to take place while returning to Earth for the signing ceremony. It was good to see Schram again as he was my favorite re-occurring character but he just disappears in the last 20 minutes or so.

Ten years on and I guess there is no chance of advancement in Star Fleet. I couldn't help notice that Hoshi and other officers still held the same rank as in the first episode. Reference is made to the signing ceremony being for an "alliance" but the UFP seal is in the room, which looked like mostly re-used footage from the episode where Daniels shows Archer the future.

The only bright spot in the whole mess was the flyby of the three Enterprises. That was the only "valentine".

 

[Jack Briggs]

What a way to depart from my usual Friday-evening PBS routine. Why not? I thought; this is the last of Star Trek for who knows how long?

That first episode was a yawner. From my standpoint, it's as if I had never taken leave of this series back in the second season. Nothing has changed; it's just low-level mindlessness.

Then "These Are the Voyages." As noted, we are treated to "The Pegasus"-era Riker and Troi holodecking the final days of the NX-01. Whew. Just as a previous post pointed out, Frakes and Syrtis look genuinely twelve years older and — to me, at least — Frakes really is heftier now than he was in the TNG's seventh season.

It didn't work.

And what a pathetic way to end Star Trek.

Way back in the Voyager era, someone here at HTF said something I've never gotten out of my head. He said that, for him, he has "cut off" Star Trek with the end of DS9, that none of the other stuff even counts.

Same with me.

I'm happy to have my TOS, TNG, and DS9 DVDs. And the feature films (though Nemesis is an awful finale to the TNG era). As for the rest, hey, forget it.

And I missed NOW, Washington Week in Review, and Wall Street Week with Forture for these two episodes? Jeez.

 

[Randy Tennison]

Ditto to everything said.

 

[Ray Gutnick]

It may be too early for this question, but I wonder whether voyager or enterprise will be ranked as the worst or the series.

 

[Qui-Gon John]

I agree, and he is also the best in acting ability, (well John Billingsley and his character of Phlox, run a close second in all these areas.).

 

[Todd Stout]

I just found an interesting site that has 81 pages of Enterprise fan fiction on it so I thought I'd share.
http://www.fanfiction.net/l/1270/3/0/1/1/0/0/0/1/

I posted my comments about the finale last night right after watching the show and after sleeping on it, I still pretty much feel the same way. It really is a shame that Enterprise had to end like that. I would absolutely love it if Manny Coto was able to wrap the show up with some sort of TV movie or maybe even a mini-series sometime in the future.

 

[Nelson Au]

I have a different perspective from most of you here. At the last minute, I decided to jump on a plane and fly down to Los Angeles for the Roddenberrry Viewing party and meet up with a very old friend whose a Star Trek fan too.

He had not known of the Roddenberry viewing party that was happening, so we decided to go there and view what might be the last Star Trek for some time with a room full of fans.

Since I got a flight that got me into LA at 8:00pm, I missed most of Terra Prime, I caught the end when Trip and T'Pol were mourning their daughter and Archer's speech. Then we saw the finale. I'll watch my recording of Terra Prime and see what I thought of it after I write this. By the way, the show was projected onto a large screen from an HD feed. My first time seeing it that way, in HD. The picture never wavered and was bright and clear.

The venue was the Embassy Suites near LAX and Roddenberry had a medium sized ballroom booked and an adjacent room where he set up Roddenberry.com to sell his products.

It was a nice crowd there of fans, I'd say somewhere in the order of 200 or more people. Standing room by the time my friend and I arrived. A funny anecdote is that when the theme song played during the finale, several fans raised their open cell phones and swayed to the song using the light from the displays in place of an open flame, quite jokey and funny. The fans were generally like any large group of people watching any TV show, hissing at the bad jokes, laughing at the unintended (Maybe intended) and sad that Riker cut off Archer's speech at the end.

What I half expected were people connected with Star Trek to be there. I was more then surprised to find that after the finale was over, Roddenberry got up and thanked all the fans for coming and the special guests too. They included Gates MacFadden, (who popped over to the other room to sign autographs), Mike and Denise Okuda(Graphic designer and production), Dan Curry and some of his crew(Special visual effects team), Larry Nemecek (Editor of Star Trek Communicator magazine and screen writer of one ST-TNG episode), of course the guy who ran Trek United was there co-hosting, and a few others I am not clear who they were. When it was over and they stayed to chat, it was like a sort of sad wrap party, saying goodbyes and networking. I was amazed to be standing right next to Dan Curry talking to a tall African American gentleman in all black and a fedora. From their conversation, I gathered the man in the fedora wrote for Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise, but I didn't get his name. And if you're asking, no I did not introduce myself to anyone, though my friend did to Okuda. There was a film crew there too doing interviews and I gathered they were for Roddenberry's film he's doing on the world of Star Trek.

Overall, I had a very good time and for the most part enjoyed the finale, though I would agree that having Riker and Troi in the finale was not a good idea. It was contrived and would have been a better mid season show. The group cheered at the end during the three Enterprise fly-bys and prologue of Stewart, Shatner and Bakula saying those famous words. It was a bittersweet experience, and one I'm glad I made the effort for.

Nelson

One more word, consider the Manny Coto show; Terra Prime the real finale, and the Berman/Braga, These are the Voyages, their wrap up of the series. Just ignore it, except the last part with the Enterprise fly-bys.

 

[Kevin G.]

Huh??

 

[mark alan]

A man dead for 14 years got up and thanked his fans? That must have been scary as hell.

 

[Ric Easton]

He's either talking about Majel or Gene's son.

 

[Mike Williams]

He was clearly talking about Eugene Roddenberry, Gene's son, although I didn't realize HE actually had fans. Interesting to note that there was no mention of Majel being there. Perhaps she was too busy further destroying "Andromeda" to give a damn about the wimpering end to Star Trek (at least for a while).

I'm sorry to say that I must join the many voices in here in expressing my utter disappointment for the finale. While I thought I would have enjoyed seeing Riker and Troi again, I found them to be a very unwelcome intrusion. The Enterprise storyline was completely unbefitting a season finale, much less a series finale, or better still, a possible franchise finale. To cap a great season to a mediocre series with a less than mediocre finale shows just how out of touch B&B truly are and how much they have overstayed their welcome. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

 

[Nelson Au]

Yes, I was referring to Eugene Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry who hosted the Enterprise Viewing party. Sorry I left that out, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night!

And the fans he thanked were the Star Trek fans.

I don't think Majel was there, maybe she was there earlier before I got there. I did hear that before the show began, they played the Enterprise blooper reel, must have been the one from the Enterprise DVD.

 

[Jason Seaver]

It'll be Voyager. Enterprise, at least, has the 19 episodes between Coto doing what he can to declare the Temporal Cold War over and the final abomination. Voyager really never climbed out of mediocrity for more than a week at a time.

As to these episodes... Man, did airing them back-to-back not do the B-team any favors or what? So, in the first episode, you've got a decent storyline, Coto and company using the entire cast (Linda Park and Travis Montgomery must wish he'd been in charge from the start), good use of Trek continuity, and, hey, a little nifty period-appropriate science. It's a good episode, a little heavy-handed with the morality-play aspects, but that's Trek. It works as a finale; it points us in the direction of Kirk and Spock.

Although demerits for having Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint in the same episode but not in any scenes together. Especially since Graham is the one wearing the prosthetics this time.

But the second... I mean, it's desperation, it's "we had success with TNG, so let's revisit that; everyone likes Jeffrey Combs, so let's bring him in." It's reducing what the entire series was building toward to just another run-in with generic, culture-less aliens with slick make-up applications. It's killing off what's supposed to be a smart character by having him be uncharacteristically stupid. It's not quite "appalling", as Ms. Blalock described it, although that adjective is much closer to the truth than one such as "good".

I recognize that I did, in part, instigate the demand for an "appreciation" thread by posting "enjoy, suckers!" whenever an episode with these two doofuses as the writers was on the schedule. But, wow. Compare the two episodes, and tell me that it doesn't put the difference between Coto's show and B&B's into sharp relief.

It's mind-boggling, in a way. Berman & Braga created this show and these characters; go back 3.5 years and look at what Jack & I were saying about the show then. They came up with the right idea, but after a couple of months, they just seemed to lose all conception of what to do with this idea. It took the network/studio bringing in outsiders for the show to get it right.

 

[Bryan Tuck]

Well, let's see; how to be fair?

I really enjoyed "Demons/Terra Prime." Not perfect, and as Jason pointed out, a little heavy-handed. However, it did have a pretty good storyline and something for most of the characters to do, and I really liked Archer's brief speech at the end.

Something that I've felt about most of this season is that the show finally felt like Star Trek, and I don't mean just the references to the original series. There has been true care taken with the characters and storylines. Good, thoughtful writing is really what has always characterized the best Trek, and I felt that's what we got this season on Enterprise. Aside from a few minor flaws, it's been worthy of the franchise name. And I really felt "Terra Prime," was a pretty decent send-off.

Then came "These Are the Voyages." I really don't mean to be a grouch, but whew, what a mess. As much as I like the characters of Riker and Troi, trying to fit them into this story was RIDICULOUS. And even if they just had to, why in the world did they put them in the middle of "The Pegasus?" Why not, as others have suggested, show us the Titan?

As for Trip, I'm not opposed to killing off a major character in the finale for emotional resonance, but well...it seems like they left out the emotional resonance. It was just useless.

The 3-Enterprise flyby was nice (and I liked the arrangement of the three themes by Dennis McCarthy), and they probably couldn't have done that and had it work right without the framework of the Enterprise-D story, but again it was just not necessary for Riker and Troi to dominate half of what was supposed to be the Enterprise characters' finale.

And even though it would have been a little redundant given Archer's mini-speech in "Terra Prime," I really would have liked to have heard his speech at the conference. If this was indeed to be a send-off for the entire franchise, that right there would have been perfect. Having Capt. Archer speak at the birth of what is to become the Federation certainly would have been a lot more powerful than shoehorning two characters from a previous series into the plot.

 

[Jose Martinez]

My .02 cents? Not just the worst finale of all Trek series but the worst episode of all Trek series! Never did I stop shaking my head in disbelief that they actually went with this script. Not only did they ruin a pretty good season but also managed to make Riker and Troi just look utterly ridiculous and foolish trying to make us believe that they're not 12 years older and fatter than how they looked in TNG. (At least the Picard double looked the part)