Finished Voyager last night and watching the first episode of Enterprise now. I have not watched a single episode of this series so in interested to see if it is what people say it is. I liked that they wasted no time getting horned up with that decontamination gel rubdown scene.
The theme song though… such a downgrade after the perfection that is Voyager’s
They change the theme song partway through and it somehow gets worse
Also that song first appeared in the movie Patch Adams sung by Rod Stewart
Still need to find time to check out Enterprise. I like the premise but then I felt that way about Voyager
It’s not great but I still kind of liked it. IMO it gets continually better until the end, or less bad I should say. I think it could have had a genuinely good fifth season if given the chance. The juggling act of trying to be a show about the wonder of the early days of space travel while also doing a bunch of extremely on the nose 9/11 stuff plus tons of overly simplistic prequel cliche stuff plus some genuinely weird time travel shenanigans never quite feels right. But the show ends right when it feels like it is starting to come together.
I also think like voyager it basically wastes its interesting premise and has a mostly boring cast, but still has good standalone episodes and some interesting supporting characters. And no Neelix which is a huge improvement
no neelix is a big downgrade imho
season 4 of Enterprise finally achieved the level of quality of Season 1 of Voyager
Season four of enterprise is significantly better than most of voyager through strategic deployment of all the best That Guy actors they have and doing a lot of good work with the absolute shit that was handed to them.
But I haaate early voyager and a lot of late enterprise is at least attempting to do stuff other than the warmed over TNG plots Voyager adores.
The doctor is everything good about Neelix but they actually figure out how to use him as something.
my post was meant to be a diss on both shows
i still haven’t seen any of the new star trek stuff (discovery/picard/lower decks) but even if enterprise is the worst star trek show, which it definitely is, it is still pretty good. i just think people are too hard on it because the bar is so high. but most sci fi on tv is unwatchable trash, especially in that era. it could have been much worse
Picard is absolutely worse than Enterprise simply because it does damage to characters that actually had rich interiority and dynamics and history instead of Travis Mayweather or whoever
honestly at the time Enterprise was out it was up against firefly, doctor who, farscape, and battlestar galactica which at that exact moment all felt way more cutting edge and interesting compared to the weird warmed over TNG plots of Enterprise.
In a way, Enterprise was the template for modern prestige Trek. an abundance of bland underdeveloped characters, a desperation to instantly skip to the Deep Space Nine war arc without doing the emotional work of setting it up, meaningless edgelord cruelty, idiotic section 31 infatuation. In this way Enterprise is much like the Star Wars prequels. A work of charming insanity that created a much worse future but as an object itself has retroactive charms that cannot be replicated by the modern hollywood machine
OK I will concede Farscape and BG is probably better. Say what you will about doctor who (I have never been able to stand it but I recognize this is a matter of taste) but I do not consider it the same genre as star trek. I mean it is in the sense that Monty Python and Seinfeld are both technically comedies. Firefly may have felt good in the moment but time has proven it is one of the worst things to ever happen to pop culture
if nothing else you gotta admit Enterprise is one of the best tv shows to ever use a track off the Patch Adams soundtrack for its theme song
Enterprise has lots to like about it: Cool Dog. Doctor Phlox. Some interesting ideas about unfederated space truckers. Basically the best Mirror Universe stuff outside of TOS. I actually dig seeing early tech like the transporter and translator being built and breaking down in interesting ways. CG just barely becoming good enough to start having cooler looking and more creative aliens than forehead guys. The war stuff is the dumbest part i guess but the pre-war stuff is solid comfort food tv and the post war stuff when they start doing actual prequel stuff and fixing all their weird mistakes is actually good. I found more pleasure in talking about how wild the bad finale of Enterprise is than bad episodes of other Treks.
Langrange Point had some fun bits, I liked the in-the-helmet cam, the hanger bay thing with Discovery itself was pretty fun, the dual-black-hole sequence was cool, Raynor got some good scenes, Breen getting sucked into the artifact constant was funny.
The FX shot of Disco literally dropping out of a jump, out of an explosion, covered in fire and damage, kicked ass.
Again, feels like 1/10th of a DVD tv movie, here to move the season arc forward another 55 minutes. This ep wasn’t about anything, but it did get us closer to these things cohering finally next week.
Riker Quantum Leaps into Enterprise. It felt like a confession that baggage of Scott Bakula was more interesting than anything else they did with him til that point. Why not jettison everything that happened on that show for the concept that was subconsciously brewing ever since that casting was announced.
enterprise has a funny mpreg episode
I had been vaguely aware of the mpreg ep but was not expecting it to be like the fourth ep of the series. Kinda wild they did that straight out the gate
I think I’m close to end of the first season at this point. Most of the characters leave zero to no impression, they just seem to be there, aside from the doctor.
I’m completely certain all Enterprise actors were picked as underwear models first, actors second. Excepting Phlox of course, who wasn’t going into the blue gel Showtime chamber, so they could instead hire someone good at acting there.
Trip ends up rising to become one of the better actors in this. I’m completely rivited by what the fuck a Floridian would look like in Star Trek’s utopian future.
This gets really obvious when they start to periodically put Jeffrey Combs in the show and all of a sudden a second character is acting.