The current image is a temporary one until I find something more fitting to my personal aesthetic tastes. The ship is my Republic Fleet Firetail frigate, from the MMORPG EVE.
Anyway, on with the show. Its time for moif's review of:
Star Trek Enterprise
I'm currently into the third series and, more or less enjoying it as I go. This is in part due to the ship itself as I really like its 'UFO look'. I've never liked the ships in Start Trek much. Voyager was the best until now, with its sleeker profile, but on the whole, they all looked ungainly and awkward. I'm a big fan of space ship concepts though, so the CGI ships in this series are all so much eye candy to me that I'm prepared to look beyond the horrible characters and accept the appalling moralizing and just enjoy the shows for what they are. Fluff with great (if unrealistic) space craft. Also I like to complain.
If I'm totally honest, I have to say that even without the ships, then I'd probably watch it any way, at least until I reached the vomit point. I even managed two seasons of the revamped Battlestar Galactica!
The characters then... well they are pretty much all horrible. The show revolves around the same set of hired actors portraying the standard Star Trek bridge crew. These, despite the large anonymous crew who they pass in the corridors, do everything. They run and repair the ship, they go on all the 'away missions' and other adventures and they generally have all the speaking parts.
Unfortunately they don't get to have much fun as their Captain Archer, a granite faced softy who reminds me of the 80's sitcom puppet Alf, gets to hog the screen and about 75% of all the various capers the ship gets involved in. He flies the shuttles into the asteroid fields, runs secret agent ops in to enemy alien installations, gets into duels and courtroom drama's and time travel paradox's and even saves humanity on several occaisions whilst all the time preaching about his humanity. Unlike the legendary Captain Kirk however, Archer does not appear to have a sexuality at all.
In one instance whilst explaining his lack of any desire to enact revenge on some villain or other he tells his sexy Vulcan science officer that it is our humanity (read pacifism) which makes us human. I thought this was a rather amusing line given that the majority of the human race, for most of human history, has not been particularly bothered about exacting revenge on which ever villain happens to be in fashion. Its kind of ironic also that a man in a uniform (who does not regard himself as military) who regularly engages in star ship combat (though he does not consider his ship a warship) should hold to the view that his pacifism is an indication of his humanity. There are so many battles in Star Trek it makes EVE look placid. Not that I mind star ship combat. I just get bored to tears with the after battle sermon.
Most of the rest of the crew are equally tedious. There is Trip the Texan engineer who appears to be a descendent of George W Bush and who has a strange habit of getting marooned. And there is Lootenant Reed, an uptight Brit 'tactical officer' who snaps at every one, makes snide remarks, is constantly being bailed out by his captain and appears to fall apart when ever death stares him in the face.
Being Star Trek, there has to be a well curvacious woman in a one piece skin tight garment of course. After all, Star Trek NG had Troi and Voyager had 7 of 9, and so Enterprise has T'Pol. (Don't worry, she's only that thin because she's not a human being).
Even without the story, one gets the feeling that one is moving over familiar ground, and then comes The Story. Seasons one and two are just a series of one off episodes in the typical Star Trek format with a loose common thread concerning a 'temporal cold war' plot that goes no where slowly. This all comes to an abrupt end at the end of season two when unknown aliens attack the USA and kill Trips sister!!!! (+7,000,000 other people) for no apparent reason.
Popular pacifist and war hero Captain Archer soon discovers why however and immedietely volunteers his ship on a long, long, long mission to find the enemy and make them stop their attack before they exterminate all humanity. Does this make sense to you? Some aliens who live a long way from Earth find out from contacts in the future, that the human race will one day, a few centuries down the line, wipe them out, and so they embark on a pre emptive attack to destroy the entire human race. They do this by launching a single attack against Earth with an under powered prototype weapon that cannot possibly destroy the planet. Then, they set about building and testing a bigger, super bad variant of this weapon.
Captain Archer, having received permission to take humanity's best fighting vessel then flies into 'the expanse' to find these mysterious aliens and their doomsday device, before they can complete it.
Now, looking beyond the fact that this entire story arc is a poorly written blatent Farscape (FTW) rip off, one is forced to wonder at the logic of launching a pre-emptive, out of the blue, surprise attack against the human race when the aliens have centuries of time to perfect their doomsday device. Thats alien logic for you! Instead, they alert the humans as to the threat they pose, giving Captain Archer months of time to find them and prevent their nefarious plans whilst all the time engaging in the humanist tradition of space combat.
Actually I kind of like the idea that humans riding in a ship laden with lethal weaponry travel to new world and preach to aliens about what great people we human beings are. All Archer really needs is a horse, some rats (he already has a dog) and small pox and he fits right in with all the other great conquistadors. Naturally a Bible is out of the question.
That would be silly.
And why is this post so long if Start Trek Enterprise is so bad?
Because I like to complain.
5 comments:
I thought Enterprise was one of the better concepts from the Rodenberry stable. Characters were defined to a greater extent than TNG, and the background less forced than Voyager. Aliens were more menacing than Voyager and the whole thing hung better. I particulalry liked the tensions between the humans and vulcans and the latter trying to stop the humans going into space (I took the Vulcans to be a lot like the US of A - flawed and imperfect but still setting themselves out to be the galactic police). Still no match for the most excellent of all the series Deep Space Nine. By far and away the best of them all and yet the one that gets repeated the least.
Largely I agree with you. As I said, despite the lengthy complaints, I'm actually enjoying the series.
I still haven't seen DS9 yet.
Ah man, this is exactly the kind of post that I like to jump into.
First off, the ships. You are so right about how they look. The biggest problem I had with the Star Trek ships was how much force would be applied to those teeny tiny struts. Almost all of the power driving the ship comes from two nacelles that are not placed along the center of mass. "Warp 9, engage." *snap*
A better idea would be a single thruster that drives force directly through the center of gravity. The impulse engines can be placed to the sides if need be. The Ferengi have a much better design. The hull of the ship is also more compact and maximizes space, and would be more robust in combat. I supposed if they really wanted to maximize space, they'd use a sphere.
At any rate, I think that Romulans in TNR have the coolest ships by far. Big and mean, and almost organic looking. And the Federation was scared of them.
As far as the morality attitude goes, you can probably guess that I sort of like that. I get a kick out of the clean-cut All-American do-gooder, risking life and limb just to find out what's out there. And I like Enterprise even more because it has a real frontiersman-explorer type of vibe. You have it nailed about the preachy-factor. It just doesn't rub me the wrong way like it does you.
Also that T'Pol gal isn't too hard on the eyes. I could watch that show all day long.
Maybe it is a little bit too cartoonish. They do need to get a little bit rougher, and quit trying to be "boy scouts in space".
I really liked DS9, because as the series progressed the story got really epic.
TNR?
If I am to be pedantic, I prefer my ships to me more functional. I'd like to see a series that used more realistic ships, something like the HMS Camden Lock in Hyperdrive. Now that ship looks more realistic!
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a44/Glazy67/hmscl.jpg
(Designed/modelled by Andrew Glazebrook whose blog is linked to in my side bar)
As for the frontier spirit thing. I thought Firefly did that better. Enterprise relies to heavily on modern/civilised concepts like unions, uniforms and stuff like that to be 'frontier like'.
I've added DS9 to my list of sries to catch up.
Dangit. I meant TNG.
I had that darn Beauchamp story on the brain.
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