Twenty years ago, the United Paramount Network premiered a show that was simply called Enterprise. It was the fourth spinoff of Star Trek and the first of those four not to have those two words at the top of the title. That aesthetic decision was reversed for its third season, being rechristened as Star Trek: Enterprise, which is how it’s currently identified on home video and streaming services and the like.
Starting next week, I’ll be doing an Enterprise Rewatch once a week every Monday.
Enterprise differed from its predecessors in several ways besides its initial eschewing of the words “star” and “trek” in its title. For starters, rather than continuing the story of Trek forward, they decided to follow the lead of that other space-opera franchise that begins with the word “star” and do a prequel. Just as The Phantom Menace rewound the clock to decades before Star Wars, Enterprise went back to a century prior to the original series (and also a century after the time-travel portions of First Contact) to show Earth’s first forays into space travel beyond the solar system.
After moving away from the square-jawed-white-guy template for the spinoffs, we get in Scott Bakula’s Jonathan Archer a stereotypical manly hero type, having gone for the middle-aged cerebral captain in TNG, a man of color in DS9, and a woman in Voyager. (Having said that, Bakula was the same age when Enterprise debuted in 2001 that Sir Patrick Stewart was when TNG debuted in 1987, but Stewart was playing much older than Bakula was.)
Most distressingly for the franchise, Enterprise was also the first (and so far only) one of the Trek spinoffs to fail in the marketplace. Its three predecessors all ended on their own terms after seven seasons, and the five ongoing series that have been produced since are all still in production. Enterprise was ended by UPN after four seasons, and that cancellation in 2005 concluded an era of Trek on television that started with TNG in 1987 and wouldn’t come back until Discovery‘s debut in 2017.
Having at this point covered every prior Trek show in rewatch form (the original series from 2015-2017, TNG from 2011-2013, DS9 from 2013-2015, and Voyager from early 2020 until last month) and also reviewed every subsequent Trek show since 2017, it is pretty much inevitable that I complete the set, as it were, by rewatching Enterprise.
As with Voyager, my initial reluctance to rewatch the series is borne of my own dissatisfaction with the show when watching it the first time at the turn of the millennium. However, also as with Voyager, I feel the show deserves a second chance with the distance of two decades, and to be seriously reconsidered.
In the vein of my four previous Trek rewatches, the entries will be broken down into categories:
Captain’s star log. A summary of the episode’s plot.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The science, and the technobabble, used in the episode.
The gazelle speech. What Captain Archer did in the episode.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. What T’Pol did in the episode.
Florida Man. What Trip Tucker did in the episode, which will be done in the style of the Florida Man Twitter feed.
Optimism, Captain! What Dr. Phlox did in the episode.
Ambassador Pointy. What Ambassador Soval did in the episode.
Good boy, Porthos! What the best character on the show, Archer’s pet beagle Porthos, did in the episode.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… For the use of Vulcans in the episode.
Blue meanies. For the use of Andorians in the episode.
Qapla’! For the use of Klingons in the episode.
Buy the Book
You Sexy Thing
Better get MACO. For the use of the MACOs in the episode.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. This will cover the sexual and romantic relationships on board the NX-01.
More on this later… Something from the episode that “establishes” something that we have already seen in one of the other series that came before but take place farther in the future.
I’ve got faith… A memorable quote from the episode.
Welcome aboard. Listing the guest stars.
Trivial matters: Various trivial matters, including continuity hits, some behind-the-scenes stuff, and other random thingamabobs about the episode.
It’s been a long road… My review of the episode.
Warp factor rating: The least important part of the rewatch entry, an out-of-ten rating for the episode, with 10 being one of the best Trek episodes ever done and 0 being one of the worst.
Thanks to various folks on my Facebook page who made suggestions for category titles (and categories). Stay tuned for the rewatch of “Broken Bow” right here on Tor.com!
Keith R.A. DeCandido will also be reviewing each new episode of Star Trek: Discovery season four when it debuts later this month.
It’s been almost 20 years and I heard that line in Phlox’s voice.
This was the show which hooked me on Star Trek, proving such a thing is possible. I am quite excited for this.
I’m just going to point out that despite not having seen an episode in nearly twenty years, I still have the montage with Faith of the Heart stuck in my head. Enterprise had some bad decisions, but its opening sequence and score wasn’t one of them.
Ah, Enterprise. This is the first Trek I actually remember from the beginning, since I was pretty young when Voyager aired. I remember… not being super enthused by the premise. I tend to dislike prequels (I think too often they fall into the trap of needing to explain *every* Noodle Incident or offhand reference in the original works), Scott Bakula didn’t strike me as a “Trek Captain” type (loved Quantum Leap, tho), and even from the jump the direction seemed incredibly juvenile about a lot of things- but namely sex.
that said, there were some things that gave me some hope. I liked the time period they picked- far too early to run into anyone from the other series, for the most part (no “young Spock!!!!” nonsense), before the Federation had formed and everything was all a utopia, and I liked a lot of the casting. Sadly…. I was mostly right about the bad stuff. Bakul often came across and whiny and borderline unhinged (his rants about the Vulcans got real old, real quick) without any gravitas to balance it out. the nudity was gratuitous, rarely served any real purpose, and was often (ironically enough) not particularly enjoyable. It was like a 14-year old boy’s idea of what “sexy” was. The characters weren’t very well thought out, and some just eventually faded away almost entirely.
the show got better eventually, but by then it was waaaay too late. While Voyager has lots of episodes I still watch and enjoy, the majority of ENT just made me cringe.
I, too, heard “Optimism, Captain!” in Phlox’s voice, and am thrilled it made the cut. :D
I’m very curious how you’ll review these. I haven’t watched all of the seasons (I keep stalling at E2 for no real reason), and there are some DEFINITE honkers in what I did watch. That said, there are some lovely moments that are *very* Trek.
And I do enjoy Phlox very much (even though John Billingsley HATES wearing makeup).
I thought you might reduce the Warp Factor rating to a scale of 1 to 5 for this series.
Phlox is great!
(I remember him saying something along the lines of “as doctor I shall do no harm, how much pain I do inflict is up to me” – I think I like him even better than Voyager’s EMH. And that’s a high bar..)
Really looking forward to rewatching with all you guys!
(However “Florida Man” should rather have been “Keep your shirt on, lieuuwtennant” ;-)
Seemed exciting at the beginning and I will second kudos for the credits, but the only good thing I remember (other than Bakula himself) was the first time any later series dipped back into the mirror universe and the re-edited scenes from First Contact and mirror universe credits that really worked well. The show went off the rails (like DS9 IMO) when it went off into a war that had little to do with the mission or what we knew of TOS history.,
[skip intro]
click,click,click,click,click,click….
Despite its obvious shortcomings I have an inexplicable soft spot for ENT, so I’m very excited about this rematch.
Looking at the series as a whole, I would put Enterprise on par with Voyager, so I’ll be curious to see the opinions of krad and of course the comments section.
Also gonna plant my flag early on this: the title sequence is good. (At least until they DS9’d the theme song.)
One of the main things I did not like about this series in the first season was, in trying to show that the human Starfleet did not quite know what it was getting itself into exploring deep space, they decided that the crew would actively disdain having any protocols for things like landing on an unfamiliar planet because that meant you lacked adventure. In other words, our protagonists had the Idiot Ball duct taped to their backs.
Man, I was really hoping for a “Reed Alert” category
I’ve been looking forward to this rewatch ever since the Voyager one was announced. My “franchise fatigue” (am I the first to mention that term in the comments for this rewatch?) had set in earlier in Voyager’s run and my lack of viewership of enjoyment of that show made me incredibly excited to watch this one. Plus, it wasn’t just more of the same TNG era that we’d gotten for 21 seasons. Set in an era where we couldn’t just call Starfleet Command at the drop f a hat? Sold.
Did the show always live up to that? No – but it definitely made some changes in style that (while sometimes cringeworthy) also differentiated it enough from the other shows that it held my interest more than either VOY of the middle seasons of DS9 did.
I think it’s going to be interesting to compare this show with Strange New Worlds in (hopefully) mid-2022 and see how the prequels stack up against each other
I’m excited to see how my own impressions might change, given the benefit of time. ENT is something that I keep liking the idea of on paper. But when I see it in execution it ends up being a little cringe. I can’t tell if it’s because it was really that bad, or if it’s because I and most fans just like star trek for its vision of the 24th century as it already was, and weren’t really interested in the “everyman” time period of how humanity got to that point. Like I totally get why they picked the opening credits song, and I agree with the idea intellectually, but it just so does not fit what I want out of a star trek show. But, it grew on me, so maybe this time around the series will too. The things people want out of TV shows have changed a lot in a couple decades, maybe it was ahead of its time.
I wasn’t too fond of ENT in first run, but when I was invited to take over the post-finale ENT novel line, I rewatched the series twice as research (well, most of it twice — there were a few I skipped the second time, including the finale), and I gained a new appreciation for it. The first season feels more focused on a binge watch, with more of a unifying arc of humanity taking its first steps into galactic civilization and trying to make a name for itself. The second season is dissolute and directionless, but season 3’s story arc is ambitious and mostly effective aside from the inane science, and while season 4 was way too obsessed with continuity porn, it was the best-written season overall and had a wonderfully innovative format, breaking up the season into arcs ranging from 1 to 3 episodes each, that I wish other series would have emulated.
While the show often had mediocre writing and characterization, and was indeed way too sophomoric about sexuality and relationships (I’m all for sex-positivity and skin, but there are much better ways to handle it), there were a couple of things about it that I feel it did better than any of its predecessors. One, the production design was top-notch; no other Trek ship has ever felt so much like a real, believable spacecraft, right down to marvelous details like cooling fans on the consoles and handholds in case of gravity failure. Two, the show broke Trek’s unfortunate habit of trivializing crew deaths. It may have unrealistically avoided crew fatalities in the first two seasons, but that’s because the producers wanted to wait until they could do it meaningfully and have room to explore the consequences in a mature way, which they finally did in season 3. There were no redshirts here.
Having recently watched Enterprise for the first time I have two thoughts.
1. The song is just fine.
2 Casting Scott Bakula was a great idea. An all-American space cowboy type would have been great for the show they thought they were making. But, they didn’t end up making that show and by season three they had their space cowboy struggling with committing war crimes week after week. What an absolute waste of a leading man.
@11. Hopefully we’ll get a “Reed Alert” later; there’s no entry for Hoshi or Mayweather, either.
“Florida Man” is gonna be hilarious. :D
This is the only show that doesn’t have a big presence in Trek Online, aside from the ship itself and the Romulan light warbirds (and I love Romulan ships). The latter were more advanced than the one Kirk and co. faced in Balance of Terror and would have appeared in the fifth season if the Romulan War story had been told. None of the characters or actors are involved. There’s a brief snippet of Archer dialogue (lifted from the show) in one mission where most of the well-known Enterprises across the timeline arrive to back you up, but that’s it.
I originally gave up on the series somewhere in season two. It may have been the “Night in Sickbay” episode, or the bottle episode where Trip is stuck in a shuttle pod (?). I think I was bored with it and didn’t think I’d have any interest in an extended Xindi storyline.
Rewatching the entire series a couple years ago, I thought season three was strong and I liked many episodes in season four. New adversaries, like the Na’kuhl as time-traveling foes, had potential. I wish there had been a season 5.
I do regret Enterprise being a victim of cancellation. I wish we could have seen the Romulan War, a whole season on the Mirror Universe, and the eventual full path to the founding of the Federation – developments Manny Coto had teased way back then.
Seasons 3 and 4 were a breath of fresh air for the franchise. They didn’t fall prey to the ongoing tendency on current shows like Discovery to treat its seasons as 10 hour movies. They had a perfect bland of episodic vs. serialized storytelling that felt just right. The Xindi arc was easily the best thing since the Dominion War – a sign that the threat of cancellation really did a number on Rick Berman which allowed Brannon Braga and the staff to cut loose and really go out there with the storytelling. Complacency gave way to a level of energy and commitment from the production we hadn’t seen since Seven’s early days on Voyager or even DS9 with that uncanny fifth season.
I’ve said this before on a Voyager comment. Seasons 1 and 2 were very hit and miss. S1 started out reasonably strong, but I feel it gradually lost its way as it struggled to be both different from what came before but also still very much tended to play it safe with Trek narrative conventions.
Meanwhile, season 2 went the opposite way for me. It started out very unevenly, and very poorly with some really atrocious material, plus a feeling of tiredness and storytelling fatigue. But then it did a near 180º and delivered the last 8 episodes, all insanely competent and solid efforts (minus Bounty). A prelude to the drive that would make the Xindi arc and the stories beyond a success.
Regarding the sexuality, it was certainly a juvenile take (the decon chambers being the prime example). But after 14 seasons of TNG and Voyager basically avoiding anything resembling sexuality (Seven’s catsuit aside), it felt fresh to see at least some partial nudity, even if it was gratuitous. I see this as more of a UPN problem than anything else. Network (and even syndication) were always hampered by standards and practices. There’s only so much they could do without crossing the line. That’s the benefit of the current Alex Kurtzman shows now having a home on Paramount+. They can do sexuality with taste without the need to back away for fear of setting some backwards watchdog group off.
And finally, Enterprise gave us the Phlox smile. Cannon fodder for current day memes.
I think I put Enterprise above Voyager. Voyager just seemed to wallow in mediocrity. Characters I liked and the ideas that excited me came to nothing. I just didn’t find Seven or the Doctor that enjoyable to watch and it became all about them. I think Enterprise was getting better when it was cancelled.
That said Enterprise continues Star Treks fascination with having Vulcans fight against key tenants of being Vulcan (unemotional and logical) which I find kind of annoying
But maybe I just had 7 years of disappointment with Voyager when Enterprise had only 4.
I’m going to try to keep up with this; I gave up on the show originally very quickly, so I’ve only seen the first few episodes, and I remember almost nothing about them except the basics of the characters. It should be interesting.
Sigh – sorry to see that the reviewer has already established a negative tone for this re-watch. If TNG had been cancelled after 2 seasons, would it have been a surprise? A cancellation isn’t always an indicator of whether a show was good or bad. It’s about studio politics too. And we know studios have a notoriously hard time with the Star Trek franchise. Streaming seems to have given the studios a clearer idea about how to plan, for non movie content anyway. This negative tone just makes it a painful read
@21: I don’t think that the reviewer’s tone is negative at all. He points out that while the show wasn’t initially his cup of tea, he’s looking to re-examine it. In other posts, he’s expressed fondness for individual episodes and storylines from this show, including “Demons//Terra Prime.” Frankly, if the recently concluded Voyager rewatch is any guide, he’s likely to be “firm but fair.” I was surprised at how high some of the ratings were.
And even if his initial tone is “negative” to you, at least he’s being honest about where his original watch of the series landed him
Antipodeanaut: Three straight Star Trek series lasted seven years prior to Enterprise, and all three ended entirely on their own terms without being cancelled. The studio (singular, there was just the one, Paramount) didn’t have any kind of a hard time with the franchise prior to Enterprise (or after, as we’ve seen). And ninety percent of the time, cancellation has to do with one thing, and one thing only: money. On a commercial network, that means not enough people were watching the show to justify the ad rates they’re charging for the commercials vs. how much the show cost to make. Hemorrhaging viewers is what led to the show being cancelled.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@eduardo,
I do regret Enterprise being a victim of cancellation. I wish we could have seen the Romulan War, a whole season on the Mirror Universe, and the eventual full path to the founding of the Federation – developments Manny Coto had teased way back then.
Another regret I remember having at the time was that the unrealized Romulan War had offered the chance to further develop Romulan culture beyond what had been done on screen at that point.
I kept complaining about this back in the Picard threads, but prior to Picard, it used to drive me crazy how the Romulans are the franchise’s oldest villains (as they predate the Klingons by several episodes) — yet they’re nowhere near as fleshed out as the Klingons or even the Cardassians.
(Of course, the trade-off was that, per “Balance of Terror”, none of the Main Cast or the future Feds could learn any of this).
@24: I think it’s just harder to come up with fresh Romulan stories in comparison to the others – and the Klingons have always been the more popular ones, even back in the original show. And in fairness, I don’t blame Ron Moore for pushing the Klingons the way he did (it was his comfort zone, no doubt), or the way Behr and Wolfe really brought both the Cardassians and Ferengi to the forefront on DS9. As writers, we go with our gut.
The conceit of Romulan stories has almost always been the ongoing tensions along the Neutral Zone, a cold war analogy if there ever was one. With the wall down in ’89, I can see why the writers went looking for other venues for new stories. But by keeping Romulan culture relatively untapped, it kept them as mysterious and interesting without getting constantly used in stories to death and fatigue (and Picard finally got to mine them to great effect after this long thanks to the preceding events on both Nemesis and Trek ’09).
@3 wildfyrewarning:
I definitely hear your comment about how the series had a 14-year-old boy’s understanding of sexiness, but, speaking as someone who actually *was* a 14-year-old…boy(?)…when this came out, I remember thinking that the “sexy” bits were incredibly juvenile even then; like they’d opted to use porn-style contrivances to set up sexy situations, but couldn’t actually show anything that wasn’t PG rated.
Anyways, I’m greatly looking forward to this. I disliked all but the final season when it came out, but I’ve caught a few reruns in the last few decades and been surprised by how much I enjoyed them. Perhaps a rewatch is in order.
@23: It’s definitely true that declining viewership and the expense of production caused the ax to fall. I’ve often wondered whether streaming would’ve saved Enterprise had the same situation occurred in this day and age. It would be interesting to see what kind of numbers Enterprise pulled in each week compared to what, say Discovery or Picard do in streaming. I’d be willing to bet that Discovery and Picard (and probably Strange New Worlds too) are actually loss leaders for Paramount+ at least within the confines of the US. There to drive traffic to to the site rather than to actually make a profit in and of themselves.
With all the shows (“Manifest” being the most recent that I can remember) being given another bite at the apple, had the current streaming situation been around in 2005, it’s hard for me to imagine that Enterprise wouldn’t have been picked up by an Amazon Prime or Netflix
I felt the same way about this one as I did about Voyager: two absolutely awful seasons, followed by a turnaround that was almost immediately compelling. I am not looking forward to the recaps of those first two seasons, but the last two really made me wish they could’ve kept going.
I only watched the first season, finding the cliff hanger time travel ending to be less than enthralling. I never picked it back up afterwards.
I guess I have a week to decide if I want to try and watch along or just rely on episode summaries. Decisions decisions.
In A Mirror Darkly is the only ten, they should have done the whole series like that. Would have been epic. Constantly rotating main cast, never knowing who will be killed off next. Sex, drugs, murder, revenge …
I totally skipped this when it was originally on, but have recently watched up to the fourth season on Netflix,
I hated the opening when it was first on and between that and the aforementioned juvenile sexy-ness I skipped the show.
since watching it on Netflix
I’ve got the opening in my head, lo
@19 For me that “wallowing in mediocrity” is also what separates Enterprise from Voyager. ENT had its share of formulaic pablum, but I think it tended to take more risks and was therefore more interesting to watch than VOY.
Having said that, I would have loved to see what VOY could have done with a season-long arc (something many people have said about the “Year of Hell” two-parter) as opposed to its episodic format, which was annoying from the beginning and only got more obnoxious the longer the show went on.
@30: elevator pitch: Game of Thrones in space? :-)
Looking forward to reconsidering the series. I’ll give it credit for taking chances and trying ambitious twists on the franchise. But, as someone above said, there was far too much fan-service prequel claptrap (I *really* didn’t need two entire episodes to “explain” that the people doing Klingon makeup on TNG had a bigger budget than on TOS) and the overarching time-travel plot built into the structure of the show was a massively disastrous decision. Time travel is fine as a framing device, but as an actual plot driver it always leads to logical contradictions and causality failures. ALWAYS. And therefore it is just lethal to real character development and dramatic tension. {/endrant}. It’ll be very interesting to see how ENT has aged in the light of all the good Trek we’ve had in the last few years. As always, thanks for doing this KRAD, and looking forward to the rewatch.
S
@33 ha! Totally agree about the Grand Klingon Retcon episodes. On their own they were fine, and a neat offshoot of the Augments storyline. But trying to reconcile the production realities of ’60s TV with 2000s TV…woof. (This also comes up in the mirror universe eps…sorry, but I’m not for one second buying that the pastel disaster that is the old Defiant is more advanced than the NX-01.)
Also agreed that the time travel device was ill-advised. As a viewer, I was already experiencing a kind of in-universe time travel since the whole damn show was a prequel. Falling back on temporal hijinks in the first episode was, I thought, insecure and condescending on the part of the creators; it told me they had no faith that the basic concept of the show would hold my attention.
Oh boy, wake me when we get to season three! J/k. Sort of. I’ll try to rewatch from the beginning along with everyone else and bare the frustration and boredom I suppose. I’ve already skipped ahead and been rewatching episodes of Season Four lately, universally regarded as the best season. The “In a Mirror Darkly” 2-parter are my absolutely favorite episodes of the entire series and follow the same over-the-top, scenery chewing, okay to kill off (or hint at it) main characters in the same style as the prior Mirror Universe episodes on both TOS and DS9. I think they were also best MU episodes since “Crossover” and then it was just nice to see the cast letting loose and having fun and for most of them, actually getting to be interesting for once.
But getting back to the series generally, Enterprise’s debut is when my interest in the franchise had really begun to wane even more so beyond my disappointment with Voyager’s latter seasons. I’ll give points to Berman and Braga for trying to do something completely different with the setting, the look, and other stylistic choices like the title and main credits. It was the execution where things largely fell down. The main credits song, while I admit can get stuck in one’s brain as it did mine, comes across as very saccharine and corny. I’m no fan of the end credits Archer Theme either. I always race to shut it off before it begins playing. The whole episodic format from prior spin-offs had gotten stale by this point. But my biggest grievances were with the casting and the characters themselves.
All of the prior spin-offs had been groundbreaking with the casting in various ways. TNG had the first non-American captain and multiple women in the cast. DS9 had the first person of color lead and the female first officer (not counting the original TOS pilot). VOY had the first female captain and additional strong and important female characters. And then with ENT we regress and emulate the TOS with “The Big Three” who are all white actors and the lead is another white American male in the Kirk and Pike vein. Nothing groundbreaking here at all. I mean I wasn’t expecting the first gay captain but something unique could have been attempted. And then to add insult to injury, making the Black man and Asian female characters as basically token props on the bridge was just sad. Usually it’s the alien characters on any Trek series that are the ones to breakout but IMHO I don’t feel like any single character ever popped and became a fan favorite or someone the writers were just salivating to do a story about. I also clearly remember the controversy regarding the will they or won’t they about the powers that be finally introducing a gay regular character on the series, with the most likely candidate being Reed. When that didn’t happen I can also recall the collective disappointment, not to mention my own. As someone who had only recently come out as a gay man myself in the prior year to ENT’s debut, it certainly would have been affirming to see a person representing LGBT people in space in the future and a member of Starfleet, in much the same ways that Uhura, Sulu, Sisko, Janeway, etc. were role models that minorities and children aspired to. It was also a chance to give the series some culturally progressive significance but they certainly passed the buck on that now didn’t they?
T’Pol was always Seven of Vulcan in my mind. Basically she was fitting that template of the cold but sexy and intelligent woman wrapped in a catsuit and the lure to salivating straight men, aboard the ship in-universe and also to the viewing audience. And this not to knock Jolene Blalock at all who I thought did a great job in the role and with what she was given. It just seemed pretty obvious with what Berman and Braga were aiming for with the character.
I also didn’t like the whole get back to the TOS way of doing things and focus on a triumvirate. I think ever since the TNG days the viewers were accustomed to and liked the format of focusing on a different main cast member every week, both to keep things fresh and interesting and to also get more insight and backstory to that particular character. If the series creators just want to focus on three characters then just have a main cast of three. Otherwise the remaining cast end up as ciphers that you feel sorry for because they were never adequately developed.
And lastly, getting to the casting, I think everyone basically did okay with their roles for what they were given. But to me the exception was Bakula. I get that he was the “big get” as he was already a very recognizable and I believe well-liked actor coming off of Quantum Leap which I actually never really watched. Aside from that the only other thing I watched him in was his role in American Beauty which he did fine in but was a pretty small part. So I was pretty disappointed when finally watching this big star be the captain and being unimpressed. It never felt realistic to me. I could believe Picard and Sisko and Janeway were commanding officers, but watching Bakula was like witnessing an actor pretending to be a captain. His primary moods appeared to be shouty and frustrated and it felt forced and fake. Even having just watched the “In A Mirror Darkly” episodes again, even Bakula’s MU Archer comes across the same way but I can go with it in this instance since that whole universe is hammy and over-the-top so his shouty, silly acting fits right in. Anyway, at least up to this point in the franchise, Archer/Bakula was the first Star Trek captain that I found to be uncharismatic and un-iconic.
Oh, I do love the fact Archer had a dog aboard. As a dog dad and lover myself I wholeheartedly approve of that character trait. I think more of the crew on any Trek series should have pets aboard, especially dogs. I guess cats are okay too. Grudge is cool.
@34/Kyle: “Falling back on temporal hijinks… was, I thought, insecure and condescending on the part of the creators; it told me they had no faith that the basic concept of the show would hold my attention.”
Not on the part of the creators, but the network. As I understand it, Berman & Braga didn’t want to use time travel. Heck, they didn’t even want NX-01 to launch until the first-season finale. They wanted to do The Right Stuff in the 22nd century. But UPN’s execs (or maybe Paramount’s?) were uncomfortable with something so revisionist and demanded something more like the familiar Star Trek stuff that would bring in the established audience. The execs were uneasy with doing a prequel and wanted something that moved forward from the 24th-century shows. So the time travel element was added under pressure from on high. And it was obvious that the producers’ heart wasn’t in it, because they never came up with a coherent explanation for the Temporal Cold War and let it drop as soon as they could, only doing a couple of episodes about it in season 2, replacing it with a whole different time-travel arc in season 3, and then washing their hands of the whole thing altogether in the season 4 premiere.
The one thing I will credit the UPN or Paramount execs with doing is not allowing Berman/Braga to do a whole first season arc of getting Enterprise launched. The first season was rough as it is, but a whole season of the ship and crew just sitting there not boldly going? That’s a viewership and ratings disaster right there.
@36 CLB: That is a *really* interesting bit of history about the tug of war over time travel. That alternate season 1 arc could potentially have been really interesting. Ah well.
One rant I forgot: Mountains visible from Detroit? Really?
S
@37/garreth: “but a whole season of the ship and crew just sitting there not boldly going? That’s a viewership and ratings disaster right there.”
People said the same thing about Deep Space Nine. Starship adventure is not the only worthwhile format for science fiction. A lot of good shows have been Earthbound. A story exploring how humanity adjusted to contact with Vulcans and other species and laid the foundations for becoming an interstellar power could be worth telling. Arguably it’s similar to the arc Stargate SG-1 successfully told for a full ten years.
No, it wouldn’t have felt very much like Star Trek, but is that so wrong? The value of a shared universe is that different series within it can have different tones and focuses. The contrast should be the point. No sense in doing multiple series in the same universe if they all feel the same. It would’ve been a big gamble to do something this different, but I will never agree with the mentality that it’s wrong to take creative gambles and just settle for the safe and predictable. That mentality is how we got seven years of formulaic mediocrity on Voyager.
Before I was offered the post-finale Enterprise novels, I pitched a series that would’ve started shortly after First Contact in 2063 and shown the aftermath, how humanity adjusted to contact with aliens and rebuilt its civilization. I think that would’ve been a fascinating untold story, but my editor rejected the idea, probably because it wouldn’t have had enough familiar Trek characters or elements in it. But that’s exactly why I thought it would be worth doing — because it would’ve filled in a large gap in the franchise and gone where no Trek story had gone before. Which is really what Trek stories should do, isn’t it?
@39/CLB: I remember the same complaint made about DS9 but I never bought into it myself because the writers built-in the wormhole into the setting. That guaranteed that aliens and adventure would always come through it to the station and the station was also equipped with Runabouts prior to the Defiant, which would still allow the crew to boldly go to the Gamma Quadrant.
And I’m all for taking risks but a setting on pre-Federation Earth spending an entire season getting the ship ready and dealing with petty Vulcans as the main adversaries would have bored me to tears and I conjecture cause the viewership to flee in droves more so than it actually did. I’m also all for you taking risks and telling new stories in your own dramatic works because I think literature is a completely different format than what’s on the screen. I think on the screen people are expecting something more visceral and showy and less talky/explanations.
DS9’s station-bound setting is precisely why I could never get into it. I rank ENT above DS9 in terms of viewing enjoyment. The baseball love didn’t help either.
I’ve got faith, faith in KRAD.
I fully expect these reviews to include some much justified brutality toward the plotline of Enterprise. I love Enterprise, but I am also of the mind that it does deserve the criticism it got with its inconsistent worldbuilding, meandering plots, and lack of a coherent vision.
One thing that was continually frustrating with Star Trek: Enterprise was the fact they wanted to do it as a prequel but everything is almost identical. TOS is dramatically different from TNG by design but 200 years later and things function more or less identically be they transporters, “polarized hulls” that function like shields, and phase pistols that act like phasers.The Klingons are identical to Klingons in the 24th century and when we visit Risa? What is Risa? Well Risa is a paradise tourist planet. What if Risa had been a crime-ridden hellhole or a swamp?
I think the show also miscalculated with how it presented the Vulcans. There’s a constant running theme in the first two seasons that the Vulcans are holding humanity back. Humanity reacts with suspicion to them and we’re clearly meant to side with humanity but I remember siding with them over Archer repeatedly–who came off like a racist bully. I also didn’t buy for a second humanity recovered from a nuclear war to world peace without Vulcan help.
The Temporal Cold War was also something I misinterpreted the rationale for. I assumed it was a fun way to explain the differences in the setting, technology, and so on. Someone is screwing with time! Maybe the NX-1 Enterprise wasn’t even named the Enterprise originally but named the Constitution! Sadly, I was way off and this clever idea would only be taken with the Augment episodes.
I like all the characters but felt some were underedeveloped (Hoshi and Travis especially) but agree the sexuality was so juvenile it wasn’t sexy. You get more out of actual romance than any decon room.
Others here my disagree but for me, the first wrong turn Enterprise made was the whole season-long Xindi arc. Or at least doing that arc before any setup for the Romulan war was made. I was looking forward to an arc leading to the Romulan War and was hoping to see Stiles’s father and other family members as casualties of that war, leading to the attitude of the Stiles we met in Balance of Terror. I thought so much could have been done with that war first, reeling in lots of viewers and ratings, and then maybe they could have afforded a diversion like the Xindi.
But when the Xindi arc happened early on, my biggest reaction was a WTF.
I’m with Keith. Not only was this show canceled because it was bad, but it effectively canceled Star Trek on TV for the next 12 years!
I like Bakula’s Archer well enough, but I think they missed an opportunity having an alien in command this voyage. A Vulcan or some other species — heck, why not go weird and make it Phlox?! — would’ve added some tension and building of trust among the crew of mostly humans this early in Starfleet history.
But hey ho, Action Man reporting for duty! Again.
I’m glad Porthos will get his due every week!
Since Keith is giving the show the chance of time, I will do the same thing for the theme song (which, I note, gave Keith a couple of category titles). At the time, I thought it was attractive enough but out of place, more fitted for the olympics or a RomCom (a problem that, I thought, might have been solved by getting rid of the lyrics and doing it as an instrumental). Though the change in style certainly was in keeping with doing a prequel instead of another 24th century show.
The main thing I remember appreciating about the series was that certain TOS-era species finally got the benefit of post-1970s effects.
@40: A full season spent on Earth wouldn’t have been necessarily boring. It all depends on the story, and how it’s written. One of Braga’s early decisions was a smart one, hiring writers who had no Star Trek experience (or sci-fi in general). Among them was the team of André and Maria Jacquemetton, two very talented and capable writers with a strong grasp of character and who could craft more intimate and personal stories – as we’d see later throughout their run on Mad Men.
They would have thrived had the show gone with the Earth-based storyline instead. As it is, they didn’t last the season – hell, most of the staff left that same year, aside from Chris Black and the ones who already had prior Trek experience (Sussman, Bormanis and Strong).
I’ll join in the comments with this rewatch because I have many left field opinions about Enterprise, e.g. – I largely dislike the fourth season because of its obsession with nod-and-wink continuity, but we’ll get to that.
Like many of us, when Enterprise aired I wasn’t that interesteD. Trek felt burned out after Voyager and a prequel story didn’t appeal. Plus, that theme song was hideous (I love it, but I hate it. Don’t we all!?). But I really liked Scott Bakula and thought he was a great choice for an all-American pioneer type of captain.
I ended up binging the whole series on DVD shortly after it finished. I found far more to like than dislike, but it was also very clear why it failed. I think time has been kinder to Enterprise then we might assume and I really hope we all end up enjoying it, in spite of its many flaws.
Take it away, KRAD!
@40/garreth: “I think on the screen people are expecting something more visceral and showy and less talky/explanations.”
Having just finished watching HBO’s Watchmen, I’m inclined to disagree with this. Indeed, there’s always been television that was more about dialogue and character than action and fighting; it’s just that science fiction has a long history of being expected to fall into the latter category, a prejudice that fortunately no longer holds, as Watchmen demonstrates.
But anyway, where do you get the idea that an Earthbound show can’t be visceral? Ever seen a spy thriller? You can tell plenty of exciting, action-packed stories on a single planet. I don’t know why you’re assuming you couldn’t.
You’re making the mistake all too many laypeople make: Assuming that just because you can’t imagine something, it means nobody could. Try to keep in mind that a writer’s job is literally to imagine things you can’t. Just as any professional’s job is to do things that are beyond a layperson’s ability or training.
@41/karey: “DS9’s station-bound setting is precisely why I could never get into it.”
But other people could. Like I said, that’s the value of a shared universe — the fact that you can tailor different parts of it for different audiences, different tastes, and thereby attract a larger audience overall than you’d get by making everything exactly the same. Nobody has to like every part of it equally; that’s kind of the point.
@42/C.T.: “One thing that was continually frustrating with Star Trek: Enterprise was the fact they wanted to do it as a prequel but everything is almost identical.”
Again, I think that’s something the network insisted on, not something the producers would’ve done given free rein. As with Voyager, UPN’s desire for a uniformly Trekkish show inhibited the creativity the series could’ve had. But ENT got lucky in that UPN basically gave up on the show after season 2 and thus stopped micromanaging, which gave it more freedom to experiment and take chances. By season 4, the writing was on the wall and they could just cut loose and do whatever they felt like, since they had nothing left to lose.
“Humanity reacts with suspicion to them and we’re clearly meant to side with humanity but I remember siding with them over Archer repeatedly–who came off like a racist bully.”
Why assume we were meant to side with humanity? Good stories often allow their protagonists to be flawed or in the wrong, or present both sides sympathetically and leave the decision up to us. I think ENT did a great job with the Vulcans, depicting a culture that meant well but was too condescending, like the British Civilising Mission or like the US toward the Mideast. While TOS told colonialist allegories with humanity as the colonizer, ENT inverted that and made humanity the colonized/subordinate culture. As a student of world history, I greatly appreciated that alternate perspective.
“The Temporal Cold War was also something I misinterpreted the rationale for. I assumed it was a fun way to explain the differences in the setting, technology, and so on.”
No way. The intent was always to show the origin of the Prime timeline, not to branch off into an alternate one. The only differences were in how the story was presented, updating the visuals for modern technology and the sensibilities for a modern audience. That’s not the same as a difference within the narrative, any more than the recasting of Saavik or Tora Ziyal was meant to represent in-story cosmetic surgery.
I probably would have really liked the original plan for the first season. My favorite episodes of the series are the ones that seriously engage with the premise that these are humanity’s first ventures into space, culminating in “First Flight” in the second season. I’d argue that creating and testing a practical starship design is going just as boldly as zooming around the galaxy in the polished finished product.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the NX-01 launching early was a remnant of the earlier plans.
@36/CLB Funny to think Brannon Braga, of all people, would come down on the side against using time travel as a story device ;)
I almost never comment, but I’ve enjoyed the rewatches very much and am looking forward to this one.
I haven’t watched the series since it first aired, so my memory has somewhat dimmed, but I remember liking the premise but not the execution. While I thought many individual episodes were well done, I didn’t much like either the Temporal Cold War or Xindi story arcs. Or reversing that, I didn’t much like those two story arcs, but thought most of the individual episodes were well done.
I was glad we got to see much more of the Andorians than in the other Star Trek series, especially considering that they were a Federation founding world.
Again, looking forward to the rewatch refreshing my memory about the series and giving me the chance to revisit and reconsider some of my views from long ago.
I am interested to see how this rewatch goes. I walked away from the series during its initial run somewhere in Season 2. Someone mentioned “franchise fatigue” above and I felt part of that, with storylines feeling like they got lifted from the prior series. I also didn’t find Bakula to be a very convincing Starfleet captain, and the less said about the gratuitous decor scenes, the better. I did hear that the series improved over the last couple of seasons, and figured I might give it another try, but unlike the other series, there seemed to be little interest to replay the series on most channels, so that option was out. And for whatever reason, the prices for the DVDs was excessive (I recall I could buy the newest Game of Thrones seasons for cheaper than what they were selling Enterprise DVD seasons for). When I finally did get my hands on a decently priced set, I guess enough distance had opened up that I was able to appreciate the series for itself and not just as the latest in an unbroken line of Trek series. I wound up enjoying even those first couple seasons far more than i thought I would. So I am curious if this rewatch will result in similar opinions from others.
You had me at “The gazelle speech”.
I saw Enterprise (as my home video releases for the first two seasons still call it! Well, okay, maybe not the DVD packaging…) all the way through on Channel 4 at the time. (Yes, this was the first Star Trek series to receives its UK terrestial premiere not on the BBC but on Channel 4. This will probably come up later…) And I loved the theme song and I loved Scott Bakula, and it could be a bit Star Trek-by-numbers at times (which is annoying when the whole point is it’s supposed to be before all that stuff) but it could also hit the spot and it did take some brave moves in the later seasons. I watched the pilot last night (are we doing that next week then?) and I enjoyed it even though elements that were going to turn out to be flaws were already there, notably the time travel plotline that they simultaneously never did anything with and did far too much with.
As for the human-Vulcan conflict, watching the episode, I don’t think anyone came across as wholly right or wholly wrong. That possibly changed later on, which will be interesting to see, but at this point the Vulcans are arrogant and condescending, but the humans maybe push back a bit too much with the aggression. Archer recognising that the chip on his shoulder may be slightly misplaced is a key element of it.
What’s a “gazelle speech?”
@49/CLB: I think I’m capable of having a pretty vivid imagination but the radical idea of doing an entire season on Earth pre-starship launch doesn’t sound very entertaining to me because to me that’s not “Star Trek” where people are ya know, trekking through the stars. They were still trekking on DS9 because aliens trekked to the station or the crew hopped in their Runabouts or the Defiant. I think a few episodes arc Earth-bound is fine but not a whole 26 episode season. We can run a poll here, but I vote that that is the antithesis of Star Trek. I also don’t mind the occasional well-thought talky episode like “Duet” or “Family” which I think are a couple of the franchise’s best. But again, I still want to see adventures that are mostly trekking through the stars. I also enjoyed the HBO Watchmen series myself, but that show isn’t Star Trek either.
@41/karey: Someone actually liked ENT over DS9?!? Blasphemy, my child! Lol. I guess the saying really is true – different strokes for different folks.
Having just started watching for the first time AND almost being through the first season, I’m really just here for Porthos and Phlox.
Though there was an episode that made my Quantum Leap heart very happy, so there’s that.
Looking forward to krad’s thoughts, as always.
garreth: At the top of season two, Archer gives a speech about gazelles that has become legendary. The speech isn’t as bad as its reputation, but oh boy is it not a good speech……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My main complaint with the series was the “Vulcans are really mean” bits. Why make them complete a-holes? It was just dumb.
Other complaints include Archer, the man who got beat up so much I was beginning to think he liked it.
And what kind of dumb organization sends people out completely unprepared for contact. Right now, we’ve got a section in NASA that wrote protocols for contact. Why wouldn’t they have any 150 years from now? There are college courses on what went wrong with Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, etc. and its not exactly rocket science to know you should act at least a little discrete when meeting new people.
Krad: Thanks. I know I’ve watched the second season premiere before but I honestly don’t remember anything from it except that it had to do with the temporal cold war and Daniels appears in it. But I think I’ll skip ahead so I can find that speech!
I always liked ENT (I kind of unconditionally love all things Trek), and I’ve been heartened to see it get some well-deserved love over the last decade or so, starting with Scotty losing Admiral Archers precious beagle in the Kelvinverse, and the design of the Franklin in Beyond.
Fun little factoid: UPN had asked Berman to produce ENT as early as 2000 so its first season and the seventh and final season of VOY would have aired concurrently. Berman resisted this because he thought yet another spin-off of Trek was coming too soon. I get his point of view but at the same time I don’t think having the two shows on at the same time would have cannibalized each other’s ratings and viewers. If anything it could have been a solid two hour block of Star Trek airing each week and may have even helped each other in the ratings in the 2000-01 season. And perhaps ENT would have lasted a total of 5 seasons if it had that one year earlier start but that’s just pure conjecture.
This is the first series where you have to drop the re from rewatch for me. To date, for various reasons, I have not seen a single episode of ENT. I’m not putting it out there like a badge of honor (or of shame), it just happened. We wound up moving three times in the space of a year between 2001 and 2002, 9/11 happened, job changes, etc. By the time life stabilized and I had a thing called “leisure time”, it was already off the air. So I plan to watch along each week. This will be interesting as I will be watching these with completely fresh eyes (ok, I don’t know if I’d call 50+ year old eyes exactly FRESH) and no preconceptions at all.
There’s a storytelling rule of thumb that I heard somewhere along the lines of: if you have a really cool idea, don’t save it, get it out there in your story quickly. With Enterprise, the idea that we would get to see how the Federation came together is really cool. That’s what they really wanted the show to be about but they missed sight of that and gave us a bunch of nonsense plots instead.
They could have given us a few seasons dealing with all the things we don’t see later because of the Federation. We could have had piracy, drifting in space when something breaks, claim jumping asteroid miners, and odd frontier settlements. (ok, I just described Firefly…) Instead, we got a bunch of repackaged TNG/DS9 storylines. The time war and the Xindi don’t belong here. This is what the writers had on their minds, but they should have channeled a bit more of the out-there storylines from TOS and a bit less of current events.
garreth: Yes, Archer’s idea of an inspirational speech: Tell the Vulcans that humans aren’t gazelles, to utter bemusement. It actually does kind of work in context, but it’s nice to take the mick out of it all the same.
I’m very excited about this rewatch! As I already wrote before, ENT was my first Star Trek show, so I didn’t have anything to compare it and I actually liked it quite a lot.
I’m really glad to see Phlox is having a section of his own, he was my favourite ENT character.
Since multiple people already commented on the credits, I disliked the song, and while I thought the idea of showing historical footage from man’s path to space was great, I was really annoyed with how US-centric it was. No Sputnik, no Gagarin? Come on!
I watched the first season every week, taping (remember VHS tapes?) if necessary. The second season, eh, if I remembered to watch it. Somewhere in the whole Xindi/Temporal Cold War arc I gave up. Watched the finale and, ye gods, what a way to retroactively ruin a show.
Eventually I caught all of it, here and there, in reruns. Have season 4 on my Tivo as I recall it was decent (except for the finale) and plan to watch it all the way through.
All Trek since has been on streaming, which I don’t have, so I’ve only caught the first 2 seasons of Discovery when CBS rebroadcast them I really liked them. Looking forward to season 3.
@55/garreth: “but the radical idea of doing an entire season on Earth pre-starship launch doesn’t sound very entertaining to me because to me that’s not “Star Trek” where people are ya know, trekking through the stars.”
Again, that’s what they said about DS9. We’re always skeptical of things we haven’t tried, but that’s our fear and doubt talking. It’s only by pushing beyond those doubts and taking chances that we ever achieve anything new. There’s no guarantee the effort will succeed, no, but the challenge is what makes it worthwhile to try. Risk… is… our business!
And as I already said, I disagree that not feeling like Star Trek is a negative. I say it’s bad if every show in the same universe feels the same and tells the same kind of story. That’s a failure of imagination and a wasted opportunity. Star Trek is supposed to be about braving the new and embracing the different, not conservatively clinging to the familiar and comfortable. The original show didn’t just tell stories about exploration; it innovated and pushed the boundaries of what science fiction television could be. It took chances and defied expectations. So I’ll never agree that it’s wrong for a Trek show to dare to be different. Better a bold failure than a timid, unambitious success.
@58/ragnarredbeard: “My main complaint with the series was the “Vulcans are really mean” bits. Why make them complete a-holes? It was just dumb.”
For one thing, Vulcans have always been jerks; that was made clear enough in “Amok Time,” “Journey to Babel,” and “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” Fans just have an unrealistically rosy image of Vulcans because we like Spock. But he could be a jerk too.
More fundamentally, though, every story needs an antagonist, a challenge for the heroes to overcome. First Contact established Vulcans as an advanced interstellar power at the dawn of the human warp era, so it made narrative and historical sense to show humanity needing to struggle against them to make a name for ourselves. Any established power, however well-meaning, will often seem like an obstacle and an adversary to a less powerful group with a differing agenda. As I said, ENT took the usual story dynamic where humans are on the more powerful side of the interaction and inverted it. Think of how Starfleet looked to the Maquis, or to the peoples it had to abandon to hardship because of the Prime Directive. It didn’t look benevolent from their perspective. All ENT did was to put humanity in that role, and it played out the way it plausibly would.
I recently re-watched the entire set of the series of Star Trek Enterprise. I found it refreshingly Star Trek in its style and production. As it was cut much too soon, I find myself wishing for many more seasons of the show that I wish I could watch. Sometimes TV Executives act more like Day Stock Traders than consummate leaders of industry.
I never thought the Vulcans came across as jerks (just as Vulcans), and that Archer (and to a lesser extent other humans) came across as giant babies. Archer is angry because they didn’t share their tech and that meant his dad didn’t get to see Warp 5? Seriously?! I mean, I get why that would be a let-down, but to hold a grudge well into adulthood and let it effect your professional life is just silly. I also love how outraged Archer is when he sells out Vulcan security secrets to the Andorians and the Vulcans respond by suspending some exercises and recalling T’Pol- an entirely reasonable and measured response. I think they were going for “both Vulcans and humans need to learn from each other and change” but the actual actions taken always made me side with the Vulcans. I get it, they are cold and uptight and not fun at parties- but hearing grown men complain about that got real old real quick.
Keith, didn’t you say you would NEVER do an Enterprise rewatch? :-D
My relationship with Enterprise: Hated it when it was on television. Didn’t make it far past the pilot. Hated the opening montage and song which felt like a cheap nostalgia trick to manipulate emotion. Hated the “we have to rub gel on our naked bodies to get rid of the germs” sequence and thought “oh, here’s 7 of 9 but she’s Vulcan”. And didn’t like any of the characters — everyone knows ships have cats, not dogs :). Loved that they abandoned phasers and transporters at first and then groaned when they brought them both back in episode 2. And then I abandoned the series thinking it was just another Voyager fail.
So it surprised me that this past year when I was looking for something to watch while painting I found myself giving it another try. And it wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered. And then it got interesting. And then I got hooked. And I was watching the whole series at a leisurely pace until Netflix announced it was taking the show off and I binged the last 2 seasons in 30 days to make it under the deadline.
Point being — at this point in my life I was ready for it. (And yeah, I think Trek Fatigue was one of the reasons it failed). I was ready for some good old Star Trek optimism in humanity. And I wish it had lasted a bit longer. And I wish the ending episode hadn’t sucked. And I wish some of the episodes were better. But it wasn’t bad. It was a gleaming bronze statue covered with verdigris. And that was enough.
And I’m greatly looking forward to the re-watch — since unlike the other re-watches this show wasn’t 20 years ago for me – it’s just been a month!
Most of the important stuff has already been said above, so I would just like to say that – on reflection – there’s something deeply appropriate about Captain Archer’s captaincy being rather a mixed bag.
After all, while the first of a breed may be the most influential they’re not necessarily going to be The Best – especially since later captains are going to benefit from Numero UNO’s mistakes quite as much as their victories – so while it probably wasn’t deliberate, seeing Captain Archer depicted as a good, but not a great, captain works for me.
Also, Porthos is the reason we all know in our heart that the Starfleet Academy mascot is, has been and always be a beagle – search your feelings, you know it to be True!
Also, if LOWER DECKS ever does an ENTERPRISE era episode, I dearly hope there will be a ‘Faith of the heart’ sing-along (with one or two of the choir rolling their eyes at the sidelines, but with one of these singing along anyway) to establish that the tune was also done to death in the 22nd century, but that quite a lot of people love it anyway.
You know, like most tunes indelibly associated with a specific era in the public imagination.
(Ooh, and I’m definitely looking forward to ‘Florida man’ feature – especially ‘Florida man fails safe sex, left barefoot and pregnant’).
I don’t share the hatred of the gazelle speech. It’s not great or anything, but it makes sense in context. If you want to hate on Enterprise there are better moments to pick.
In general, I don’t consider Archer a great captain, but I’m not sure that’s actually a flaw in the narrative. Just as humans were technologically inferior to many of the established species, they also had a lot less experience with… doing anything in deep space. It’d be weird if they didn’t do a bit of bumbling.
As for the Vulcans, they’ve always been condescending at best, although I’d still rather hang out with them than Klingons.
I’m looking forward to this re-watch. I missed the show when it first aired, because my life was extremely busy at that point, and poor reviews scared me away. But then I had a chance to watch it in syndication during a protracted illness, and quite enjoyed it. I think it was on SyFy, and remembered being irritated they did not air the episodes in order, which for this show was very important.
I am surprised no one yet mentioned the Andorian Commander Shran, who ended up being one of my favorite recurring Star Trek characters ever.
@25,
The conceit of Romulan stories has almost always been the ongoing tensions along the Neutral Zone, a cold war analogy if there ever was one. With the wall down in ’89, I can see why the writers went looking for other venues for new stories. But by keeping Romulan culture relatively untapped, it kept them as mysterious and interesting without getting constantly used in stories to death and fatigue (and Picard finally got to mine them to great effect after this long thanks to the preceding events on both Nemesis and Trek ’09).
That’s a good point. So much of the Romulan perception is built on that shadowy mystique and secrecy.
I loved that world build detail from Picard about the Shaipouin (false doors) in Romilan homes. It’s just so…Romulan.
I just always loved the basic concept of ‘evil Vulcans’ and how the Vulcan embracing of Surak 2,000 years earlier unwittingly unleashed catastrophic consequences for the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
Just jumping in to agree with everyone who said it wasn’t their cup of tea when it was originally broadcast, but have warmed to it since then.
Starting with TNG, it seems the first several episodes or first season of a Trek series are… not bad, per se… but not fully formed. By all accounts there was drama going on among production staff at TNG and the writers had the task of explaining a new world to viewers. Voyager was a little uneven in its first season. DS9 not as much, but the first half season had a lot of exposition about character’s backstory. And I’m the only person I know who liked the Disco/Lorca/Mirror Universe reveal.
And Enterprise was no different. I didn’t dislike Scott Bakula’s performance as Archer, but every now and again I would expect a hologram of Dean Stockwell to appear and mumble something about Ziggy. Fortunate Son was probably the first Enterprise episode I liked, and sadly, I didn’t see it until years after it aired. After that episode, things started picking up, and I regret bailing on the series in it’s initial run.
Carbon Creek is one of my favourite Trek episodes. And while I generally think of time travel as a gimmick, Carpenter Street was great. And Observer Effect as well. All very good episodes. I roll my eyes a little at the various Temporal Cold War episodes, but they were a delight to watch. I wasn’t invested in the Bindi war, but it was a good backdrop and effectively motivated character’s actions in the episodes I did like.
So… yeah… a rewatch of Enterprise. On the whole, a solid series.
@68 said: “For one thing, Vulcans have always been jerks; that was made clear enough in “Amok Time,” “Journey to Babel,” and “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” Fans just have an unrealistically rosy image of Vulcans because we like Spock. But he could be a jerk too.”
The thing That differentiated this batch of Vulcans from those was the sheer amount of militarism on display, what with spying on the Andorrans and later shooting it out with them on Coridan. When we see that there’s been infiltration by their Romulan cousins in Season 4, it’s somewhat easy (for me at least) to assume something similar has been going on for quite a while. Call it “Unification 0.5” if you like.
In general, there were Vulcans that were better than others. Soval may have gotten verbally beaten up by Archer on occasion, but he presented as mostly sympathetic. V’Lar seemed to be sympathetic to humans as well. Not to mention T’Pau and her followers
That alternate first season would have been amazing. Completely missing from the show is the recognition that humanity went through a terrible war in the recent past. Starfleet is even more amazing when you acknowledge that these humans (or their parents) would have been on different sides! A great thing Star Trek gives us is the notion that however we are divided now, it need not always be so.
I really liked the Vulcans (and Andorians) in Enterprise. Species-wide character development.
As a professional working in the spaceflight industry, I loved the opening sequence. “I’ve got faith of the heart” is still a terrible lyric
@75 AlanBrown: Hear, hear! In fact, I would watch “Star Trek: Andorians” in a heartbeat as long as he was captain.
I think the Archer hatred of the Vulcans hits so hard because xenophobia isn’t meant to be part of Star Trek and having a captain display such an egregious personality flaw is pretty big to begin with. One that he doesn’t seem to get over as a whole until the 4th and final season when Sarek takes him over. It’s also weird given a major part of Archer’s characterization is he’s meant to be a peacemaker across races.
But its just extra egregious because Archer is hostile to Vulcans when Vulcans are explicitly Earth’s closest allies. It’s like a man who is racist and belligerent during the Cold War…to the British. So much so that he exposes a British listening post to agents of the Soviet Union (Andorians).
The Temporal Cold War is pretty weak to begin with, and it doesn’t help that it ends with Star Trek taking a third trip to the Space Nazi well.
Space Nazis seems to be a popular Star Trek trope. Speaking of which, it looks like the upcoming season of Picard might feature Space Nazis.
Whether it took place on Earth or in space like the usual Trek series, its success depended on, as always, the characters. And I think that was the main problem here, for the most part.
I remember someone — pretty sure it was Ira Steven Behr — once remarking that the world of Roddenberry’s future, namely TNG, made it look like everyone was from Connecticut, and Enterprise was mostly a return to that — but worse. Just a big ole plain graham cracker of a series.
For what it is worth, I liked it, too. I actually enjoyed season 1 of Discovery (although I think it works better if you tweak the watching order a bit), and that was in no small part due to finding Lorca really interesting (which was no surprise, I love Jason Isaacs), and the idea of someone crossing over from the MU and actually (more or less) blending in to be an interesting and fairly unique one. The show actually lost me in season 2, and I’m admittedly a woman of limited patience, so now when the show is on it’s like 4th captain and 3rd premise I’ve checked out.
@81 I think Archer’s racism also grated because it was just so petty (not that real racism can’t be, too, but it’s not a great character choice for your hero). They way he resents them you’d think that a drunk Vulcan had landed their shuttle on Archer’s dad and squished him like a bug, instead of just… not being super helpful in their engine design process. I get him having some animus over it, but he literally puts people’s lives in danger because of it.
I’ve always kind of assumed that the Vulcans did some sort of active discouragement of, or interference with, humanity’s warp program, instead of just not sharing their own designs. After all, in the second season episode “First Flight”, they give advice that would have delayed the Warp 5 program for years had it been followed.
Having made it through the show mostly due to a convenient time slot in the UK, looking forward to the rewatch.
And apparently there was an earlier rock ballad option, with UPN trailers using “Wherever You Will Go” by The Calling. Would it have worked better? Various fan edits of the titles suggest… not really.
@86 It’s still a very weird thing to have it color your entire view of a species and relationship with them over.
@88 You’re right, but I don’t think Archer’s prejudice is usually depicted as rational, or justified, or even something he’s completely aware of himself. It’s more a semiconscious resentment at what he perceives as their frustration of his father’s life’s work. There are even episodes, like “Breaking the Ice”, where he has to realize that his mistrust of the Vulcans is getting in the way of his duties as captain.
@89 My frustration with that episode in particular is that it proves exactly why someone as prejudiced as Archer shouldn’t have the job at all. “I’m willing to let two member of my crew die because I hold a grudge against our closest ally over (essentially) a transportation policy recommendation they made” didn’t strike me as a flaw he needed to overcome so much as something that should have disqualified him from the jump. I mean, the Vulcans were pretty much the only game in town for help if anything went wrong with the Enterprise mission, so having someone who would almost literally rather die than ask them for help seems like a bad choice for the captaincy of the ship that is going to be the furthest out in space.
And I get it, a five year delay would have sucked, but part of my issue with that whole set up is….what is the rush, exactly? Most of the first season shows a ship that is basically just bopping around and landing where the spirit moves them. It doesn’t seem like they are doing a methodical sweep of planets that would likely have intelligent life, or meeting with some species that the Vulcans had contact with to help make more allies. There doesn’t even seem to be a list of ‘things to say or not to say upon first contact,’ and instead of returning home after “Broken Bow” to be properly fitted out for their trip, they just keep on keeping on without even all the tactical equipment they need. The series wants me to believe that the Vulcans are holding them back because they just don’t understand the ingenuity of the human spirit or whatever, but in reality it often comes across as the Vulcans trying to keep Archer from pressing his hand onto every hot stove he comes across.
To be fair, in the Star Trek universe warp drive is basically the most important technology around and the key to the interstellar community, so “transportation policy” kind of undersells it. And for Archer, it’s more than just the delay of humanity’s first deep space mission—I think he took it personally because it meant his father didn’t live to see his work come to fruition. That doesn’t justify it, but it does explain it.
The timeline in Star Trek was always a little compressed but there’s already apparently a generation-old culture of spacers that exist in Archer’s time transporting cargo to what we can presume are human colonies (Terra Nova had some of the most horrifying morality in the series–let’s abandon children to vaccination and ignorance within a couple of generations!). I liked the concept of the Boomers being essentially a divergent human culture that is doomed to die out because of the rush of technology but they didn’t do anything with that or the fact Archer’s pushing the Warp 5 engine would wipe it out (which makes extra weirdness given he’s so crazy about protecting other cultures from contamination).
So clearly humanity IS out in space and doing things, which makes the premise weird. Are we newcomers on a mission of exploration in what presumably is already mostly-explored space (I assume the Vulcans provided a map) or are we an expanding new power?
Okay for the record put me in the theme song sucks camp, Archer sucks because Scott Bakula is a “look mom I’m acting” square-jawed caricature of every character he’s ever tried to portray, Vulcans are ornery mmmkay, and I can’t believe no one has mentioned the non-chemistry between Florida man and the hot Vulcan. I mean, ordinarily I like the depiction of romances between odd couples, but those two? Seriously, no way no how. I mean I could see Tripp slobbering all over T’pol because she’s hot and he’s just a good ol horny boy from the Panhandle, and I can completely see her giving him a spin just to find out what all that human lust is all about from a purely scientific perspective, but to have them develop real feelings for each other is a contrivance that worked in the script, but not on the screen, not in my opinion anyway.
So, all that said, after failing to get through this when it originally aired, I gave it a re-watch a few years ago and managed to get all the way through and wasn’t disappointed that I’d spent the time doing it. Maybe it’s because Archer kept getting his head beat in every other episode, which I kind of enjoyed. More than likely though, it was about the writing. I actually enjoyed the plotlines here, and perhaps it’s sacrilegious to say this, but on balance, I think there were fewer outright duds per season then in any of the other series.
Bring on the cringey sexytime.
Archer says flat out that the Klingons homeward is “four days out and four days back”. Now sure, the new engine is faster but Travis grew up on these freighters. They’ve been out there for years. And nobody happened to stumble across the barest hint of the Klingons in all that time?
The first season should have been taking Klagg back home. Coming across other planets. Finding new stuff. Having the Klingons so close makes no sense. But, that’s what we’ve got.
At the end of TMP, Scotty says that they can have Spock back on Vulcan in four days. We know that the Vulcans were fairly close to Earth and Enterprise even sets it as 16 light years. The upgraded Enterprise can apparently cruise at Warp 7 as opposed tot he TOS Warp 6. So, just how close are the Klingons? Proxima Centauri?
@70, 81 and others: The Vulcans were jerks. And hypocrites. And a lot of other unpleasant things. It kind of feels like people are focusing on half the story to paint Archer in the worst light possible and portray the Vulcans as the innocent victims of his prejudices, ignoring things like the Vulcans breaking a treaty out of paranoia and xenophobia (these are the people who came very close to following a madman/double agent into a devastating war on the basis of false intelligence) or nearly getting Archer and T’Pol killed (and getting an Andorian agent killed by friendly fire) with their triggerhappy behaviour which nearly messed up Starfleet and the Andorians’ own rescue attempt. It’s misleading to suggest Earth and the Vulcans were in a cold war against the Andorians: Archer exposing their listening post (more or less by accident) is less exposing a secret British listening post to the Soviet Union and more exposing a secret British listening post to the French. And then the Vulcans, having desecrated their own holy territory by using it for military purposes, act all insulted when it gets destroyed without loss of life.
Which isn’t to say Archer isn’t perfect, and he can come across as childish in his interaction with Vulcans at times, but that’s not to say that he’s completely blinded by his resentment either. It takes him precisely one episode to get to know T’Pol as an individual and begin to view her as a trusted colleague. It’s all right to focus on that one scene in “Breaking the Ice” where he wants to rescue his crewmembers himself rather than accept help from the Vulcans, but that ignores the fact that he does end up swallowing his pride and asking for their help, and that he tried to be sociable to the Vulcan captain while getting nothing in return. Soval wasn’t the most open-minded of people in the early seasons, and ultimately both he and Archer had to realise that they might have misjudged the other and meet in the middle. There’s more storyline potential in a flawed protagonist with room for growth than in someone who’s already perfect.
@87.
The company that created the titles sequence for Enterprise originally used the U2 song Beautiful Day as temp track, you can see that version on their website:
http://montyco.tv/sources/work/work_pages/MC_Enterprise.html
I’ve always liked the visual and a different track gives a better idea of what they were aiming for but I still don’t think it ever really worked.
An opening theme without any vocal might have been less distracting and off-putting, but the changes they made in later seasons only made it worse.
It was nothing if not memorable. Twenty years later and we’re still talking about it.
@74:I don’t hate the gazelle speech either. Like I said, it works in context, but out of context, “Captain Archer made a speech about a gazelle” is too funny to not laugh at.
@81. C.T. Phipps: I think your point very reasonable, but would like to suggest that the Cold War analogy is a little misleading – Earth’s status quo in the 2150s seems more comparable to that of Japan as she emerged in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
In this analogy Vulcan is still more or less in the position of Great Britain, but Humanity (like Japan) has a much stronger reason to be reluctant to toe any Party Line drawn by Vulcan.
@92. C.T. Phipps: It’s not impossible that the situation has elements of both scenarios – Humanity is continuing to expand into space, but has to date mostly stuck relatively close to home and avoided commitments beyond a now traditional friendship/apprenticeship with Vulcan (with occasional exceptions, such as the Boomers – who’ve definitely gone where no Human has gone before, but whose information will be long outdated by the time their round trip is completed, who (as independent commercial actors) would not necessarily have shared what they’ve encountered with potential rivals in any case and who have clearly not been setting Official Policy towards other species.
However the launch of NX-01 immediately upends this Status Quo – since it’s the first Human built ship tailor made to establish Earth’s place in the stars as an organised polity (as opposed to an untidy collection of settlements and the odd freighter) and defend that position against all comers.
Earth has, in essence, just produced it’s first dreadnought and marked itself as a Player, rather than a pawn, in the Great Game of Interstellar Politics.
Regarding Vulcan-Human relationships, I don’t think any side was represented as fully right or wrong. It’s a bit like the relationship between parents and teenaged kids: the parents err on the side of caution, trying to shelter the kids and underestimating their maturity and kids err on the side of recklessness, overestimating their ability to handle everything. Of course, applying this to whole species is a bit simplified, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic that most humans will be at least a bit bitter about it. This is probably also why Archer was not disqualified over his bitterness: everyone dislike Vulcan’s behavior at least a little bit.
@81. That describes US Navy CINC Admiral Ernest King during WWII. King had great disdain for the British and worked to undermine the Allied “Germany First” strategy whenever he found an opportunity as well as having a reputation for being in a perpetually angry mood.
That incident does account for why the Andorians would come to trust Humans, despite the United Earth being something of a Vulcan protectorate.
@100. Crusader75: Dear me, this sounds like a man overcompensating for a lifetime as the butt of jokes every Fourth of July …
If you get time, do a rewatch (or first watch) of the original Animated Series. The animation is super cheap, but it’s not dumbed down for kids at all. It has almost the entire original cast doing voices, and top writers from TOS as well. It’s very easy to see it as the fourth and fifth years of TOS. It even has the first holodeck.
@102/Silly: Krad did review TOS animated series back in 2016! Here’s the link and then scroll down towards the bottom for the rewatch entries on the individual episodes of the animated series:
https://www.tor.com/series/star-trek-tos-rewatch/
Sorry, I’m late. I don’t always comment, but I usually comment on krad’s announcing these rewatches (especially since this will be the last Trek rewatch).
Enterprise. I think my love of Quantum Leap and Scott Bakula in that show made me blind to Enterprise’s flaws. I remember being excited Scott Bakula was returning to sci-fi, and coming to Star Trek!
Watching Enterprise in first-run 20 years ago, I never actively hated it, but I wasn’t super excited about it either. To me it was like, welp, Voyager is over so I have to make the most of Trek still being on air. Like someone commented above, I felt dutybound to watch anything Star Trek (of course Lower Decks would change that…)
I could see even then what the show could be and what they might be going for, but just couldn’t quite get there.
Like I’ve already said, I’ll be interested in your take, krad. Getting the inside story of the behind the scenes of this show is going to be very interesting.
Straight and steady.
I liked Enterprise on the whole. I don’t really fault the cast for much, in that regard and Archer was bent out of shape a lot because he often got pulled into a lot of crap that he didn’t sign up for. I will forever despise the executives for their idiotic Time travel mandate as Time Travel requires an immense amount of energy to do well. Season 3 while I wasn’t a fan of the Xindi Arc I feel it was well executed. Season 4 was the lady that brought me to the dance. Some deride the continuity wink and nods, but that was the entire point to me. We were suppose to see the birth of the Federation here. I’m here for the connective tissue, so I found S4 to be intensely enjoyable. And the T’Pol Trip ship is a favorite of mine. Also…this show gave us freaking Shran. The elements that showed the tensions between the other races before humans started “meddling” is quite good, it shows why our newness was an advantage.
The Theme Song…I like it I’m not gonna lie. I would’ve preferred another Goldsmith special, but Faith of the Heart isn’t evil or anything.
I feel the loss of the Earth-Romulus War is a massive scar on all Star Trek and it could’ve been a thing of true beauty.
Lastly, Terra Prime-Demons is the true finale of this show, and I throw These Are the Voyages on the same trash heap as Threshold. Only the last 30 seconds mean anything.
So thanks for this ReWatch KRAD, I’m looking forward to it.
@105/Mr. D: “Season 4 was the lady that brought me to the dance. Some deride the continuity wink and nods, but that was the entire point to me. We were suppose to see the birth of the Federation here.”
Yeah, but there are different ways to handle laying continuity groundwork. I think season 1 did a good job of handling it subtly, laying the early foundations for things without feeling too blatant. Season 4 was just too self-conscious about it, constantly shouting “HEY YOU REMEMBER THIS THING FROM STAR TREK HERE’S WHERE IT CAME FROM!!!!!!!!!” rather than just telling a story where that’s a grace note. I mean, it did a good job with the continuity porn, but that’s the sort of thing we tie-in authors are supposed to do, picking up the dangling threads and weaving them into pleasing illusions of consistency. The actual franchise itself should be blazing new trails, not just riding on the coattails of what came before it.
As for the Earth-Romulan War, while it is a major omission in the history, I feel that far too much Star Trek over the past few decades has been about war, and it’s been done to death already. It’s that other franchise that’s supposed to be about wars among the stars.
I think that the problem with season 4 us that they were trying to make up for lost time. So they hammed as much world building in as they could, particularly once they knew that they were not getting renewed.
Personally, I could have done without the whole Vulcan trilogy. Sure, it was nice to see some time spent on Vulcan but having Archer be the saviour of the Vulcan people was just too much.
I’ve started my own ENT rewatch. When it first aired, I wasn’t crazy about the first two seasons. However, that was a long time ago so I figure I should check it out again.
It’s still early and I’m enjoying it for the most part but I really hate the Temporal Cold War. I just found out now that the studio pushed for it because they thought the show should have something *futuristic. :insert eye roll:
I also wish it had more of a “prequel” feel. It seems like we should have more references to planets we’ve heard of in the later series. There are some references, which I appreciate, but I always felt it wasn’t enough. In the same vein, I don’t like their tendency to introduce aliens that we’ll never see again such as the Xyrillians or the aliens in “Silent Enemy.” At the time this show aired, they had 35 years of history to draw on. They should’ve been focusing on that not introducing aliens that suddenly disappear after the 22nd century.