Star Trek: Enterprise: 5 years later.

[MSgtGlennSmith]

Us nerds just enjoy picking on the mistakes.

We nerds... but what makes you say that?

[AnthonyEPIC]

Yes, I refer to an ad-hoc explanation for the phase-pistol/laser/phaser issue.

As for the Vulcans' odd emotionalism, that is one of the issues Manny Coto addressed... sufficiently, in my opinion.

Just out of curiosity, where?

I don't remember the names of the episodes, but there were a series of 3(?) in the fourth season where they went to Vulcan--met up with a young T'Pau, in fact.

[spoiler]There was a sort of Vulcan underground of people following the old ways of Surak. They were much less emotional than the mainstream Vulcans we had been seeing in the show previously. By the end of the trilogy, we are left to conclude that they eventually become the majority of the Vulcan population.[/spoiler]

To be more specific.

[spoiler]Archer and T'Pau discovered a lost relic that contained Surak's true teachings (believed to be a myth at this time). The discovery showed the Vulcan high command that they were going down the wrong path (one that could potentially take them back to their savage ways). It was also revealed shortly before the end of the arc that the head of the high command was in cahoots with the Romulans and perhaps even a Romulan himself. That could also go a long way into explaining why the Vulcans were going down the wrong path.[/spoiler]

[Cable]

Actually I found the first 2 seasons virtually unwatchable.  I only caught up with it when Manny Coto and CO. to over. I did go back later and re-watch some of the earlier episodes after but I really could not reconcile it with TOS or anything that had come after. I think B&B were out to make their own show and it just happened to be called Star Trek.

I was really glad to find Phase II because here is a show that is actually good and has made me want to watch Star Trek again.

[Dennis]

I liked Enterprise from the beginning and was sorry that it wasn't more successful. 

That said, there was certainly not much novelty about Trek by that time, and the series tended to run together in tone. 

The visual artistic work on all of the Trek shows was always first rate.

Enterprise and TNG were my favorite modern Trek series.

[Carwyn]

I found season 1 watchable from there it went down hill and then season 4 came along and was very good the best season of trek made in a long time. Then it had the worst last episode of any show with the best 30 seconds stuck on the end.

[Saladin_CO]

I like all the Star Trek series and watched them all.  Every series had its ups and downs.  My preference in order of favorite to least favorite only represents 'as a whole' and there are individual episodes and story arcs that exceed the order of favorites to one degree or another.

Star Trek -- TOS/TAS
Star Trek -- Phase2/New Voyages
Star Trek -- Next Generation
Star Trek -- Enterprise
Star Trek -- Voyager
Star Trek -- Deep Space Nine

If I were to break it down further, I'd say that TOS seasons 1 & 2 (and some of 3) were the very best Star Trek ever.  But some of the TOS episodes are pretty silly and so are exceeded by other series' better episodes.

Phase 2 just plain rocks.

ST:TNG had a lot of quantity of episodes that were very good.  They also had a large quantity of forgettable ones in my opinion and had a lot of political correctness that was hard to swallow, IMHO.  The first two seasons were not very exceptional in my opinion and far too repetetive of TOS which handled the stories better.  It felt like they were trying to remake TOS and doing it with cheesy "Dr. Who" style video keying FX.  Some of it just looked a lot more fake than TOS scratchy film did.  Not all of it, of course.  But there were episodes where it had a definite look of being put together with a digital box and not with an optical printer which at the time had a far more realistic look.  Technical aspects aside, I really didn't like the characters much until "The Best of Both Worlds" which turned that show around for me.

Enterprise for me, worked well for most of it, except I didn't like the Xindi arc a whole lot.  It started off well, but it got pretty mundane pretty quickly.  I liked the first season and the last season the best.  The last season went a long way to correcting a lot of things to be the way we knew them to be.  The only disappointment I had with the series is that they had to bring in the temporal war issue and that they missed the best opportunity of all... telling the tale of the Romulan War.  Maybe they would have, had they not been cancelled so soon.  But if they had done that, rather than the Xindi, it would have been far better, IMHO.  But the reason this series gets higher marks than Voyager or DS9 overall, is that it felt more like TOS to me, overall.

Voyager was a pretty good concept that repeately fell short.  It had some great stories and a lot of good characters.  It fell short in that they always rebooted it whenever something disasterous befell ship and crew.  Way too many time fixes.  Not enough Maquis vs. Starfleet tension, not enough continuity of stories over the long haul.  Having pitched for that series and seen their reasons for rejecting some of the ideas we presented, I felt they underestimated their audience or had very little faith in their viewership.  They were more interested in filling the timeslot with irrelevance than thought-provoking material.

Deep Space Nine doesn't really deserve the bottom slot.  It has some of the very best story arcs in the TNG era and some of those are highly elevated and highly prized in my mind.  But I didn't really like the formula of the series as much and I didn't care a lot for the Bajoran culture.  It just didn't do a lot for me.  I did like Kira and I liked almost all the characters, I just didn't like the 'Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing' feel of a space station, overall.  They did a good job of telliing stories for the most part, especially in the Dominion War.  That puts it over the top of several of the other series' story arcs for me.

It should be noted that I would still score them all in the 95% or better category of like vs. dislike.  All the series were good IMHO.

Ken

[G-man]

Hurm ....

Enterprise.  It could've been great, pity the opportunity was squandered to deliver same-old same-old.

I can go on at length ... but some complaints may be judged story material, so I'll just leave it there, with the proviso, I did like the "Mirror-Mirror" two-parter. 

/s/

Gloriosus
the G-man Himself

[FredtheRedShirt]

I found season 1 watchable from there it went down hill and then season 4 came along and was very good the best season of trek made in a long time. ...

I thought Enterprise  got off to a much better start than did STtNG.

[Thomas Kilbourne]

I believe that if Enterprise had taken the same tack as the 2009 movie did and say it was an altered timeline that left the possibility of the original still being out there, it would've ran another three seasons. Maybe more.

The cononical inconsistancies and Berman/Braga's attitude that THEY knew better than WE did about what Trek was about and THEY would tell US what we wanted to see in the show, in my humble opinion, sealed the doom of Enterprise.

[Saladin_CO]

I think all the canon issues with Enterprise were resolved by the end of the series.  Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens pulled it out very well.  If there had been no season 4, however, it would not have fit very well, or most definitely have required a lot more suspension of disbelief.  But it does go to show that if you're going to play in the sandbox, you need to know the material as well, if not better, than the ones to whom you intend to present that program if you want it to be well-received.

The movies are a little different in one aspect.  They are made for a wider audience and the corporate mentality has a different expectation.  They look at it as ticket sales.  That's ALL they look at.  When they put any effort at all into making it for the fans, that is just to guarantee a few ticket sales.  Cynical but true.  I was rather pleased that despite all the 'reboot' aspects of the new film, they at least got some things right.  I don't like the new technical designs, but if I were to imagine the original Enterprise, with the original actors in the uniforms of "The Cage" era, even acting the same way, I could see it as being mostly plausible for a valid telling.  There are still flaws.  The biggest one is dropping the warp cores to 'boost' them out of a black hole.  Considering that the warp core is what keeps them in warp, the instant they jettisoned the core(s?) they would have shot at lightspeed right into the black hole.  Of course, there would be no slow swallowing of the Narada, either.  But Star Trek 2009 is off topic here. 

[Lab Mouse]

We should have seen the Romulan War

[chunkysoup85]

I found season 1 watchable from there it went down hill and then season 4 came along and was very good the best season of trek made in a long time. ...

I thought Enterprise  got off to a much better start than did STtNG.

Very, very, true.  Season 1 of TNG was, at times, nearly impossible to watch.

[Saladin_CO]

We should have seen the Romulan War

I totally agree.  They missed out on the best opportunity ever to tell the story.

[FredtheRedShirt]

We should have seen the Romulan War

We should have, but they decided that the Romulans in Enterprise
had a cloaking device a century or so earlier than on TOS.

So there might have been a Romulan war, but we wouldn't have seen it...

[Angelus Lupus]

We should have seen the Romulan war, but certainly not the Romulans themselves. There should have been less Klingons (even though I like them) and more Tellerites. We should have seen the Saurians so Archer could have had the brandy.
Above all I think the Temporal Cold War was a bad idea. Even those in charge didn't have it planed as to who was pulling the strings.