samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
More seriously... I think a large chunk of what happened with Enterprise can be solidly laid at the feet of it being a prequel, we know how everything ends, so it never feels like there are stakes.
Athene Watches Star Trek Enterprise: How To Get Away With Franchise Murder
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More seriously... I think a large chunk of what happened with Enterprise can be solidly laid at the feet of it being a prequel, we know how everything ends, so it never feels like there are stakes.
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Nobody goes watch a Bond movie expecting Bond to loose.
I don't think prequel is the reason Enterprise is what it is at any level.
Individual episodes can still have tragedy, story arcs can stil go into places you don't expect, viewer still does not know how the characters grow.
The amount of things set in stone are minuscule in comparison to what could happen.
I don't think prequel is the reason Enterprise is what it is at any level.
Individual episodes can still have tragedy, story arcs can stil go into places you don't expect, viewer still does not know how the characters grow.
The amount of things set in stone are minuscule in comparison to what could happen.
It being a prequel isn't the issue. Especially since before this series none of the characters existed. Like, if you have a series with a young Kirk/Spock(and it's not an AU) then yes, you do have to be more inventive regarding what's going to happen, but you could absolutely have things happen to the crew of the ship/Earth, and as long as it didn't go too far off the rails it would be fine. It's also not exactly a period that we know a ton about(yes, yes novels or the like could touch on it, but Star Trek is like Star Wars, if it didn't happen on screen then it's not necessarily real for anything that did happen on screen).
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- Patriarchova
This. For all we knew at the time, Earth's first longranged explorer ship could have been destroyed by those clone guys who showed up once in TMP and then never again on its maiden voyage.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Yeah, the biggest problem with Enterprise is the writing is bad and the characters are terrible (or at least most of them, Reed seems okay).
You can fiddle with all the details you want, make it a sequel instead of a prequel, but that's not going to fix the fact the showrunners are doing a bad job.
You can fiddle with all the details you want, make it a sequel instead of a prequel, but that's not going to fix the fact the showrunners are doing a bad job.
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Red Rationalist
Spinning in eternity
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Don't forget the complete lack of ideas too. You have a prequel, with the Earth-Vulcan relationship at the forefront, the completely novel idea of the temporal cold war, vast regions of unexplored space and the first long rage exploration ships - and what plots you get are cliched, constantly about how Archer is the best and go nowhere. You have setting where factions of time travellers pit states against each other and the show has Archer being dragged into the future to search for a certain part of scrap. The first away mission on an habitable planet, and Archer turns it into a camping trip. Where he kills people, because using a probe is BOOORING. And the Vulcan - Earth relationship, which is about one thing and one thing only: Humanity is clearly ready, but the meanie Vulcans won't let us do the fun stuff. There is never anything but this extremely simple idea brought up.
The point is, the show has a premise which just invites creativity, but the actual scripts are completely devoid of it.
The point is, the show has a premise which just invites creativity, but the actual scripts are completely devoid of it.
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I agree with most of this, with one strong exception.
The temporal cold war was a terrible idea for a show like Enterprise. If this was a Star Trek sequel, or even an interquel set between TOS and TNG, it would be fine. Enterprise, though, was supposed to be about how the Federation came to be. It needed to be about the period of time it was set in, to a greater extent than any other Trek show.
The only reason the temporal cold war was even a thing is because they were afraid to cut themselves off completely from the popular 24th century era, and thought they needed to leave themselves a window to shift back to it if fans demanded it. No, really, that's why they did it, it's in interviews. They ended up doing exactly that in the finale, only without anyone even asking for it and done in a way that just makes it worse instead of better.
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Strange New Worlds running right now on Paramount+ is a prequel. It's having its share of problems, but "lack of stakes" doesn't seem to be one of them.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
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The only time that Enterprise actually seemed like a prequel was in Season 4, when the new showrunner started actually telling stories about how to Federation formed the way that the premise had implied. Before that, it didn't really matter if it was a prequel or sequel, because the writing was just rehashing the same stuff that they'd already done in previous shows, only worse.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
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You can always blow up the ship, have another one of the same name, and make a nod to the fans by mentioning the debate on how to handle specific nomenclature in these circumstances raging in the Federation Council and expected to be settled any decade now.
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Oh. Oh you don't know, do you? You don't know what the Vorlons REALLY did.
The Great War between light and dark? The endless cycle of death and destruction? The Vorlons came up with the idea.
Did you ever wonder why everyone uses Vorlon jump drives in B5? The simple answer is that the Vorlons seeded the galaxy with jump gates, and everyone based their jump drives off of those. The complicated answer is that the Vorlons didn't want a repeat of the emergence of the Kirishiac Lords.
The Kirishiac Lords were the youngest of the First Ones. They evolved on a planet with truly monstrous gravity, necessitating that they develop a frankly terrifying degree of gravity manipulation technology just to get into orbit. From there, they went on to discover hyperspace and then started conquering chunks of the galaxy. The issue was that the other First Ones had already carved the galaxy up for the most part, which meant that the Kirishiac had to take from them. I'll skip the details, but there was a war, and while the Kirishiac lost, they still put up a very good fight and caused a lot of damage.
Once the war was over, all the First Ones sat down and tried to figure out how to make sure that this would never happen again. The Vorlons were the ones who realized that using and replicating hyperspace technology is MUCH easier than figuring it out on your own, and that by seeding the galaxy with jump gates they could essentially cause new species to emerge onto the galactic stage at a significantly lower tech level, thus making them easier to detect and manage. And, to ensure that no species could ever catch the First Ones by surprise again, the Vorlons decided to monitor and test the younger races, a job they partially outsourced to their good friends the Shadows.
And that's how it started. Over the eons things deteriorated and relations between the Shadows and the Vorlons soured, but originally? The whole thing was a conspiracy, and the Vorlons were behind it all. That's what I meant when I said the Vorlons wrote the script. The Shadows are just acting out their part.
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Lord Chimera
Primordial Split Personality Disorder Dark God
"We have no right to interfere with the illness evolutionary process affecting the Markab!"
- Dr. Phlox to Dr. Franklin
"Not my problem nor do I care. I have my hands full of being obnoxious to T'pol."
Captain Archer to Dr. Franklin
"Who in the hell gave that moron a degree and license on medicine!? And who made that jerk captain of a spaceship!?"
- Dr. Franklin's journal entry
- Dr. Phlox to Dr. Franklin
"Not my problem nor do I care. I have my hands full of being obnoxious to T'pol."
Captain Archer to Dr. Franklin
"Who in the hell gave that moron a degree and license on medicine!? And who made that jerk captain of a spaceship!?"
- Dr. Franklin's journal entry
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Lets be honest Archer is pretty standard for most Earthforce starship captains.
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That... makes entirely too much sense.
And B5's crew is largely closer to Star Trek than they are their own universe's norms.
...is that what happened? Were B5's staff borrowed from Trek to save B5, while the original crew were dumped on Enterprise? Is Enterprise the price we paid for B5?!
If so, eh, I've made worse deals.
I don't think issues with the Enterprise characters really explains the show's issues.
TNG had a main cast of nine characters, if we count Tasha Yar and Wesley Crusher. Of these, only three(Picard, Data, Worf) were ever all that compelling or interesting. The series had Riker in an extremely prominent role, for God's sake.
DS9 had a main cast of 10 characters(counting both Daxes and Worf). Of those 10, I would say five were particularly compelling or at least interesting(Odo, O'Brien, Quark, Kira, Worf). Yes, I've never liked Sisko all that much.
VOY had a main cast of 10(counting both Kes and Seven). Of them, four were compelling or at least interesting to some degree (Tuvok, who was at least a very well acted Vulcan even if the series did little with him, Torres, the Doctor, Seven).
Enterprise had a main cast of seven characters. Archer is Archer. Mayweather is an area of empty space that someone forgot to give anything compelling to, but T'Pol, Trip(i.e. "we took Archer's character and made it better in every possible way"), and Reed are conceptually very strong characters, and well-acted too. Hoshi is fairly well acted and has a fairly strong concept(college professor who would really rather not be out there, but who is just interested enough what languages they'll find to stick around, but not enough to be happy), and Phlox is well acted and charismatic, even if they didn't lean into the mad scientist route with him the way they should have(and yes, I have deliberately avoided watching "Dear Doctor").
It's normal in a Star Trek series for half the characters to be duds, and Enterprise is arguably about average here. There was a lot the writers could have done with these characters and this cast with better writing, even short of dumping Archer out an airlock at the end of Season 1. I don't think "all the character's suck" is a strong explanation of why the series ended up being less than compelling.
TNG had a main cast of nine characters, if we count Tasha Yar and Wesley Crusher. Of these, only three(Picard, Data, Worf) were ever all that compelling or interesting. The series had Riker in an extremely prominent role, for God's sake.
DS9 had a main cast of 10 characters(counting both Daxes and Worf). Of those 10, I would say five were particularly compelling or at least interesting(Odo, O'Brien, Quark, Kira, Worf). Yes, I've never liked Sisko all that much.
VOY had a main cast of 10(counting both Kes and Seven). Of them, four were compelling or at least interesting to some degree (Tuvok, who was at least a very well acted Vulcan even if the series did little with him, Torres, the Doctor, Seven).
Enterprise had a main cast of seven characters. Archer is Archer. Mayweather is an area of empty space that someone forgot to give anything compelling to, but T'Pol, Trip(i.e. "we took Archer's character and made it better in every possible way"), and Reed are conceptually very strong characters, and well-acted too. Hoshi is fairly well acted and has a fairly strong concept(college professor who would really rather not be out there, but who is just interested enough what languages they'll find to stick around, but not enough to be happy), and Phlox is well acted and charismatic, even if they didn't lean into the mad scientist route with him the way they should have(and yes, I have deliberately avoided watching "Dear Doctor").
It's normal in a Star Trek series for half the characters to be duds, and Enterprise is arguably about average here. There was a lot the writers could have done with these characters and this cast with better writing, even short of dumping Archer out an airlock at the end of Season 1. I don't think "all the character's suck" is a strong explanation of why the series ended up being less than compelling.
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Red Rationalist
Spinning in eternity
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I think there is a difference between generally bland characters (Troi, Mayweather) and actively annoying characters (Weasley Crusher, Archer). TNG had a fair number of bland characters, but I would argue they weren't terrible. While Riker could be annoying, he was not bigoted and more importantly, the series didn't treat his decisions as completely correct as they did with Archer. Riker also had a smaller share of the screen time compared to Archer.
I think the issue with ENT and it's characters was that they were static and paper thin, more than anything else. (TNG had some godawful writing in the first season, nearly as bad as Enterprise in some of the first episodes.) What does Reed learn in the first three seasons? What struggle does T'Pol undergo, aside from "Be more human and less of a disgusting foreigner" or the one drug subplot she got in season 4? I think I can think of one somewhat memorable character arc in Enterprise, Tuckers guilt regarding his sister. The rest of the time, Archer makes horrible mistakes, Reed plays with weapons and Tucker does something in the engine room. And beyond anything else, this refusal to let any character change or be challenged in interesting ways for 75% of the run time doomed Enterprise. Some characters had potential, but they focused on the racist uncle and his never ending quest to complain to the Vulcans instead of giving any other character screen time.
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In a certain sense, Archer is one of the franchise's greatest triumphs in characterization. It only takes one or two scenes to show you exactly who this guy is. Thing is, that guy is unlikeable and incompetent, and the rest of the show is built around the assumption that he isn't at least one of those two things.
The Last One
Here because reasons
I don't remember any clones in The Motion Picture.
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
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I'm going to be completely honest: I find Dr Phlox more annoying than basically any other character in Star Trek upon rewatch. I'll take a Neelix/Wesley crossover episode over even one more Phlox focused episode, I swear to god. Voyager at least occasionally fucked with Neelix and have like, Chakotay drive him to suicide with his bullshit or having Tuvok murder him on the Holodeck.
Strange New Worlds has its main character being haunted by the predestination inherent in a prequel though.
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It also has some weirdass morals, too. Like "mercy is bad" and "Gorn are biologically evil" shit.
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
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Well yeah, the EA turns into a fascist dictatorship based on Humanity First and there are dudes in high ranking leadership positions who think they could beat the Minbari this time. The anti-fascist forces aren't able to get enough people to join their side at the start either, which is why Babylon 5 becomes the focal point since its able to get foreign support.
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I'm sorry, what.
Goddammit, this just sounds like Enterprise all over again!
Here's a tip: If at any point the main characters EVER need to stop and ask "Wait, are we the baddies?", YOU ARE NO LONGER WRITING STAR TREK! Sure, their bosses can be sketchy, but the main characters need to find a way to stop that sketchiness. Because Star Trek is meant to be a shimmering ideal of what humanity is truly capable of when we aspire to the absolute best parts of our natures. It's Aesop's Fables in Space!
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
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Yeah, Pike is basically having to comes to terms with being under a prophecy of doom like something out of a Greek tragedy. Stories about characters whose fates we know are nothing new. We know how they end up, what's interesting is how they get there and what they accomplish on the way. It's similar for Spock and T'Pring's relationship: we know that's going to end badly, but they don't, and now we're getting to see how things got to that point.
And we only know the fates of some of the SNW characters from TOS. The others are still up in the air. One has already died.
With a very small number of exceptions, one can go into any episode of Star Trek pretty sure that the ship won't be destroyed and the main characters will all survive and remain on the crew. That's never really kept it from having stakes.
And, of course, Star Trek has never had an episode before that could be interpreted as having a dubious moral, like "women are too crazy to be in charge," or "letting people die while you do nothing to help them is morally superior, and you should be smug about it," or "denying people medical care due to your ideas of eugenics is good," or "you need the evil rapist half of your personality to lead."
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that's not the defence of SNW you seem to think it is.
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Just for clarity, are you trying to defend Strange New Worlds, or just pointing out that other Star Trek series have episodes with messed up morals?