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Athene Watches Star Trek Enterprise: How To Get Away With Franchise Murder

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Damn, I had forgotten just how badly humanity comes across in this series. I think the writers wanted to convey the impression that humanity was inexperienced when it came to space exploration, but they confused "inexperienced" with "incompetent." There's a first season episode (I forget which), where it's revealed that Starfleet has no first contact protocol, when the whole bloody point of their mission is to seek out new life and new civilisations! The Apollo astronauts trained extensively for almost every conceivable occurrence, but the crew of the Enterprise hasn't even prepared what they set out to do in the first place!

T'Pol really is the longest-suffering member of the crew. No wonder she turned to drugs later in the series.
 
So from what I'm getting from this, the show can summed up as "T'Pol and the pack of mouthy rebellious thirteen year olds she's being forced to babysit", except it's told from the perspective of the thirteen year olds.
 
It's definitely coming across as 'What if Star Trek was written by US American white supremacists?', complete with 'Vulcan' being a word that was probably in an early draft just whatever slur for 'Jewish' the writer was thinking at the time. Though at the time this was being written I think they were still hiding it behind pretending that when they said 'liberals' they meant something else than 'I believe literally everything written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion'?

(Also the commentary in the last post RE: the alien pregnancy and abortion is grimly hilariously false given what we've seen recently, though the fact the victim is a man might be enough.)
 
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Terra Nova: *Inarticulate Alex Jones Screaming about Earth*
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    • T'POL: I'm not familiar with the early years of Human space exploration."
    TUCKER: Really? Every school kid on Earth had to learn about the famous Vulcan expeditions.
    T'POL: Name one.
    [Exceedingly long pause lasting over 7 seconds as Tucker awkwardly looks to Archer for help and he gives a look back of "Can't help you there Bro"]
    TUCKER: History was never my best subject.

    Yeah baby, we're off to the fucking races already on this episode. Vulcans have dozens of cultures they interact with, Humanity has just the one and you can't even get that right. We're off to Terra Nova, humanity's first and most xenophobic colony established in another star system during early warp travel. See, they settled the first 200 people there and then when it came time to send the next 200, the original colonists went full Castle Doctrine and said "Planet's full" and threatened to kill anyone else that settled there. Nobody ever points out how absolutely stupid it is to act like a planet with a population density of one millionth of a person per square mile is too full and that any additional people would be stealing their land. Shortly after this interstellar flame war, the colony went completely silent and its status is a complete mystery 70 years later.

    T'POL: Why didn't you send a vessel to find out what happened?
    ARCHER: Nine years there, nine years back, it would have been a pretty long trip.
    T'POL: A Vulcan ship could have made the journey in far less time. Why didn't you ask them?
    TUCKER: Asking favors of the Vulcans usually ends up carrying too high a price.

    Uh...what the fuck is that supposed to mean Trip? A Vulcan ship would have been there in a matter of days and the colony wouldn't have been, as we will find out, mostly wiped out only leaving a handful of survivors. No seriously though, what do you mean by the high cost of Vulcan favors? Feeling like a racist presupposition since mostly whenever you ask the Vulcans for help, they get a bit smug but I think enduring some small amount of smugness from a Vulcan would have been worth everyone not dying from radiation poisoning.

    They get to the planet, go "man there's a lot of radiation around here, wonder why?" and then go spelunking, where they run into some hostile humans who somehow have plenty of guns and ammo and start shooting at the intruders. Malcolm Reed covers Archers escape and in return, gets shot and has Archer go "You ok?" and then leave him to be captured. I cannot stress enough, Archer just absolutely doesn't spend two seconds covering his shot security officer while he crawls towards a cave opening and instead just fucking leaves only to return when he hears him getting beat up. Go after him? Are you nuts? Meanwhile on the surface Mayweather instantly gets owned by a guy because he's not a security guy and is saved by T'Pol casually shooting his attacker in the back. The safest way to shoot someone.

    From here the episode just fucking ping pongs around trying to find a point for itself. The Terra Novan's have experienced a ludicrously large, and bafflingly inconsistent, level of cultural drift. Only the children survived the radioactive meteorite that hit near their colony and the adults all assume that Earth threw an asteroid at them for threatening to kill any foreigners, and have passed that attitude to their children. Archer has Phlox treat the cancer of one of the original colonists who was 5 when Earth lost contact (letting them keep Malcolm Reed as a hostage in exchange) but while Phlox is able to use a series of injections to completely cure her cancer, they realized they needed something else, so their water is doing "microcellular decay" to their endocrine system. If they stay, they'll all die at some point.

    Here the episode writers bounce between more ideas, having found a plot at the 30 minute mark of this 43 minute episode. The son of the eldest member of the survivors is his generations Alex Jones and believes that Archer is out here to steal their land from them and poison them. Archer of course, wants to steal them. He wants to convince them to all leave their home and relocate them to Earth. T'Pol is a solutions oriented person and goes "Well lets stun grenade them all and confine them during the trip". Archer goes "OH SO LIKE AFRICAN SLAVERY" but T'Pol points out that his actual plan is forcible relocation of what has improbably become what a white person thinks a tribal culture looks like, and so he would be doing a bit of the old cultural genocide and they will very obviously not agree to completely destroy their entire way of life willingly. She wants to make sure they're on the same page here, since obviously he would have thought about that right? And yet he still wants to ship them to Earth and make them get office jobs or something?

    Archer decides to try to move them to a safer spot on the planet. However again, the entire foundational belief of this people is that Humans are aliens who want to steal their land, culture and resources, which is to be fair, statistically true but not accurate in the case of this one dumb planet. Lord of the Flies Alex Jones will not believe a single thing this guy says, won't cooperate at all. In any normal world, you're going to have to fall back to phase line Teleported Stun Grenades. But this is Enterprise and we only have 7 minutes left to tie this entire thing up.

    Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Malcolm this entire time. He's fine during all this aside from his festering gunshot wound. He's befriending his captors and enjoying their culture, chatting them up about their guns, homemade body armor and food. Listening to some pan flute music. He's fine, he's currently the most successful a British military officer has ever been at interacting with an indigenous culture. Anyway, Archer crashes a shuttlepod through their roof on accident, endangering everyone directly.

    Archer manages to save the people he's directly endangered, giving him the power of friendship and convincing them they're all humans and to let him move them. This then happens entirely offscreen, we get to instead see Travis, Trip and Archer all patting themselves on the back for solving Terra Nova and saving everyone, THE END.

    This is a real nothing of an episode. The writers seem to think a plot is "a bunch of stuff happens I guess", they have to assure us the people who are just wearing paint and mud are in fact human, everyone from the tribe talks like a heavily concussed version of the Valley People from Cloud Atlas, and they introduce and "solve" their own moral quandary in 5 minutes. Just an absolute filler episode they crapped out.
     
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    Terra Nova will never stop baffling me, who Someone saying "No no this planet can only take 200 people max" unless the only habitable land is the size of an average walmart or something. You could literally drop a million people on the opposite side of the planet and the OG colonists would never know.
     
    Teen Spirit said:
    Terra Nova will never stop baffling me, who Someone saying "No no this planet can only take 200 people max" unless the only habitable land is the size of an average walmart or something. You could literally drop a million people on the opposite side of the planet and the OG colonists would never know.
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    Yeah. While sci fi writers are notorious for having no sense of scale, that's atrocious even for sci fi; 200 people is easily small enough for it to be obvious to even the most intuition-dependent person that there's plenty of room to stash them somewhere on an entire planet. Or even a good sized island.

    I'm willing to give some slack to writers who just don't do the math and get blindsided by large numbers, but you don't need math to figure this one out. A bunch of people who could fit into an auditorium with space left over are at exactly the scale of things the human mind is built to handle intuitively.
     
    Teen Spirit said:
    Terra Nova will never stop baffling me, who Someone saying "No no this planet can only take 200 people max" unless the only habitable land is the size of an average walmart or something. You could literally drop a million people on the opposite side of the planet and the OG colonists would never know.
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    If they allowed such a thing, their descendants in a hundred generations or so might couple with outsiders, and they can't have that, the race must be kept pure.

    Or some equally heinous eugenics nonsense.
     
    Avernus said:
    Yeah. While sci fi writers are notorious for having no sense of scale, that's atrocious even for sci fi; 200 people is easily small enough for it to be obvious to even the most intuition-dependent person that there's plenty of room to stash them somewhere on an entire planet. Or even a good sized island.

    I'm willing to give some slack to writers who just don't do the math and get blindsided by large numbers, but you don't need math to figure this one out. A bunch of people who could fit into an auditorium with space left over are at exactly the scale of things the human mind is built to handle intuitively.
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    Like legitimately if they said 200,000 colonists in the first batch and they didn't want anymore after that, it would still be stupid but it would be the kind of stupid that takes a second or two to realize. This is like saying a battle involved millions of people yet only five died despite weeks of heavy fighting.
     
    I actually really like the crew dynamic in this show, like you got a bunch of vaguely likeable beleaguered normies on a starship run by a pair of drunk-ass rednecks and space Mengele. Hoshi is literally a post-grad shanghaied onto a starship and Reed is a competent officer turned nervous wreck for trying to keep track of the armoury under the Enterprises' 2nd Amendment friendly command.

    The show's pretty enjoyable if you engage with it like it's Star Trek themed Republican Space Rangers. Really I guess it makes sense that Starfleet only came together as an organization when they had the larger Federation to mitigate the influence of the post-apocalyptic rednecks on earth.
     
    This recent episode feels like it was made as a rather mean-spirited parody of Star Trek and similar shows.

    You have a bunch of jagoffs standing around blabbering about nothing. There's a requisite 'smart and logical' alien on board who says X only to be 'countered' with Y by the protagonist, with Y being something from Human history. The quip about 'vulcan favors being too costly' is the requisite 'hint at how the smart aliens have a dark secret' type comment. The crew are hilariously inept at defending themselves, with the Security Officer himself being the one who gets captured. The 'aliens' are a bunch of humans in facepaint and the episode resolves itself off-screen and ends with the Crew patting themselves on the back.

    Its like a very surface level 'ho ho, look at the bad alien design and copy-paste plot points' type parody but somehow the people behind Enterprise decided to play it straight and actually turn it into a real episode because...???
     
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    Tbf, I'd take Water Polo with my dog over exploring a hostile planet but I'm also not the Captain of humanity's Premier Exploration Spaceship.
     
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