I Hate Enterprise

[Victory is Life]

Please list your reasons why you agree. Imperical research on my part.

(apologies if this has been done, I am a NOOB)

[Mikey]

You'll find plenty of research material here. Mine isn't the trampling of previously-established canon itself - rather, I see that as an indicator or symptom of the over-arching problem; which was, the complete lack of concern for the franchise as a whole, and for the established 'Trek audience.

[Tsukiyumi]

Stomping on canon, boring (or pointless; sometimes both) stories, disregard for basic math, several completely bland, forgettable characters, lack of direction...

The tagline could've been: "Set Phasers to Snooze!"

[Victory is Life]

Stomping on canon, boring (or pointless; sometimes both) stories, disregard for basic math, several completely bland, forgettable characters, lack of direction...

The tagline could've been: "Set Phasers to Snooze!"

Or 'set phasers to kill (a multi-million dollar franchise).'

[Mikey]

"Umm... except they're not pahsers... they're 'phase pistols.'"

[Aaron]

It was a sitcom in space and not a cool one like Red Dwarf and it just snowballed from there into a complete embrassment for all concerned. It did nothing new or relevent, if you excised ENT entirely from canon you would lose very little of importance or worth.

That was one of it's greatest flaws, it was entirely irrelevant to the franchise as a whole. And I'm not even one of those guys that considers Trek relevant to popular culture, so you know something was wrong with the show.

[Victory is Life]

It was a sitcom in space and not a cool one like Red Dwarf and it just snowballed from there into a complete embrassment for all concerned. It did nothing new or relevent, if you excised ENT entirely from canon you would lose very little of importance or worth.

That was one of it's greatest flaws, it was entirely irrelevant to the franchise as a whole. And I'm not even one of those guys that considers Trek relevant to popular culture, so you know something was wrong with the show.

You don't consider Trek to be relevant to pop culture? I think you need your head examined, no disrespect intended.

[Aaron]

You don't consider Trek to be relevant to pop culture? I think you need your head examined, no disrespect intended.

I think it's effect has been blown wildly out of proportion with things like folding cell phones and automatic doors being credited to ST, even though they are obvious answers to a problem. And the less said about it's influence on science the better.

[Victory is Life]

You don't consider Trek to be relevant to pop culture? I think you need your head examined, no disrespect intended.

I think it's effect has been blown wildly out of proportion with things like folding cell phones and automatic doors being credited to ST, even though they are obvious answers to a problem. And the less said about it's influence on science the better.

Yes, but even if you ignore the technological aspect of Trek's supposed influence, you cannot ignore the references to Trek in wildly popular shows like, Robot Chicken, and Family Guy, and entire motion pictures dedicated to Trek, such as 'Galaxy Quest', etc.

[Aaron]

Yes, but even if you ignore the technological aspect of Trek's supposed influence, you cannot ignore the references to Trek in wildly popular shows like, Robot Chicken, and Family Guy, and entire motion pictures dedicated to Trek, such as 'Galaxy Quest', etc.

So two shows that are basically a "shout out" to every series ever made (Family Guy is especially bad for this) and a movie that is easily a homage to a bunch of sci-fi shows? Look is Trek part of pop culture, yes. I do not consider it that relevant beyond being something for nerds to latch onto and go "see! see! we're cool too!", even then a great number of those references are from TOS and not the later and (arguably) better series.

[Lazar]

Why do I hate Enterprise? I only followed the first two seasons, but here goes:

- Ripping off the Akira with their silly starship design.

- Making up a famous, groundbreaking ship that had never once been referenced anywhere in Trek, and whose very existence was contradicted by its absence in starship displays in TMP and TNG, just for the unnecessary gimmick of reusing the name "Enterprise".

- Making up an early human ally and founding Federation member, the Denobulans, who were never referenced anywhere else in all of Trek.

- Making up early enemies like the Suliban and Xindi who were never referenced anywhere else in all of Trek, even though by later standards they must have been living relatively close to Earth. (And what about the Donoban, the Callagan, and the O'Reillians?)

- Completely bullshitting the premise of the show from the very first episode, when despite their early, frontiersy speed limit of Warp 5, they manage to travel to Kronos in about 3 days. (I mean, even with subspace highways, such a short travel time would still be ludicrous.) This, combined with "phase" pistols, "photonic" torpedoes, abra-cadabra hull plating, proto-transporters, and magical linguists, means that the fact that they're in the 22nd century is of no significance at all, rendering the show just a crappy rehash of TOS, TNG and VOY with no distinguishing characteristics.

- The fact that they acted like impatient 10-year-old idiots and decided to introduce such races as the Klingons, Ferengi and Borg all within a tiny span of time, long before they were supposed to have been discovered.

- The fact that they made a 22nd-century show and barely even touched the Earth-Romulan War, which has been developed with such creativity by people like the Starfleet Museum. I mean, who does that?

- The fact that they had to make the history of Earth's space exploration so dependent on one heroic crew that epically makes every first contact and solves every problem within a tiny timespan, so suited to a cookie-cutter TV show, even though in a more reasonable universe, the exploration would be gradual and carried out by many ships and crews.

- The fact that they so childishly copied the crew profile from TOS, with the heroic white male American captain, the conflicted Vulcan first officer/science officer, the best friend folksy Southerner, the technology-obsessed UKer, and the Japanese female communications officer and black male helmsman in place of the original black female communications officer and Japanese male helmsman. Plus the fact that the black male in question was subjected to horrendous non-speaking tokenism for most of the show.

- Miscellaneous bad writing, cheesiness and absurdity. Oh, and the shitty opening.

***

Jeez, this exercise really makes me aware of what an utterly shit series that was.

[Teaos]

I was going to write out a really long review about why I hate ENT. But you may as well just read Lazars again.

[Deepcrush]

I don't think I could really add much to that.

Other then the characters who couldn't win any battle no matter how simple.

[Graham Kennedy]

I posted this on the forum before I think, and it's in an article on the site but here it is again :

Berman and Braga's "stuff it" attitude to continuity is the worst possible one to have on as show like Enterprise. It's far easier to trample over continuity in a prequel series than it is on a show set in the "present". It would be almost impossible to pull something like Enterprise off well even if you were of a mind to be incredibly careful about such things. But with an attitude of "I don't care, and neither does anybody else who matters", Enterprise was doomed to be a continuity nightmare from day one.

And so it has proved. Even before the show premiered it blundered badly with the design of Enterprise itself. Ideally Enterprise should have looked like the ring-ship seen on the recreation deck wall in Star Trek : The Motion Picture. At the very least a ship built during this era should share the general design ethic of the Daedalus class, or be more primitive even that that. Instead Enterprise borrows heavily from the Akira class, a design which post-dates the show by over two hundred years. A ship like Enterprise in the timeframe of the 2150s is like a stealth bomber featuring in a series set at the turn of the 19th century.

The first episode revealed a few more clangers - Enterprise's crew was equipped with "phase pistols", which look and act exactly as phasers do. Yet people of this time should have been using lasers, at best; Worf once stated that there were no phasers in the 22nd century. The ship is stated to be capable of warp 5, yet makes a trip to Kronos in only four days; in all fairness this particular type of nit is hardly unique to Enterprise, but by setting the show at a time when the ships were inherently slower than even Kirk's ship, the makers are compounding this problem.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, we even have blatant and deliberate gaffes such as the introduction of the Ferengi in an episode, more than two centuries before they were mysterious unknowns in The Next Generation! Yes I know that they never said that they were Ferengi, but it beggars belief that Archer and his crew wouldn't at least draw pictures of their attackers. Data at least would have recognised the Ferengi at once when he first came across them, and would have commented on the fact.

This is the contradiction at the very heart of the new series - Berman and Braga have chosen to found a show on a premise which is particularly demanding precisely in those areas which they don't think are important. After all, what on Earth is the point of doing a retro series if you are not going to do it in a retro way? I can't imagine what it was about a prequel that really attracted Berman and Braga in the first place. It was rumoured that Berman was jealous of the "never equalled classic" status that Roddenberry's TOS has in the minds of many fans, and wanted to rewrite Trek history in his own image. I don't know the man, but I find it hard to believe that he would be this petty. It's rumoured that the idea of a prequel was somewhat down his list of things he wanted to do, and that he only took it up when his first choices were rejected by the studio. This is a better possibility, but it's something that we will only know in many years when everybody concerned writes their memoirs. If then.

In a way I feel sorry for Enterprise. I mentioned earlier my seventeen episode rule for holding off on judgment of a new series. But Enterprise's "boldly filling in the gaps that other captains have not filled in before" ethos was built in from before the first episode, and its continuity problems were a disaster waiting to happen given the people in charge. I was vocal in my criticisms during the run up to the pilot episode, but I tried my best to hold my tongue during that seventeen episode run. Well, that run is now over and the judgment is in.

Enterprise has some of the same problems that most other series suffer in their first seasons - everybody is settling down into the job, getting used to the universe, finding out what works and what doesn't. The first season has not been a great one, but it's been as good or better than the likes of Space : Above and Beyond or Dark Skies managed. Its apparently doing okay in the ratings, and I have little doubt that it will eventually mature into a pretty decent show. But in my mind it will never - can never - be a true Trek series, and it can never be the shining star that it could have been.

UPDATE :

The following is a slightly modified copy of a post I made to alt.startrek in response to the question "Why Dont U Like Enterprise" (that's how they spelled it). I figured that since a goodly stretch of episodes has now gone by this would serve as an update on what I think is wrong with the show.

First and foremost, I still don't like the premise. I want to see starship captains visiting strange new worlds, and while what Enterprise explores is new to Archer and new to us, in the context of the Trek universe it's anything but new. They're boldly going to fill in the gaps that none have filled before.
As such Enterprise lacks the capacity to really engage me, and always will.

That said, it would be possible to do a prequel series that was at least well made and worth watching. Enterprise does this to an extent, but it has serious flaws :

Action : Archer simply doesn't cut the mustard as a Starfleet captain. Kirk virtually NEVER lost a fight - offhand I know of only one time in his whole life that he did. [it's been pointed out by Tool Packing Mama that this isn't quite true, and though I would argue that the exceptions mostly involve godlike beings or some such, it's not really relevant to the point, which is that Kirk kicked ass and Archer gets his ass kicked.] Even Picard beat Klingons in a knife fight! Yet Archer is beaten up on frequently, and almost never even manages to put up a decent fight.

Sex : Enterprise's attitude to sex is childish. If they want to have sex in the show, then actually have sex! Get Hoshi into a relationship with somebody, hell even do it with T'Pol if you like. Make one of the crew a real man-eater (or woman eater) like that genetically engineered gal off DS9 and have them work their way through the crew if that's what you want. But oh noooo, we can't do that... B&B's idea of "sexing up" consists of finding absurdly flimsy excuses to put people in their underwear and have them massage one another. Oooo, I'm in the decontamination room wondering if I have an alien disease that's going to eat my skin off, don't I feel sexy...

Continuity : In terms of the odd wrong date, I find Enterprise's "couldn't care less" approach to continuity annoying but tolerable. But on a broader front, the whole premise of this show demands that this be a more primitive setting than other Treks. Yet it is not. We have a ship that can get from adventure to adventure in an average of two weeks, just as every other Trek ship did. We have "phase pistols" that are essentially identical to phasers, we have "polarised plating" that is essentially identical to shields (in the dramatic sense, not the technological one), we have a food synthesizer that is essentially identical to a food replicator, we have a transporter that IS identical to a transporter, we have no prime directive, but a crew that has followed the prime directive anyway, right from day one... and so on. Enterprise's attempt at doing things in a retro way consists entirely of doing exactly what Trek always did before, but with slightly different words for everything.

Enterprise should be taking months to get from place to place; we should see a few shows set on one planet, then three or four on the way to the next planet, then three or four shows there, and so on. There should be no transporter, no polarised plating, no phase weapons - I'd have given them handheld slugthrowers. And the ships should use lasers to chew at one another, and nukes as their "big punch" weapon.

There should be no Prime Directive nor any concept of not interfering. Let's see Archer happily arm some locals because they look like the "good guys" in their war, only to come back six months later and find that they are using the weapons for genocide. Let's see him make the mistakes that made people back home say "hey, every time we interfere it turns out badly. Let's not do that anymore."

Above all, let's see the "balls to the wall guys, let's grab this galaxy by the throat, show it there's a new kid on the block and MAKE IT RESPECT US!" attitude that you need to carve out a big chunk of the alpha quadrant and make it your own. When they meet bad guys I want to see them shoot first, shoot again, shoot some more, then MAYBE see if they can ask the smoldering wreckage a question or two! Where are the Humans who taught the Klingons to fear and whupped the Romulan Star Empire so bad it went and hid behind the neutral zone? Where are the people who will make 150 alien races say "yeah, these guys kick SERIOUS ass, let's sign up to this Federation thing they're setting up!"

Coz sure as hell Archer and his crew don't look like those people.

And that's why I don't like Enterprise.

[Sionnach Glic]

Please list your reasons why you agree.

Trust me, it'd be far easier for me to not even bother. Imagine a rant the length of Graham and Lazar's combined. It'd be something like that.

In short: It was shit in every single respect, with virtualy nothing redeeming it.