Friday, May 13, 2005

The Final Final Frontier...

...until the next time Paramount tries to dig up Star Trek, anyway.

What can I say about the final installment of Enterprise? "It didn't totally suck." I suppose that would be damning with faint praise. In fairness, there were some good moments, but most of them featured Riker and Troi.

Marina Sirtis looked clearly aged from 1994, and clearly caked with makeup trying to hide that. No shame in aging; we all do it. I'm just saying they could have avoided this issue by setting the "future scenes" post-Nemesis on the Titan instead of during TNG years. Though I suppose the "Enterprise" symbolism wouldn't have worked then.

They came dangerously close to humanizing Archer a little bit in the last few minutes. Why they waited until the last possible moment to do that is beyond me.

Bummer that they killed Trip -- he was like their one character. T'Pol was constantly constrained behind "being Vulcan," Archer was stubborn "yelling guy," and the rest were lucky to average 5 lines per episode all season. And they gave him a totally stupid death too. He got killed because the crew was too arrogant in their victory to notice aliens sneaking up on them and boarding their ship. I guess Reed was off making dinner with Chef/Riker when he should have been manning his station.

In all, though, still better than the Voyager finale.

And so now, for the first time since 1987 -- 18 years -- there won't be a first-run Star Trek series on the air. There are kids graduating high school now who've never been alive when there wasn't Star Trek on. Weird.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I kinda liked Enterprise -- the first season, at least, which was on when I was in Virginia. Then I moved to Stevens Point, which doesn't get UPN, so it was on at some odd time on the weekends on our Fox affiliate.

I haven't read your post, still having some odd desire to avoid spoilers and watch the whole series someday. Would it be worth my time?

And, regarding the age thing: I ran a Star Trek tournament in 1997 which had a nine-year-old entrant. It boggled my mind back then that this kid was born after Next Gen went on the air.

GiromiDe said...

My baby sister is one of those who hasn't known a time without Star Trek. She was born in the fall of 1987.

GiromiDe said...

I'll save my own comments for my own blog. In fact, the comments will comprise my first real post.

DrHeimlich said...

I'd say Enterprise is worth your time if you carefully cull the good episodes and skip the rest. It won't take long. You probably don't have to do much trolling to find the accepted fan favorites.

The real strike against Enterprise overall, I'd say, is the characters are virtually non-existent. As written, they're incredibly bland, and in four years we learn virtually nothing about them. What little life they have was imbued by the acting talents of the cast. Most of the time, it's just episode after episode of techno-babble problems. After 98 hours of that (well, to some extent, over 700 hours of that, when you think about it), I'm ready for a break.

GiromiDe said...

700 minus a good portion of DS9.

thisismarcus said...

Normally I'd be annoyed with myself for reading spoilers, but this is only Enterprise :) Does anyone have it in a digital format?

TheGirard said...

I was pretty impressed with it. I read the script on Tuesday and was really looking forward to seeing it. The death scene wasn't done justice in the show as much as I had imagined it. To me Riker looked worse than Troi, he had the bags under the eyes. To me the worse part about last night was when the terra prime ray hit enterprise and then they said "oh, it was only 2%". I guess RoboPrime was too "Arik Soong" for me. He didn't want to really kill anyone. Also, the whole "vulcan baby" thing didn't work for me either, it seemed rather, slapdashery.