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Oct. 1st, 2001 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottobearI just finished watching the pilot for enterprise, the latest star trek television franchise.
overall opinion - not bad, better characters than voyager, some of the same writing flaws.
as always, I have a "3 strikes, you're out" rule. if the show doesn't grab me by the third show, forget about it. if two out of three are crap, and one is good, the same. (that's why I stopped watching next gen, until someone told me the show was getting better 2nd season. I thought the first season of next gen was kakadoodie, as was 70% of the voyager episodes I've seen. (I've seen maybe ten episodes total, 6 of which were just because they were on at a friends house.) I really liked next gen, later on in the series, the original series, and ds9.
Things I liked - most of the characters
the doctor. a pleasant alien. nice, bubbly guy, and not irritating like the other guy from benson, not odo but the freckled warthog guy, on voyager. dang if I like the doctor one every one of the series, for different reasons...(Even Crusher... a pretty redhead, that has a desire to preserve life. go figure)
the engineering buddies - good way to fill in the audience on the tech and background...
No kids / socially immature folks on board. so far as I can tell anyhow. ugh, I *hate that*. Data/Wesley/Worf syndrome. my least favorite aspect of next gen.
Minimal Transporter use. Good.
More of an 'astronaut feel' than a cruise ship feel. hearkens back to more of the frontierish idea.
The ship looks keeno, a lot like the reliant.
The phasers look like guns again.
Things I didn't mind so much-
obligatory "this is a starship, these are flight consoles, this is a wacky alien healing turd (I'm not making that last one up)" sidebars that probably could be introduced more slowly over the course of the series, but added to make it more exotic.
Next-gen looking uniforms - eh. no biggie to me. jumpsuits make more sense to me than the classic star trek uniform. The "boobies in a skintight catsuit" on the vulcan girl is borderline, but it's as acceptable as the non-functional miniskirts on the classic show.
the "every character gets a line syndrome"... it makes sense on the pilot. hopefully, though, we won't have to see every character every episode, whether the plot warrants it or not.
Vulcans aren't so controlled as on the other shows. Fine by me, we don't need robot sidekicks. Funny seeing Sykes from alien nation in pointy ears.
Thinks I disliked -
transparent application of sex and action inserted just to have "sex and action" in the story, "anti spore hot oil massage" being the most transparent of them all. I didn't mind the bodypainted flycatchers, though.
Time travelling villains. (well taking orders from the future, anyhow)... that plot device is going to get old for me, fast.
Same ol' Crappy voyager level writing. some poorly executed dialogue. that's me being nit-picky though. I'll still give it two episodes before getting snippy about it.
so many new aliens.... where did they all go, 80 years into the future, where kirk is? or however many years later where everyone else is? I would have preferred more 'classic trek aliens, like andorians, tellarites, that sort of stuff. again, time will tell)
overall? I'll watch it again, so far it looks good, maybe a six out of ten. potentially better than next gen and certainly better than voyager... if they get good writers, I might like it as much as ds9 and classic.
overall opinion - not bad, better characters than voyager, some of the same writing flaws.
as always, I have a "3 strikes, you're out" rule. if the show doesn't grab me by the third show, forget about it. if two out of three are crap, and one is good, the same. (that's why I stopped watching next gen, until someone told me the show was getting better 2nd season. I thought the first season of next gen was kakadoodie, as was 70% of the voyager episodes I've seen. (I've seen maybe ten episodes total, 6 of which were just because they were on at a friends house.) I really liked next gen, later on in the series, the original series, and ds9.
Things I liked - most of the characters
the doctor. a pleasant alien. nice, bubbly guy, and not irritating like the other guy from benson, not odo but the freckled warthog guy, on voyager. dang if I like the doctor one every one of the series, for different reasons...(Even Crusher... a pretty redhead, that has a desire to preserve life. go figure)
the engineering buddies - good way to fill in the audience on the tech and background...
No kids / socially immature folks on board. so far as I can tell anyhow. ugh, I *hate that*. Data/Wesley/Worf syndrome. my least favorite aspect of next gen.
Minimal Transporter use. Good.
More of an 'astronaut feel' than a cruise ship feel. hearkens back to more of the frontierish idea.
The ship looks keeno, a lot like the reliant.
The phasers look like guns again.
Things I didn't mind so much-
obligatory "this is a starship, these are flight consoles, this is a wacky alien healing turd (I'm not making that last one up)" sidebars that probably could be introduced more slowly over the course of the series, but added to make it more exotic.
Next-gen looking uniforms - eh. no biggie to me. jumpsuits make more sense to me than the classic star trek uniform. The "boobies in a skintight catsuit" on the vulcan girl is borderline, but it's as acceptable as the non-functional miniskirts on the classic show.
the "every character gets a line syndrome"... it makes sense on the pilot. hopefully, though, we won't have to see every character every episode, whether the plot warrants it or not.
Vulcans aren't so controlled as on the other shows. Fine by me, we don't need robot sidekicks. Funny seeing Sykes from alien nation in pointy ears.
Thinks I disliked -
transparent application of sex and action inserted just to have "sex and action" in the story, "anti spore hot oil massage" being the most transparent of them all. I didn't mind the bodypainted flycatchers, though.
Time travelling villains. (well taking orders from the future, anyhow)... that plot device is going to get old for me, fast.
Same ol' Crappy voyager level writing. some poorly executed dialogue. that's me being nit-picky though. I'll still give it two episodes before getting snippy about it.
so many new aliens.... where did they all go, 80 years into the future, where kirk is? or however many years later where everyone else is? I would have preferred more 'classic trek aliens, like andorians, tellarites, that sort of stuff. again, time will tell)
overall? I'll watch it again, so far it looks good, maybe a six out of ten. potentially better than next gen and certainly better than voyager... if they get good writers, I might like it as much as ds9 and classic.
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Re:
Date: 2001-09-30 11:55 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2001-10-01 08:32 am (UTC)yeah, plenty to see and do in our own time!!
no subject
Date: 2001-10-01 03:55 am (UTC)About the other series, DS9 first series sucked, but it was good to go back and rewatch some of them once you were familiar with the characters and could see how they developed (so glad they improved Bashir tho, what a slimeball in the early stages).
Voyager - actually voyager got to be my fave, has some sucky episodes, but then so do all the series, once they got past those interminable "clash with the Kazon" type ones of the first series or so it got really good, and the ones messing with time were great, theres one where Seven has to go back countless times to stop a bomb being placed on Voyager.. if you mean the "see the crew back ion the 20th century looking dumb" ones, yep, hate those.
Give voyager another chance, when it was good it was better than the rest, I reckon :)
Re:
Date: 2001-10-01 09:08 am (UTC)I don't know... voyager seems to be, if you'll forgive the expression "a girl thing". I think many of the folks like the show just because it a) has a woman in command or b) has lots of boobies.
I don't know... I think this is one where we may have to agree to disagree... I did like the doctor, mostly, but the writing was really bad on the gorss majority of the episodes I saw.
I'll try again, if it's an ep I haven't seen. :)
no subject
Date: 2001-10-02 05:24 am (UTC)Give it another go, maybe find out which are the better episodes.. I know it took me ages to settle down to TNG and DS9 until the later episodes when the writing improved, and even then some of them are cringingly bad...lol
Re:
Date: 2001-10-02 06:31 am (UTC)I'll take another peek. :)
I mostly agree with this assessment...
Date: 2001-10-01 06:08 am (UTC)I really think part of the problem is that the show is airing on UPN. The whole "anti spore hot oil massage" thing smacked of the "we need innuendo to keep young audiences interested" mentality. Then again, Voyager never had much of that (not that I could bring myself to watch it regularly). I don't know, I really think UPN wants to combine WWF Smackdown and Star Trek into ONE show, but despite a few crossover guest appearances, they've never really figured out how to do it.
I think that during upcoming episodes, they're going to have to explain the Vulcan thing more. It doesn't seem very like the human race to indefinitely defer to a bunch of pointy-eared strangers, especially when it comes to something exciting and adventuresome like space travel. I'd like to see an episode in which the first warp flight is re-enacted, something that will catch us up on the past. I'm also curious as to exactly how they managed to eradicate war, hunger, etc. etc. in two generations -- this is one of the things that makes Star Trek a nice utopian vision of humanity, but smacks of implausibility. Maybe they'll do a few episodes about it and make it just slightly less implausible.
The pressure's off for this series because it's a prequel. (I explained it to a friend who's never seen Star Trek as "the Phantom Menace of the Star Trek universe".) We know they're going to end up in a war with the Klingons. We also know they're going to generally succeed in space flight and exploring new worlds, and get along better with Vulcans, and so on. How their outfits will evolve into 60s-esque space cheerleader teenybopper clothes is another question altogether...
Re: I mostly agree with this assessment...
Date: 2001-10-01 09:02 am (UTC)I agree with you especially with the utopia/listening to the vulcans assessment.