Re: Whither Trek?


DDAY wrote:
----------
In article <2006071401044716807-@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Christopher Basken
wrote:

My own view is that I enjoyed Trek far more before TNG. I liked it when far
more was left to the fans to interpret their own way, before it was
franchised.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, which is why I felt Enterprise was a
doomed venture from the start. There's so much disparate fandom
regarding the origins of Trek that any show that purported to dictate
those origins was bound to tick off more people than it satisfied.

I think that's true. But I also think that Enterprise could have succeeded
if it had been much better. I was at a fan discussion at the convention and
one of the panelists said that he thought that Enterprise had a good premise
that they undermined almost from the beginning--no phasers, no transporters,
no shields.

I'll partially agree with that, but the panelist was wrong about the
shields, the NX-01 never got shields, except in an alternate timeline.
Also, the premise was not that they didn't have transporters, it's that
the crew didn't trust using them, and only very seldom used them
compared to other Treks.

Phase cannons and photonic torpedoes are a problem, but at least in the
4th season it was made fairly clear that phase cannons are not phasers,
not exactly anyway. In fact, dispite the portrayal of how the phase
cannons looked when firing, they don't really act at all like a phaser.
The photonic torpedoes, on the other hand, are a bit hard to swallow,
and should never have been introduced at all. What the NX-01 should
have gotten as it's weapons upgrade was a more effective and powerful
version of the nuke missle-like spatial torpedoes. At least throughout
the series, the NX-01 was usually outclassed technologically. I loved
it when they did things like have the Klingons possessing photon
torpedoes well ahead on anyone else, even the Vulcans.


For me a big problem with Enterprise was that their version of the pre-Kirk
future just _felt_ wrong. It was too easy to encounter the new alien of the
week. For some reason to me with the original series it felt like the ship
was far from contact with Starfleet and help, and it took them months to
communicate or to reach anything. That was the Horatio Hornblower feeling.
But with Enterprise, everything was just too easy for them.

Except for the communications, the NX-01 was essentially isolated,
except for the occasional visit by the Vulcans. They very rarely ran
into Boomers, much less other Earth Starfleet vessels. And there's one
of the real missed opportunities in ST:ENT, the Boomers were a great
concept, but was only given lip-service throughout the series. I would
have liked to have seen more about how the Boomer culture has to deal
with the likelyhood going extinct with the introduction of the warp 5
engine. Episodes like "Demons" and "Terra Prime" started to get back
into showing us the consequences, and the social impact on Earth and
humans in general. We seldom in any Trek have a viewpoint outside of
Starfleet's like that. It reminded me a lot of John M. Ford's "The
Final Reflection" with groups on Earth of people actively being opposed
to exploration and Earth becoming a major player in the galaxy.


Compare this to an episode of Firefly called "Out of Gas." In that episode,
a simple part breaks and suddenly the entire crew is facing the possibility
of death. Lots of drama and the ship doesn't even move. Enterprise could
have done a much better job of portraying this risky exploration in the
early days of warp drive. But they didn't.

Actually, that's what ruined an otherwise great episode for me. In
order to get into the situation, the McGuffin-of-the-week was the life
support on Serenity failed because of a benign failure of the ship's
engine! I'am sorry, no matter what excuses you try to make up for it,
that is just about the dumbest thing I've every heard of. Even today,
as you well know, the ECLSS on space stations like ISS and on ferry
spacecraft like the shuttle orbiters is not tied into the SSMEs or the
OMS or RCS systems. In the case of the Apollo 13, the life support was
failing due to explosion of the #2 O2 tank which caused severe damage
to the CSM Odyssey. With the Serenity, it should have been the ship
cripped on auxilery power, which was slowly running out without the
main engines to recharge the batteries, and once the power was gone, so
goes life support. That should have been their dilemma, and would have
provided a much more logical reason for using the shuttles as
lifeboats.
-Mike

.

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