The Brad Hole

One of the entries on our TiVo system pass is for Star Trek: Enterprise (formerly just Enterprise). Before I launch into my opinion, I need to supply some necessary background. I don't really consider myself a trekkie - I'm mainly a Star Wars whore. However, I loved old-school Trek and I'm intimately familiar with the Shatner-era work to a disturbing level. New Trek has never done anything for me, so I've pretty much ignored it, catching a few episodes of Next Generation here or there and generally being bored by it (unless there's borg or Q). I didn't watch (and don't really have a clue about) Deep Space 9 or Voyager other than what I see in the general day-to-day mass media as it crosses my eyeballs.

Having said all that, I've watched Enterprise since it started, mainly because I added it as a season pass to the TiVo and haven't yet seen fit to remove it. Funny thing about TiVo is that it makes you feel obligated to watch these shows as they come pouring onto your hard drive, and so it has been for me with Enterprise.

The point - and I do have one - is that I'm not sure what to make of Enterprise even now at the start of the 3rd season. There's a lot to it that appeals to me. Seeing old-school Trek goodies like Andorians, Vulcans and Tellarites make me smile; since they played such a small role in all the other next-gen Trek series it feels right to have them back in a Trek show. I also think the special effects are pretty high-budget and look great, and the actors that play the doctor and the chief engineer bring a lot of the old McCoy humor to the show and add a spark that I always felt the other new shows missed.

But the truth is that Enterprise is boring. Scott Bakula has an acting style that grates on you after a while - in a way, he's just dull. The plot lines show brief sparks of interest (I liked the whole Vulcan-Andorian conflict thing) but the over-arcing storyline (first the temporal war and now this whole Xindi business) don't seem to have any direction and seem like knee-jerk, standard Evil Plots With "Shocking" Twists. It seems to me as if the folks running the series have not clue one as to how to keep large storylines running, and will just string these things out forever, X-Files style. This is one reason why I like watching Stargate SG-1 so much. They have great one-shot episodes and their "arc" episodes actually move the arc along in a major way each time.

The other thing that bothers me about Enterprise is the writing. The show is saddled with the Star Trek universe, and as such, plot holes and conveniences abound. In one episode, the crew might save themselves using some deus ex machina whereby they pull some technological miracle out of thin air, while in other shows, the same solution could be applied but is conveniently ignored or forgotten. It's come to the point where I'm surprised when this doesn't happen. I find myself watching Stargate and saying out loud to Beth, "Why don't they do X?" and 9 times out of 10, they'll do X on SG-1. It pleases me every time to see writing that doesn't cut corners on SG-1, and now that I'm used to it again, Enterprise disappoints me all the more frequently.

So I keep watching it, hoping it'll get better. It has in some small ways - they gave T'Pol real Vulcan eyebrows this season, and the captain has grown some Shatner-esque balls. But then, they've added "Star Trek" to the title, and subtly altered the incredibly bad theme song to make it worse, which suggests to me that whoever is running the show really has no clue. it's never so bad that I regret watching it, but it's never been good enough to make me look forward to the next episode.

But maybe if I keep watching, it'll get better.