Enterprise

Once upon a time, I was a huge Star Trek fan.

I was a big fan of the original series. At various points in my life, both Captain Kirk and Mister Spock have been heroes of mine. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite films. When Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced around 1986, I was as excited as any Trekkie around about the new series; I even thought they were doing the right thing by going with an entirely new cast in a new century, so the show could stand on its own!

Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened: I intensely disliked TNG. I felt the stories were dull, the lack of conflict and excitement palpable, the scripts tedious, and, worst of all, the characters were flat. Colorless. What little life they had was due to Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner (and, on occasion, a few others) managing to draw blood from the stony scripts. In trying again, Gene Roddenberry and his cohorts had managed to dump everything that made Star Trek fun: The humor, the character interplay, the moral dilemmas, the strong guest stars, the excitement of learning about this future universe. (TNG snatched away this last part by directly contradicting many elements of the original series.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation drove me away from Star Trek. I watched a season and a half of Deep Space Nine, and a handful of episode of Voyager, but I was no longer a fan of the franchise that Star Trek had turned into. Roddenberry and his successors - Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga, and others - had dulled down this lively show to the point that I no longer cared to watch it. (And it didn't help that Babylon 5 came along and exceeded even the original Star Trek in overall quality. It raised the bar for what science fiction television could be, and the latter-day Star Trek series didn't come close to meeting it.)

It's sad, really, but I can live with it. Those great old, original series episodes and the first three movies (the good ones) are still around for me to watch. And that's enough.

However, tonight featured the premiere of the new series in the Star Trek franchise: Enterprise. Starring Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer, it's the story of humanity's first warp-capable starship in Starfleet service, a century before the original series takes place. When a Klingon courier is found stranded on Earth, pursued by mysterious aliens, and near-death, humanity's Vulcan advisors recommend taking him off life support and returning his body to the Klingons. But Archer convinces Starfleet to let him use the new Enterprise to take the Klingon back alive. Along the way they encounter more of the mysterious alien race, who seem to be getting advice from a mysterious figure from the future, and Archer struggles with his Vulcan advisor, T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) to keep the ship focused on the mission, no matter what obstacles stand in their way.

As you can see, I decided to give it a try. I guess you never quite entirely give up being a Trekkie. Some little bit inside you is always curious about what they've come up with this time.

At its core, this two-hour pilot, "Broken Bow", is a pretty good story: It has the running theme of humanity trying to stand on its own feet even though the Vulcans don't think they're ready, and a genuinely deadly alien race with mysterious motives and a mysterious benefactor standing in their way.

The episode avoids the worst excesses (and, to be sure, they were very, very bad) of The Next Generation and its ilk: It sticks to a single plot line, rather than spinning off "B stories" which have no relationship to the "A story"; the technology is known and kept under control, rather than having some genius work some technobabble magic to save the day at the last moment; our heroes persevere through drive, determination, and smarts.

The visuals are impressive. The Enterprise looks like a believable ancestor of the Classic Trek ship, and the interiors seem an appropriate mix of unfinished ideas and high technology. Visually, it's far more interesting than, say, The Next Generation's sets, which made the ship look like a giant Quality Inn.

And Bakula - clearly the star of the episode - is the most impressive thing about the show. Although he perhaps overdoes his "pained expression" shtick, he's fun to watch, and carries off the role of the captain trying to grow into his shoes quite well. His triumphant moment comes when, well, I won't completely spoil it, but let's say that the expression on his face after an unexpected rescue pulls his fat out of the fire is just priceless.

But the episode does have some real problems. Most seriously, Blalock seems miscast as T'Pol, as she seems to be barely keeping a straight face through much of the episode. She doesn't have the stoic aloofness that Leonard Nimoy or Mark Leonard had; she's just too animated (and perhaps too obviously intended to present some serious sex appeal, in her skintight outfit).

The music, as has been the case since The Next Generation, is also a big problem. Frankly (and I use this description after some consideration), it sucks. The opening title theme is a lame pop song with lyrics that I suppose are supposed to be inspiring, but there's not much melody there. But it's miles better than Dennis McCarthy's incidental music throughout the episode. McCarthy has been contributing to Trek since TNG, and he and the others who have composed for the various series since that time have produced some of the least memorable, least dramatic, and least melodic music I can ever remember hearing on a TV show. This is a particular letdown since the original series and the movies showed how valuable great incidental music can be in crafting the mood of a show. Babylon 5 did the same, and although I wasn't a fan of Christopher Franke's music for that series at first, it eventually grew to be an integral part of it. Here, well, you could completely yank all the music and I doubt anyone would really notice.

That the producers retained this style of music for Enterprise is another sign that they just don't get what producing good television or good Star Trek takes.

"Broken Bow" also continues latter-day Trek's propensity not to pay much attention to continuity in the series. Among the various inconsistencies in the episode:

• It takes only four days at Warp Four to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld. Not only does this seem to directly contradict previous series, but it seems essentially implausible given that the Federation and the Klingons will later fight a major war.
• Various new aliens are introduced, casually, in a "barroom" sequence, although we've never seem them before and probably never will again. This is gratuitous, and suggests that the creators would rather wow us with their make-up and visual effects prowess than have to actually think about how to create a self-consistent universe using the building blocks they've already got.
• The technology - notably the phasers - looks, visually, more advanced here than they do in Classic Trek.
• The "hull plating" used to protect the ship basically behaves like the later shields do. At one point the forward plating is depleted; doesn't that mean there's a big hole in the ship? This seems like a cheap way to add meaningless tension, and maintain the same method of creating such meaningless tension (shield or plating failure) while sounding superficially different.

All of this indicates a tendency for shoddy writing to me, and given the people involved, and their track record of shoddy writing on many previous Trek series, I'm not hopeful for the future. Especially since one assumes that they gave this pilot episode their best shot.

Still, it does seem that there's promise here. I think there are three keys to making Enterprise into a good series, worth watching:

1. Make it clear - and quickly - that there's a central, ongoing storyline which will occupy the entirety of the series. Be it the founding of the Federation, or the struggle against the mysterious aliens, or whatever, the series needs to have a point, and it needs to build steadily to that point over time. Nothing will sink this series faster than the impression that the creators are making it up as they go along.
2. Resist the temptation to trot out superfluous frills just because they seem cool. Don't introduce any new aliens: There are already hundreds in Trek who can be used. Stick to those. Don't introduce new technologies about which we'll wonder later why the future series didn't use them. Stay focused, and flesh out the universe we know; don't keep mutating it every week into something different.
3. Resist turning the show into a TNG-style "ensemble cast" series. It didn't work then, and it won't work here. Keep focused on three or four characters who are the true stars of the series; the rest may have arcs relating to the ongoing story or to the main characters, but they're solidly supporting cast, not stars. Episodes clearly written to get a certain character some screen time because they haven't had a starring moment recently are usually among the worst episodes of a TV series.

We'll see.

P.S.: Linda Park, who plays Communications Specialist Hoshi Sato on Enterprise, is the same name as the wife of the comic book character The Flash. The comic book Linda is also Asian. What are the odds?