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Longtime readers of the rec.arts.startrek newsgroups may remember me from my reviews of episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (and early episodes of Deep Space Nine) circa 1990-1993. I was one of the "loyal opposition", as I sometimes called it: The few people who thought NextGen was a big step down from Classic Star Trek (largely due to the poor quality of the writing), but who were still big enough fans of Trek to enjoy participating in the newsgroup. Eventually, though, I decided that NextGen and its spin-offs just didn't have what I enjoyed about Star Trek or science fiction, so around 1993 I stopped watching Trek even semi-regularly - only a random episode here and there. When Enterprise started up last year, I decided to give it a look. It sounded like Enterprise might even have some sort of ongoing storyline, about the eventual founding of the Federation. Having watched almost all of the first season, I've been moved to write this set of articles about the series. This is part one of three parts. SPOILER WARNING: This post and its fellows contain spoilers for episodes of the first season of Enterprise. If you're concerned about any episodes being spoiled for you, I suggest skipping this post.
Part One: Premise and Design I. The Premise At a glance, Enterprise's premise seems novel, by the standards of second-generation Trek. Executive Producer Brannon Braga was quoted (at http://www.brannonbraga.com/september_2001.htm in the September 6 entry) as saying:
"We felt that to just put another crew on another spaceship with a new name or to set it at the Academy on Earth at the same time as the other shows, with the same aliens and political situations wasn't fresh enough. We needed an impetus to tell new, exciting kinds of stories and character arcs. Setting something even further in the future than Janeway's time felt odd because every time we try to do that we end up with ships that look a little sleeker and suits that are a little tighter, so going back seemed like a nifty way to reinvigorate the whole thing."But what do we get in the first season of Enterprise? It's, well, another group of people on a starship, off to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. We even have tight suits and a sleek ship. During the course of the first season, two things became clear:
There's still some room for novelty in there: The technology is older, the procedures for dealing with the unknown still unmapped. But even here Enterprise disdains a sophisticated approach. We don't actually see any of the older tech that humanity was supposedly using: "Hull plating" seems effectively to be shields with a different name. The torpedoes look basically the same. Our heroes have primitive phasers, but they behave the same as the newer models; wouldn't it have been neat to see our heroes using slug-throwers (i.e., bullet-firing pistols)? The only nod to the tech of the time period is that our heroes get around using shuttlecraft rather than the transporter. That's about it, though. The show's approach to procedures and protocol is completely undermined by the sheer lack of common sense that the crew displays. "Strange New World" is nothing more than a sterling example of just how dumb our heroes are, when Archer refuses to do proper scans of the new world, sends down a landing party without proper protection, and then leaves them there overnight without an easy way to return to the ship. (There are echoes of this sort of stupidity in Trip's visit to the alien ship in "Unexpected", and the rampant silliness of Trip and Malcolm's misadventures in "Two Days and Two Nights".) If the show has any theme which sets it apart from other second-generation Trek series, it's that it involves constant tension between the Vulcans and the humans, mostly involving the latter demonstrating how they're more complete beings, mentally and emotionally, than the Vulcans (although sometimes choosing strange times to show it). Of course, this was a major theme of the original Star Trek series, so this, too, isn't really new, except that the tension is taken up to the governmental level. The bottom line is that the premise of Enterprise hasn't done anything to reinvigorate the franchise. It's pasted a very thin veneer of antiquity over the essential premise, but the approach to the stories are basically the same as previous series. Enterprise is, for the most part, warmed-over Next Generation. And since NextGen itself generally seemed like it had been left on the table a few hours too many, you know that's not a good thing. II. The Design Star Trek has rarely tried to be innovative in its design, whether you mean its format, episodic structure, visual design, or use of audio. The original Trek might be an exception to this - for its era - in its use of special effects and sound, though 35 years later that's hardly more interesting than the innovation of Space: 1999 in the special effects realm. The world has moved on so far since then, that rooting around in Classic Trek looking for "innovation" seems fruitless. What's more interesting is to consider NextGen and its offspring - Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and now Enterprise - since they represent a fairly continuous body of work produced by several TV-generations of people who seem to approach it with similar mindsets. The designers of all four of these series seem to be targeting three groups of people, in this order:
As a result, NextGen and its successors have generally been engineered to be "safe": Bright colors, pleasing visual designs, intelligent and well-spoken and -mannered characters, and lots of "cute" character bits. This resulted in a series which mainly appeals to fans of the original series who liked its optimistic view of the future of humanity. What got thrown out, on the other hand, were the gritty and hard-fought battles such as "Balance of Terror", the morally ambiguous themes such as "Errand of Mercy", and the stories based around deeply flawed humans such as "The Ultimate Computer" and "The Doomsday Machine". The heroes are heroes, and if there is much complexity or subtle politics or social issues, it often felt like the writers were straining to poke those issues through the show's veneer without doing so much that they might be controversial or thought-provoking. NextGen, in short, strove for the lowest common denominator. And succeeded. Despite being 15 years newer than NextGen, Enterprise feels like it's very much followed the same design sensibilities. The creators have found a "comfort zone" (and found it 15 years ago!) and almost every move modern Trek series make seems to underscore their reluctance to move out of that comfort zone. What about the "look and feel" of the series on-screen? a. Uniforms The Enterprise crew's uniforms look like they were lifted largely from the Babylon 5 sequel Crusade. That's probably not entirely fair, since the uniforms in both cases are fairly generic blue jumpsuits, but it is something that struck me as soon as I saw the uniforms. The main exception, of course, is T'Pol, who wears a form-fitting grayish uniform. While one might argue that it's a functional outfit in some ways, the fact that the outfit seems starkly at odds with anything we've previously seen Vulcans wear (outside of the NextGen-era Starfleet uniforms) forces one to cynically conclude that the outfit was mainly designed for cheesecake effect. Jolene Blalock is certainly a striking woman, and Trek has certainly designed with sex appeal in mind before (remember Counselor Cleavage?), but usually such designs were either a bad idea, or were done for semi-comical effect. Considering that T'Pol is Archer's primary antagonist on the ship, this outfit undercuts her dramatic effectiveness. It's a bad idea. (One especially sarcastic critic - not me, surprisingly enough - observed that "The best thing about Enterprise is that the Vulcan has a great rack.") b. Enterprise Sets The sets mostly seem nondescript, hewing to the same pleasing pastel colors of previous sets, with some here-and-there attention paid to making the Enterprise of this series seem more primitive: Consoles in rectangular boxes on the Bridge, the cramped nature of Archer's quarters. Beyond this, there isn't much in the visual design of the ship to really distinguish it from the original series' designs. Maybe this is intentional. But again it raises the issue: Classic Trek has already been done; why not do something new? c. Aliens and alien sets I have fairly little to say about the aliens and otherworldly sets in the show. Second-generation Trek has rarely done well with designing visually (or otherwise) interesting aliens, especially the one constructed for one-off episodes. Enterprise hasn't really broken that trend. The most memorable aliens in the series are the Andorians, who of course were resurrected from Classic Trek. And they're not especially interesting as aliens, but largely as foils for the Vulcans. The show's other major aliens are Doctor Phlox, who comes from the long and silly heritage of "guys with funny bumps on their heads", and the Suliban, who come from the even longer and almost as silly heritage of "guys covered in a layer of latex". d. Special effects When NextGen debuted, one of its most talked-about points was the fact that it cost about $1 million per episode, and the inference was that much of that was spent on state-of-the-art special effects. Whether or not this was true, a few years later it was clear that:
Are these effects state-of-the-art? How can we tell? For the most part, the special effects don't look any more sophisticated than NextGen's effects. They're a bunch of ships flying around, sometimes firing at each other, or people on the ground with the occasional phaser blast, or a CGI rendering of a cityscape or landscape. Some of this is a failure of design sense: Trek ships look like Trek ships, and we're been watching things like them for 20 years or more. They don't really engage our imagination much. For that matter, the show's premise requires that things look somewhat familiar, which undercuts most of what they could do with the effects. e. Directing I've always been perplexed by the laudatory comments aimed at previous second generation Trek directors, as there have been few directorial moments in NextGen or since which seem memorable. Camera angles range from the mundane (simple establishing shots at eye level) to the amusingly melodramatic (close-ups of an aggrieved captain's face). Scenes of the starships always seem entirely pedestrian (although "Yesterday's Enterprise" was a good episode, the space battles seem tediously slow, and lack any of the compositional peculiarities of a dozen Babylon 5 episode, with ships passing at odd angles and unusual, eye-catching visual compositions). Enterprise has continued this tradition (if you can call it that), as far as I can tell. The directing has been capable, but not notable. Now, great directing isn't exactly a hallmark of television, but it's eerie - in these days following series like Homicide: Life on the Street - to see just how much things haven't changed on this front in the Star Trek franchise. f. Music Second-generation Trek has always worked - quite consciously, it seems - to minimize the impact of its incidental music. After a brief moment of interesting composition during second- and third-season NextGen, the music has been generic, unobtrusive and uninteresting. Enterprise has stuck to this formula pretty rigidly. I've always lamented this approach, since the incidental music was a major contributor to the artistic success of Classic Trek and the earlier films. It was also a key element of Babylon 5 (not to mention shows a diverse as The Avengers and the aforementioned Homicide). The music in Enterprise might as well not be there. It's unfortunate, and it's a decision that I still don't understand. As for the main title music, well, the less said the better, and I know I'm not the first one (or even the five thousandth) to express that opinion. What were they thinking? Overall, Enterprise doesn't feel cutting-edge or even particularly fresh. It's staying in that "comfort zone" being careful not to challenge the casual viewer and thus not giving the more serious fan much to get intrigued about. Television SF has always tended to be shallower than written SF, but Enterprise - like its recent predecessors - has not even managed to take good advantage of the differences its medium afford it. It's not especially pretty to look at, little about it makes you go "Wow!" or "How did they do that?" or feel admiration for the skills of the creators in crafting a future world. In this way, it's the same old thing. But wait, there's more. NEXT: Characters and Continuity hits since 4 November 2002.
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