Star Trek: Enterprise Season 1

Space.  The final frontier…we know the rest.  After decades of television shows and movies, if you don’t know the general idea behind Star Trek, well, I don’t know what to tell you.  As of this writing there’s a nice exhibit going on at the Louisville Science Center about Star Trek, spanning five television shows and the eleven feature films.  Sadly, the animated series isn’t represented, but that’s okay.  It’s a little difficult to watch and isn’t considered canon anyway.

After seeing all sorts of models, props, and even standing on the transporter pad (I would have sat in Captain Kirk’s original chair from the original series, but they wanted twenty bucks to do so) I’ve been on a Star Trek kick as of late.  I’ve been skipping around, and overall the originals are still the best, The Next Generation is great at parts, painful at others, Deep Space Nine is slowly becoming my favorite show of the franchise, and Voyager still stinks.  In my humble opinion, anyway.  The only series I didn’t watch upon initial airing was Enterprise.  So I decided to give it a whirl.

Now, I’m an all or nothing kind of guy.  Enterprise lasted four seasons, and of course, I had to acquire them all.  Out of all my television purchases, for better or worse, this has been the only one where I’m wishing I would have tested the waters with only the first season. 

It starts out interestingly enough.  As a prequel to the original series, we have a ship named Enterprise that’s capable of going faster than any previous vessel, warp 5.  Relations with the Vulcans are strained at best, because we’re stubborn humans and the pointy-eared race aren’t ready to have us tromping all over the galaxy and urinating in the faces of other cultures and races just yet.  Which is exactly what the crew of the Enterprise seems to do at every given occasion. 

The crew doesn’t gel together as well as they seemed to in other shows, and offer very little to make me empathize with them.  Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer is a man of action, but not in the heroic way Captain Kirk was.  Archer has an axe to grind with the Vulcans.  He feels they kept humanity grounded for too long and robbed his father of the chance of seeing the galaxy.  I understand that’s supposed to add depth to the character and give an emotional push, but all it really does is make Archer the whiny guy always trying to prove himself and humanity by waving his genitals around screaming “MINE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS!  GO HUMANS!”  And maybe this is addressed in other seasons, but for a society that has abolished poverty, war, and greed in such a short amount of time, racism is still alive and well 100 years before Kirk takes the bridge.

The diversity of the crew is there, the Vulcan science officer (who seems to have been cast for a weird sex appeal that seems horribly out of place in Star Trek ((and I know Seven of Nine was brought on Voyager for sex appeal, and to boost ratings, but Voyager isn’t the show you should measure the worth of the Trek franchise against anyway.)), Tripp, who has a southern accent and a variety of “down home” sayings that don’t really apply in space, the Asian woman, the black guy, and the Irish guy security chief and tactical officer (who would have made a much more interesting and appealing Captain).     As much as I hate to admit it, I miss the ‘gimmick’ crewmembers.  The android, or the blind guy wearing an air filter to see.  There’s Captain Archer’s pet beagle, but he isn’t really a crewmember or do anything cool like the robot dog in the original Battlestar Galactica. 

The episodes themselves don’t even feel like Star Trek.  Part of the fun was watching the crew encounter something they had never encountered before and trying to either learn from it or get away from it.  In Enterprise, if the humans didn’t know about it, the Vulcans have information on it in their databases.  Communication with species isn’t even that difficult or much of a hindrance.  There are very little elements of ‘classic sci-fi’ in the first season, unless you count the idea of a temporal cold war, which is very poorly executed.  My solution would have been to fire the writing staff, and hire science fiction writers.  It’d make it less of a soap opera and more of a fun adventure series, like Star Trek should be.

1 ½ out of 4

reviewed by Seth Moore

© Copyright 2011 John Shatzer