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andrewduckerWhen I'm tired, everything seems overexposed, faded slightly, and scratchy. Listening to music starts to feel like having sandpaper pulled over exposed nerve endings, even when it's not the kind of music that's supposed to have that effect. I can't keep my concentration long enough to read anything in-depth and I can't empathise enough to make it worth reading much fiction.
It was not, therefore, probably the best time to finally get around to watching Broken Bow, the first episode of Enterprise.
However, having thought about it, I suspect it still would have come across as shallow, derivative, clumsily scripted and blankly acted. Sure, there's a few interesting characters in it (the doctor and the British guy, for instance), some nice special effects and a few interesting ideas but the hammering home of "We have to do it for ourselves, even when it's a bloody stupid thing to do" moral, the flaky "Trust the wind, even when it's a bloody stupid thing to do" philosophising, the fact that yet again we have a captain who throws himself into combat rather than being, well, a captain and the lack of any pace or feeling of threat meant that I have no interest whatsoever in watching any more of it.
If anyone would care to tell me that it gets better and it's ever worth caring about this crew, then let me know.
Ooh,in case it helps to know my prejudices, in order of preference:
1) Deep Space 9
Long arc plots, writers that clearly cared about the characters, moral decisions that make a difference to people's lives and a darkness that fits in better with my worldview than Voyager. Oh, and a fair sprinkling of humour too.
2) Next Gen
While it could sometimes be lacking, generally the acting is of very high quality, lots of the ideas are first rate and there's a lot of incredible episodes in there.
3) TOS and Voyager
Both TOS and Voyager and TOS have some fantastic episodes, but never managerd to sustain quality enough to make me watch a random episode, I'm afraid.
It was not, therefore, probably the best time to finally get around to watching Broken Bow, the first episode of Enterprise.
However, having thought about it, I suspect it still would have come across as shallow, derivative, clumsily scripted and blankly acted. Sure, there's a few interesting characters in it (the doctor and the British guy, for instance), some nice special effects and a few interesting ideas but the hammering home of "We have to do it for ourselves, even when it's a bloody stupid thing to do" moral, the flaky "Trust the wind, even when it's a bloody stupid thing to do" philosophising, the fact that yet again we have a captain who throws himself into combat rather than being, well, a captain and the lack of any pace or feeling of threat meant that I have no interest whatsoever in watching any more of it.
If anyone would care to tell me that it gets better and it's ever worth caring about this crew, then let me know.
Ooh,in case it helps to know my prejudices, in order of preference:
1) Deep Space 9
Long arc plots, writers that clearly cared about the characters, moral decisions that make a difference to people's lives and a darkness that fits in better with my worldview than Voyager. Oh, and a fair sprinkling of humour too.
2) Next Gen
While it could sometimes be lacking, generally the acting is of very high quality, lots of the ideas are first rate and there's a lot of incredible episodes in there.
3) TOS and Voyager
Both TOS and Voyager and TOS have some fantastic episodes, but never managerd to sustain quality enough to make me watch a random episode, I'm afraid.
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Date: 2003-01-01 12:12 pm (UTC)I've only seen 8 episodes of series 2 of Enterprise but already it is infinitely better. The writers have toned down the machoism of the officers, and appear to have got a handle on some of the other ludicrous plotlines. For example Hoshi has stopped learning entire alien languages in 2 days, the captain has stopped being as brash and is more like you would expect a trained astronaut to be.
I'm now really enjoying Enterprise. It's great to see the "trek" back in Star Trek, now that we have a ship going out and exploring once again, meeting entirely new alien races. That was one thing that always bugged me about Voyager - in a galaxy a zikillion miles from Earth and they still run into Romulans, Klingons, Ferrengi and the Borg on a weekly basis.
Oh and the opening credits, complete with Russell Watson, are still the best I've ever seen in a series.
For the record I rate the series as follows:
TOS: the acting was awful, but the plots were ideas driven. The writers would take an idea and follow it to a conclusion, without being afraid of poor viewing figures. This, for me, was what science fiction was all about.
TNG: great acting and some good ideas. It's biggest weakness was that approximately every second episode was good, the rest often turned to technobabble or "anomaly of the week" to try to write a story. Oh and the Data storylines hadn't a patch on Asimov's "Robot" stories.
DS9: this series was the first to have a plot arc lasting more than 2 episodes. Problem was it was never like that until the writers reacted to the success of Babylon 5. It was always a poor cousin of the amazing Babyolon 5.
Enterprise: This series is getting better and may well rise higher with time. One thing in it's favour is they have a new writing team, wheras TNG, DS9, Voyager were all written by the same people.
Voyager: Voyager ran out of ideas far too quickly and rapidly degenerated into space anomaly of the week. Ironically the first episode "Caretaker" was one of the best episodes of any Star Trek series, but after that there was the odd episode which was good, but the majority was tedious.