What do you feel was the reason "Enterprise" was canceled?
A. The Temporal Cold War Arc...it went from sublime to ridiculous.
B. The Xindi Arc...A Romulan Arc would have been better.
C. The Sulubans...I would have preferred an old enemy rather than a new enemy.
D. Lack of continuity with TOS.
E. Lack of continuity within itself. (Contradicting stories)
F. Poor script writing
G. Bad acting by some of the cast.
It was basically poor writing and poor handling of the franchise by Berman and Braga.
There were so many possibilities, for so many interesting discussions, interesting things they could have shown.
We did see Tellarites, but it didn't seem like a "First Contact" story. They seem similar to Klingons.
How would Tellarites and Klingons get along?
First contact with many other races we saw in TNG and DS9.
Here's one small thing which would have been interesting. Shran calls humans "pinkskins." But he never talks to Mayweather and never calls him that. Would he use the same term for Mayweather? They never discuss ethnic terms and slang.
T'Pol goes into pon far. Her husband was on the way but we never get to see him, we don't learn the details of what the pon far customs are for female Vulcans, the situation was contrived anyway.
The Temporal Cold War and the Xindi War were not much fun. And they consisted of people shooting each other, same as so many other TV shows and real life.
Instead of killing a random bunch of people on Earth, the Xindi could have done something really
weird and alien, like covering the whole planet in some sort of white residue we have trouble analyzing. No imagination.
There were lots of interesting stories to tell about communication problems, but those get ignored and Hoshi's linguistic specialty seemed to be forgotten after the first half of the first season.
After that she's just a communications officer.
Plot holes and unconvincing alien customs. The race with 3 sexes, one of them a cogenitor, was interesting, but there were plot holes and the discrimination against the cogenitor was implausible.
They ignored the real stars and interesting things astronomers are discovering out there. No exoplanets were mentioned.
If an episode mentions a real exoplanet and establishes certain facts about that star system,
then subsequent discoveries contradict what was in the episode, I don't think we'd care.
Rigel being a Klingon world 4 days away? It must be a different star with the same name, but the producers didn't care about plausibility.
Here's the Internet Stellar Database.
http://www.stellar-database.com/
They could have used it to decide which stars the Enterprise would visit, in what order, and how long it would take to get there.
There are also web sites with ideas about really alien aliens, and unusual life forms on Earth, but no....
It was that stupid Temporal Cold War. They should have realized it wasn't working and ditched it in Season One.
Beater... Rigel being a Klingon world 4 days away?
Rigel wasn't a Klingon world, they just had Klingons on it. It's was sort of a space/shipping port where a bunch of trade occured between several species. The distance thing was still a bit odd though.
I agree that the temporal cold war was lame, but I liked the Xindi arc, though I do agree they should've done more with their infamous 'weapon' then just a beam of death. I also thought that interal continuity was ok, and much better than Voyager's. Other than the TCW I think the biggest problems were with not following a logical timeline, ie John's letter D, and we didn't really find out that much about UFP's core members, except Vulcan. There's my 2 cents.
I remember reading an article from an ST fan who said that his problem with Enterprise was while it was billed as a prequel where things were different than in Kirk or Picard's time but most of the things were basically the same with slightly different names.
They don't have "shields" but they can polarize the hull plating which serves the exact same function as shields in the rest of Trek.
They didn't have phasers, but they had phase pistols that operate just like phasers, with a stun and kill setting. How about showing a universe where our heroes don't have the option of stunning an opponent? In the rest of ST "just stun them" was generally an option when someone was a danger to others but they didn't want to kill them for whatever reason. Babylon 5's creator once said that "Stun settings are for people who can't commit."
There was no prime directive but when Archer comes up upon a situation about interfering with another species he decides of his own volition to essentially do what the Prime Directive would require. How about showing how such a directive came about? Perhaps Archer helps out a less advanced people by giving them weapons to fight off an aggressor only to find out that they turned around and used the weapons for genocide against the origional aggressors.
There are lots of alien species who appeared in the other Trek series but didn't get that much screen time. I'm thinking of the Andorians, Tellarites & Orions. They all made occasional appearances in Enterprise but I think they should have been the main aliens. Instead they created new aliens out of whole cloth that we've never seen before or since in Trek.
And on that note, they already have the Klingons, the Romulans and all of that history but they go and create the Xindi as a powerful foe? How about episodes dealing with the Klingon threat or the mysterious Romulans. They did a few but the Klingons never seemed that menacing and the Romulans appeared in less than 5 episodes.
Rather than the Xindi arc for a whole season make one about the Romulans as the mysterious attackers and incorporate what we've already seen. Granted it would be dificult to have them interact and fight a war without ever seeing each other but it can be done. It's already been established that they would destroy their own ships rather than be taken prisoner. And while you're at it include some members of the Stiles family. Remember him? A Lt on Kirk's Enterprise who had an extreme hatred for the Romulans because several of his family died in that war. Perhaps make the MACO's commander a Stiles who's brother or sister is the commander of another star ship in the conflict. Personally I'd like to have seen a Stiles finding out that the Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcans only to get killed before being able to tell anyone.
This is much more of a superficial issue but how about at least trying to respect the design lineage of ships? At least make the Enterprise white and boxier, rather than looking like a TNG ship. You can keep the basic layout, just make it white and more like a TOS ship. I actually did a design myself of how I'd have rather it looked. The new "Star Trek" movie has shown that white ships in the TOS style can still look high tech if done right.
I do enjoy some Enterprise episodes and really liked Season 4. I do wonder how the show had been if Manny Coto had been the showrunner from ep1.
I myself thought of a design of what the NX-01 could've looked like. So did other fans, like this one guy who designed it with the main deflector dish on the edge of the forward edge of the hull like in the series, but round like in TOS.
Nice!
Love the impulse engine design!
Thanks, it was designed to me more TOS like. Also the spot below the glowing red of the impulse engine is supposed to be a shuttle bay. It opens from side to side like Kirk's did.
Uh, guys, you're drifting off topic here
I dunno, I think alternate visions of what an Enterprise-era ship should've looked like is fairly within the topic area.
While we're on the subject.....
The show was supposed to be about people before Kirk's time who were out in the "final frontier;" so how about not having real time communications with home? I mean sometimes they act like it was Picard's era with full video links every time they send a message back home.
In Kirk's era long communication lags often featured in the plot as to why Kirk had to think on his feet, he couldn't wait for a response from home that would take 3 weeks round-trip. So how about Archer not being able to have real time communication with Starfleet Command when something came up? How about the best he could do would be text messages that take 24 hours to get home and a response to come back? That's still pretty impressive technology. Today it would take 4 years to send a message to our nearest star and another 4 to get a message back. So a 24 hour turnaround would still be futuristic but it would also give Archer the ability to think on his feet without calling home when something big came up.
Another thing that I think killed "Enterprise" was that there were TOO MANY Shuttlepod scenes and docking scenes.
Once everyone saw that the Transporter was safe for human use....they should've made the switch-over.
That's comparable to how people reacted to the "horse-less carriage". Not everyone took to the automobile immediately. The same is true of the telephone, airplane, VCR, DVD, cell phone, Blueray player, etc. People do not immediately take to new technology, especially one as radical and dangerous as the transporter.
OTHER PROBLEMS:
Opening theme: Should've done a "Classical" theme like "Voyager". The opening theme is annoying....especially when they "jazz it up" for seasons 3 & 4.
End of episode closing Seasons 3 & 4: Good grief...knock it off with the drums already! We got the point. Everyone is in danger and the situation seems hopeless. There's NO NEED to bang on the drums like a banshee.
Opening graphics: I think the historical montage was nice, but would have preferred a "solar system" montage
Finally...they should have listed the character names along with the cast...like they did in previous TREK incarnations.
NANJAO. The alternate opening they made for the episodes in the mirror universe was great. It is my opinion that the history the the REAL Earth falls midway between the regular opening depiction and the alternate one.
Yeah...that theme was good.
Hard to believe it's been eight years now since Enterprise ended. Where did the time go?
Into the Nexus...where time has no meaning!
Now if it (by that I mean the entirety of the spinoff series itself) could only be completely and effectively stricken and wiped clean from official Trek Canon for all time. Like it never existed. That would totally rock!
Think about it...no militant, emotional Vulcans, no question about when first contact with the Klingons/Ferengi/Romulans *really* happened, no Temporal Cold War, no Suliban, no Xindi, and no Delphic Expanse! I'm sure there are many other examples that could be given, but this is a good start, dont you think?
I for one, think that the official and confirmed Trek canon as we know it could very easily have gotten along just fine without the existence of this show. I was against it from the very beginning, and certain people at the time didnt understand why I felt that way. Now, I am very glad to know that numerous other Trekkies besides myself were against it, as it was chockful of continuity errors and didnt even try to actually be consistent with the existing canon until Manny Coto became EXPRO in the last season. Too bad that by that time, the damage already done was irrepairable and it was pretty much time to throw in the towel on the franchise.
We are all now pretty much aware of just WHAT killed the show...and now we can be GLAD that it is so!
At least I am! Continue resting in peace, Gene, the Killer B's will torment you and spit on your memory and legacy no longer!
The second season had slow episodes, beginnings that hardly invited the viewer in, and whatever magic was in the first season was lost in the second. The second and in some cases the third season had episodes retreading old ground we've seen before. Given that, once it took off, the Xindi arc did become quite strong and the fourth season was especially strong, I think, because the writers had to go on the assumption it would be the series' last. Given that, the series ended on a high note, although I did have mixed feelings that for then on whenever we pictured the character of Chef, there was Will Riker. :P
Continue resting in peace, Gene, the Killer B's will torment you and spit on your memory and legacy no longer!
Now the CBS Swindlers are butchering Gene's legacy even worse than the Killer B's ever did. In fact, I find myself longing for the days of the Killer B's.
We didn't know when we were well off, did we.
Oh, and guess who made the call to cancel Enterprise, the swindling con man/sex criminal Les Moonves. Gives me another reason to celebrate his downfall.