982bb674
XPost: rec.arts.sf.tv, alt.tv.scifi.channel
From: kilroy@elvis.rowan.edu
"SFTV_troy " wrote:
> I'm curious why everyone hated Enterprise so much?
I didn't hate it, but I was disappointed because it could have been
really good and instead it was just blah.
What makes a story really interesting is when people have conflict
between their values, and have to resolve them. A starship captain
can be put on the spot week after week: here's a serious problem, but
doing this is bad one way, and doing that is bad the other way. What
do we do? He's sitting on top of huge power, and it's a multi-day
lag between asking for advice from HQ and getting an answer. All the
responsibility rests with him.
But instead, "Enterprise" often had it so that one decision was
obviously right and the other was obviously wrong: the bad guys were
clearly the bad guys. That's boring.
Eight years ago, in a thread about the episode with the three-sex
species and the cogenitors, I wrote this:
I really think just about all Star Trek episodes would be better if
someone was assigned the job of "Make the bad guys seem sympathetic,
and make their approach seem reasonable, even if in the end we
decide it's wrong. Whatever they do, make it the solution to a
problem that they couldn't see any other way to solve. No simple
black&white, right&wrong situations will be allowed."
I still think that's a good idea. Nobody sees themselves as the bad
guys; everybody has their reasons for what they do.
Another missed opportunity was de-technifying the world. "The Wrath of
Khan" works so well because it removes some of Star Trek's
overly-powerful baggage. The original series had the problem that the
transporter solved too many problems too easily. At least it was
unreliable, giving back some room for the writers to create problems
for the characters. This was done in TWoK by having the Enterprise and
the Reliant -- both evenly matched and heavily armed and shielded --
badly damaged by their respective commanders' errors. And the ships
*stayed* badly broken for most of the film. ("The Undiscovered
Country" gets the same effect with a Bird of Prey that can fire while
cloaked. It has an advantage, and also the disadvantage of small
size. The odds aren't even, exactly, but both ships are at real risk.)
Enterprise had the perfect situation for de-powering the technology:
some of it hasn't been invented yet. They could have used CGI for
shuttle-type landings, and skipped the transporter entirely, or had it
be completely unsafe for living matter of any kind - it would have given
the people more to do.
Consider this quote from Lois McMaster Bujold's book _The Vor Game_:
[...] Miles had seen it complete in Metzov's eyes sixty
seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of
his father's. *A weapon is a device for making your enemy
change his mind.* The mind was the first and final battle-
ground, the stuff in between was just noise.
The climax of any conflict-based story is the point at which the
characters make the irrevocable decisions -- that is, it's the point at
which the outcome is set. In "The Wrath of Khan", that point is when
Kirk runs to the nebula and says "I'm laughing at the superior
intellect". That insult was Kirk's best and most powerful weapon: it
caused Khan to change his mind about what he was going to do. What
happened after that -- the space battle in the nebula -- was playing
out the results of Khan's decision.
Like too much of other Star Trek, "Enterprise" filled itself with the
shooting, and not with the decisions. Too often, Star Trek relies too
much on "the stuff in between", which Aral Vorkosigan correctly describes
as "just noise".
Instead of the Suliban and the "Temporal Cold War" and (God forgive
them because I never will) Space Nazis, they should have done more
stories in which the Enterprise finds itself in a situation where the
captain has to make a choice, and show us that the head which wears
the crown sleeps uneasily. I remember watching "Farscape" once and
realising that this story could trivially have been reworked into an
episode of "Voyager", and it would have been much better than nearly
any actual episode of "Voyager. That's when I decided that maybe it
was time to give up on the franchise, or at least fire everybody and
hire all new blood to make it go.
As for the link you posted, in which Rick Berman says he has no idea
what went wrong with "Enterprise", that just tells me that he had no
business running a creative project in the first place. He thinks
obvious bad guys are good plot devices; he thinks science fiction is
better the *less* the people have to do and the *more* the technology
does. He likes the noise, not the thought.
*
Incidentally, I can highly recommend all of Lois McMaster Bujold's
books. There is the difficulty that, having finished them, you'll find
yourself somewhat disappointed with science fiction as done on TV.
But if you end up watching less TV, that's probably good for you. And
if that causes the people who make sci-fi TV to do a better job, that'd
be good for all of us.
Darren Provine ! kilroy@elvis.rowan.edu ! http://www.rowan.edu/~kilroy
(The following is an after-battle discussion of tactical computer
displays from _The Vor Game_:)
Gregor Vorbarra: "It seemed almost unreal, till I visited sickbay
afterwards. And realized, such-and-such a point of light meant
this man's arm lost, that man's lungs frozen. . . ."
Miles Vorkosigan: "Gotta watch out for those little lights. They tell
such soothing lies. If you let them."
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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