Stop Trek

EnterpriseI’ll admit a fondness for “Star Trek,” having enjoyed the original show in reruns as a generally geeky youth and its many successors as an only moderately less geeky adult. But after having caught five minutes of an episode this season wherein the crew of the latest show, “Star Trek: Enterprise” were shooting it out with aliens on a world that resembled America’s old West (crazy!), even I will admit that the whole franchise is just begging for a bit of television euthanasia.

For about five minutes at the launch of the series, “Enterprise” seemed to promise a new, fresher take on the tried and true Trek formula, in which a cadre of futuristic office co-workers spreads free market principles around the galaxy. But it too has succumbed to retreading the same old territory as its predecessors, and just a glimpse of the show reveals it to be hackneyed to distraction. Now word comes that, apparently, UPN has acquiesced to fan pressure and renewed “Enterprise” for another season. Please, someone make it stop.

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2 Comments

  1. frank

    Related, there’s a campaign going on to get NBC to cancel THE WEST WING.

    http://dontsaveourshow.org/

    I’m rewatching the first season on DVD (in anticipation of the second season DVD set’s release today), and the current episodes of TWW can’t touch the old ones.

  2. Donald Cart

    I read that ‘Enterprise’ has been offered to the network next season at a greatly reduced cost. The show was scheduled to be canceled, but the new price of the show is keeping it alive for one more season. The reason is that the producers of the show want enough episodes to be able to offfer it in syndication.
    A couple of other remarks. In the orignal series A lone genius named ZephramCochrane? invents a WarpDrive. In Enterprise, the Vulcans give the Federation the technology. The technology of the ship in the prequel is more sophisticated than that in the original series. I wonder why technology went backward instead of advancing.
    A couple of things I’d like to point out about the original series. In 2 or 3 episodes, the Enterprise desparately needs dilithium crystals. I’ve always wondered why there was never an extra supply of crystals on the ship. Star Fleet must be a pretty crappy organization. In the episode about Jack the Ripper, with Scotty being accused of murder, Kirk says something like, “Mr Spock, am I correct in assuming that some problems can’t be solved?” Spock responds the exact value of pi is unknown and commands the computer to calculate the value of pi to the last digit, thus chasing the entity from the computer system.
    Kirk went through school, then Star Fleet Academy, became the best captain in an elite group that captains a Star Ship, yet needs Spock to tell him pi is a repeating decimal? Doesn’t sound right to me.

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