Over the past couple weeks, I noticed something interesting during my wanderings through the ‘net. During my near-obsessive investigation into Battlestar Galactica, discussion threads would often end up contrasting the new series to Enterprise, and I kept seeing people openly admitting that the first few seasons of Enterprise were dreck, but then going on to claim that their current season was actually quite watchable.
While reading some of the reports about the current fan-driven campaign to rescue Enterprise from cancellation, the same general comments kept popping up. Then I got into a conversation with a customer at work, and he ended up saying much the same thing.
Unconvinced but intrigued, I decided to see what I could find, and ended up downloading all of the episodes to date of Season Four of Enterprise and watching them over the past few days.
While I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m impressed, I do have to admit that I found this season to be far more bearable than what I had seen during the first season. It’s still by far my least favorite incarnation of Trek (out of TOS, TNG and DS9, at least, I’ve yet to see more than a few random episodes of VOY), but the overall feeling I got was that someone on the Enterprise team got their head out of their ass started actually listening to the fans and tried to turn the show around.
First step in the right direction was spending the first two episodes wrapping up the “temporal cold war” storyline. I thought that was a bad idea when it first popped up, and nothing I’d seen or read since then had convinced me any differently. Now that that’s over and done with, things seem to be improving.
They’ve also spent a few episodes working on the Vulcan culture, trying to explain why they’re presented so differently in this series than they ever have been before. It all came off as a little far-fetched, but at least they’re trying.
The storyline touching on the Eugenics Wars and augmented humans wasn’t bad (though I do wish that they’d used some other scientist as the antagonist — as much as I like Brent Spiner, how old must Soong have been by the time he died?), and it allowed them to finally create an explanation for the differences in appearance between the Klingons of the original series and those we’ve seen ever since The Motion Picture. A pity the second half of that two-part story became so muddled, as the first part was fairly strong, and the general premise is at least bearable (and no worse than some of the other convoluted explanations that have had to be created over the years to explain away various goofs).
So, I’ll admit that they’ve gotten better, and the current season of Enterprise is at least watchable. I still don’t think that there’s any great need for it to continue, though — let it die, and let the Trek universe have a few years to settle and regroup before trying to fire up the Paramount marketing machine yet again.
And please, please, please — no more bad ballads over the opening credits in any future incarnations of Trek. Someone (other than the people sitting through it week after week) really needs to suffer for that.