{"id":508,"date":"2002-03-29T20:46:54","date_gmt":"2002-03-30T04:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/03\/29\/bye-bye-enterprise\/"},"modified":"2019-11-27T07:54:21","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T15:54:21","slug":"bye-bye-enterprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/03\/29\/bye-bye-enterprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Bye-bye &#8216;Enterprise!&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:16319,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260314062324\\\/https:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-19 15:45:38&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-24 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03:16:43&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404}],&quot;broken&quot;:true,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-05 03:16:43&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:16321,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.michaelhanscom.com\\\/cgi-bin\\\/mt\\\/mt-tags.cgi?blog_id=1&amp;tags=stent&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/michaelhans.com\\\/cgi-bin\\\/mt\\\/mt-tags.cgi?blog_id=1&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:16033,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com\\\/library\\\/episodes_tng.asp&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com\\\/library\\\/episodes_tng.asp&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:16322,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.amazon.com\\\/exec\\\/obidos\\\/ASIN\\\/B00005Y1NF\\\/djwudicom-20&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260314062326\\\/https:\\\/\\\/www.amazon.com\\\/exec\\\/obidos\\\/ASIN\\\/B00005Y1NF\\\/djwudicom-20&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.amazon.com\\\/exec\\\/obidos\\\/ASIN\\\/B00005Y1NF\\\/djwudicom-20&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-19 23:06:08&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-27 06:55:03&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-17 10:12:27&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-25 10:13:52&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-01 06:12:11&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-05 03:16:47&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-05 03:16:47&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:16323,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com\\\/library\\\/episodes_tng_detail.asp?ID=68324&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.startrek.com\\\/library\\\/episodes_tng_detail.asp?ID=68324&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been watching the new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startrek.com\/\" title=\"The official site.\">Star Trek<\/a> show, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startrek.com\/news\/nextonent.asp\" title=\"Whatever the next ENT episode is.\">Enterprise<\/a>, off and on for a while now. I haven&#8217;t caught every new episode, but those I have, I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaelhanscom.com\/cgi-bin\/mt\/mt-tags.cgi?blog_id=1&amp;tags=stent\" title=\"All of my Enterprise-related posts.\">posted my thoughts on<\/a>. It doesn&#8217;t look like I&#8217;ll be doing this anymore, though.<\/p>\n<p>Wednesday evening I turned on my TV to watch the show, and as it turns out, my reception here at the new apartment is actually <em>worse<\/em> than it was at my old one. So, watching the broadcast isn&#8217;t an option, and there&#8217;s no way I&#8217;m going to pay for cable access just so I can watch one show. At first I was kind of disappointed by this, but something else has happened this week that made me realize that I probably wasn&#8217;t going to miss Enterprise all that much.<\/p>\n<p>This Tuesday marked the release of the first season of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startrek.com\/library\/episodes_tng.asp\" title=\"StarTrek.com's listing of TNG episodes.\">Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/a> in a <em>very<\/em> nice <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B00005Y1NF\/djwudicom-20\" title=\"Amazon: Star Trek TNG First Season\">DVD box set<\/a>. I picked up my copy on Wednesday on my way home from work, and when I found that I wasn&#8217;t going to be able to watch Enterprise, I started watching TNG episodes.<\/p>\n<p>The thing is &#8212; I&#8217;d forgotten just how <em>good<\/em> this show really was! Sure, it was their first season, everyone was still getting the hang of their characters, and the special effects were fairly horrid (and that&#8217;s not just hindsight talking &#8212; I remember being extremely unimpressed with the effects in &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.startrek.com\/library\/episodes_tng_detail.asp?ID=68324\" title=\"Summary for 'Justice'.\">Justice<\/a>&#8221; at the time it first aired) &#8212; but even with all that, each episode I (re-)watch drives home more and more just how good TNG was&#8230;and just how much Enterprise pales in comparison.<\/p>\n<p>Watching the first season of TNG now is actually much like watching it for the first time. I watched TNG almost religiously when it first came on the air &#8212; it first aired during my sophomore year in high school, and for quite a while it became a ritual for my group of friends to gather at someone&#8217;s house (usually Tammy&#8217;s, though I think Royce, myself, and some of the others hosted the gathering from time to time) and watch whatever the newest episode was. However, by the time I graduated in &#8217;91 and moved out to live on my own for the first time, television was less and less of a priority, and I ended up missing the majority of the last few seasons of TNG. In the ensuing years I&#8217;ve caught the occasional episode of one Trek show or another in reruns, but those times have been fairly few and far between. I remember bits and pieces of the shows I&#8217;ve seen, but much has faded in the mists of memory over the years.<\/p>\n<p>In essence, then, it&#8217;s very easy for me to compare watching the first season of Enterprise fresh out of the bottle to watching the first season of TNG the same way &#8212; and I&#8217;ve gotta say, ENT just doesn&#8217;t compare. Up until now, I&#8217;ve been somewhat of an apologist for ENT, doing my best to give it a chance, and one of the most common arguments when someone says that ENT just isn&#8217;t that good of a show is that it&#8217;s still their first season. Often someone will offer up, &#8220;remember just how much better TNG was after a few seasons, and how shaky their first season was?&#8221; Well sure, it was better after as it went on (which makes me look forward even more to those seasons being released on DVD later this year) &#8212; but that argument was a lot easier for me to accept when I hadn&#8217;t actually <em>seen<\/em> first-season TNG since 1987. The episodes and dilemmas presented therein are much more interesting, the characters are more engaging &#8212; about the only point that I can see that first-season ENT really has over first-season TNG is the special effects, and much of that is the simple fact that it&#8217;s 15 years later (side note &#8212; 15 <em>years<\/em> later? Ugh&#8230;I&#8217;m feeling old again!) and modern-day F\/X technology is that much better.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps ENT will mature as it goes along, and perhaps it will grow into being a truly worthwhile addition to the Star Trek universe &#8212; it&#8217;d be nice to see that happen, as I still think that some of the new ideas and directions they&#8217;re exploring in ENT could be very interesting (the new take on the Vulcans, for example). However, at the moment &#8212; I can&#8217;t say I&#8217;m going to really miss not being able to watch it anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Enterprise, off and on for a while now. I haven&#8217;t caught every new episode, but those I have, I posted my thoughts on. It doesn&#8217;t look like I&#8217;ll be doing this anymore, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2047],"tags":[924,1661,13,4097,8,2149,1767],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-trek","tag-ent","tag-enterprise","tag-life","tag-star-trek","tag-television","tag-the-next-generation","tag-tng"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}