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rfmcdonaldFollowing up on last week's post praising Battlestar Galactica, you'll be happy to know that the remake has been picked up for a second season. This series is, happily, gaining recognition as a serious show, entertaining and well-written and well-acted and doing a good job generally of showing human beings in extremis, across the board. Even Tech Central Station, which has a tendency to overideologize everything, recognizes this, as evidenced by its sensible review.
Enterprise, now, has been cancelled; more precisely, the show hasn't been picked up for a fifth season. Buffy survived the transition from one network to another, between the fifth and sixth seasons. Buffy also had a mass fan base, and a degree of critical appeal, that Enterprise lacks. All of the fan appeals posted on Trek Today will, I suspect, fail as surely as did the original series' third-season appeals almost four decades ago.
I started watching Enterprise in the first season, starting from the pilot "Broken Bow." I stopped watching early in the second season. Why? There were a variety of problems, and I'd rank bad script-writing for too many of the episodes as the second problem from my perspective. Yes, the first season of ST:TNG had some dodgy episodes, but the ratio went in a different and a worse direction on the first season of Enterprise. By the time that the Enterprise began its investigation of the Xindi in the third season, I'd given up on it.
No, for me the main problem with Enterprise was the way that it protrayed Earth's position in the galactic community. Back in May 2003, I wrote about Earth's status in a hypothetical galactic community. My conclusion? At best, Earth is a poor and underdeveloped second-tier power, behind the leading planetary systems in our next of the galaxy like 82 Eridani, though a long-range aspirant. At worst, Earth is to the Eridanites as, say, Iraq is to the United States: impoverished, technologically backwards (save for what techniques have been imported at high price by empire-builders), dominated by all manner of socially and politically retrograde ideologies and ideologues. The questionably optimistic vision claimed by the Federation of Star Trek--the Borg-like assimilation of worlds and entire civilizations into a sophisticated and prosperous and benevolent and technologically advanced framework, for the mutual benefit of all--has always seemed questionable to me. Our own international organizations hear on Earth, after all, tend to be organized on rather more practical and less high-minded lines.
Star Trek: First Contact was an enjoyable science-fiction/action movie. It pitted the Enterprise-D's crew (now on the Enterprise-E) against the Borg. As importantly, it filled in a historical gap in the Star Trek history, by revealing something of the nature of the Earth's 21st century troubles and introducing our saviours the Vulcans. Earth was devastated, four hundred million dead after a nuclear war and civilization crumbling rather nicely; the first warp ship was a converted missile. Earth was a mess. You don't have to believe just that film. Look at "Encounter at Farpoint," where Picard and several subordinates are transported to a court of the "post-apocalyptic horror," where United Nations human-rights conventions have been cheerfully revoked, where judges make unfair summary decisions in front of jeering crowds, and where drugged security guards stand at attention cradling their automatic rifles in their arms.
And yet, a constant theme throughout Enterprise is that the Vulcans are being softly oppressive, that they're keeping Earth from fulfilling its true destiny, that they're overprotective parents.
Hasn't it occurred to any of the writers that the Vulcans are right to be suspicious of the upstart Earthlings? The average Vulcan lifespan is three centuries, after all; most of the Vulcans alive at the time of the launch of Enterprise would have remembered the news bulletins indicated that, look, this minor world that had just destroyed its civilization in an orgy of genocidal global warfare has just developed warp drive, and we have to intervene now to prevent said world from becoming a still-more-dystopic nest of interstellar pirates with warp drive. For that matter, the global nuclear devastation and the long period of reconstruction would have been well within the memories of most of the humans, with exterminated populations and devastated lives still rising uncontrollably in Earth's collective memory. Look at how the memory of the Second World War has ineradicably transformed interstate relations and popular culture at all levels in Europe and Asia and the entire world to one degree or another.
And yet, I never picked up on any sign of this inevitable angst. Even when the crew of the Enterprise investigated worlds on the brink of catastrophe or ships that had hosted horrors, nothing. Relations with the Vulcans were always, and ahistorically, prickly and tense; not that this mattered, of course, since the Vulcans were shown as somewhat untrustworthy.
Roddenberry, starting in the original series, strictly limited the amount of interpersonal conflict visible on the Federation side, in order to demonstrate the utopian nature of the society descended from 20th century Earth. As crippling as this dictum was for drama, in the hands of people more competent than Brannon and Braga it could be controlled. As expressed on Enterprise in terms of a complete historical amnesia, it was uncontrollable. In the end, it doomed a potentially interesting series.
If only.
Enterprise, now, has been cancelled; more precisely, the show hasn't been picked up for a fifth season. Buffy survived the transition from one network to another, between the fifth and sixth seasons. Buffy also had a mass fan base, and a degree of critical appeal, that Enterprise lacks. All of the fan appeals posted on Trek Today will, I suspect, fail as surely as did the original series' third-season appeals almost four decades ago.
I started watching Enterprise in the first season, starting from the pilot "Broken Bow." I stopped watching early in the second season. Why? There were a variety of problems, and I'd rank bad script-writing for too many of the episodes as the second problem from my perspective. Yes, the first season of ST:TNG had some dodgy episodes, but the ratio went in a different and a worse direction on the first season of Enterprise. By the time that the Enterprise began its investigation of the Xindi in the third season, I'd given up on it.
No, for me the main problem with Enterprise was the way that it protrayed Earth's position in the galactic community. Back in May 2003, I wrote about Earth's status in a hypothetical galactic community. My conclusion? At best, Earth is a poor and underdeveloped second-tier power, behind the leading planetary systems in our next of the galaxy like 82 Eridani, though a long-range aspirant. At worst, Earth is to the Eridanites as, say, Iraq is to the United States: impoverished, technologically backwards (save for what techniques have been imported at high price by empire-builders), dominated by all manner of socially and politically retrograde ideologies and ideologues. The questionably optimistic vision claimed by the Federation of Star Trek--the Borg-like assimilation of worlds and entire civilizations into a sophisticated and prosperous and benevolent and technologically advanced framework, for the mutual benefit of all--has always seemed questionable to me. Our own international organizations hear on Earth, after all, tend to be organized on rather more practical and less high-minded lines.
Star Trek: First Contact was an enjoyable science-fiction/action movie. It pitted the Enterprise-D's crew (now on the Enterprise-E) against the Borg. As importantly, it filled in a historical gap in the Star Trek history, by revealing something of the nature of the Earth's 21st century troubles and introducing our saviours the Vulcans. Earth was devastated, four hundred million dead after a nuclear war and civilization crumbling rather nicely; the first warp ship was a converted missile. Earth was a mess. You don't have to believe just that film. Look at "Encounter at Farpoint," where Picard and several subordinates are transported to a court of the "post-apocalyptic horror," where United Nations human-rights conventions have been cheerfully revoked, where judges make unfair summary decisions in front of jeering crowds, and where drugged security guards stand at attention cradling their automatic rifles in their arms.
And yet, a constant theme throughout Enterprise is that the Vulcans are being softly oppressive, that they're keeping Earth from fulfilling its true destiny, that they're overprotective parents.
Hasn't it occurred to any of the writers that the Vulcans are right to be suspicious of the upstart Earthlings? The average Vulcan lifespan is three centuries, after all; most of the Vulcans alive at the time of the launch of Enterprise would have remembered the news bulletins indicated that, look, this minor world that had just destroyed its civilization in an orgy of genocidal global warfare has just developed warp drive, and we have to intervene now to prevent said world from becoming a still-more-dystopic nest of interstellar pirates with warp drive. For that matter, the global nuclear devastation and the long period of reconstruction would have been well within the memories of most of the humans, with exterminated populations and devastated lives still rising uncontrollably in Earth's collective memory. Look at how the memory of the Second World War has ineradicably transformed interstate relations and popular culture at all levels in Europe and Asia and the entire world to one degree or another.
And yet, I never picked up on any sign of this inevitable angst. Even when the crew of the Enterprise investigated worlds on the brink of catastrophe or ships that had hosted horrors, nothing. Relations with the Vulcans were always, and ahistorically, prickly and tense; not that this mattered, of course, since the Vulcans were shown as somewhat untrustworthy.
Roddenberry, starting in the original series, strictly limited the amount of interpersonal conflict visible on the Federation side, in order to demonstrate the utopian nature of the society descended from 20th century Earth. As crippling as this dictum was for drama, in the hands of people more competent than Brannon and Braga it could be controlled. As expressed on Enterprise in terms of a complete historical amnesia, it was uncontrollable. In the end, it doomed a potentially interesting series.
If only.
