To: Rick Berman, the writers, the janitor, or whoever the hell is beating the dead ‘Star Trek’ horse at Paramount Pictures
From: M-D November
Re: ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’
I’m done. (No, really. I’m DONE.)
I really wanted to like Enterprise. You came up with a great concept. You cast one of my favorite sci-fi actors as your Captain. You started out strong, probably better than any Trek series to come before. And then, at some point, you chose to shoot yourself in the foot with a phase pist…screw that. You shot yourself in the head with a phaser.
Set to KILL.
I tried to like Enterprise after you introduced all the time travel ‘temporal cold war’ crap. And after you teased sexual tension between Archer and T’Pol. And after you teased interesting plots. But Enterprise, like Voyager before it, suffers from poor writing, and worse forward planning. A great concept (like the remains of The Borg from First Contact being resurrected and trying to take control of Enterprise, for instance) gets wrapped up neatly in the last ten minutes of the episode with no mention of it thereafter. But even through poor forethought & too many Hoshi-centric episodes (and don’t get me wrong, I like the Hoshi character), I was willing to stick with you and see where you were leading.
Then you tore Earth a new space-hole. Introduced yet another alien species (actually, 5 species under one umbrella) that we’ll never hear from again ‘in the future’, and sent Enterprise off on a wild goose chase through a region of space we’ve ALSO never heard of. And then you sent Archer and T’Pol back in time to 2004.
Now, my Trek chronology is a little rusty. But the last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big Eugenics War in the late 1990s, resulting in unsavory characters like Khan Noonien Singh being loosed on an unsuspecting planet. Nuclear war followed, and mankind regrouped. A little rag-tag band of scrappy humans in Montana (including one Zefram Cochrane) break the warp barrier, and humanity is back on track, with a little Vulcan supervision.
I’ll grant you that Archer and T’Pol were sent to Detroit. But this version of 2004 didn’t look ‘war torn’ or ‘ravaged with fallout’. (Even for Detroit.) I would think that a post-nuclear war society wouldn’t have fast food joints open. Or very many running cars, let alone full streets of them. The people of this version of Detroit look…well, very much like people you would see every day. And unless I overslept at some point back during college, I don’t think I missed a nuclear holocaust. And that means you’ve just decided to say ‘fuck you’ to over 30 years of canon.
So, like I said, I’m done. Rumor is the show is going to get cancelled after season four anyway, so I guess my tune-out doesn’t matter much, in the global scheme of things. Do something worth watching – something that returns Trek to the kind of episodic quality circa DS9 – and we’ll talk.