I heard, through an unlikely channel, that UPN is cancelling “Star Trek: Enterprise.” There are links to the news all over the web (Google “star trek enterprise cancelled”), but I learned it when reading this morning’s Sheldon.
I may need to get out more.
In one of the related articles (Link!) Executive Producer Rick Berman said they’ve done 624 hours of Star Trek in the last 18 years. I’m not sure if he means episodes or actual sixty-minute hours. Depending on that crucial piece of information, you could, in theory, watch Star Trek shows for between 18 and 26 days straight, with no breaks for sleep, snacks, or stool.
By contrast, you can watch the entire Star Wars franchise in about 10 hours. No, I’m not counting the many excellent games, nor am I counting the books set in the Extended Universe. And no, I’m not counting the 1978 Christmas Special, or the made-for-TV Ewok movie, either. Rolling the TV stuff in brings the total to just under 14 hours, and (depending on who you talk to) raises the entertainment value of those 14 hours significantly.
Anyway… no more Star Trek. What can I say? I never watched even a single episode of Enterprise, and missed out on pretty much all of DS9 and Voyager, too. I did watch every last episode of ST:TNG back when Fox ran them in order in 1994/1995, and those evenings were, interestingly enough, capped off with an hour or two of PC gaming — “X-Wing Fighter” and “Tie Fighter” from the fledgling behemoth game company “Lucasarts.”
Me == Geek.
Forgetting Star Wars Cartoons…
Not that I even recall all that much about them, myself, but I do recall an animated Star Wars based cartoon… I want to say the late eighties or early nineties… Ah! IMDB.com saves the day. The name of the show was Droids, and it was in 1985. Whoa… twenty years. I don’t quite feel old, but I have my moments…
But then again, Berman didn’t count the original series or the animated series in his calculations, either, so… who cares? I’m nit-picking again, right? No worries…
Re: Forgetting Star Wars Cartoons…
Don’t forget the Ewok cartoon too – I think it did pretty well if I recall, a couple of years anyway. I spent way too many Saturday mornings watching it when I was a kid. =)
Re: Forgetting Star Wars Cartoons…
My mother actually banned me from watching the Ewok cartoon because they used magic to fight their enemies and God said magic is bad.
*sigh*
Silly parents
Re: Forgetting Star Wars Cartoons…
Sigh. I hate when parents don’t actually watch the shows that they forbid their kids from watching. There wasn’t much magic in it, and it was a very tame show.
That’s a lot of Trek, any way you look at it. =)
I’m kind of glad Enterprise was cancelled… I have also watched every episode of TNG, plus a good chunk of both DS9 and Voyager. Enterprise irritated me. I think, speaking purely geekishly, that the Star Trek universe became way too much about ratings after TNG (Hey! What can we do to make our target 18-34 male audience watch more Trek? Oooh… let’s add some more hot alien chicks, wars, etc) and less about the social commentary that made TOS and TNG (to a lesser degree) so great.
Well Roddenberry died. Are you suprised that as time passed, less and less of his original vision remained, and more and more of the corporate executives idea of committee creativity wandered through?
I watched every single episode of TNG (yes, including “Farce of nature”, the worst episode ever and this includes taking the entire first season into account). I watched maybe the first five seasons of DS9. I watched about a season of Voyager until the stupid episode where they wandered through the event horizon of a black hole without noticing (I went through the physics of what’s wrong with this ina livejournal post once… This one: http://www.livejournal.com/users/landley/3674.html ).
I think I watched about three episodes of enterprise, back when it first came on, and then lost interest. Nothing major could happen. Forget a “best of both worlds” style bet the federation thing, how about a new technological discovery or important new species? Any time we saw ANYTHING we hadn’t seen before, they had to explain why we hadn’t seen it in the “later” series. Because we knew the future.
Now this is the IDEAL for network executives who want to prevent change and reduce risk while milking the cash cow of an established property. They can take all the old established things and re-introduce them all and make a big deal out of each one. Woo! But for the fans, it starts out old and gets tired really quick.
Rob
I gave up on Voyager after the Amelia Earhart episode. The truck starting and running was bad enough, the sight of Voyager balanced on those ridiculous landing legs was worse, and the way nobody chose to stay behind on the planet and have an actual life was the final straw. The doctor was cool, though.
Enterprise lasted about four episodes for me. There was an episode where they found a derelict alien ship and another (different-looking) alien ship cruised up and Archer’s hail to them was essentially: “Hello, aliens we’ve never met and about whose motives and attitudes towards other species we have no clue, but who clearly have much higher technology than us. We’re a newly warp-capable race; in fact, this is our only warp-capable ship. The entire rest of our species can be found at the location we’re sending over now.” Gosh, it’s a good thing the aliens weren’t conquerers or genocidal or anything….
(I did actually give Enterprise one more try, but that turned out to be the episode where the guy got pregnant from sticking his hands in glowing cat litter. After that, I didn’t even come back to watch the hot Vulcan chick smear blue goop all over herself.)
Dav2.718
Actually, the main thing that irritated me about Enterprise was that they tossed the established chronology of the Trek universe completely out the window. I used to be a hardcore fan, and it drove me nuts when they’d, for example, introduce the Ferengi in Enterprise after establishing in TNG that no one had ever seen/communicated with them before – they’re kind of a distinctive species in appearance as well as ideology. =) Same with the introduction of the Klingons and how that was established in TOS. *shrug* They lost my interest after things like that, despite that nothing new could happen. I still would have watched to see how they presented the expected.
I stopped watching DS9 around season 5 too… bringing Warf on was a nod to the Klingon Interest Groups and the whole war thing was irritating. As for Voyager tossing physics out the window, I noticed quite a bit of that in that series. Stupid stupid. Good post about that, and the comment about it being hard to hug a tree in space with “Force of Nature” cracked me up. =)
As for Roddenberry’s death, no, I’m not surprised that it’s changed, I’m just sad that so much of his original vision has been lost through the years. I hate that they felt they had to sell out the message to make a few extra bucks, but I guess that’s the modern world for you.
Not that you have time for it now, but if you want to play the very best space shooter sim in the X-Wing and TIE Fighter style, try out Freespace 2.
It’s out of print, but available here:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4150
and they released the source code and there are some truly spiffy updated graphics available for it.
http://www.3dactionplanet.com/hlp/hosted/scp/
It’s a truly epic story unfolding. Starting with Freespace (available as a free addon to Freespace 2), and going through several campaigns. In the game you’re a fighter pilot, sometimes doing rather spectacular things, but always being a cog in the machinery. Important, but not truly pivotal – the war is much, much bigger than that. And the unfolding story and background are actually captivating, and tend to grab hold.
Worth a look, but it’s dangerous; mighty addictive stuff.
I gave up on Enterprise after the first few episodes.
I can’t remember why, but I started watching it again.
The last couple seasons have actually been pretty decent.
Though, like the original series, I tend to fast forward
through some of the more painful bits.
Enterprise; a study in replicative fading.
I had given up on Enterprise after the first few episodes, only to drag myself back and watch so long as it was running.
Despite the horrifying lack of continuity ( which many of us would have gladly fixed, for far less than they paid their writing staff, well amybe that was the problem:), bad writing, characterization, etc. I felt as long as they were filming, there was hope.
In that vein, I`ve actually seen a few glimmers of character development, and the occassionally well rendered scene. But yeah, overall, it`s stinking up what was once a fine vision by Rodenberry.
ST was never about hard sci-fi, it was about people and societies, the grand struggle of enlightenment vs. stagnation. War is a part of that struggle, as inevitable as the things that drive wars, greed, avarice, culture memes, resource competition.
A prequel type Trek series would have been difficult in the extreme for Hellywood (mispelling intentional this time) to do well. Virtually impossible since it was done in corp. boardrooms and not led by a visionary anymore.
I used to sneer at the term “space opera”.
Babylon 5 got it right in so many ways that the last few Trek franchise`s have failed.
After being subjected to the four R`s of bad sci-fi ( Rayguns, Rockets, Robots and now Racey costumes:) I`m ready for plot driven drama and less demographic driven swill.
I would have give more props for a few seasons of Space: Above and Beyond. Who remembers “The Angriest Angel” episode? A tank waxing philosophical while fighting a war against aliens and his own race/ culture? ( I must admit I first dismissed it as ‘90210-in-space’:)
It`s sad to see any scifi show go the way of the Dodo, but in Enterprise`s case it may be for the best.
As far as Enterprise’s departure, this is probably the best thing that could hapepn to Trek for a while – they really do need to stop producing that show if they want to go into more Star Trek movies, or at least to refresh the public’s interest after spamming them with Star Trek series’ and movies for the past six or seven years.
DS9 did improve towards the very end, especially in the last two seasons; the writing did get a bit sharper with the ending of the war, even if they played up the whole metaphysical aspects with the Prophets. Voyager was hit or miss, though there were episodes I definitely enjoyed (“Pathfinder”, “One Small Step”, and “Life Line”) in the last two seasons. Even in the first two seasons there were things worth watching (“Death Wish”), though things didn’t REALLY get better till Season 3. Then took a nosedive with the first season that had Seven of Nine.
Enterprise, on the other hand, tramples all over my Trek-love and spits on it. It annoyed the detail and canon-lovers with its introduction of the Klingons at the very beginning of the series (with bumpy foreheads – even DS9 didn’t digitally edit their Klingons in ‘Trials and Tribblelations’), then the Ferengi, then the proto-Borg. They misused Blalock since the very beginning with the showe–er, decontamination scene, and then redid pretty much every idea from the previous few series (getting crewmembers pregnant with alien children, the ‘rescue my ship from hijackers’, ‘time travel wars’) without adding much to it.
On top of this, we’ve been spammed with Trek since 1997-1998 with three series running one after (or atop) another, including several forgettable TNG movies. The public has been exposed to so much Trek that they’re probably sick of it; and I know I am. HEll, Star Wars hasn’t been this glutted in terms of material, even including all the NJO stuff or the games. Giving it a break of five or so years may help the property in general, at least so that people forget all the ‘bad’ things about it and get nostalgic again.
Besides, they can probably get an audience in for a movie that way. 😀
Ah, there were two episodes I missed; “Message In A Bottle” and “Timeless”.