SF Signal: Why Did Enterprise End?

Why Did Enterprise End?

We have dueling views on the reasons why Enterprise failed to find a long term audience. First up, Rick Berman believes there is too much Trek on TV, resulting in oversaturation and, thus, a loss of audience. He also believes that the last Trek film, Nemesis, was a 'fine movie'. Berman also says, 'And it's become like a family. It's a very rare thing in our business, and we've spent a lot of time working together and learning together...". Well, speaking for me, I think that family became inbred and insular and couldn't, or wouldn't, reach out for an infusion of new thinking. We kept getting rehashes of previous stories and more technobabble. To me this is what killed Enterprise, the lame stories.

And Jolene Blalock, a lifelong ST fan, agrees with me. Sweet. I'll let Pete know when I get her phone number. But, in looking at this second article, Manny Coto's comments also bother me. He says, 'It's a genre that appeals to a certain type of individual, and there's not a lot of them'. I'm sorry Manny, I know you've done a decent job making Enterprise a better show in its last season, but you are wrong here. Enterprise pulled in almost 13 millions viewers for its premeir. I believe ST:TNG pulled in more than that on a regular basis. This tells me the audience is there for ST. What wasn't there was a compelling show. Enterprise could have done a lot with the birth of the Federation, instead we got more time travel, and as a show arc for crying out loud. That's why people left in droves, crappy stories. As Ms. Blalock says, 'The audience isn't stupid'.

Indeed.

The thing is that Berman and Braga are like the Emperor in the Emperor's New Clothes. They refuse to accept the fact that something is wrong and they it might be their fault. They won't accept any blame for it. Had it not been for the fact that Coto came in this year and started delivering on the promise of Enteprise (two seasons too late BTW), then I feel sure he (Coto) would be the Fred Frieberger of Enterprise. Frieberger came into TOS season three and many fans blame him for the final season being less than stellar. Not his fault that behind the scenes stuff hampered the show, including the long fuel between Shatner and Nimoy about who the star of the thing really was. I see a lot of this in Berman--he just won't say, "Hey, we screwed it up that second year and drove away the audience."

Or that he drove the movie franchise into the ground.

Berman needs to have done with him what they did with Roddenberry toward the end of his life...they need to put him in an office where he can send out memos but he needs to not have any direct involvement in the day to to day running of Star Trek ever again...

Posted by Michael on Thursday May 05, 2005 at 4:03 PM

My two bits...

I watched the premiere with a friend of mine, and we were both disgusted by their pulling out the transporter that soon - that was premature ejaculation, in my view. They should've kept transporting humans in their back pocket until at least mid-season.

The theme. Although the backing montage is pretty cool, that theme is the worst kind of cheesy crap - it's basically Cheap Trick's "The Flame" with cookie cutter affirmation lyrics. Things were not improved by the sped-up tape in the second season, or the folky version for 3&4. The theme song, more than anything else, is what turned me off Enterprise.

The crew were alright, overall, except for Archer, Reed, Tucker and Mayweather (I guess four makes it not so much good overall). They were all decent actors and their characters were fairly well-constructed, but look at the crew on TNG: every one of them was instantly recognizable through some kind of immediately notable thing: LaForge's visor, Troi's empathic ability, Worf and Data being completely unique looking, etc. That worked, and gave everyone something instant to hang their brains on, and the only plain ol human male was Picard himself. Actually... I guess I'm forgetting Riker, but he sucks, so whatever.

Enterprise, conversely, had FOUR human males with no special dis/abilities on the main crew, and as a result the three besides Archer (who was easily discernable by his position and the fact that he's Scott Bakula, and thus recognizable to SF tv fans) kind of blurred together. It took me half of season one to get straight that Oooohk, Reed is Worf's counterpart, Tucker is Scotty, and Mayweather is... a fag.

Seriously, am I the only one who sees that Mayweather is a total closet case? I'm not saying this as a bad thing, at least, it doesn't make Mayweather bad - it makes the producers bad, in that apparently having an openly gay character is still a little too crazy for the Star Trek universe. I guess we still need to keep those old gay stereotypes in the holster so that we have one thing to hate the gymnastically-inclined Suliban for. And wouldn't that have been a great secondary plot for the episode where Mayweather goes back to his family's ship? Instead of facing his father's death, he could've faced his father himself and said he's here, he's queer... you get the idea. Maybe that's why he left to join starfleet. But I digress.

So yeah, too many human males on the crew.

All that being said, I disagree about the writing. One thing I really like about the show is that in season three, they finally took a cue from Babylon 5 and developed a long story arc. Even if it wasn't that well done (I do admit that I was not a habitual watcher of DS9 or Voyager, so perhaps what I'm seeing for for the first time is actually being done for the third), the effort alone is worthy of commendation, and even if time travel is old news, I still thought it was put together pretty well, for the most part. The spheres were a pretty cool idea, I thought. I'm really glad that whole nazis/Bobby Baccala thing only lasted two eps though. I'm about halfway through season four now, and I wish it could keep going. It seems to me that Enterprise was just hitting its stride when it got killed, and that's a damn shame.

Posted by J. Tode on Tuesday June 13, 2006 at 11:39 PM