Watching: 24 - there is something oddly reassuring about seeing Jack Bauer massacre hapless thugs going about their job, but possibly the best part of the penultimate episode of the final season comes when we don't even have to see the mass murder of a room full of Russian diplomats, we just know Jack did us proud and those godless commie fucks got what was overdue.
Enterprise season 1 - I recently rewatched seasons 3 and 4 and assumed I'd judged the show too harshly first time around, but going further back to view the debut season, I can see that I'd really just had a bad opinion of the series by the time I'd got to 3 and 4, and the uniformly terrible first 9 episodes really ram that home - they aren't just bad, they're aggressively terrible, from the awful 'Unexpected' (where a crewman becomes space-pregnant and acts in a sitcom manner that would be offensive even if you saw it on a Benny Hill rerun, then tracks down his babymomma because he can't raise the kids himself so he dumps them on her and buggers off never to even mention them again), to the aimless, padded, self-referential and continuity-masturbatory pilot where we're assured this is a different kind of Star Trek yet everything works just the same as the last couple of decades of Trek, right down to 'armor' that erodes by percentages in just the same way shields do on all the other shows. How does that even work anyway - someone says "Armor is down to 50 percent!", does that mean that half the hull plating is gone? Why don't aliens just shoot the exposed bits of hull instead of looking for all the other bits of armor to shoot off before they try destroying the ship? And what in the name of blue Jesus was with that 'decontamination' scene? They aren't even trying to pretend it's so we can look at a guy rub oil on a woman's tits. Don't get me wrong, Jolene Blalock is crazy hot, but they don't even try to come up with a plausible reason for it to be in the episode, and call me old-fashioned, but this does nothing for me for the same reason most porn doesn't - it's not me doing it and that makes me feel sad.
Possibly the remaining episodes will be better, but - apart from vague memories of an episode about the doctor that was so painfully unfunny that it could give AIDS cancer - they can't really get much worse, and I do recall my utter disappointment in the season finale with the Captain transported to an unfamiliar place and which ends in a tracking shot that pulls back to reveal he's on a post-apocalyptic Earth, rather than ending with a close up on Scott Bakula's face as he says "Oh boy!"
Fail, Enterprise. Weapons-grade FAIL.
I started to watch Enterprise because I was told it was a hark back to the old school heroics of the Captain Kirk era Trek. I was immensely disappointed to discover that it was nothing more than a collection of re-hashed Next Generation plots. In fact, it felt like they were trying desperately to ignore the original series, and pretend it never happened. It's almost as if they're determined to remove all the fun aspects of the franchise...
ReplyDeleteThey (Enterprise producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga) tended to nick more from DS9 - which is a bit of a cheek considering that was the one modern Trek show that succeeded without them.
ReplyDeleteApparently falling ratings got them sidelined (in favor of writers and producers from other genre offerings like 24) by the third season, and if that's the case you can really see it onscreen - they even have a cowboy episode! It wasn't great and got really preachy in the second half, but still - COWBOYS IN SPACE.