Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

L50LasPak said:
Personally, I do agree it was out of character for Wesley to join Starfleet. He's written as a boy genius, and completely insufferable at that. Intelligent, full of themselves, highly egotistical people generally have a hatred or at least strong resentment for authority. Or at least they used to, its kind of disturbing how that seems to have been suddenly reversed in recent decades.
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That describes Picard too. At least in his youth.
 
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L50LasPak said:
I dunno if I would describe Picard as a boy genius to be honest. Intelligent yes, but he wasn't regularly inventing shit in a lab like Wesley was. Young Picard was definitely boisterous and full of bravado though.
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Not the genius part, but he had little or no regard for authority or tradition.
 
Travoltron said:
The version of TOS airing on most stations is the HD version. It's mostly pretty good. But occasionally, flaws are revealed.
My mom was watching an HD episode and said, "The Enterprise doesn't look as good as I remember." You can kind of tell all the sets and props are made of wood.

The technology for upscaling just isn't there yet. But I suppose it's going to be necessary for all those old 70s and 80s sitcoms that shot on video tape. Most of those look like absolute garbage now in SD.
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That's the "problem" with HD. It's easier to see how cheap those sets were with the increased detail and clarity. When these episodes were originally aired, and for decades afterward, the chintziness of the show wasn't nearly as easy to see due to the lower definition of the TVs used to watch them, not to mention the quality of syndicated TV print dupes.

Those shows shot on videotape will always look comparatively crappy next to shows shot on film.
 
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I finally finished up Enterprise.

It's really a shame, because there is legit a lot of great material in the series. The first two seasons were solid overall, I thought the third season was a real slog to get through, although it randomly had two or three of the best episodes of the series right in the middle of it. I really liked the format of season 4. I thought the two-part episodes worked really well and were a happy medium between singular self-contained episodes and the mystery box writing they do today where every episode ends on a cliff hanger. I also liked how they were clearly setting up the chess pieces to get everything in place for the original series.

That last episode though, bruh, what the fuck was that? The TNG stuff was totally unnecessary and the writing was incredibly lazy. All of a sudden chef is the one everyone confides in? What? We have clearly seen Dr. Phlox is who everyone confided in throughout the series. Trip just blows the shit out of himself for no reason? Why? They had a ship full of Macos and only like two guys go to check it out when there's a boarding party?

It all just stinks of stuff that was done to pop a quick rating at the time.

After watching the whole thing I can only conclude the following reasons why it was an abysmal failure:

1) It came out at the end of a long string of Star Trek TV series and theatrical releases and people where just sick of Star Trek. There had been some Star Trek series on the air continuously for like 20 years at the time Enterprise ended.

2) The theme song is atrocious and probably drove some people away.
 
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Never Scored said:
That last episode though, bruh, what the fuck was that? The TNG stuff was totally unnecessary and the writing was incredibly lazy. All of a sudden chef is the one everyone confides in? What? We have clearly seen Dr. Phlox is who everyone confided in throughout the series. Trip just blows the shit out of himself for no reason? Why? They had a ship full of Macos and only like two guys go to check it out when there's a boarding party?

It all just stinks of stuff that was done to pop a quick rating at the time.
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Now you know why everyone was pissed at Braga. That series finale was a huge insult.
 
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Never Scored said:
It all just stinks of stuff that was done to pop a quick rating at the time.
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VOY and ENT were tethered to a network. UPN's demo was skewed less toward sci-fi and more toward low-brow entertainment. That is why we got cameos by The Rock and Big Show, as UPN hosted WWE at the time.

So ENT not only had to contend with network demands, like getting more visually-appealing actors, but also expectations from an audience who weren't predisposed to liking Star Trek.

It will never grow on me, like VOY grew on me over the years. *peeks up from tea cup while taking a sip*

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Picard s2e05
Did you know that the key to all of this is Jay-El's ancestor, the pilot of the Europa mission? Before you say "who is he?", it's a she. She's not just a random woman, she's super smart (learned herself to sail at 10, chess master at 13, and became a test pilot, she was so great at it that NASA couldn't wait to hire her for their mission) but she is not a Mary Sue, she has a weakness: she's a woman she suffers from depression.
It looks like they're just ripping-off First Contact now.
 
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Miller said:
Picard s2e05
Did you know that the key to all of this is Jay-El's ancestor, the pilot of the Europa mission? Before you say "who is he?", it's a she. She's not just a random woman, she's super smart (learned herself to sail at 10, chess master at 13, and became a test pilot, she was so great at it that NASA couldn't wait to hire her for their mission) but she is not a Mary Sue, she has a weakness: she's a woman she suffers from depression.
It looks like they're just ripping-off First Contact now.
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Are we not certain that one of the producers isn't just typing "woke feminist bullshit" into an AI and using whatever it shits out? This is some paint-by-numbers/bingo card NPC trash.
 
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JamesFargo said:
VOY and ENT were tethered to a network. UPN's demo was skewed less toward sci-fi and more toward low-brow entertainment. That is why we got guest-appearances by The Rock and Big Show, as UPN hosted WWE at the time. So it not only had to contend with network demands, like getting more visually-appealing actors, but also expectations from an audience who weren't predisposed to liking Star Trek.

It will never grow on me, like VOY grew on me over the years. *peeks up from tea cup while taking a sip*

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An advantage Voyager had that I'm realizing ENT didn't in retrospect is just how much money that series had to light on fire every week. There is literally a brand new ship or alien design almost every week. Sometimes three new ship designs. Year of Hell had six, in just a single two part episode. Because the writers didn't give a shit, the plot often flies off the rails with some really fantastical shit that doesn't really belong in Star Trek but stands out in retrospect because its at least something different. Its almost like watching someone's Spelljammer campaign. Voyager is a lot of things, but its rarely dull.

ENT strains against the limitations of its budget almost constantly. Either the producers or the executives clearly thought somewhere along the line that making a more oldstyle Trek meant they would be able to work with a smaller budget, but the opposite is kind of true when you think about it. You don't need a very complex set to show futuristic technology because nobody really knows exactly what that will look like, but near-future tech is close enough to reality that you need more complex and detailed set designs because even Joe Average can tell right away that it's fake and shitty if you cheap out.

I suspect the writers also put in less work or perhaps had tighter schedules to deliver scripts by. Also it would take me a lot of analysis to prove this point 100%, but I don't recall Enterprise's camerawork or shot composition being all that great. That seems like a stupid thing to nitpick, but every once in awhile Voyager would come out of the gate swinging with something like this:


Like shit, that's an awesome opening. Its a simple idea, just show the attack from the Borg perspective, but it adds so much personality to the teaser. A lot of the shots in Enterprise are very simple and formulaic, flat perspective shots that just show X character doing X thing. Which, to be fair, was a lot of what TOS had to do and especially TNG did. I dunno if Enterprise just had more inexperienced directors or if there was a time crunch or something, but there's a marked difference in the way something like DS9 and Voyager were shot and the way Enterprise was shot.
 
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GloryHole Stalker said:
That's the "problem" with HD. It's easier to see how cheap those sets were with the increased detail and clarity. When these episodes were originally aired, and for decades afterward, the chintziness of the show wasn't nearly as easy to see due to the lower definition of the TVs used to watch them, not to mention the quality of syndicated TV print dupes.

Those shows shot on videotape will always look comparatively crappy next to shows shot on film.
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I don't know, some of the monsters in TOS were almost Doctor Who levels of cheesy, even watched on a TV with a grainy picture from an antenna barely picking it up from a distant station.
 
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