Comment Stream

Re: ENT S1: Fight or Flight

Archer _is_ a bad captain and a bad leader, by any standard.

Contrary to what people think, as a leader you don't do whatever you please, you allow the people around you to excel at what they do. Archer listens to literally no one. He discards the advice of his science officer, and jeopardizes crew and humankind. He scoffs at his security officer for doing his job: deciding what kind of protection they need on an away mission.

And all characters are written as borderline idiots, not to mention Starfleet which sends out a spaceship without even the most basic of protocols.

Archer is an impulsive nut job. He likes to insult his science officer because she is a Vulcans, and he hates Vulcans. He is nothing but a racist.

The science officer T'Pol is right all the time, but an arrogant prick. Arrogance is an emotion, Vulcans repress their emotions, they don't express them. But I must admit: Vulcans are written as obnoxious obstacles in this series.

The chief engineer is a little kid, whining to go with his buddy instead of doing his job he's asked to do.

The armory officer is a danger to his surroundings by wanting to blow up everything instead of using common sense or electronics to open a hatch.

The comm officer isn't a teacher by nature, as Jammer suggests, but a starfleet officer. She went through a starfleet training and education for years, to join, umm, to... what's the purpose of STARfleet, again? Yeah, right, to teach gibberish clicking sounds in the jungle. Or was it about SPACE and SPACE EXPLORATION?
"I went to medical school but I faint the moment I see a drop of blood." That was a good decision.

And Phlox is a creep. Did you see that scene in the mess hall with Tucker?

I know it's a story, but I wonder why aliens would search other aliens to pump them out for their body fluids. I think it's utterly ridiculous. A civilization able to cross space has access to such vast command of energy and technology it would be idiotic to harvest it in space instead of creating it at home. But again, that's just a nitpick.

An actual depiction of life in space would be boring as hell for the spectator. Like watching astronauts preparing for an EVA aboard the ISS. Talking about protocols and common sense, we should Archer force to look at those preparations for an hour or so, together with his superiors back home. That should teach them a few basics.

At the end there's no indication of a learning curve. Archer has just escaped mass annihilation and a possible attack on Earth but will continue to ignore and humiliate T'Pol.
Now that is a good premise for the prequel the producers told it would be.

A few episodes in Enterprise have shown the potential of a prequel show, in which people learn from mistakes and other things that happen of don't happen, and explain why the so called "future" star trek inhabitants behave like they behave.
After all, the audience didn't come up with the prequel idea. The producers did. And after saying that, they did everything to ridicule their own premise. I wonder why you would blurt out such nonsense in the first place if you knew you weren't going to stick to your own ideas.

Regardless of that, the show looks great. The CGI is still amazing even for today's standards.

I'm not much into "canon" and "star trek bible". But I ofter have the feeling that there was so much possible and so little opportunity grabbed. Often I feel cynicism thinking about what Enterprise could have been. Too bad.