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February 6, 2005
Coffin, Meet Warp-Speed Nail
For the first time in 18 years, there will be no Star Trek series in production. (via Nick)
Did I see this coming? No. But then I wasn't even looking in the direction: I never did watch Enterprise on a regular basis. Initial reviews suggested that the series was so far away from the established TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY canon that to have watched it would have simply confused me, and such fears were indeed confirmed through the few episodes that I did manage to catch. Of course, the commercial floundering didn't give any extra incentives for the producers to stick to the script.
Of course, the whole concept of making a prequel to a television series made in the 1960s about the future was a tenuous one to begin with: everything in Enterprise looked cooler, neater, and cleaner than in the original Star Trek. Now, one can point out that the same problem exists in Episodes I to III in the Star Wars franchise, but the truth is that the Star Wars productions were movies to begin with, so they had considerably better production budgets. Seriously, have you actually noticed how fake things looked back in TOS, and how much things have improved since then?
Of course, it's not the first time continuity has been an issue. Voyager has done a lot of stupid non-Federation-eque things, but then it's always been possible to discount it as the way things work in the “wild west” of the Delta Quadrant. And discontinuities related to real-life technological improvements have always been (grudgingly) accepted in cases when the series was also moving forward in time: the Klingon Forehead Mystery, after all, has been left unresolved for decades. Alas, in a series whose premise is that the future is better, an improved past did not compute.
A digression: on the subject of Klingon foreheads, one of the redeeming qualities for Enterprise is that in two weeks, there will be an answer (spoilers) to that age-old question. At least there'll be one episode that should be worth watching, even if the plot turns out to be a piece of crap.
Looking back, it's hard to say whether Rick Berman and Brannon Braga has successfully run the Trek franchise into the ground, or whether the Roddenberry vision simply was too fancifully optimistic to begin with for any series based on it to survive for long. After all, DS9 was probably the darkest of the Trek series, and yet arguably the most enjoyable to watch. Reading the official UPN press release, the total lack of recognition that cancellation is (by definition) a bad thing seems to be an ironic mirror to the world that Roddenberry hoped we live in, or that Berman and Braga actually did reside.
Posted by Kelvin at February 6, 2005 2:19 AM
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