Watching Enterprise.

[kane_magus]

I'm five episodes in now (if you count the two-parter first episode as two eps), and while I hear that it gets pretty bad later on, it's certainly off to a much, much better start than Voyager was by the same number of episodes in.

In the fifth episode of Enterprise, "Unexpected," they meet aliens with holodeck technology[1], Trip (a male character) gets pregnant, and a Klingon has a valid reason and opportunity to say "I can see my house from here." I genuinely enjoyed the episode, despite how ridiculously stupid it was, mostly because they knew this ep was silly and were kind of playing it up for the comedy, though not overly so. The ones that came before that were pretty good too.

The fifth episode of Voyager, by contrast, was "Phage," i.e. the episode that is at the very top of my personal "worst Voyager episodes ever" list and one that I've ranted about before (not only because it introduced the terribad Vidiians, which I have also ranted about quite a bit). It wasn't even "so bad, it's good" bad like the Enterprise ep was, mostly because they took the whole thing so seriously despite it being ludicrously "Spock's Brain"-level stupid. It was just bad, period, and the ones that came before were rather lackluster as well.

The only low marks I give Enterprise so far are for T'Pol being so... let's say overly antagonistic at times. Spock and Tuvok were never as bad as she has rather consistently been so far, even at their absolute Vulcan-y worst. Still, I guess I should cut her a bit of slack for being the first Vulcan to serve on a human ship. The worst thing about it, of course, is that T'Pol is usually 100% right. They'd have avoided whatever horrible problems that they encountered if they'd just listened to her, instead of being all "rah, rah, we're humans and we do things differently than Vulcans do, so screw your protocols and regulations." So I totally get why she'd be rather irritable, even for a Vulcan. Of course, the episodes would have been far less interesting if they had taken her advice, so... yeah. Still, it makes T'Pol look bad for being such a hardass, and it makes Archer and the others look stupid for just blatantly ignoring her concerns. I guess she's kind of like Worf in that respect, although Worf was rarely so "ugh, what are you stupid humans about to get us into this time" about it.

[1] - Two hundred or so years before the Federation gets it in TNG, though technically they did have something similar in Kirk's time, even if it was only ever seen in that one episode of the cartoon.

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

You know, with T'Pol being from a spacefaring race I can understand why she would be totally right most of the time. The kinds of mistakes Archer and them would make would usually be out of the legit ignorance humanity would have in their first manned deep space exploration, etc.

Of course, you'd think they'd realize this and listen to her, so yeah. >_>

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

To be fair to Archer and the rest, just about everyone (everyone human, anyway) tends to react poorly when a condescending know-it-all starts dictating what they should and shouldn't be doing, even if the know-it-all is exactly right. Especially when the things that she is advising gets in the way of their fun. They might have been a bit more inclined to listen to her if she wasn't so stuck up and holier-than-thou about it, though, and that's part of my problem with her. Even for a Vulcan, she's pretty snooty. I'm just hoping that her character arc over the course of the series (or, even better, just the first season) is to get the stick removed from her ass.

[tokoz.livejournal.com]

You make me wish I had netflix so I could keep up with your Trek viewing.

[sailorzeo.livejournal.com]

I loved the first season of Enterprise. Then things got weird. Is it on Netflix? I might have to go back and give it a rewatch.