I’m finding it a very root-beer-flavored entry in the franchise.
Enterprise is a lot better if you assume the crew is supposed to be inept, inexperienced and kinda stupid.
That makes zero sense considering humans have been exploring for centuries and already come up with protocols to handle the situations that seem to repeatedly cause issues for the NX-01 crew, but maybe thinking isn’t helpful for enjoying the show.
But hey! Look! Did you notice T’Pol has both TITS and ASS?? Incredible!
Every day this world gets dumber and dumber and yet I’m still surprised by how completely incompetent and unstable the main ENT crew (sans T’Pol and Phlox) are. It is something that even by 2025 standards - which are just about the lowest standards for stupidity possible - these people probably could probably not get through a week working at Walmart without getting fired for like fighting a stranger or sexually harassing their coworker.
Yes! They are so fallible, and believably so most the time, that I really appreciated their missteps.
The only time I didn’t appreciate thinking was when it decontamination time. I just pretend it is like watching an old b/w show with an embedded detergent ad: an unfortunate relic of its time that is just baked into it.
Decontamination time is fucking stupid. Like, the idea of it is good because we literally did that with Apollo, but in practice it’s just a chance to have semi-erotic fanfic play out as canon.
What’s so odd about those scenes is that the camera is far hornier than the actors. The crew is mostly very professional and chaste about decon, but the camera is leering at their bodies as they do it.
I drew the line at them dragging Porthos of all beings into it. Like they thought that would legitimize it.
The horniess of the early 2000s makes Gene’s vision of the Original Series seem downright conservative.
It’s been a long road
Getting from there to here 👌
For the first two seasons I would listen to right up I til the title card disappeared, just long enough for the first two verses and that sweet whiff of a strings section.
So you’re enjoying pro-slavery messages and zombie-apocalypse episodes in your star treks? Huh.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or if you’re literally referring to Storm Front and Impulse lol. I don’t know too many Storm Front fans but I thought Impulse was generally considered a good episode by the fan base.
I’m referring to the orion slaves episode (Bound), the cogenitor episode, and impulse, yes. And if people like impulse then they like a low-quality resident evil movie, not star trek.
Made me realise that I also forget to mention the episode with graphical teen incest scenes, too. And the various episodes with discrimination and sexual assault which are plenty.
Ya you make good points, but when I think like that I begin to strongly dislike alot of it.
My personal beef was always how the federation looks the other way at all the vassals and clients of the Klingon Empire. Just ignore their hordes of space helots I guess.
Ironically it is only in Enterprise where I finally see someone disgusted by it, but they technically aren’t the federation yet.
For those particular episodes you mentioned the cogenitor one was the one I really disliked. Some of the worst moralizing ever: think of the perils of unrestrained suffrage before you enlighten a slave!
Oh, right, the Orions. For sure Gene put quite a bit of his prejudices into the races, which then got amplified by early Trek writers’ tendency towards mono-cultures, and I think all of Star Trek has had trouble trying to figure out how to fix it. Enterprise decided to just lean into the stereotypes hard though for some reason. The Ferengi were an anti-semetic caricature in TNG until the DS9 writers worked to expand their culture on screen and move away from some of Gene’s more troubling stereotypes. Hell, they had an entire arc where Rom and Leela worked to literally dismantle the existing Ferengi culture into something more aligned with Starfleet ideals. It took until Lower Decks, a 30-some odd minute cartoon, for them to do something similar with the Orions. So I guess the point of this ramble is that, while nothing is gonna change these old episodes, if you wanna see some positive progress for the Orions I would highly recommend watching LD if you haven’t already!
