Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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In the end Star Trek Enterprise was merely a superhero comic book and that was not a good thing

I�ve been a poor watcher of Enterprise, only occasionally bothering to watch it, or for that matter even remembering that it was on in the first place. There were problems with the show, things such as boring stories and uninteresting characters, though those eventually could have been solved, in the end it was possibly the very basic premise of the show, or rather viewers and fans (not necessarily the same thing) reactions to the premise that was an insurmountable problem.

I once had a conversation with a trekker guy about Voyager before it aired where he only half facetiously told me that the problem with the new show was that it couldn�t be summed up as a western. Supposedly Gene Roddenberry sold the original series as Wagon Train to the stars (by extension, the next generation was as well). Thus DS9 was the story of a troubled sheriff and his young son coming to town to bring the law, and Voyager was�well that was the problem. He believed the show would be bad because there was no TV western about a group of lost pioneers heading back east. In this frame of mind, Enterprise could have been the Star Trek that was Lewis & Clark exploring the west. I don�t think there was a Lewis & Clark TV show, but by this guy�s theory looking back at Treks fictional history should have worked.

It�s easy enough to imagine why the folks in charge of such things would imagine that doing a �historical� version of a Star Trek show would be a good thing. Aside from the (now obviously false) idea that it would be easier to do (no new alien races, no new ideas, merely filling out the back story), it plays perfectly into the nostalgic and essentially cannibalistic trend going on in American entertainment. War, stress, conflict, fear, economics, whatever the underlying cause, as a culture we�ve embraced recycled and reformatted ideas, giving us things like new �serious� remakes of shlocky horror movies, musicals and movies rebirthing each other, the new serious Battlestar Galactica, and even Enterprise, a nostalgic look back to an imaginary history.

It�s easy to imagine that it should have worked, but well, before it even aired it was criticized. Maybe people are getting tired of false nostalgia, or maybe Star Trek fans are just as capable as trashing what they love and supposedly wish to promote as much as comic book fans, or maybe it was just not a very good show.

Despite the problems, it chugged along at least for a little while, trying to solve the problem of how to attract new viewers without losing the old. These attempts to boost ratings ultimately bored me. Showing us a Star Trek influenced by the attacks of 9/11 might have had a chance of being mildly interesting, but making it the basis of the entire third season was overkill. Tying it into the ongoing temporal cold war storyline, and having everyone be all angry, bitter, depressed, and drug addicted because �this is serious, this is war,� killed a relatively weak premise and got me in the habit of not routinely watching the program.

This last seasons� idea at boosting ratings by boosting nostalgia, also didn�t interest me that much. I saw the Brent Spinner as his own ancestor episodes, and more or less sort of liked them, only because I like Brent Spinner as an actor. The story itself would have been more interesting to me if they had spent more time telling us something new rather than trying to make fans go �that was so cool! It was like stuff from Space Seed, and it even had an homage to Star Trek II, the best movie of them ALL!�

I�ve read online that people fans thought the �why klingons had bumpy heads, then didn�t, then did again� story was great. I only saw part of the second episode, so I can�t really comment other than to remark that differences in the make up budget made for great storytelling?

In the end catering to fans may have given the show some good word, but not good viewers. So, efforts at improving ratings by sort of doing something new, and by sort of doing something old failed. I was disappointed with the final episode because it seemed to be a distillation of everything I wasn�t enjoying with the show. More so, it also had all the markings of a clich� �big event� superhero comic book, making it seem terrible rather than merely uninteresting.

A big event comic book will have characters from other books show up, because the event is just so big! Even if all they do is stand around in a crowd scene and do nothing. In this case that means what�s their faces, the actors who play Riker and Troi (which well, I�m sorry but as an attempt at big name draw is kind of sad) show up and then proceed to not really do very much. Because of the way the story was set up with their involvement, their guest appearance turned the finale into an episode of the next generation, making it seem like the producers wanted to distance themselves from Enterprise and remind the views of when Star Trek was �good,� which again is more pointless nostalgia.

Another comic book clich� is dependence on obscure facts from earlier stories, allowing fans who follow the series more closely to feel smug and superior because they know the reference, though this unintentionally puts off newer readers, but this is an event book that they have to buy anyway so who cares. In this case it made the entire show Ricker-centric (always a sign of a weak Next Generation episode) referencing a story that I don�t even want to bother figuring out how long ago it aired.

A third clich� is death to demonstrate how serious the story is. Unfortunately, instead of being seen as hackneyed and cheap, killing off the main character�s wife or girlfriend is a common way of providing a (male preferably white) superhero with some angst and death, because nothing is more poignant than a dead white woman. Interestingly it seems that the closest thing captain Archer had to a girlfriend was Mr. Tucker. Given my fondness for the Archer/Trip slash paring, this oddly seems like a good thing, though well, it�s not, as Trip�s now dead. Besides he died doing something �heroic� if stupid, which is more than most superhero female significant others who only manage to last long enough to get raped then burned alive or stuffed into a refrigerator.

Ultimately death in comics is pointless as was Trips. It was set up that Ricker would learn something from Trip�s sacrifice, but I wasn�t quite too clear on how dying while protecting your Captain related to taking the moral high ground and telling the truth even when you�ll be hurt by the consequences (yes, I�m geeky enough to remember the Phoenix episode�it was a stronger story before this add-on back story).

In the end, all the episode did for me was make me not mind that the show was over and that at least for a little while Trek is gone. Which is unfortunate, because for the most part, even with all its problems, I sort of liked the show, and not merely because I have a weakness for shirtless Scott Bacula, or Archer/Trip slash fic. Oh well, fan fic seems to be answer to a lot of science fiction shows lately.

More later,

nico

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