Some are still good though.
(midwest.social)
Risa: Your Home Away from SpacedockI think the modern writers have forgotten that some of those gimmick episodes of TOS happened because they had a shoestring budget and had to reuse whatever cowboy or city set was available.
TOS barely survived airing, no budget, became iconic, TNG, DS9, VOY, all well beloved, ENT was good if you are open minded.
Nutrek: let's keep doing the first one! Nobody cares about.. the story.
Hope new Orville season gets released soon.
Season 1 of TNG... oof, just... painful to watch. Amazing how it found its voice/characters at all
https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65941374/
I think calling VOY "well beloved" is a bit of a stretch -- maybe in the 90s when the comfort fans couldn't wrap their heads around DS9 -- and ENT was fine, just fine, there are some good episodes.
What's interesting though is you're giving ENT grace even though it suffered for many of the same reasons that new Trek is. Namely, the capitalization of Star Trek as an intellectual property means that decisions are being made to further that value, not produce a quality piece of media. Star Trek hasn't produced any meaningful social or political commentary since DS9 for this very reason; and in many ways, DS9 was a special case especially because it had a good story. I don't watch a lot of new Trek in the same way I don't really watch Voyager or Enterprise, or most of TNG and TOS if I'm being honest.
The best way to enjoy ENT is to remember that they aren't federation. They're just astronauts. It makes the show way better. The unfortunate thing is that they didn't know how to write that and the show suffered from all that post 9/11 drag that had to make everything darker.
That's what I think people miss. Seeing humanity form the federation was the point. The teething troubles. The galaxy we found ourselves in. The one time I actually want a prequel.
Vot suffered from not relinquishing it's serial roots. We all wanted the year of hell as a whole season I think. I wanted the whole show to show wear and tear on the ship and crew. That's why I liked the Xindi arc in ENT, the accrued damage and fatigue. No new, fresh ship in each episode.
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To add to your point about VOY I think they missed the other side of the coin too. Not just wear and tear on the ship but the upgrades. We're told many times that they added borg tech though out the ship. With a digital ship they missed a real opportunity to have it slowly change over time like a Vidiian. Yes show us the scars of battle but also show us how the ship has changed. It could have been as simple as a splash of green in the lighting. Unfortunately they always reset to zero.
It doesn't help much that they also didn't use change in the characters to convey developments and time on the ship. Voyager was mired in a serialized stagnation when its premise demanded at least a mixture like what is seen in earlier seasons of DS9 (which, go figure, felt like a different setting from the start to end of the show). When you look at contemporary discourses surrounding both shows, you'll notice that this was in fact a consequence of how older fans vocalized frustration with the "darker" and slower-paced storytelling on DS9, so it's understandable to see why the production took this route.
Star Trek is at its strongest when it excells even within budgetary and production limitations, so they could have still achieved this effect even with the ship models they started out with. Christ, how often do they do redresses on these sets anyway? Could have changed some panels and added different colored glowy bits to the gell packs if it's just a visual thing.
I think it would have been great if they had actually committed to what is intriguing about a pre-Federation humanity; especially after the criticisms of liberal utopianism that were fleshed out in DS9. They didn't though, it mostly manifested as vague, "racism bad," stories where political tensions are a consequence of misunderstandings or external bad actors, and not the struggle to reconcile fundamentally oppositional material and political interests.
The Xindi arc was at its most interesting when the tensions within the Xindi were focused on, but that was itself shortlived and reductive. It's all just a bit flat unfortunately, even though there are a lot of really interesting ideas and a decent production behind them.
I am taking the show on its own merits, and was excited about the premise. Either way, most episodes are pretty intellectually bankrupt, and the exceptional ones are typically effective because they successfully execute gimmicks. Are there any Enterprise episodes that succeed primarily for their narrative and character depth? Maybe "Shuttlepod One" if you don't consider the premise a gimmick since it is supposed to be a technologically deficient era?
I can't say. I watched Enterprise well after it's air date and only because I try to be a completionist. I like to think it gives me some level of clarity in my critiques of the show. I'm not as biased by nostalgia for it's predecessors. Though there's a fine line between a gimmick and a show's stated premise. The show's premise was a prequel. It ventured into gimmicks when it started doing three part episodes to try to speed run the premise that it ran away from with the temporal cold war. A few novelty episodes a season isn't a bad thing but when it becomes 70% of your show I think you have a problem.
Ahh so it's the reliance on gimmick episodes that you think is the real problem, not just the frequency of them. If that's the case, I'd have to actually go back and check ENT and VOY for this, because serialized episodes tend to rely on some kind of gimmick, especially in Star Trek where we often need a sci-fi whatzit to create an issue for the crew. I actually am curious if VOY had more gimmick episodes than ENT then, since it was far less interested in episodic storytelling overall, even if they did apply it sometimes. But then again, ENT was more reliant on "Star Trek" as an IP to exist, which got way more fanservicey than even the contrived Romulan, Klingon, and Ferengi episodes in VOY (but then "Regeneration," is one of its stronger episodes for exactly that reason).
I think “gimmick” has become the colloquialism that is used to describe this season. It may not be the most accurate. To me, a gimmick episode is like “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” the heist episode of DS9, or “Qpid,” the Robin Hood episode of TNG. They happen, they’re fun. They’re episodes where the series steps away from its normal tone and genre voice to have a little laugh. They aren’t every episode.
Time travel, MU episodes, and reality warping don’t make it a gimmick episode. It's when you can tell it's writing to be reminiscent of something else entirely for the whole episode. The problem is that the gimmick episodes don’t usually have as much substance. I really liked the soap opera episode because, at the end, we got to see Pike go to therapy and mourn his daughter. How much heavier could that have been if it was just a situation where thoughts were being manifested into reality with everyone on the ship being 'haunted' by the emotions that they're ignoring? To be fair though, DS9 did that with "If Wishes Were Horses."
This did happened in the horror episode that was trying to be Event Horizon and it didn't resolve anything. So maybe the issue isn't the gimmicks, Maybe it's just that they're laying the gimmicks on too thick and more often than not using them to try to hide some writing issues.
Stepping out of the show’s genre is fun, but it weakens the message (or it hides the fact that there isn’t one).
I like this season. Star trek always has this premise of "crazy ass shit happens in space all the time," but instead of leaning into the science mumbo jumbo to fix the crazy shit like most series do, the crazy is a narrative tool to tell these like genre bender stories. SNW was becoming way too serial. The two seasons of Gorning became so sucky, like I am so sick of the "endless waves of un-human enemies that have to be killed in order to be survived" trope. And then the final episode of season 3 where Batel like transcends no real good reason, with no explanation or basis, was such a weird cop out.
I was also so fucking over all the lovey dovey eyes and kissy faces in the first 3 seasons, trying to shoehorn in all this romance that just never felt natural. The whole hot Spock/Nurse Chapel epoch felt so fake and lame. Both characters are more believable without the goopy romance forced into every episode.
This season IMO feels really fresh. The horror episode was really good and legit scary, Star Trek noir was fucking badass, even the soap opera episode landed on a really excellent emotional note despite being so cheesy at first blush.
I'm frustrated that for a moment it seemed like Spock couldn't stand to be single. La'an ends their casual thing and he soon after calls his ex. It's a bit of a bad look. Like he got with La'an to forget Chapel, then called T'Pring to help forget La'an.
It just hit me the wrong way.
Though I rationalized it by remembering that Spock was hinted to have been a ladies man in ToS before he became all about the science and logic.
TOS hinted Spock had been a ladies man? Having seen all those many times I'm baffled. Could you explain more?
There are at least three episodes where a female character either shows interest in Spock romantically or discusses a romantic history. The episode with the sky city and the episode with the farm spores come to mind. I can't do a deep dive at the moment. I suppose you could include Chapel. It was never outright said mind you, but there was enough implied to draw conclusions, which SNW has done.
Sex appeal and being a "ladies man" or "playa" are completely different things. Lots of women IRL were attracted to Spock, believing they could break down his barriers and reach him emotionally. He was like a brooding loner character. But the only memory I have of Spock having any prior relationships with women is a character named Leila who had been in love with him a few years earlier, and that was clearly described as a one-way thing. Obviously his childhood betrothal to T'Pring doesn't count.
Seems all of season 4 has been gimmick episodes, some of them are funny as hell though.
They're def not all bad. "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass" and "Off-Hour" were great. Though I did just flat out skip "Once La'An a Time."
In this era of 10 episode seasons, I think they’ve finally come home to the idea of episodes that can stand alone. I’ll gladly take another gimmick season over another fate of the galaxy season.
