Who destroyed Star Trek? Hmmm…
I recently re-watched Star Trek: Enterprise, after perhaps a decade. I’d seen it twice before: when it originally aired, and then once I got all 4 seasons on cheap DVDs. And my memory of the show was:
Season 1: Bah.
Season 2: Bah.
Season 3: Meh.
Season 4: Woo!
On the whole… I thought it was kinda bad, but trending upwards. But now I watched it with not just DS9 and VOY close in the rear view, but after having been subjected to JJTrek, STD and STP. And suddenly that mid-tier show became pretty damned spectacular in comparison. Season 4 of Ent was truly awesome; and while the first two seasons weren’t objectively great, and there were some definite canon issues… compared to nuTrek, *all* of Enterprise was, at least, Star Trek.
It turns out that Enterprise wasn’t cancelled on purely “well, it’s a failed show” grounds, but because of a single villainous executive. A decision that left us with arguably only a few seasons worth of decent Trek in 18 years. One season of Picard (10 episodes) and several seasons of Lower Decks (30 half-hour episodes) and Prodigy (20 half-hour episodes) which are of arguable canonicity is a poor compensation for the *hundreds* of hours of quality Star Trek we *could* have had. Eighteen years with 22 one-hour episodes would be 396 episodes, and that assumes no overlapping series. Entirely possible that Star Trek could have been properly managed to produce 600 full-hour episodes in this time. Three more seasons of Enterprise, seven seasons of a post-Voyager show (from, say, 2009-2017), another seven seasons of a further-future show (2014-2022) and an advanced show (2021-2023) using deep fakes to recreate the original crew, to flesh out the 4th and 5th year of the original mission, including remakes of many of the TAS episodes, would give us 418 episodes.
Gah.
7 responses to “Cultural Vandal”
Larry Niven has said that Season 5 of Enterprise would have included Kzinti. (Via CGI, I assume.) They had already appeared in ST: The Animated Series. I would like to have seen that.
One more reason to despise this timeline.
Now me, I’d also would have liked to see some Caitians in there as well. Particularly Lt. M’Ress. 😉
With a spin-off to the Ringworld Cycle, perhaps? I’d think pretty fair representations of Pierson’s Puppeteers would be do-able now with CGI.
Kizin would have been great as would some Lyrians. Wasent there a Kizinti Dancer in ST5? 🙂
As for the Caitians.. they exist!
a couple of years ago we had the misfortune to be staying in a hotel where a furry convention was being held. one of the participants was a cat with a Red TOS shirt. Bonus, we had the kids along.
Caitians made their canonical debut in Star Trek IV with a Caitian representative on the Federation Council, dressed up as, I believe, a Starfleet admiral.
As for the STV cat-dancer, seems unlikely to be a Kzinti. Their females are supposed to be dumb animals, which would make the dancer both unlikely and pretty damned creepy. Of course, the Kzinti could be wrong or lying. But she doesn’t *look* like a Kzinti.
The Caitians and the Kzinti are, according to some non-canonical sources, related species. I’ve never thought to much of that, and there’s no reason why they should be. There are a bunch of independently primate-derived species, from humans to Vulcans and Klingons and such; no reason why vaguely feline species can’t arise independently as well. There are also the Vedalans from TAS.
On a side note,
ST shows seem to take a while to find their footing.
TNGs first season was awful. It probability should have been canceled.
DS9 started better but was hit and miss for a long time.
VOY settled down fairly quickly but theres a lot of subjectivity there. I never did warm to it.
ENT had issues from day one but it was more of a “lets make another star trek show” attitude so we never really saw their A game until Season 4 although I was never really happy even with that. It had a “too many cooks” feeling
Everything since has been a bag of unsalted dick tips. and I’m not at all thinking the Babylon 5 remake will be worthwhile.