Could TNG Stunt Casting Save 'Enterprise'? 785
Tycoon Guy writes "It seems Star Trek: Enterprise isn't about to go down without a fight. TrekToday is reporting that Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis will guest-star on the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, to reprise their Next Generation roles of William T. Riker and Deanna Troi. Hello stunt casting! The news has been confirmed on Sirtis' official fan site."
nah.... (Score:3, Interesting)
unless they stop travelling through time. and get the regular actors to learn how to act....
Am I the Only One (Score:4, Interesting)
EMPATHY ALERT (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Am I the Only One (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:5, Interesting)
Galactica is essentially a bleak war movie in space. There is none of the technophilia that Trek so prominently features, and the emphasis is on finding and killing an implacable, deadly enemy. It's dark, it's gritty, and very entertaining, but comparing it with Trek is compeltely apples and oranges to me. Nothing against Galactica, but I like a little optimism in my visions of the future sometimes.
I could watch a few more seasons of Galactica, but it seems like it's playing most of its cards in the first season. If Galactica is the "new face" of sci-fi, I think it will get pretty boring pretty quickly.
Re:Wouldn't this require a time-portal thingy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Enterprise is the first series running the risk of being cut short (which would be unfortunate with Manny Coto now steering the show in a much more fun and interesting direction this season-- if you tuned out during the first 3 seasons, you should tune in and give it a shot).
Re:Am I the Only One (Score:3, Interesting)
The "season finale"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:5, Interesting)
The writing in BSG refuses to let the technology get in the way. On Voyager, it was always a damned alient of the week using the particle of the week. On BSG, it's a story about the people, how they interact, how they respond to extraordinary stresses, etc. Star Trek always claimed to be that, but then Geordy saved the day with a fancy modification to the main deflector dish.
BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
That said... I don't watch much TV anymore, so there may be other shows I've been missing that are very impressive. I've been reading a lot lately. much better than any space opera TV show.
Re:Oh Dear God (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to disagree with that.
I'm not a Star Trek fan nor have I seen all of the movies.
I don't know all of the character names in any of the shows. In fact I hardly can recall the names of the main characters.
However, out of all of the TV shows that I have given a shot, including the other Star Trek series when they ran, I really enjoy Enterprise.
It is one of two shows that I try to watch every week and would hate to see it die off.
Out of all the crap that they try to shovel down our throats on national television, Star Trek is most certainly a relief from it.
Re:Oh, no more... (Score:4, Interesting)
The origial Trek did push difficult issues such as birth control, eugenics and racial issues. Kirk kissing Uhura was a major risk for TV in the late 1960's
Re:nah.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, it's a long shot...
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do agree with you though that multiple seasons of no hope would get pretty tough to watch. At this point it's seemingly correct as the story goes IMO. It "fits". I'm just hoping that when the time comes to move the story along the producers realize it and do so. For now though I'm digging it.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:2, Interesting)
Everytime I hear action alert I picture a big, hairy, burly, castrated man in a pink tutu prancing around the stage saying it in a very feminine fashion.
A war movie/series? Try a geeks softcore porn fantacy with all the sex scenes. There's no great technical advances in the show as far as the character's technology. Everything is basically what we current think is possible, and there is not enough battle scenes to be a war movie. I don't really care about the Education Secretary turned President's current cancer status. I found it to be an irrelevant detail!
Star Trek atleast was a future projection of Earth, so they had an exscuse to reuse ideas take from modern day Earth. BG has no such exscuse besides the laziness of the wanna-be writer. The basic plot of BG is Terminator in space because man created the Cylons (no so in the original series) and same with the machines in the Terminator series.
I actually have liked some of the Star Trek Enterprise plots. I only watch the show when it has a good plot and an intertesting twist. It has been a refreshing change from the normally stale and dry characters of Star Trek.
This is still just a rumor. I will wait until I see the episode. There have been episodes that I didn't think I would like, but I did after watching them.
Re:OK, give the show a chance (Score:5, Interesting)
I think most of the "let it die!" crowd has either never seen the third season - IMHO one of the best seasons of any scifi show, ever, including any single season of Farscape - or is so obsessed with continuity that any deviation from the previously established universe is heresy.
Well, how crappy, bland, and predictable do you think the show would be if everything went exactly as foretold? It'd be a challenge to get a single decent season out of that setup. And I do agree that neither of the first two seasons, where they tried this formula, were particularly good.
Rather than looking at the downside of the lack of continuity, consider the upside - there's now a possibilty for an "alternate" future, where the temporal war has changed things. Will this wind up being for the better or worse? Who knows!
DON'T TAKE THE TREK UNIVERSE TOO SERIOUSLY. When you get your panties in a wad anytime creative liberties are taken, you'll lead a very unpleasant life in your parents' basement.
OK, rant over. Flame on.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if you've seen it, but at one point Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama uses a set of electric pulse generators to send out a big burst of radiation in order to cover the refugees' escape from a cylon attack. In the commentary, Moore says that he hated putting that kind of technobabble bullshit into his script, but he'd written himself into a corner and that the jargon was the only practical way out of it.
But he did poke some fun at himself along the way. After Apollo gave his wordy, jargony, meaningless speech to one of the other characters, her slightly glazed-over reply was, "The lesson here is not to ask follow-up questions."
I thought it was a good line at the time. Now that I know the story behind it, I think it's brilliant.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny you should mention "The Next Generation," though. In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family." Other episodes like "The Best of Both Worlds" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "All Good Things" were very good, but in my opinion they're not really on the same level as the four I named.
What those four episodes I named all have in common is that they've got nothing to do with spaceships or phasers or Romulans. They're about characters. "Darmok" is the story of two characters who don't speak the same language. "The Inner Light" is about a man who loses his memory. "The Perfect Mate" is about impossible love, and "Family" is about how a man recovers from an unimaginably traumatic experience. Any one of those would have made a great drama without any science-fiction aspect to it at all.
I think that's the kind of writing that we see on "Galactica" every week. It's complex and nuanced and, in a way, hair-tearingly frustrating, because there are no answers. Take last week's (US-aired) episode for instance. Is Tom Zarek a terrorist or a prisoner of conscience? We don't know, because the writers don't tell us. We're not allowed to know, because which one he is isn't important. What's important is how people react to the situation he creates. Or last week's "33." Why 33 minutes? We never find out, not ever, not even by the end of the first season. I can see where some people would be annoyed by that kind of laser-beam focus on what's important to the story. Personally, I really like it.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't fault Trek for being what it is-- Trek. And don't treat it like a competition, there's too little quality Sci-Fi on TV. It's not like we're making a choice between BSG or Enterprise; you can try enjoying both for what they are.
Stunt casting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stargate: progressive discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that's true in one sense, but in another sense it's not true at all. The technobabble and the bumpy-headed aliens and the blinky lights all stayed constant during the run of that show, yes, but the characters evolved visibly. Picard grew from being a gruff, distant captain to being a father-figure for the crew and emotional touchstone for the show. Geordi went from being a giddy cadet to a resourceful, competent engineer. Et cetera, et cetera.
Now, a lot of that character development was organic. As the show went on, the producers eventually learned that some types of stories worked better than others, so they became more refined. Would the show have been better if that character development had been planned from the start? I dunno. Maybe.
"Stargate" is kind of the opposite. The plot thickens, new secondary characters come and go, the settings change and evolve, and a big back-story develops as the characters explore the universe
Take the character of Sam Carter for example. (Set aside the fact that she's a stone-cold geek hottie. This is very important, but I'm not gonna talk about it right this minute.) In eight years (nine? whatever) she's gone from being a captain in the Air Force to a major to a lieutenant colonel. Now, ignore for a minute the fact that that's completely unreasonable. Has her character grown? Has she become a leader? Not really, no. She's still just another member of the team, the Spock to O'Neill's Kirk and Jackson's McCoy. When they promoted O'Neill to accommodate Richard Dean Anderson's desire for less screen time, it left a vacuum in the structure of the show. Has that vacuum been filled? Not really. It would have made sense for Carter to step up and fill it, but instead the writers just chose to write stories that didn't involve SG-1 as a team any more.
I like "Stargate." I find it entertaining. I have a season pass for it on my TiVo. But great TV, it ain't.
Hey look - another persons random enterprise op. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll admin that I never really watched DS9. The theme music put me to sleep, and I saw it as B5 without tha action. I understand it got a lot better, but the first season turned me right off.
I watched Voyager - I can't recall very much about it. Lots of holodeck adventures or "oh...that never really happened" stories to the best of my knowledge.
Voyager to me was way too calm. TNG had stuff going on, crap that just had to happen even if Picard thought it was a bad way to handle things. Voyager just seemed to be too much of "well...we're in a jam, lets all sit down, talk about it, and then talk our way out of it." Though, in their defense with Species 8xxx, they finally came up with an alien that was more than a funny forehead or nose! Though another annoying thing was every alien planet looked like the california desert with little mud homes that had high tech doors on them or something. Okay...find a few different locations to shoot on folks.
I was REALLY looking forward to Enterprise. Sounded cool - the Federation at the beginning during it's rough founding years. Soundes like a nitty gritty show. I like Scott Bacula as an actor and thought that would help.
While I still like it better than Voyager, the show suffers from the same problem - too much "lets show the universe how wonderful and diplomatic humans are".
I think one of the best episodes was when Archer sole the warp coil or something from one ship stranding them. Reminded me of TNG where crap had to be done, against the rules or not and it was done - damn the consequences.
Other problems I have with enterprise are:
1) Why is it so damn dark? Here it is in 2005 and we have light bulbs that put use 25 wants and act like a 75 watt light bulb. The enterprise looks like it is lit with a few flashlighs that need new batteries.
2) why is the ship so nice? This is one of the first ships, it should be rougher. I like the different bridge design, but to me, it should be something more like the Maru in Andromeda.
3) Why don't we ever come across aliens that can't kick our ass?
4) Enough of the shots of the shuttles. We know the transporters work pretty okay now - time to start using them and stop having "were stuck due to shuttle issue" stories.
5) enuff of the damn vulcan's. Yeah...they are annoying but mostly look good in tight garb. We get the picture.
Probably my two favorite characters are Hoshi and the Doctor. Hell...on Voyager, the Doctor was my favorite character as well. Perhaps they should write more medical stories.
Oh well...I'm tired.
The only way I'd buy it (Score:5, Interesting)
That way you can get the guest appearances without having to come up with a complete cheese story.
Kinda like how they got Starbuck into Galactica 1980!
Either that or have them be guest stars but in different roles or something.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:3, Interesting)
Your comment made me think of the opening of "Water" with Boomer sitting in a room dripping wet and not knowing how she got that way. It opens just on her fingers, with the water dripping off, then you get to see more of the situation, bit by bit. Nice stuff. Definitely not typical TV grade.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:3, Interesting)
I love the fact that Sci Fi in the US decided to air "33" and "Water" back-to-back. If you watch them a week apart, it's easy to miss what I think is one of the most clever storytelling devices I've seen in a long, long time. At the end of "33," Boomer on Caprica is soaking wet from the rain, huddled with Helo beneath a tree. In the opening scene of "Water," Boomer on Galactica is soaking wet, sitting in the locker room. It really does a lot to connect the two Boomers together in the viewers' minds, but it lost a lot of its impact in the UK airing because of all the time that transpired between the first and second episodes. I think it's great that Sci Fi decided to air them together.
This kind of thing is why I *stopped* watching... (Score:3, Interesting)
The first season was quite good, though it had the usual Trek first-season weaknesses: plots kind of random, characters not fleshed out, tech not developed, etc. Unfortunately that probably turned off a lot of the viewers who were expecting more, and the reduced ratings may have started the whole spiral...
I rolled my eyes when they brought in the time-travel gimmick with people from the future, but at least it was all new material and helped the storylines develop, so that was okay.
Then they did this future-9/11 thing which was obviously a big huge gimmick to try to tie the show to current affairs. It was too obvious, but it did help the stories (some were actually quite riveting) -- for about half the season.
Towards season's end they started dropping more and more references to past Trek series (i.e. to the future), like Archer hinting about the Federation and "explainations" of some of the history from TOS/TNG/DS9. That was the point they crossed the line from "good" gimmickry to "bad". These did nothing for the series, and just seemed to be there to try to keep old Trek fans hooked.
Then Archer starts making alliances with the fuckin' "hated" Xindi and I knew I wouldn't be watching for much longer. I know Trek is repetitive, but it's usually in a good way. Heck, they've used the "enemy-turn-friend" theme to produce some great Trek episodes in all series up until Enterprise. There it just killed the story lines and took the drama with it.
I stopped watching at the end of last season, and when I saw the preview for the first episode with Spiner in it, I knew I'd done the right thing.
I wondered how much lower they might sink, and with this Troi/Riker thing, now we know.
It's time to kill this Trek and file it off in the "bad mistake" pile along with ST:V and most of Voyager. (Though at least Voyager didn't make a mockery of Trek. It just wasn't well-written most of the time.)
Hopefully we'll still get to see a "Birth of the Federation" series at some point, which is what Enterprise originally (d?)evolved from. There's so much potential there. Just as long as they don't give it to the Enterprise producers...
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
I "skimmed" a lot of DS9. And I mean A LOT. The first two seasons weren't that great... some episodes were down to Enterprise-level. I finally got back into it around the time the Dominion and Worf started to figure in heavily (what do you know, gimmicks that worked!). Even then, I didn't watch every week. There was quite a bit of Dominion War stuff I missed... but I could still come in, watch a single episode, and walk away entertained, even though they were part of an overall arc. Now, going back and being able to watch those arcs in sequence greatly enhances the entertainment value, I will agree. But individual episodes of Enterprise still leave me cold. If they had nifty massive space battles, or strong standalone character pieces like "In The Pale Moonlight," I might get pulled in. The entire point of my above post was that I have watched all the stuff that was supposed to pull me in, AND IT DIDN'T WORK. Call me obstinate, but I still don't like it. I use the DS9 comparison so heavily here because that was the only Trek series up till now to heavily employ the concept of the story arc. TOS, TNG, and Voyager all were mostly standalone episodes with the occasional interseason cliffhanger.
Now, about characterization. That's all well and good that they're learning how to be a starship crew. It's obvious that Archer can't have the "ultraslick" personality of Picard. But what I get from Archer is the aloofness of Sisko with an occasional dash of the brashness of Kirk. Not too terribly exciting.
Also, if they're just now learning to be a starship crew, doesn't that ignore previous efforts at space travel, even in the pre-Enterprise continuity? I mean, I'm sure our current space shuttle crews could handle something like NX-01 with a minimum of fuss. Wasn't part of the point of having a cramped vessel of limited capability such as NX-01 to make links between Star Trek and contemporary cramped, limited space technology?
There are also established space crews by the time of Enterprise. What about the cargo crews that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) Trip Tucker's family is part of? Wouldn't it be just a snazzy upgrade in technology for them? I mean sure, they have new devices like the transporter to get used to, but other than that, NX-01 could be a freighter with bigger engines. To me, it seems like the spit-and-polish crew of the other Treks, but with supposedly more primitive tech. It would be much more interesting if we saw the crew as trying to become more regimented from the more loose, informal cargo crew culture. Instead, they've basically already got the military discipline so there's little there to develop. I'm not suggesting Star Trek: Redneck Rampage, although that would be pretty damned funny. But I still don't think the series is showing the development of a starship crew that it's supposed to, if so much of the baseline stuff is already in place and we're just watching some running fanboy injoke about the development of the technology.
Also, if there's some decrease in available talent between now and the 22nd century, can we explore why that is? Maybe it's due to the after-effects of World War III, which were barely touched upon in First Contact. It'd be nice to explore that (and I don't mean through the Vulcans being condescending to warlike, primitive humans angle, that just serves to draw a sharper dichotomy between Enterprise and established Trek).
Re:This kind of thing is why I *stopped* watching. (Score:2, Interesting)
That would be interesting.
Empire rise and fall - but the Federation collapsing beneath corruption and war would be amazing.
(this was supposedly a show idea, starring Frakes and Sirtis - but I'm not sure they could carry it themselves)
Re:Wouldn't this require a time-portal thingy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not at all. You could have an episode that is partly set in the TNG era and partly in the Enterprise era, with actions in one affecting the other.
Riker etc. could discover something in the TNG era (an alien artifact?) that is explained by the Enterprise crew within the same episode.
It's possible for the viewer to move around in time as far as the story goes without some extreme sci-fi wormhole etc.
Re:Stick a fork in it please... (Score:4, Interesting)
You haven't seen Firefly [amazon.com].
Re:Oh, no more... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it fleshed out the Ferengi really. One of my biggest peeves with the Star Trek franchise is how one dimensional all the races are. It basicallly took single aspects of the human race and made other races utterly single-minded in that aspect.
The Klingons see glorious death in battle as their highest ideal, something they've been breeding for for thousands of years. Don't ask me how the hell they managed to become a spacefaring race, because it seems that wimpy occupations like scientists, bakers, and librarians are simply not allowed. These occupations are absolutely necessary to any civilization.
The Ferengi, I can dig the greed thing. That *almost* makes sense. But they probably exterminate their unemployed. Or worse, sell them at a markup.
The Vulcans have their logic, to the exclusion of all else. Too bad creative thinking is required for science...
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
The dominion... they seek... dominion... over everthing... Mmmkay.
But the humans? What do the humans believe in? Well, nothing it seems. And as the franchise got older, it seemed to get worse and worse that way. In TNG, everyone was perfect and boring. Or flat and featureless, take your pick. We apparently still had an emotion or two, but mostly it seems that we'd completely stopped bothering with art and music, since the most modern thing anyone listened to was jazz, the most modern drama anyone was interested in was Shakespeare, and the only pictures to be seen anywhere were drawn by an android. Noone's religious, noone drinks, and noone is unemployed. It's like we're all turning into Vulcans or something.
Re:Possible BSG rank structure (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, a petty officer in the Navy is an E-4, E-5 or E-6, which is equivalent to a corporal, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Marines, or a specialist, sergeant or staff sergeant in the Army. The equivalent rank to a Marine private is a seaman recruit (E-1).
A CPO in the Navy is an E-7, making him equivalent to a sergeant first class in the Army or a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.
Adama's rank is equivalent to an O-6, making him a Navy captain or a Marine colonel. His XO, Col. Tigh, is an O-5, which would be a commander in the Navy or a Lt. Col. in the Marines. His given rank, colonel, is one grade too high to jibe with any existing set of ranks.
No, the correct conclusion is that Glen Larson just made some shit up when he wrote the original "Galactica" movie back in the 70s, and because the new writers wanted to stick with the same names for their characters, they were stuck with it. There's absolutely no sense in trying to reconcile it. It just is what it is.
shark (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to love Enterprise, but time travel and special guest apperances always get out of hand. Though the episode with the Borg even though that was technically a special guest appearance was great.
Re:Possible BSG rank structure (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it any wonder that Moore decided to split the character up into a military component (Adama) and a political one (Roslin)?
Re:Possible BSG rank structure (Score:3, Interesting)
The Galactica is not a naval ship, it is a spacecraft. So we would expect it to be operated by the Air Force. As a result, the officers all have Air Force ranks. Starbuck is an O-2 (Lieutenant); we know she isn't an O-1 because she took over flight operations when Apollo was gone. Apollo is an O-3 (Captain).
It seems very unlikely that Tigh would be an O-5 (Lt. Colonel). He's the XO of a carrier! It's much more likely that both Tigh and Adama are O-6s (Colonels). That's what you would expect to see on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Given the history of the Galactica, Adama might have gotten his promotion and could already be an O-7 (Brigadier General) - on his way to some sort of fleet or staff command once the decomissioning of the Galactica was complete.
So why doesn't anyone call him "Colonel Adama" or "General Adama?" Because he's the skipper. There's an old naval tradition (not observed, as I understand it, in the U.S. Navy) that the commanding officer of a ship is called "captain" regardless of his rank. However, the CO of a NASA space mission (e.g. a shuttle) is not the "captain" - he's the "mission commander," which you'll hear shortened to "commander" in mission briefings and CAPCOM radio chatter. It's reasonable to think that after hundreds of years of space missions, this tradition might have gained the stature of the naval "captain" tradition. So the CO of the Galactica can be referred to as "commander" regardless of rank.
Particularly if Tigh and Adama are both O-6s, Adama might well encourage his people to refer to him as "commander" in order to highlight his senior status.
-Graham