Enterprise Ramblings

[Mikey]

"simple impulse power" is a direct quote from Scotty in TOS: Balance of Terror. Kennedy explains this on the site - it doesn't mean that the Romulans didn't have warp drive, which would be ridiculous. It means that their power generation systems were analagous to those of impulse power.

And I agree that the execution was not the problem with ST: Enterprise. The problem I have with the series - and I do watch the syndication - is, aside from continuity which I have discussed elsewhere, that the writing takes decent, plausible ideas and then stretches them to the point of incredulity.[/b]

[Blackstar the Chakat]

That would make it difficult to reach the same speeds as the Constitiution-class ships of that era. Especially under cloak. I'm betting the 'simple impulse' power means that they don't have the equivilent of a warp core yet. In fact, I don't remember the Romulans to have ever stated they have anti-matter technology. We know they use a quantum singularity for power rather then a Matter/Anti-matter reactor. Were any of there torpedoes ever officially called photon torpedoes? I know in TOS they used Plasma Torpedoes.

[D. Sergez]

Season 4 was By Far the Best Season with the Execption of 'these are the voyages' its was horrible.. I Consider 'Terra Prime' The Last Episode...

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

That would make it difficult to reach the same speeds as the Constitiution-class ships of that era. Especially under cloak. I'm betting the 'simple impulse' power means that they don't have the equivilent of a warp core yet. In fact, I don't remember the Romulans to have ever stated they have anti-matter technology. We know they use a quantum singularity for power rather then a Matter/Anti-matter reactor. Were any of there torpedoes ever officially called photon torpedoes? I know in TOS they used Plasma Torpedoes.

Beat me to it. If all they had were the equivelant of impulse power, then they'd never be able to rev it up enough to match the Enterprise. Perhaps Scotty was wrong? Perhaps it's a retcon? Perhaps that one line is not supported by the evidence onscreen?

[Captain Seafort]

That would make it difficult to reach the same speeds as the Constitiution-class ships of that era. Especially under cloak. I'm betting the 'simple impulse' power means that they don't have the equivilent of a warp core yet. In fact, I don't remember the Romulans to have ever stated they have anti-matter technology. We know they use a quantum singularity for power rather then a Matter/Anti-matter reactor. Were any of there torpedoes ever officially called photon torpedoes? I know in TOS they used Plasma Torpedoes.

Beat me to it. If all they had were the equivelant of impulse power, then they'd never be able to rev it up enough to match the Enterprise. Perhaps Scotty was wrong? Perhaps it's a retcon? Perhaps that one line is not supported by the evidence onscreen?

That was the point of the quote - Scotty was expanding on the reason why the Enterprise could run circles around the Romulan ship. He never said they couldn't achieve warp speed, he just said the Enterprise was faster.

[MetalHead]

Overall I don't think Enterprise was TOO bad. Sure, there were some horrible episodes, but still, I found the series highly entertaining. And I also think that there was some very good acting a few times. I personally think Scott Bakula is a good actor (though Enterprise wasn't his best performance, per say)

the special effects were good, and the plots, though sometimes horrible and in sheer violation of continuity, were entertaining to watch. I can't complain that much!

[celeritas]

Overall I don't think Enterprise was TOO bad. Sure, there were some horrible episodes, but still, I found the series highly entertaining. And I also think that there was some very good acting a few times. I personally think Scott Bakula is a good actor (though Enterprise wasn't his best performance, per say)

the special effects were good, and the plots, though sometimes horrible and in sheer violation of continuity, were entertaining to watch. I can't complain that much!

i thought enterprise was terrible; now that i've seen andromeda, i'd rather watch that. When enterprise was on the air, i kept watching it cuz i liked scott bakula ever since his quantum leap days. and i agree that the special effects were very nice, especially since they really took advantage of widescreen and modern CGI. in fact, of all the trek dvd sets, the enterprise set is the most technically impressive. plus the packaging wasn't annoying to close back up like voyager's.

i thought that the season 4 arcs were very good also. however, like voyager, i felt enterprise didn't exploit their premise very well in their story writing. if i were to develop a show with a prequel-type premise, i would set the show in both the past era and a "future" era to exploit the story more. So you can have an A story of Archer doing his enterprise thing in the pre-federation universe, and then switch to a B story where the federation has already been founded and Archer's an old (probably crazy) admiral with a desk job dealing with running the Fed and missing his old starship days like kirk in star trek II.

this way you can exploit the story by doing things that seeming break continuity in the A story but show no continuity break in the future B story; this reassures the viewer that (1) there's going to be a story to explain the apparent discontinuity and (2) the writers know what they're doing since they are using the future continuity to their story telling advantage.

These types of stories can exploit milestone events for dramatic effect; for example, a crew member (say the engineer) was foreshadowed to die in the B future story and you are left wondering when in the A story such a death would happen? Or you find out in the future B story that somebody will betray the crew, so during the A story, you are left wondering, who dunnit?

I suppose i was really impressed with Babylon 5 for using these kind of flashback or flashforward stories (Earth-Minbari War, Telepath War) to let you know that major events happened or will happen, but slowly tell reveal to you how it happens and how the events justify a character's present or future actions.

(for voyager, i would have liked to see them return home a season early, and see them try to reintegrate themselves back to the alpha/beta quadrant for a season, especially since so much happened since they got stranded in the delta quadrant).

[Teaos]

Hmm Trek and star gate have been the only 2 scifi series I have really got into. I watch Enterprise only because it was trek related. I never really enjoyed it but I still watched it every week.

[Sionnach Glic]

I watched in the vain hope it would get better. It did eventually, but too little too late.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

That would make it difficult to reach the same speeds as the Constitiution-class ships of that era. Especially under cloak. I'm betting the 'simple impulse' power means that they don't have the equivilent of a warp core yet. In fact, I don't remember the Romulans to have ever stated they have anti-matter technology. We know they use a quantum singularity for power rather then a Matter/Anti-matter reactor. Were any of there torpedoes ever officially called photon torpedoes? I know in TOS they used Plasma Torpedoes.

Beat me to it. If all they had were the equivelant of impulse power, then they'd never be able to rev it up enough to match the Enterprise. Perhaps Scotty was wrong? Perhaps it's a retcon? Perhaps that one line is not supported by the evidence onscreen?

That was the point of the quote - Scotty was expanding on the reason why the Enterprise could run circles around the Romulan ship. He never said they couldn't achieve warp speed, he just said the Enterprise was faster.

I don't recall the Enterprise running circles around the ship... and their weapon did outrun the Enterprise, albeit it did dissipate somewhat.

[Aaron]

I don't recall the Enterprise running circles around the ship... and their weapon did outrun the Enterprise, albeit it did dissipate somewhat.

The Romulan Commander commented several times that their fuel reserves were almost gone. And he limited the amount of firing based on that. He was trying to get home and excessive firing or manuvering might have put that at risk.

[Azrael]

I actually enjoyed Enterprise, looking past the obvious glaring defects

exp: the NX-01 looking more advanced then anything from TOS.

It showed humans how we really are, and Archer wasn't afraid (atleast in 3-4th season) to do what had to be done, morally right or wrong.

[CaptainQuantum]

I actually liked Enterprise more than most people, but it does still bug me to think that they could have done so much more with the premise.

For starters, there were some odd tech choices that I never understood. Why have phasers? Why not have laser weapons? It doesn't affect the plot at all and keeps the canon-pedants happy. Why introduce the Ferengi? Aren't there dozens of TOS species that we could have had an amusing first contact with?

I would have loved to see the sort of shows they did in S4 - clever storylines linking in with some significant event in TOS or later series - occur semi-regularly throughout the series. I thought the best thing about a prequel is showing how thing ended up the way they did, but until S4 we didn't get much of that.

The whole temporal cold war thing produced a couple of good episodes but could've happened in any series. It certainly wasn't the thing to go with in S1, when you are trying to establish the show's identity.

I would also like to have seen something to justify the Prime Directive. I kept waiting in S1 for an episode where Archer's good intentions in interfering with a pre-warp culture end in disaster (ok, narrowly averted disaster if you like).

I agree that the build up to the Earth-Romulan war would've been cool, although the whole no visual contact thing would've been tricky to justify for a whole series. I also wanted more of Archer vs the Klingons. The pilot was a good start, but I wanted to see more well-intentioned human interference rub the Klingons the wrong way.

I kind of liked the tension with the Vulcans plot, but they quickly got a bit too evil and had to be fixed in S4.

All of that said, without ENT we would not have had the following awesome things: the Xindi arc, a canon explanation for Klingon foreheads, Andorians with moving antennae, Dr Phlox, the self-repairing station in Dead Stop, the Reed Alert, the best mirror universe episodes ever, Archer torturing a dude in an airlock and alien Nazis. Those were worth the price of admission on their own.

[Mikey]

Unfortunately, Coto came aboard too late.

[Captain Seafort]

To be fair, on the "lasers" front they couldn't use true lasers because it would have severely limited what they could do with them (no phaserising effects, no visible-in-a-vacuum ship weapons). Though they could have come up with something to distinguish them from phasers.