Rant: Enterprise: Acquisition

[tuftears]

Since I started playing Star Trek Online the other month, I had a yen to watch the old Star Trek shows. My bro lent me a bunch of DVDs, and Enterprise was the only complete series in there, so... Sure, I'll start there.

I'm almost done with the first season. In general, Enterprise is really hitting the good old Star Trek nostalgia vibes. I've really enjoyed the feel of old-school nuts and bolts rather than the 'so future it's magic' feel of TNG. That said, there's this one episode that simply appalled me.

It's the one with the Ferengi.

In a word: there's no way that Ferengi developed warp technology. They are idiots. This episode made me want to bite the script writers.

I get the basic joke behind the Ferengis, they're hypercapitalists, obsessed with the pursuit of wealth. Sure. That's cool. But they can't be *stupid* because that's directly counterproductive, otherwise they'd be getting fleeced left and right by the smarter races, who should have all the advantage of their past experimentation with capitalism and knowing what breaks the capitalist model. Pillaging random stuff off of the Enterprise and stealing *perishable food* in the same "loot bag" as all the more durable equipment is just the mark of total amateurs who shouldn't be trusted with their own ship.

Sell the Enterprise the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge, that's a much better story. Or trick the crew into bumping into your ship, have the pre-stressed nacelle fall off, then charge them indemnities until their wallets cry. They are *capitalists*, not raiders like the Nausicaans. There are a thousand and one scams that would have made better episodes than this tripe that made me want to weep every time barely literate Ferengi struggled with technology that should be similar to their own.

Not that I like the Ferengis, but good writing can make you respect an enemy even though they're still on the opposite side. Bad writing just makes you want to stop watching.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

The middle-end of Enterprise is some truly awesome writing. Alas, there was enough horrible writing in front of it that people had given up on the show before the new writers turned it around. :/

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

By middle-end, you mean seasons 2 and 3? Yeah, I'll continue watching, it hits enough of the right buttons that I'm willing to forgive it one or two clinkers like this one. But yeesh, this one...

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Yep, yep. They got some of the Star Trek novel writers to come to the show and start working on backstory for the original aliens, like the Andorians and Vulcans.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That should be fun, I'll look forward to seeing more Andorian vs Vulcan hijinx. ;)

[rjbartrop.livejournal.com]

And having just spent 7 years waiting for Voyager to get good, it's understandable why people weren't as ready to cut Enterprise as much slack as they had to other Star Trek series.

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

Over the past couple of years I've watched all of the Star Trek series (including the animated one!) from start to finish... except Enterprise. A friend of mine tried to watch it and was telling me about blue Nazis and then he couldn't even finish watching it, just gave up because it was so bad. After listening to his complaints I decided I didn't need to see it. :D

Are you arguing that the Ferengi are idiots and could not develop warp technology? Or was that the premise of the show? Because I'd have to disagree with that, the Ferengi are really smart.

(I actually love the Ferengis, the episodes with them were among my favorites on Deep Space 9.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I'm arguing that the Ferengi (in this particular episode) behaved like idiots who could not possibly be smart enough to develop warp technology or operate a warp vessel successfully. I picture their ship's computer being a long-suffering soul who has to do its best with their random button-fumbling when all it wants them to do is to give the name of the next destination, and their clan leader having picked that ship to dump the most idiotic Ferengi that would otherwise constantly plague the actually competent ones.

They behave like techno-illiterate robbers. They are based on a highly advanced piece of technology, a starship. This episode would have been far better if they had written the Ferengis to actually *act* like smart capitalist thieves, rather than simple-minded muggers.

Don't get me wrong, I have actually enjoyed a lot of the Enterprise series. This was just the clinker, the lead coin in a pile of silver coins and some gold coins, figuratively speaking.

Guessing the Andorians are the 'blue Nazis'. They don't strike me as exactly Nazis; I'd actually characterize them more like 'Cold War USA' military types. They're military rivals of the Vulcans, they're violent but possessed of a warrior's ethics, and that's all I really know about them at this point. There's no evidence yet to support that they subscribe to a 'master race' ethos or the idea of conquering everyone.

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

Oh okay! Yes, that is very bad writing. I seem to recall on DS9 there were a few times when Quark seemed to know more about technology than he would really need to, being a bar owner, so I always figured the Ferengi are really quite smart, even if their smarts turn it to "how can I profit off this?"

I most recently watched the original series and found it fascinating to see how it evolved from Kirk trampling all over the utopias he found while claiming "Man is supposed to struggle!" to the ST:NG world where people don't have to work if they don't want to. (I always did wonder how the heck that worked...)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Post-scarcity civilization! I'm okay with that, they do document that replicators and cheap energy (from anti-matter reactors) provides all their needs.

I don't recall much in the way of original series Trek.

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

I hadn't watched the original Trek series in years (decades) and I had this vague idea that it was really goofy. There are always jokes being made about Shatner's overacting and some of the episodes have gained notoriety, but I found it quite good, and definitely the seeds of the later series were planted. They did approach some subjects with a heavy hand but something that really surprised me was how multiracial the background cast was, given the decade the show was shot in.

There was problematic stuff too, the whole portrayal of the Klingons for instance. It was interesting viewing it3-4 decades later.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

From what I can recall of both TOS and TNG, the Klingons were pretty much an expy of the Russians/Soviets, and their depiction evolved with the US's perception of Russia.

In TOS, they were a scary militaristic society with technological parity and superb spying. Klingons who appeared in-show were hostile but smart and sneaky. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union was winning the space race, boasting loudly about how much better its technology allegedly was than the US's, and was known for scarily effective espionage (this was right after the Red Scare).

In TNG, they were a race of thugs that weren't the social or technological peers of the humans, but were still a military force to be reckoned with. They'd recently made peace with the Federation, and much was made of olive branches and cultural exchange and getting to understand each other. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, the US had clued in to the fact that the USSR was actually about 15 years behind the US technologically, and the cold war was in the process of ending. The USSR was still a scary military power but one that wasn't as cutting-edge as the US, and olive branches were being exchanged.

I'm not entirely sure who the Cardassians were supposed to be an expy of in DS9, but the general themes of the conflicts in each series has always been a mirror of what the US has been concerned about in the real world during the show's production.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have to wonder about how that "don't have to work" thing pans out. You mean, I can CHOOSE to either risk life and limb as a Red Shirt, possibly getting vaporized by the Alien Encounter of the Week in order to make a point, *OR* I could play video games all day in a world where the tech level allows for HOLODECKS?! Because I don't even have to drag myself out to go to work? Wow. How DOESN'T civilization come to a screeching halt? ;)

But then, we get to Deep Space Nine and it seems like some of the writers didn't get the memo. Why, there's this valuable stuff called latinum (which I'll guess just CANNOT be replicated, or it wouldn't be valuable anymore). And someone says "put it on my tab" in a bar. And there's gambling. And ... well, basically just other stuff that seems to suggest that there's some sort of economy, and just because you're from the Federation doesn't mean you've got an endless money supply. Perhaps there's some way to explain or regulate that, but I never got the sense that the writers put the least bit of thought into it. Over in TNG, we've got our smug heroes boasting that MONEY is a thing of the past, and yet ... surely there's some sort of *rationing* that happens? And what if someone, for instance, decides to TRADE his allotted holodeck time with some other crewmember in exchange for something else? Whatever is rare or in limited quantity might in effect become a new currency in the absence of anything else.

[rjbartrop.livejournal.com]

I think the "blue nazis" might be referring to a different race that was actually helping the Nazis when the Enterprise got sent back to WW2.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

I vaguely remember that episode.

I think the best way to explain the situation is that these PARTICULAR Ferengi were criminals, and not very bright. They were, after all, robbing the ship and behaving like idiots. Just like we have stupid criminals on Earth, I'd kind of expect there to be stupid criminals of each species in a galaxy populated by a number of sentient races.

Of course, being that I saw that episode so long ago, maybe my explanation doesn't work; perhaps these Ferengi are on an official mission or something. But it's a shot, right? :)

[centauress.livejournal.com]

An official mission with the side effect of them being banished? ^-^

[caffeinewabbit.livejournal.com]

I think there's an unwritten rule somewhere that Ferengi based episodes have to be bad by law or something. Ever see DS9's Profit and Lace? Quark, Rom and Nog are great characters in and of themselves, but holy God was that episode horribly unwatchable. Armin Shimerman officially disowned it.

I watched Enterprise for a little while, but it ultimately felt like a great premise completely squandered. As soon as the words "Temporal Cold War" were spoken, my enthusiasm dimmed, because I've always hated time travel in Trek. It's a beef I have with the reboot too (even though I like it for the most part) - we're already interested in the idea of what came before TOS, you don't need to add all this dumb time travel nonsense to it, just tell us the stories!

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

Yeah the time travel in Enterprise was the problem my friend had with it too. :/

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I did not see it! I want to watch the DS9 stuff next, after I get through Enterprise.

Temporal Cold War doesn't bother me too much, I'm waiting to see how it goes. There are definitely a lot of pitfalls that could happen with it. Ultimately the question is going to be whether they can make a good over-arching plotline with it. (or whether they did, since the Enterprise series has finished)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Glargh. Time travel. Any typical TV story involving time travel makes my brain hurt -- but it especially bugs me when time travel is introduced as an INCIDENTAL technology, brought up every now and then. Like, "Assignment: Earth" (thank you, internet!) -- an episode from the Original Series that I watched in the past few months with Gwendel, and I was boggled about how the episode just starts with Kirk casually mentioning that the Enterprise has gone back in time for research purposes. No great big ordeal, no "we only have 1 in 100 chance of surviving this!" or whatever -- just: Boom. "Here we are in the past, folks! Moving on with our story...."

Or, in the movies, all you need is a Klingon bird of prey and a star to whip around, and then you're off to save the whales (and while you're at it, introduce a chicken-and-egg paradox by selling some technologies from the future and then arguing, "Well, who's to say he wasn't the one who INVENTED it?"). And I actually enjoyed that movie, by the way. But once you introduce the possibility of targeted time travel (even if there's some nominal risk involved), it becomes a sort of "elephant in the room" when the heroes are struggling with some disaster. Why can't they just go back and fix things? What stops them? What is the justification for NOT doing it more often? And, if it's simply that our heroes are too PRINCIPLED to do such things, what is going to stop the various other races who are just as technologically advanced -- but who are decidedly LESS principled on such matters -- from doing it first? How in the world could a war between Klingons and the Federation persist for any appreciable amount of time, when all it takes is one or more crazy starship captains to whip around the nearest sun to go back and do any number of things to alter history to one's favor?

If time travel is this accidental, uncontrolled thing (temporal anomaly of the week, anybody?), I can deal with it to a certain point. But ... temporal cold war? It seems that the only way one couldn't bring that to a swift (very swift!) end would be due to a complete failure of imagination, or some major retcons to the "Star Trek canon" about how time travel works.

And, yes, I could just say, "It's ONLY A TV SHOW!" But when I cross that line, I just cease to care, and that doesn't give me much incentive to keep watching. And, besides, it's much more fun to just grouse about stuff. :)