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

[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. :)