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Eternal_Freedom wrote:For instance, somwhere in the first season Janeway is reluctant to use photon torpedoes because, according to Chakotay, they have "32, and no way to replace them." They fire off a LOT more than 32 during the series

That's not too hard to explain. They bought the unreplicatable components from somebody else at some point.

Baffalo wrote:Everyone no doubt knows about Ritalin, the scary drug they sometimes force on kids to make them sit still and behave, or in other words CONFORM OR BE PUNISHED.

Sadly, I must inform you that Ritalin does not work that way, being a synthetic cousin of amphetamine.

Granted, the results of ubiquitously applied CNS stimulants throughout the Federation would be fucking hilarious.

That came up in the infamous "UPF" stories. I shudder every time I think of them. BUT I CANT STOP READING THEM

Incidentally, who are you referring to by "our favourite opinionated commentator"?

He's talking about Chuck.

Ah, I thought he meant someone on the board

Chuck is an inactive member of the board, indeed one of the old boys in the world of STvsSW.

Agent Sorchus wrote:Chuck is an inactive member of the board, indeed one of the old boys in the world of STvsSW.

He was involved in VS? Funny. Which side was he on?

He was one of the people who worked more on the fanfiction than the debate per say, but his work is on the pro wars side of things, if only just because he wanted to write a good piece of (fan) fiction.

His main 'series' of fanfiction is on his site for you to peruse.

He strikes me as the sort of bloke who picks VS sides based on "against them" rather than "with us"

Srelex wrote:

Agent Sorchus wrote:Chuck is an inactive member of the board, indeed one of the old boys in the world of STvsSW.

He was involved in VS? Funny. Which side was he on?

Pro-SW, and member of the Lump Club (whose natural antipode would be, well, most types of food).

He strikes me as the sort of bloke who picks VS sides based on "against them" rather than "with us"

Chuck is pretty mellow, actually. His allegiance seemed partly due to personal preference, partly due to being sane. The pro-Trek side was not what you'd deem reasonable back in those days.

Voyager couldn't be enjoyed as sci-fi because the plot and "science" don't stand up to five minutes of thinking about them. It's not good story because the characters are inconsistant, often unlikable, and occasionally morally reprehensible while being portrayed as being entirely in the right. It completely discards it's unique premise almost immediately. It uses the reset button so often that continuity feels weak even when it is present. And the make it worse, it keeps these "features" episode after episode.

One of the things I really like about Enterprise is they learned from their mistakes, and each season was quite a bit better than the one before. It's why I wished it had kept going for the full seven seasons like other Trek episodes, despite how much "real fans" hated it; I think there needs to be a rule that you can't judge a Star Trek series by it's first two seasons. By comparison, Voyager didn't really get better so much as it went from offensively bad to just generally bad as it ground on.

open_sketchbook wrote: I think there needs to be a rule that you can't judge a Star Trek series by it's first two seasons.

Unless that series is TOS.

Of course. The rule there is that you can't judge it by the third season...

open_sketchbook wrote:One of the things I really like about Enterprise is they learned from their mistakes, and each season was quite a bit better than the one before. It's why I wished it had kept going for the full seven seasons like other Trek episodes, despite how much "real fans" hated it; I think there needs to be a rule that you can't judge a Star Trek series by it's first two seasons.

The problem with ENT was that by the time I started getting interested again, it was too late. I stuck through Season 1, came back in Season 2 for "Regeneration", and that was it. Season 4 was exactly what I thought the show would be like at the beginning. And they were starting to lay the groundwork for the Earth-Romulan War, too -- which granted, the novels have continued, but I had expected them to start laying the seeds for that early in the show ala the Dominion conflict.

With Enterprise getting better by its third or fourth season, closing the gate on an empty stable comes to mind. And Voyager getting the full seven season run like TNG and DS9 did, a car going over the finishing line with flat tires and a burning engine comes to mind.

Farscape, that lasted four complete seasons, is a show that is unquestionably better than Voyager with a similar premise (crossed with Muppets and Blake's 7).

Four seasons, AND a rather good film that tied a lot of things up

Indeed, I had high hopes for Ent and it was utter shit. Never made it to season 3, and I don't care it people think season 4 was 'better'. While plenty of shows have had a slow start but piked up steam in the second season to become good shows; there is nothing wrong with being a good show at the start either.

Knife wrote:Indeed, I had high hopes for Ent and it was utter shit. Never made it to season 3, and I don't care it people think season 4 was 'better'. While plenty of shows have had a slow start but piked up steam in the second season to become good shows; there is nothing wrong with being a good show at the start either.

I got to agree. Three, even four seasons is a lot of time to give a show to find its footing. There are plenty of shows that have "rocky" first seasons, but there is something that keeps you coming back. Babylon 5 was like this. Hell, even "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" in retrospect (to point to some very popular non-sci-fi shows). But by season 2 they've learned from their mistakes and have honed the cast/writers/production crew. Others of course come out the gate running.

As much as people knock season 2 of TNG, it was a vast improvement from season 1. "Q Who" gave a great introduction to the Borg. "Measure of a Man" serves as one of the series' best, and a strong example of the morals of Star Trek in general. It wasn't season 3, but it was heading uphill. DS9 took a while as well, but the darker atmosphere held my interest, and plus season 2 ended with a bang (though DS9 overall never went above "average" in my book). By the time "Enterprise" got better, it was too late.

And frankly, the "better" aspect of "Enterprise" was found in fan-service. That may be enough to make me watch an episode or two, to see Vulcan, or a Constitution-class in full CGI glory, but not enough to keep me coming back. The cast never captured me. The plots seldom did. The series still remained contradictory on some level to what I imagined pre-TOS Star Trek to look and feel like. Nods to TOS, while nice, could not save the show. It has to stand on its own, on some level. Enterprise never quite did.

Ent made the mistake of trying to be "fresh and new" without realizing it didn't need to be.

In TOS, we are giving a WEALTH of races, systems, ships and situations. Any number of them could have been used for setting up the new series.

Instead, from day one, we got a races we never heared of, a war we never heared of, and situations we never heared of. Virtually all of season one and two was pulling new races and new civilization from their ass while ignoring the mountain of ready made plots that could be explored. Really it was B&B trying to show off before realizing that stuffing thier version of trek down our throats killed the show.

The long and short of it is, as others said, it should not take three seasons for a show to get going.

Thats poor logic when the same could be said of Next Generation, Voyager, and perhaps even Deep Space Nine as well.

open_sketchbook wrote:Thats poor logic when the same could be said of Next Generation, Voyager, and perhaps even Deep Space Nine as well.

But those were set afterwards and in their own little settings, whereas Ent had a load of continuity to take into account, if I'm making sense. Then again, Regeneration, one of the more continuity headache-inducing Ent episodes, is one of the more entertaining.

As far as I am concerned, that's fanboy bullshit. Out in the real world where casual fans watched "the new Star Trek", nobody gave three quaters of a fuck that the ship's interior didn't look like a 1960s cardboard set and nobody had heard of the aliens in an earlier series; we had bits and pieces of classic Trek coming together but still wrapped up in ball caps, jumpsuit pockets, and polarized hull plating. You really think the series would be better if it spent every second trying to be the bitch of the shows that came before instead of going it's own way, even if it meant the first two seasons dragged a bit? Season four wasn't good because it was non-stop masturbation to the previous series; it was good because it was well written and well executed, it just happens to be more impressive because they had one hand in their pants over TOS the whole time.

open_sketchbook wrote:As far as I am concerned, that's fanboy bullshit. Out in the real world where casual fans watched "the new Star Trek", nobody gave three quaters of a fuck that the ship's interior didn't look like a 1960s cardboard set and nobody had heard of the aliens in an earlier series; we had bits and pieces of classic Trek coming together but still wrapped up in ball caps, jumpsuit pockets, and polarized hull plating. You really think the series would be better if it spent every second trying to be the bitch of the shows that came before instead of going it's own way, even if it meant the first two seasons dragged a bit? Season four wasn't good because it was non-stop masturbation to the previous series; it was good because it was well written and well executed, it just happens to be more impressive because they had one hand in their pants over TOS the whole time.

Bull and Shit. You don't make another show as part of a legacy and shit all over the legacy and expect no repercussions. It was a prequel, and everyone gave a shit if the visuals coincided with their expectations.

Knife wrote:Indeed, I had high hopes for Ent and it was utter shit. Never made it to season 3, and I don't care it people think season 4 was 'better'. While plenty of shows have had a slow start but piked up steam in the second season to become good shows; there is nothing wrong with being a good show at the start either.

For me, it was the whole piece of shit motherfucking time travel arc, which took up a good chunk of Ent's middle episodes, and just pissed all over the concept of a Trek prequel. The whole Nazis/WW2/aliens time travel thing. The worst thing is that Future Guy, Blue Man Group, etc. were all featured in the 1st season (indeed the first episode) so the whole series started off on a bad note.

Knife wrote: Bull and Shit. You don't make another show as part of a legacy and shit all over the legacy and expect no repercussions. It was a prequel, and everyone gave a shit if the visuals coincided with their expectations.

Screw the set visuals, I could have forgiven that as ENT was supposed to look futuristic to us now and stuff that would look slightly dated compared to TOS sets would have likely been...well...
Nevermind the fact that they shat all over established continuity (which they routinely did), they managed to blow it in the very opening episode by parking the capital of the (until then) distant Klingon Empire (far enough that they established a Neutral Zone in between it and the Federation, in fact) right next door to Earth.