27. [ENT] Season 1 Review

SCORE:

(3.42/5 stars, averaged over all ratings from the season)

Thank you all for your readership up to this point. Now that I’ve hit the first season finale, I’m rolling out my end of season recap, and averaging the star ratings of each episode to find out how the season holds up overall. This should hopefully be a good metric to judge each series on, and should provide some reflection on my part as to how much I actually liked a season.

So how did the first season of Enterprise hold up? Well, it wasn’t exactly the strongest season of Star Trek, but as far as first seasons go, I think it comes second only to TOS. It did a fair job of introducing us to most of the main characters, except for Mayweather, who’s as two-dimensional as the plot of Avatar. It’s clear that they were attempting to recreate the Kirk/Bones/Spock dynamic in Archer the ego, T'Pol the superego, and Trip the id. It’s not as good, and the hostile respect between Bones and Spock is replaced with sexual tension for Trip and T'Pol, which will grow more apparent and more sexual as the series goes on.

In terms of acting, T'Pol could do with a little more warmth in her characterization. Spock was analytical but rarely icy, and definitely someone you could consider a friend. T'Pol being cold makes sense for the first few episodes, but later on they attempt to play it that Archer and T'Pol have a growing friendship, and you wouldn’t know it but that Archer says they do. Archer himself is a little hammy. I don’t think Scott Bakula knew what to do with the role other than make it different from Sam Beckett, so he spent a lot of time imitating Kirk’s odd speech patterns and squinting his eyebrows a lot, but that’s not acting.

One character I’ve grown to like a lot more than when I first watched Enterprise is Hoshi Sato. Back when Enterprise was on the air, I found her whiny and annoying, but I realized I was judging her through the lens of four series’ worth of explorers who are more professional and experienced just by virtue of having the knowledge of their predecessors. Hoshi was never meant to be an explorer, and Starfleet Academy couldn’t adequately prepare any of them for all the things they’d encounter on their journey, because it was all uncharted territory. You shouldn’t judge Hoshi as a Starfleet officer, because she’s one of the first and is miles more competent with her lack of training than say, Uhura, who had to look up Klingon in a dictionary.

As far as Phlox goes, I get the feeling (though I’m probably wrong) that John Billingsley had a handle on the character right from the get-go. His characterization is both nuanced and consistent throughout, and he’s a consummate professional who deserves all work thrown his way. He’s woefully underused in the final few episodes of the season, not even appearing in some of them and having only a token line in others. It’s pretty much a given that the doctor in a series is one of the most-liked characters regardless of how well or how poorly the show was otherwise received, and it’s a mistake to keep them hidden away in sickbay all the time. Bones got plenty of exposure in his series. The writers should have stepped up their Phlox game.

The technical details are definitely at the high point of Star Trek, just by the virtue of being produced with better technology and better budgets. The sets are of excellent quality, looking like a real ship (although the 4:3 LCD screens all over the ship date it fast), and not attempting to hide ship functions as “magic energy” like later series do. This is the only series of Trek to have embraced the 16:9 aspect ratio, which it did several years before it became the shooting standard for television. They’re also the first series to have ditched traditional models entirely for computer generated space shots. Voyager had a mix of traditional models and CGI, but there was never a physical NX-01 Enterprise constructed for filming. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. It allows for more freedom of shots, but at the cost of tangibility. Which looks more like a real ship, the NX-01 or the NCC-1701-D?

There are several small elements strewn about the season as continuity nods, but they’re not noticeable enough to really count as prequel elements. In terms of actual prequel continuity, there were 12 episodes out of 26 of proper prequel content: 4 episodes featuring Klingons (Broken Bow I+II, Unexpected, and Sleeping Dogs), 7 prominently featuring Vulcans other than T'Pol (Broken Bow I+II, The Andorian Incident, Breaking the Ice, Shadows of P'Jem, Fusion, Fallen Hero), 2 featuring a race not seen since TOS, Andorians (The Andorian Incident, Shadows of P'Jem), 1 appearance by the Ferengi (Acquisition), 1 by the Nausicaans (Fortunate Son) and a visit to the planet Risa (Two Days and Two Nights). Considering Enterprise is exploring our close stellar neighbors, it feels like almost every alien species they encounter should have been one established in canon, yet we have 14 episodes that don’t really build on them, instead choosing to focus on one-off aliens we’ll never see again, or building up the Suliban, an alien threat so severe we never see them again in any series.

It’s obvious that the Temporal Cold War is still being built up and they didn’t want to go all-out for the first season, but the very existence of it as an arc is evidence in my mind that the writers didn’t know how to show that Enterprise affected the future of Star Trek without having them actually affect the future of Star Trek through cheap tricks. Still, the cliffhanger of Archer trapped in a 31st century world that never knew him is compelling enough to tune back in for the resolution.

All in all, it’s not a fantastic season, but it’s not bad. I currently hold that season 3 of Enterprise is the worst, but we’ll have to wait a couple more months before I get to that one and challenge my current assertions. Next up, the resolution of Shockwave. Will Archer make it back to Enterprise and repair the future? (Hint: yes.)