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This is sad news to some of us. UPN and Paramount pulled the plug on Enterprise yesterday, the last episode will air May 13. They did give them time enough to do a  special finale episode.  The  show will go into syndication next fall in most of the US.

I liked the first two seasons and became indifferent when they launched the one year arc  in season three, but they finally had started to make the show what it was supposed to be this year. But in their infinite wisdom UPN moved them to Friday night up against Scifi's Friday night line up  and the shows budget was cut,

According to Exec Producer Berman he expects about a three year hiatus before another incarnation of Trek reappears. Let;s hope they do it right when it does come back.

I feel for you Trek...you have my sympathies.

It's been said, but it bears repeating: Enterprise is the best Trek show since the original. It was really trying to get back to its roots. The galaxy was a bigger, more hostile place, the technology was not so advanced as to be all clean and neat, and mankind was not yet so "enlightened" as to become unbearably dull and preachy. Great characters too. The first Trek series that interested me at all since the middle seasons of TNG.

Now I've pretty much lost track of it on it's new night. Wednesday was perfect for me, but Friday is no good. And those two three-parters in a row, which were then immediately rerun, what was up with that? Great way to lose what viewers are left.

This is a Trekkie who is saying this, but as much as I enjoy ENTERPRISE, UPN (and Paramount/Rick Berman) simply screwed around with it TOO much and moved it to the ridiculous Friday night timeslot.

This was said here and there awhile back, but the TREK franchise really needs a rest for a few years (I think 5 years would be better than 3, IMHO), with NO new series or movies. Build up the anticipation, so to speak.

Hopefully, I think this will actually be a good thing in order to reinvigorate the entire TREK franchise and give the creative team time to come up with something fresh and different.



Post Edited (02-03-05 07:44)

True enough. Going through most of the 70s with no new Trek really made fans hungry for the movies and shows that followed. Maybe a repeat of that would be just what is needed.

Still, I think they had the right idea with Enterprise. I especially like that they went back to the original Trek universe, full of Vulcans and Andorians and Orions and such. I was getting sick of each new show introducing a pile of new aliens that we're supposed to accept on a par with those we've seen all along. I personally didn't give a damn about Bajorans or Trills or Kazons or Cardassians or any of those. It just served to complicate things. Enterprise got back to its roots, and I hope any future show does the same.



Post Edited (02-03-05 08:02)

AndyC wrote:

> True enough. Going through most of the 70s with no new Trek
> really made fans hungry for the movies and shows that followed.
> Maybe a repeat of that would be just what is needed.

Exactly.....a TREK reprieve. Give it a rest for awhile.

> Still, I think they had the right idea with Enterprise. I
> especially like that they went back to the original Trek
> universe, full of Vulcans and Andorians and Orions and such. I
> was getting sick of each new show introducing a pile of new
> aliens that we're supposed to accept on a par with those we've
> seen all along. I personally didn't give a damn about Bajorans
> or Trills or Kazons or Cardassians or any of those. It just
> served to complicate things. Enterprise got back to its roots,
> and I hope any future show does the same.

I think so too.....and add to that I really think Berman needs to keep his writing hands OUT of any future TREK series. I think one of the major problems was that he and Braga kept hogging all the writing credits instead of bringing in outside writers to come up with fresh ideas and stories.

Yes!
I lost intrest in the show, sadly, because i was all "Treked out".
Next Gen and Voyager and DS9....i liked some of them, and understood the need to expand the universe...but there was no real improvment to me.
Going back to the early years of the Federation was a good concept...but they still muffed it up!
Nooooo...the Klingons and Romulins did not contact the Feds till much later. The Andorians and Tellerites were underused original series species, and its good to see them fleshed out...but agine, still too much intrusion from next gen.
And the Original starship Enterprise was a passanger vessel. Based on a book, the  Star Trek spacefllight cronology, and the line up of previous Enterprises seen in the first Trek movie...this version was not there.
Yea, i'm going Medievil trek on yo butt...deal with it, Paramount!

Grumble,grumble,growl,growl...piffel...i'm gonna go play StarFleet Battles...

This sucks! Another show I watch down the drain.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think that with the cancellation of Enterprise, selling another Star Trek series will be much harder. Execs will simply look at the less than perfect ratings for Enterprise, completely disregard any of the circumstances for those ratings (like a bad timeslot) and declare that the public is tired of Star Trek, Star Trek no longer sells, etc.

BTW, to those who say they can't catch it on Friday nights, the same episode repeats two days later at 7PM on Sunday.

Our local UPN replays it on Sunday at  9:00 pm.

I was holding out hope for this one and they were making progress on improving the show even with the reduced budget (most of the loss was made up by them filming  with HD digital cameras this season).  Manny Coto and  the Reeves-Stevens' were what the show needed after it being abused by Berman & Braga.

When DS9 ended, Ron Moore went over to Voyager and was badly abused by these two idiots and left Star Trek.  Now, his show Battlestar Galactica is beating Enterprises ratings.  At least someone is getting a little justice out of this deal.

The people over at Save Enterprise say they haven't given up the fight, but I don't know what they can do. The press release was made by Paramount and UPN, so it sounds like the studio isn't interested in pursuing someone else to buy the show. According to Berman the show is too expensive for first run syndication.

I'll keep on watching what's happening, but I expect that it is over for now. Hopefully  when another incarnation appears in few years they will get someone that cares about the Star Trek universe to run the show.

I watched this show with great hopes for the first 2 seasons and while some aspects were okay, mostly it was all so so ... wrong.  Kinda like the first Star Trek movie, the feel was just off.  Even though they had a truly clean canvas to work with, they fell into the same old patterns and storylines.  And then in season 3 when they introduced that wrongheaded idea to do a Star Trek version of 9/11, the whole thing got so dark & ugly.... I'm glad it's gone.

Let's hope the next one starts out fresh & right.

For me... Enterprise was a step up from Voyager... but still, despite the pretense at "returning to its roots" very much made from the Trek cookie cutter.

Personally, I blame the cancer that has long lingered at the heart of Star Trek - Berman and Braga. Quite why these two hacks weren't taken out into a field and shot 10 or more years ago is truly beyond my ken.

Seasons 1 and 2 were just a usual hodge podge of generally unrelated bland episodes - then as phantom points out we get essentially some thinly veiled War on Terror and WMD season.

All the temporal cold war stuff was terrible really but the start of season 4 seemed promising after that got cleared up with the mini-arcs. The Augments one was pretty awesome, there was (for perhaps the first time since TNG) actual tension and Brent Spiner too... the one after that was a bit weaker but still good. Now they've fallen back to rather prosaic episodes - even going for the tired "humans are great - they have so much potential!" messages. Really though - too little too late IMO.

I mean, it was interesting to see humans being kind of s**t but yet they still manage to go up again the Klingons etc. and they still used new races a fair bit instead of exploring the ones we know about. We had the whole thing about the Xindi who I'm sure have never been mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

Anyway - I think Galactica has pretty much in every respect trumped Star Trek and that's why Star Trek needs to sit on the bench for a few years, get some new writers and some new blood and come up with an idea that isn't "ship going around exploring".

I blame how badly Star Trek: Nemesis did at the box office.

Prophet Tenebrae wrote:
> we know about. We had the whole thing about the Xindi who I'm
> sure have never been mentioned before and will never be
> mentioned again.

The key is that they'll never be mentioned again. Inventing an alien race for a particular story is good Trek. Inventing a bunch of them every year and expecting us to treat them like they were always there, well, that's more typical of the crap they've been doing since the early 90s.

I got annoyed with this from the first time we were introduced to Cardassians and Bajorans, and told there was a fairly significant, and recent, war involving the Federation that we'd never heard of before. Then we've suddenly got a Bajoran on the bridge of the Enterprise, and we're expected to put these Johnny-come-lately Cardassians on a par with Klingons and Romulans. Bulls**t.

Then it just kept right on going with each new show.

The mistake that they were making, seems to me, was that they were reinventing the Trek universe and using the same basic stories, when they should have set it in the same universe, and diverged more in the stories. For example, how about a show in the Trek universe that isn't about Starfleet?

Enterprise at least tried to get out of the same time period, and back to the time when the galaxy was quite a different place, and humans less sure of their position in it. At the same time, they went back and started with the basic Trek universe established in the original series, with perhaps a little influence of the later shows.



Post Edited (02-04-05 10:29)

What a shame. I like Enterprise.

I'll miss Enterprise,  the crew were not a bunch of PC twits, and they didn't rely on reversing the polarity of the tachyon flux stream.  I like story arcs, it makes a show seem more lifelike, where things don't get wrapped up in a hour.  Thats' one reason I really liked Babylon 5

What the hell is a tachyon flux stream?

Yeah, I agree completely.  I guess I'm the opposite of most Trekkies - I loved TOS and it got cancelled pretty quick.  By moving it to Friday night, if I remember correctly.  I didn't care for TNG and it went on forever.  Didn't care for DS9 and it went on forever.  Detested Voyager and it went on forever.  Liked Enterprise, so cancel that puppy right now!

Oh well, I only really liked season 3, so I guess I'll pick it up on DVD and that'll be enough for me.

>We had the whole thing about the Xindi who I'm sure have never been
>mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

Not to mention that they just HAD to have a Borg episode, even though they were supposedly first seen by the Federation in the TNG episode. Frankly I'm surprised that Q hasn't appeared to screw up the continuity even more.

Maybe they'll restart it in a few years time...

Should've let it get a stronger foothold before it was canned.