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Note: These comments about Star Trek were originally written for my weblog, which I stopped updating in July 2003. They are reproduced here unchanged. Enterprise: Tomorrow is Yesterday (3 February 2003) The trouble with Voyager, and Janeway (5 January 2002) 1  Enterprise: Tomorrow is Yesterday (3 February 2003) Particularly lame episode of Enterprise tonight. In "A Night in Sickbay" Captain Archer spends the night bickering with Doctor Phlox after his dog falls ill on an away mission. What's really stupid is that Archer took his dog with him on a diplomatic visit to an alien race known to be particularly sensitive about etiquette and from whom he needed to obtain an important spare part. Yet when his mutt took a leak on their sacred trees Archer had the gall to be angry that his hosts were so insulted by it. But this illustrates the way in which Enterprise is going back to Star Trek's roots. Despite Gene Roddenberry's liberal ideals, the original series often tended to be like Wagon Train in space, with Captain Kirk socking bad guys on the jaw and wooing the ladies as though the Wild West had never ended. The Next Generation completely reworked the whole concept, adding much more sophisticated character-based stories than had ever been possible in the original. It was a more subtle and complex universe, but also one with a more mature sensibility. Deep Space Nine brought further innovation, with long-running story arcs and a stronger political element. Whereas the first two series had focussed on exploration, DS9 showed us the diplomacy involved in keeping the Federation together. Then came Voyager, which started off with a radical new premise but failed to follow it through. Thus began the decline of Star Trek. Life aboard Voyager should have become very different to anything seen before on a Federation starship, but the producers lost their nerve and Voyager was soon trekkin' around as if that whole Delta Quadrant thing had just been a dream. At least Janeway didn't find Bobby Ewing in her sonic shower. Enterprise continues the retreat. Plots and characters are simpler, and Archer blusters around trampling on aliens' sensibilities and lecturing them on human uniqueness as if channelling the spirit of James T. Kirk. More fighting, less thinking, and absolutely no intellectual captains who know about poetry and stuff. Instead of innovating, Enterprise dumbs down and tries to copy the original Star Trek format in the hope of repeating its success without taking any risks. 2  The trouble with Voyager, and Janeway (5 January 2002) Star Trek: Enterprise - starts showing in the UK on Monday 7th, on Sky One. I'm looking forward to it but I hope it turns out better than Voyager, which although it had some good ideas and some good individual episodes didn't live up to its potential. It should have been something completely new. A single Federation crew lost in the Delta quadrant would have to make alliances with the local powers to survive. They would have to carry passengers or cargo, trade technology, or even act as mercenaries to get the supplies and spare parts they needed. There would be constant clashes between the high principles of Federation law and the low necessities of survival. The ship would have to be repaired with alien technology, and whenever they lost a crewmember with important specialist skills they would have to take on whoever - or whatever - they could recruit locally to replace them. The Maquis wouldn't just put on uniforms and accept Federation regulations, so the whole functioning of the ship and crew would have to be rethought from scratch. Once they realised that there was no quick way home, some of the crew would have decided to settle in the Delta quadrant (hence more alien replacements) and some would have wanted to redesign Voyager as a generational ship. It would become a ship and crew totally unlike anything ever seen before in Star Trek. Only...none of that actually happened. It just became a copy of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", as if it was just a normal ship with a normal crew back in the Alpha quadrant. It was a colossal failure of nerve by the producers. They set up this radical new scenario and then backed away from its implications, preferring to repeat a successful formula rather than risk doing something completely new. Another problem was that Janeway is totally unbelievable as a Starship Captain. "The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" have given us a fairly consistent picture of 24th century human society as a place where greed and hatred have been abolished, and people spend their time pursuing a vocation or personal fulfillment rather than such primitive vices as wealth or power. In this society, Picard and Sisko are just the kind of rounded, balanced personalities who would be considered as role models and potential leaders. But Janeway is a total throwback. Obsessively competitive, driven, ambitious, tense and irritable, she is a classic 20th (and 21st) century over-achiever. Every large company contains people like her, determinedly working their way up the corporate ladder to a seat on the board and an early heart attack. No doubt the producers had met lots of men and women like that in the entertainment industry, and this may have influenced their idea of what a successful and powerful woman would be like. Yet in the 24th century society we've been shown, that kind of personality would be considered unhealthy and unbalanced. Even apart from that, Janeway's recklessness would keep her out of the top job in any century. A much better use of this character would have been to have Janeway start out as a first or second officer, who had risen quickly through the ranks because of her obvious ability but whose career had then stalled because of her character flaws. She would be frustrated and desperate to prove herself, and would finally get her chance through the original Captain being killed in the pilot episode. Initially the Maquis wouldn't trust her because she was Federation and the Voyager crew wouldn't be sure that she was up to the job, and neither group would trust the other at all. She would make mistakes, learn from them, and eventually grow into the role, developing as a person in the process. That would have been much more convincing, and more interesting.

		Last Updated: 1 Oct 07