Recently I undertook to do something I’ve never done before, which was to watch an entire TV series from beginning to end as a project. Of course I couldn’t do this in one sitting, mind you, but over a period of several weeks I went plugging through the thing an episode at a time, right in order.
The show in question was Star Trek: Enterprise, sometimes considered the weaker sibling of the various Star Trek shows and movies, although I was actually quite taken with it. It’s the series which shows the very first Enterprise, making its first interstellar trip.
It was cancelled after four seasons, probably a bit of a shame because it had obviously found its style and had become quite effective. It features some of the best acting I’ve yet seen on a Star Trek series — I was particularly taken with the performances by the communications officer and the first engineer, both of whom took two-dimensional caricatures and turned them into very compelling characters. But ratings are ratings.
So, after watching four seasons of a single show — about 100 episodes in all — some observations:
1) I began mentally tensing up every time people sat down at a table to eat together. That’s because there is a long-standing Star Trek tradition of people never finishing their dinners. Meal-related scenes always seem to end in only a few ways: a) somebody is paged to go to the bridge or engineering or whatnot, b) the ship goes on tactical alert, or c) somebody gets upset about something and takes off.
This particular show carries on the tradition beautifully; out of the 100 episodes or so, I think I saw people actually finish their dinners maybe 3 or 4 times. I began feeling a lot of concern for those folks: my, my they must be getting hungry a lot!
2) The great old Star Trek tradition of gratuitous pretty people was very much in effect throughout. By this I mean folks hovering around in the backgrounds — at some unidentified console on the bridge, going by in the passageways, working in engineering, etc. There is a tendency for these to be excessively pretty people, both male and female, and there is also a tendency for them to change from episode to episode, in fact from scene to scene. That tradition dates back to the original series, in which the “red shirt” guys had a tendency to be hunks, which made their inevitable death-before-the-opening-credits all the more poignant.
3) Consistency remains both a bugaboo and a source of charm for the entire Star Trek franchise. All things considered, they’ve done pretty well. Still, I really don’t think they needed an entire episode of “Enterprise” to try to justify Klingons having smooth foreheads in the original series, while they always have ridged foreheads in the other parts of the franchise.
4) If this were a real situation, and people actually went through the amount of trials and tribulations faced by this crew week after week, every one of them would be hopelessly insane in a short time. I suppose that’s true of just about any TV show: imagine trying to live as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, with some minor household crisis or wacky thing happening every week.
5) Overall I think the Star Trek franchise is at its best in two circumstances: a) when they’re working with bigger ideas such as the nature of identity (episode “Similitude”), interfering with other cultures (episode “Dear Doctor”), or the like; b) when they’re just kicking up their heels and putting on a 1950’s-style space opera (episodes “Through a Mirror Darkly”). They’re at their worst when they start turning into soap opera (the entire series plot line about an affair between human first engineer and Vulcan science officer.)