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To Boldly Go Into Cancellation
Enterprise is gone. I know the cancellation happened awhile ago, but it only now began to hit me that I liked the show a lot more than I thought. Well, I liked the idea of Enterprise a little more than the application, since I stopped watching it after the second season. I’m not a big TV person in the first place and I sort of lost touch with the series. For everyone else, I think that Enterprise never got a fair shot, since it got off on the wrong foot in the first couple of seasons and it never fully recovered. Stupid actions such as the idiotic theme song and boring opening credits combined with the disassociation with the Star Trek name never helped the series to get a strong foothold with the public. I think the nixing of the Star Trek label was the biggest fumble on the part of Paramount. The axing of the Star Trek brand name from the title gave the impression that to be a Star Trek series was a negative. The series was also controversial with Star Trek fans, considering how it fiddled around with Star Trek continuity. Nerds everywhere blew gaskets on message boards about a lot of small details while continuing not to have sex. (Just a side note, something's got to be said about the way Japanese use continuity like in series like Gundam, by having side stories or alternate reality series so fans won't get their panties in a bundle over the continuity). I know some who blame the series demise on the fact that it wasn't very good, but from all the episodes I ever saw it was no different than any other Star Trek series. Whatever the cause may be, this is yet another blow to the battered Star Trek franchise, which has seen much better days. The more recent Trek films were exercises in bad writing and beating a figurative horse to death. Deep Space 9 and Voyager were both series that may have been pleasing to the core fans, but never did much to capture the hearts of the greater public at large. If they would have, we can be sure that The Next Generation cast-centric films wouldn't have been milked dry like they were. Could you imagine how badly a Voyager film would tank at the box office? Another factor to consider with Star Trek’s woes is the close proximity of each series to each other. Star Trek wasn’t given a breathing period between series starting from The Next Generation onwards. I believe that any huge franchise should lay fallow for some time to increase its demand from its hard-core fan base. One of the many reasons The Next Generation was so popular at the start was that Star Trek fans had waited for how many dozens of years before they got a new series on TV. Similarly, it took about fifteen years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Before that, there was a great drought for Star Wars fans who were dying for more. Guess what we got? A horrible movie dressed up in Star Wars clothing, but we loved it anyway simply because it was new and it was Star Wars. Whatever may be said about George Lucas, it's true that he knew enough to leave his beloved franchise alone when everyone got sick of it. Paramount, on the other hand, seems content to continually rape the Star Trek franchise for every dollar they can get out of it. Enterprise was a good show that never got its due. Hampered by a slow start and the poor decision making of Paramount, Star Trek fans have been robbed of an entertaining series. Maybe Paramount should let the franchise rest a little before grabbing a can of Vaseline and going to town on Gene Roddenberry's corpse yet again. - Paul - 3/30/2005.
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