Man-oh-man.
Star Trek: Enterprise is the prequel series to the original Star Trek, airing from 2001 to 2005, and I hadn't actually watched it since it was being aired, so I figured that it might be time to give it another go. It was the first star trek series that my family stopped watching (and we watched
Voyager together). The air date puts a lot of the things that happen in the show in context, I think. Anyways, so the show's aim was to make Star Trek 'fresh' again, something that modern audiences would sit down and watch over other primetime television of the era. So, they aimed to make Star Trek something that could compete with Buffy or Alias: something exciting, occasionally gritty, and above all,
SEXYBut, like, they start with the bits where they have to rub decontaminant gel on each other, in tank-tops and shorts.
"Not good enough! Make it sexier!"
Uh, then they move it to, like, intimate massages for "Vulcan neural realignment therapy".
"Still not good enough! Ratings are too low!"
Fuck it. Naked Vulcan shower massages.
"NOT WORKING! PULL UP PULL UPPPPPP!"
AUGH. Are you wearing a snake's skin?! Anyways, so yeah, the totally transparent boobs=ratings grab was shitty and remains shitty.
There's also the really muddled nature of the show's politics: the show started in 2001, and continued through 2005. You've got 9/11 there at the start, the main villains of the first couple seasons are named the Suliban, just a couple letters off from Taliban. You've got the Iraq war happening, and there's a storyline about an alien race, the Xindi, that is developing a WMD that could wipe out the earth. And the traditional enlightened Star Trek 'all problems can be solved by communication, and all sentient species deserve our respect' collides with the 24-esque sensibilities of the era. Captain Archer fucking tosses a dude in an airlock and starts sucking the air out 'til he tells him where the weapon is, and that's not something that anybody ever calls him out on.
This sort of dovetails with the show's weird racial attitudes: the Xindi, developing the WMD, are composed of five subspecies, some of which don't actually want to destroy Earth. Like, I guess the intention was to demonstrate that sometimes there are internal groups in a conflict that we don't necessarily see, and no species is 100% ideologically aligned, so we shouldn't hold all of them responsible for the actions of a few, but two of the subspecies are just out-and-out evil, which kind of contradicts the whole point. Plus, there's this weird thing where the Vulcans are actually, like, controlling the human government? And they get to say what kind of missions Starfleet undertakes? It's got a really weird kind of Jewish cabal/Illuminati vibe to it. Plus, there's a bit where kindergarteners are sending their crayon drawings to the enterprise, and the one of the Vulcan officer is this weird green racial caricature, and it's played for laughs! Like, if there were a chinese character, and some kids drew, like, a yellow-skinned buck-toothed crayon drawing, that would be some serious shit.
Also, the writing is bad, the characters are one-dimensional and totally fail to grow in any significant way over the course of the show, they don't ask any interesting questions or explore any interesting themes, and they do way *way* too many dumb episodes where they meet (THING YOU KNOW FROM STAR TREK) for the first time, even if it doesn't make any sense and directly contradicts what we know from the other Star Trek series (the Borg, the Ferengi, the Romulans).
AUGH.