Originally posted by Dogg Thang
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I read a while back that when Abrams came to make the more recent Star Trek movie, he apparently was quite specific about certain members of the "Trek Family" that he explicitly didn't want to have creative input to the project. Enterprise makes you appreciate why. It's like they were brave in so many areas to really stretch the concept, but those areas weren't the right ones upon which to focus.
Everyone talks about this, but the (I think second?) season where they've got a season arc, and have a year to find the Xindi Superweapon before it destroys the Earth and irreparably changes the future, and the whole stuff about the "temporal cold war"... There was good stuff in that. The ticking clock, the high stakes, having the ships go out into unknown space against the rising tide; all good. The problem is that the character interactions didn't reflect this. Yeah, okay, people got a bit battered and bruised and there were some raised voices here-and-there, but I wanted to see more.
There's a phrase in writing which says that characters are like geodes. On the outside, they're just dull rocks; you only see what they're made of by smashing them apart. You've got to be brave enough to put your characters through hell in order to get the best out of them. This is why some of the best TNG episodes are the ones like "Chain of Command", or "The Measure of a Man"; they push the characters out of their comfort zone. I wanted to see the Enterprise crew do okay, at first, but critically, start to run out of time and start to fail, and then I wanted to see them struggle to maintain their "evolved sense of ethics" in the face of destruction. I wanted to see Archer go from upstanding hero to a desperate man who will do anything to prevent a disaster, even stuff that would make the audience look upon him with suspiscion. I wanted a fall from grace.
EDIT: Oh, also, the "masked" character, AKA "future guy". The fact that the writers wrote a masked character but never decided who he would eventually be revealed to be (and had intended to never reveal his identity) was a terrible idea.
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