Revisiting Enterprise: "Fight or Flight" and "Strange New World"

The series itself begins. My thoughts on the second and third episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise's first season are after the jump.

Revisiting Enterprise: "Broken Bow"

Star Trek: Enterprise has a pretty poor reputation, and I've decided to investigate whether or not it truly deserves it. The first season was recently released on Blu-ray, so I'll be taking in these episodes for the first time since their Australian broadcast in 2002, and a lot has changed in Star Trek and TV SF in general since then.

Back then, we'd had multiple Star Trek shows on the air for years. Today, Trek fans get one highly questionable movie every few years, so it's easy to forget that many of us were feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the Trek on the air in the 1990s and early 2000s. Plus, the timidity of Voyager's seven, cosy seasons didn't inspire much confidence in the next show from the same team.

To their credit, Trek custodian Rick Berman and long-time Trek writer Brannon Braga did shake up the premise. Instead of another 24th century show, they gave us a prequel, set 100 years before the original series and following the crew of Earth's first substantially warp-capable vessel. That meant no Federation and no Roddenberry utopia. Many of the familiar alien races wouldn't have been encountered yet, and the crew would be facing a more mysterious and potentially hostile galaxy.

On paper, Enterprise was promising. Ironically, what could be viewed as the limitations of a prequel concept actually could have freed the show to become genuinely about exploration again. The Next Generation ended up focusing largely on social and political dilemmas and scientific mishaps in an increasingly familiar universe, and Deep Space Nine told a more serialised story about war and intrigue. Voyager, however, should have restored that sense of wonder and perhaps even some sublime terror, being about a ship lost on the other side of the galaxy. That it became a safe retread of TNG didn't bode well for much awe in Enterprise.

SPOILER REVIEW: Star Trek into Darkness

Benedict Cumberbatch as the Star Trek franchise

JJ Abrams's War on Creativity scored a major victory this month with the release of Star Trek into Darkness. Facing the dual threats of a liberating, astronomical budget and a universe of narrative possibilities, Abrams valiantly fought them off with a timid rehash of a classic story that will fail to satisfy fans and non-fans alike. His refusal to surrender and make something up himself bodes well for a bright future in big-budget filmmaking.

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There are plenty of spoiler-free reviews of this film out there. This one is spoileriffic, so it's hidden under the cut. Don't click through if you want to remain surprised, although as you'll discover, you probably won't be.

Star Trek Fiction - More than Mere Tie-Ins

I like to consider myself the kind of fan who isn't slavishly faithful. I don't think it's healthy fandom when the object of your ardour can do no wrong. If nothing else, it prevents you from demanding the best, not to mention the fact that you may end up spending far too much time thinking about it.

Tie-in novels have a reputation among more casual geeks as being extreme fodder targeted at such all-encompassing fans, wherein the large backlog of episodes still isn't enough. When the corporate owners of the show don't see any creative value in these extensions of the franchise and are keen to just make a quick buck, then it's sad to see mediocre and inconsequential tie-in novels get gobbled up by the fanbase without discernment (and don't get me started on novelisations...). To make matters worse, the tie-ins inherently can't contribute anything substantial to the narrative of their series or franchise as they are tightly constrained by being unable to contradict what may come. While the shows are running, the novels occupy a fairly pointless limbo where they can only ever hope to be a standalone episode free of budgetary constraints.

But to tar all tie-in novels with this brush is to generalise and ignore their potential. I read some Star Trek novels in my teens and a couple were hugely exciting, written so creatively that the stakes were huge without contravening the series they were based on. Peter David's Q-Squared was a terrific read in this vein, but I soon came to feel that most of the novels I was encountering were entertaining but inconsequential Trek yarns. There were still plenty of TV episodes I'd yet to see that served that purpose, so I moved on. As the years passed I would spot the latest novels in the bookstore and cringe a little that they were still going, even after the TV and movie franchises had gone to dust.

I've since learned that this was far too reductive an assessment. Out of curiosity, I read up on the current state of Trek fiction and was surprised to discover that its ambition has skyrocketed. Free from the constraints of conforming to series in production and movies in development, the books can now be as adventurous as the authors can imagine - anything can happen. The shows have essentially continued in prose form, but with the added bonus of becoming increasingly intermingled in mostly plausible ways, taking care to avoid what's been termed 'small universe syndrome'. The fallout from the Dominion War now affects Voyager and The Next Generation rather than being contained to the Deep Space Nine books, and the political and cultural complexity of that show is now one of the book line's calling cards.