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Which ST had the worst first season?
mimey2
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Personally my vote has to go for TNG. The 'holier-than-thou', 'better than you', 'overly perfect' human characters are incredibly grating to put it nicely. The poor stories and just saying how amazing humanity is over and over got my nerves.
I'd certainly rather watch any of the first season of any of the other shows. Ent had it's faults, and plenty of suck, but I'd still take it. DS9 tended to drag it's feet and had a couple of stinkers (see: Move Along Home), but also a great couple of ones as well (See: Duet). Voy also had it's faults, but I feel that it isn't that terrible; if anything it might have an overall aura of 'bad', but isn't a cesspool of suck. TOS is well, TOS.
I never really watched much of TAS myself, but I'm sure I'd still rather watch that over TNG if for no other reason than late-60's camp.
I'd certainly rather watch any of the first season of any of the other shows. Ent had it's faults, and plenty of suck, but I'd still take it. DS9 tended to drag it's feet and had a couple of stinkers (see: Move Along Home), but also a great couple of ones as well (See: Duet). Voy also had it's faults, but I feel that it isn't that terrible; if anything it might have an overall aura of 'bad', but isn't a cesspool of suck. TOS is well, TOS.
I never really watched much of TAS myself, but I'm sure I'd still rather watch that over TNG if for no other reason than late-60's camp.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.pwlaughingtrendy wrote:I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
Post edited by mimey2 on
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So to answer your question, Enterprise, I think, was the worst. I was seriously hyped to see that show and then severely disappointed by what I saw.
(TAS is considered by me to be TOS' 4th season.)
ENT's was actually pretty decent, I think. It did a good job setting up the rest of the series (well, until season 3 at least).
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
While TOS is relentlessly silly in its first season, one has to remember the time frame in which it came out. This was a contemporary of the Batman live-action TV show and The Monkees, after all. Thus as long as you can get into that frame of mind, it's quite enjoyable - and markedly less serious than Trek would become or, rather, than most Trek fans would have it become. I feel we need a touch of that silliness again.
Deep Space Nine commits the sin of not being Babylon 5, which is hardly a sin but still a strike against it: I saw the latter first so I can't help but judge the former by it, and Babylon 5 just does most everything that DS9 tries to do, and does it better. But this might be a situation like with Dan Brown's books Angels & Demons and The da Vinci Code - the one to like is the one you read first, because the two are so similar in structure and feel that the second one you read will just feel like a pointless retread. I prefer Angels & Demons, incidentally.
VOY's greatest sin in its first season is mostly just that it was a show that is desperately trying to convince us that it has a voice of its own when compared to TNG, but in fact is basically just TNG - a situation that would only grow as the series went on. Having said that, however, none of it is really all that bad in comparison to early TNG.
ENT suffers from the problem of being in a franchise fundamentally about exploring strange new worlds, but being set during a time where most of what is strange and new to humans in-universe isn't strange and new to the audience. Even still, it gets major props for bringing back the Andorians. Aside from "Dear Doctor," (which is at worst as offensive as "Code of Honor") the worst that can be said about ENT's season 1 is that it's so okay it's average.
I haven't watched the animated series, and so can't comment on it.
I see someone else noticed what I did.
...eh? The entire series was based around the idea of the NX-01 being humanity's first deep space exploration ship. Why wouldn't they encounter situations where they refine the transporter n' such?
Because the development of those things, was, as Marcus said, too forced. There was no actual "research and development" time. Instead, it was "I think I can do this with the thing" and they do it with the thing, and the thing works on the very first try.
Thus... forced.
TOS>DS9>TNG>VOY>>>ENT
Second seasons, best to worst:
DS9>TOS>>>VOY>TNG>ENT
Season 1 TNG was merely silly, rather than offensively stupid as ENT's was. Especially as a product of its era, season 1 TNG was solidly mediocre. Season 1 VOY was a bad copy of season 1 TNG, and hence gets a lower rating.
Season 2 TNG offended me, in part because Maurice Hurley is a piece of human offal who sexually harassed Gates McFadden and made the first episode of season 2 about a space alien impregnating Troi without her consent and only Worf caring about this awful action. It's lower than season 2 VOY because season 2 VOY was just garden-variety bad SF with one offensively racist episode. Season 2 ENT rates lower because of "A Night In Sickbay", which does the entire franchise a disservice by existing.
If I might slip into my 4Chan persona for a moment...
>"Code of Honor," "Angel One," "The Neutral Zone."
>Not offensive.
Pick one.
Well, with regards to the forcefield, I'm presuming you're referring to "Vox Sola," where the forcefields had been worked on since 2147, some years before Enterprise launched. This is a fact stated in the episode itself, dude, it's not like Malcom Reed created the forcefield apropos nothing. More on that below.
With regards to the transporter, it wasn't a new technology, but rather had been in use for years and the only recent change was that it had been approved for use on humans (stated in the first episode). The refinements we see are what amount to field tests.
Given that all we're seeing is refinement of standard Trek technology that itself had been , I'm not sure why you can hold this against Enterprise when in so many series set later in the timeline, solutions to problems often come in the form of equally ludicrous technobabble and are often things created on the spot for the first time ever by Spock, Data, or whoever. Hell, half the plot of Star Trek IV involves Spock having miraculously come up with a way to recrystalize dilithium when all of five seconds earlier Scotty - one of if not the the most accomplished engineers in Starfleet - stated that it was imposisble using 23rd century technology.
Evidently modifying the main deflector dish to emit a high-energy tachyon pulse to disperse the chroniton particles and cause a cascade failure in the temporal anomaly's subnucleonic structure is alright, but figuring out how to transport stuff more efficiently or build a better forcefield isn't.
TOS>DS9>TNG>VOY>ENT
I think the margin of separation is razor-thin, especially between TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise. Season 1 of TNG has some REALLY bad stinkers. Voyager's first season was "more of the same" in terms of storytelling, so it just feels bland (although, I did a rewatch last year, and the first season wasn't that bad... although, maybe I'm blocking it out of my memory, LOL). Enterprise, though... ugh. STALE.
I could be arm-twisted into slotting TNG or VOY as the worst, but honestly, I can't figure out what Enterprise's excuse would be.
ENT is everything bad about TNG on serious steroids. VOY? VOY's just TNG, watered down and processed for pat TV messages because Viewers Are Morons.
I'd have to rank TNG as having the worst first season - seemed like every episode was either a poor retread of a TOS episode ("The Naked Now", for example), offensively sexist/racist ("Code of Honor", "Angel One") or just plain dumb ("Justice"). Second season wasn't much of an improvement; it took the show three years to really hit its stride.
VOY actually had a fairly cohesive first season; it was as the show went on that the cracks appeared, since it was supposed to follow a story arc, but the producers wouldn't let it.
ENT's first season was, IMO, the best of the Berman/Braga years. It wouldn't be that good again until Manny Coto got hold of it; if he'd been given a decent chance, I think he could have gotten a full seven years out of it.
When I first read that one of the characters was actually a Starfleet officer from the future, my initial suspicion was that it was Malcolm, as some of his comments, such as the lack of scans on shuttle landings or some such, struck me as coming from someone who was used to say the protocols of the TNG/DS-9/Voy era (or beyond) Starfleet. That could have explained how he was able to develop forcefields, his idea of 'Reed Alert', etc. When it turned out to be a random faceless crewmember, I felt they dropped the ball they'd pitched themselves, hense why I rate it as a worse season than TNG'S...
You should consider the reason for the bolded carefully. Why was it advised that it be only used for cargo up until they needed a plot device to rescue Archer? What was it doing to living matter? As you said, the NX-01 was supposed to be an experimental ship, yet they surprisingly did very little experimenting... everything worked the first time right out of the box. Was there an NX-00.9 before them that was the real experimental ship that the trial and error existed on?
I mean hell, right in the first episode, they successfully breach their primitive warp barrier on the VERY FIRST ATTEMPT!
Yes, yes, earlier Star Trek occasionally had these "first try miracles" too, but there were also a lot of other times where they didn't and the whole episode was about trying to solve whatever damn problem they were having.
It would have been more interesting to watch the crew of the NX-01 to struggle with and refine their ship's capabilities over several episodes rather than hit Warp 5 right on their first mission lickity-spit and so forth.
You actually answered your own criticism, in a way.
Worffan has a legit beef with Hurley (as most fans should) because he was the head writer for TNG during the first two seasons. He became the co-executive producer at the end of season one, and left the show at the end of season two. Michael Pillar took over at the beginning of season three... and TNG took off.
He's basically the polar opposite of Ron Moore, LOL.
Am disgusted to hear Gates McFadden was harrassed though, I had no idea that had happened :mad:
There's a reason why I loathe every fiber of his being.
And, Jonsills...I'd appreciate it if you stopped falsely accusing me of bias in these matters. I hated "The Child" and "Up the Long Ladder" before I knew who Maurice Hurley was. That's your opinion, but I feel that season 1 of VOY is worse for being a tired retread of it, and ENT's first season was worse for containing "Unexpected" (treats sexual assault as comedy), "Fight or Flight" (shows abject incompetence among the crew and Captain), "The Andorian Incident" (Archer thinks that behaving better than a toddler is difficult), "Dear Doctor" (Genocide is A-OK!), et cetera ad nauseam. Cohesive. Sure.
Cohesive in mediocrity and suck, with a racist caricature XO, utterly inconsistent CO, the Kazon, and Harry Kim who was just sort of there.
Season 2 was worse, but season 1 was pretty bad in terms of special effects, writing, and acting.
I violently disagree, but again, your opinion.
Either way, Worf was the only person showing a modicum of competence. That was actually the 4th ST episode I saw, and why I started to really like Worf.
On the second part: Mem Alpha has conflicting information on the subject; McFadden claimed that she left because of harassment, Stewart was too British to say anything either way, Hurley claimed that he didn't like her acting skills (which was bull considering who he had replace her), and the official line was that they decided to go a different way with the character and she left to pursue other options.
The likely truth is probably something like: Hurley said something offensively sexist, McFadden got angry, it turned into a giant fight, Hurley got her removed from the show, and the studio covered it with BS.
Fortunately, Hurley got kicked out after the ratings dropped and (I like to think) Sir Patrick Stewart got tired of the BS, and some marginally more competent people (Berman and Piller) got brought on with some other people to tell them "no, that's stupid". Better all-around for us.
I thought she left because she was pregnant?
And so was "Angel One" and "The Neutral Zone" and "The Last Outpost" and "The Naked Now." For each bad episode in ENT's first season there are two in TNG. And if we're talking about insulting the intelligence of the viewer I don't think you can get worse than "The Neutral Zone" where, in fact, Picard actively insults everything about the viewers, directly.
Amusing, because I consider it to be everything good about Trek as a whole.
It wasn't. It's stated as having been recently rated for human use when Reed and Mayweather are beaming up some of NX-01's final cargo, about 20 minutes into the first episode of "Broken Bow" or so (before they've left Earth orbit, anyway). They also each of them discuss how even if it has been officially as being safe for humans, neither of them are comfortable with the prospect of being transported (a deliberate inversion of transporter tech from the rest of Trek, where Roddenberry wanted the cast to always consider it safe save for if the episode called for a specific character with an irrational phobia of it - key word irrational).
Archer isn't rescued with it until much later in "Broken Bow," but again the episode had already established much earlier that the transporter was safe for human use, and the only inhibitions people felt about it were because of the lack of personal experience on using it up to that point. The refinements to the transporter we see throughout the rest of the series are the sort of refinements you can only make when in the field, and again, I don't see how they're any different from bouncing the photon particle beams off the main deflector dish.
Whatever it was, it was rated as being safe some time prior to the launch of the NX-01
Exploration, not experimentation. Different concept. You don't send your first deep-space ship into deep space with stuff that you're not sure if it's gonna work (desire to return a Klingon to Qo'noS aside). When the NX-01 launched everything aboard was presumed to have been in perfect working order, or close enough to it. The transporters were already rated as human-safe. The warp drive was already rated for Warp-5.
The only thing you can object to that you've raised is the force field, and again, I don't see how that's meaningfully different from any of the other bull**** technobabble we've seen over the years.
And then, literally two episodes later, not only shoots some aliens he's just met but calls them to tell them how he's going to do it?
"Unexpected", where sexually assaulting and impregnating someone with an ectopic pregnancy IN HIS RIBCAGE is A-OK and nobody should care about anything but the embryo and ha, ha, pregnant man is funny!
"Dear Doctor", aka "Genocide is OK as long as you can justify it with bad science!"
"Shadows of P'Jem", aka "If you're tied to the female XO you've done nothing but belittle, harass, and throw racist insults at for months, whose species you openly hate, the first thing you should do is motorboat her and try to talk to her about how she's an uptight b*tch while your face is in her cleavage".
"Two Days and Two Nights", where Archer is drugged by an alien whose species he f*cked with so that he can...wake up with no aftereffects?
Still don't think that ENT season 1 was offensive?
I can't respond to this without bursting out in gales of uncontrollable laughter.
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/d/d7/NovakovichTransporterMalfunction.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130403022917&path-prefix=en
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/0/06/Asteroid_phase_cannon_explosion.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20060305095624&path-prefix=en
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Meaning there was a good possibility of something going wrong considering it just got hairless ape approval. But no, apparently you see nothing wrong with everything on a ship with an NX designation working perfectly right away. More on that later.
You don't designate your ship as NX if it's not experimental. That's what NX is used for. Experimentation. At least, that's what it means in the modern military. And considering B&B didn't elaborate on why they chose NX, we'll have to assume by the only available definition that the NX-class is an experimental design.
And "they did technobabble this before" is not a good argument to defend shoddy writing.
And I can hardly read anything you post about it without feeling a sense of irony, since your rage at Enterprise existing is nearly equal to the four years of rage I felt after it was cancelled.
Ultimately, I got my satisfaction when the 2009 movie scared everyone into thinking that TOS-on had been wiped out.
I remember liking this episode...but I'm going to admit that I can't quite remember how the episode played out, but are you referring to the Nausicaans, or the humans of the Fortunate that are on a revenge quest and are torturing a Nausicaan? Oh, and also betrayed Archer, attacking him and his ship, when they found out about the captured, tortured Nausicaan? 'Cause they could be considered pirates too. Hang on, let me go to good ol' Netflix and see if I can find the scene you're referring to...
Watching now...Archer just offered to upgrade Fortunate's weapons specifically to shoot at pirates in self-defense. Skipping ahead to the end to see if it's there...looks like Archer is trying to diplomatically defuse the situation by talking down Ryan and making him turn over the Nausicaan prisoner rather than let him basically do his damnedest to start a blood feud. Kind of reminds me of that TNG episode with the soldiers who were used by their civiliation in a war and then shipped to the moon in order for that civilization to be forgotten about. I liked that one.
Eh, I have things to do, don't have time to watch the whole episode. Feel free to direct me to the scene in question.
Humor is based in pain and/or misery. If you can laugh at Tom & Jerry then you can claim no moral high ground by not laughing at "Unexpected," unless you're saying that violence and murder can be funny but accidental impregnation can't ever be.
Internally consistent bad science, and anyway it's hardly genocide. The Valakians still had several generations to find a cure on their own, and as has been pointed out to you, the stance that Phlox and then Archer took would later be the stance taken by the entire Federation, so at worst you can claim that this is the earliest example of how ****ed up the Prime Directive really is when applied.
Blame the setting, not the series, if you take issue with "Dear Doctor."
Your Hyperbole-fu is impressive, but obvious. You are blowing this episode entirely out of proportion, and you know it. Plus it's another Andorian episode and therefore is automatically good, as is any episode with an Andorian in it, in any Trek series. Except maybe the animated series, I dunno, haven't seen that.
Worth noting is that Archer doesn't hate Vulcans, he hates how Vulcans held back humanity. While he takes it out on T'Pol, he also made her his first officer and was actively trying to keep her. He did not intentionally motorboat her, they fell into the position while trying to escape their bonds.
Also I feel you're conveniently forgetting that the only reason T'Pol and Archer were in that situation at all was because Archer was trying to talk her into declining reassignment by the Vulcan High Command.
I actually don't even remember this episode, hang on...oh right, the Risa one.
Yeah, okay, the Archer plot in that was lackluster (though in fairness he hardly screwed over her species - he once let some Suleiban prisoners go, and Keyla's parents were killed by Suleiban, but it's not like it's ever implied that they were the same Suleiban). Given that we still have the Mayweather-plot, Hoshi-plot, and the Trip/Malcom-plot, I can still enjoy the episode.
No, it really doesn't. This is no different from, say, the FDA approving a drug to go onto the common market. It's rated as safe for humans.
NX was the name of the ship class, and the entire line of ships was slated to have the same prefix. We see NX-02 Columbia in the series, and the books establish a total of I believe nine being built, all with the NX prefix, and none of which are experimental ships (indeed the last ones were rushed to completion for the Earth-Romulan War). It was experimental only in that it was the first ship class to have the Warp-5 engine, and even then that was already rated for use.
I don't know why Starfleet decided to name it the NX-class rather than the Enterprise-class, which would be the standard, but it did.
Perhaps not, but it does mean that at least on that front there is nothing wrong with Enterprise that isn't also wrong with other Trek series.
Also, I don't like Tom and Jerry. I'm offended by sexual assault and brutal violence as comedy. There's a difference between light slapstick and a man getting an embryo implanted IN HIS RIBCAGE being treated as comedy.
I will not respond to you further, because my blood pressure's already dangerously close to hypertension levels and I just can't afford to waste oxygen on ENT defenders.
Dude, Tom and Jerry both die in a few episodes. Some Warner Brother's stuff, too (Bugs: [After a slapstick routine that killed Daffy] "They loved it, Daffy! They loved it!" Daffy: [Up in Heaven] "I know! But I can only do it once!"). Pain is funny, misery is funny, this is undeniable fact since pretty much all comedy is based on pain and misery in one form or another. What matters is a combination of how it's presented, and how the audience takes it, and the latter can be influenced by the former.
You might not like brutal violence, but, if a guy stepped on a rake and got slapped in the face as a result, but suffered no permanent harm, you'd laugh, right? So why don't you laugh at a guy getting pregnant, but suffering no permanent harm? Trip takes the whole thing in relative stride - he's embarrassed and shocked but by no means traumatized.
If he had been depicted as held down and assaulted, and thereafter traumatized by the experience, that would be entirely different, not funny at all, and your rage would be entirely justified. At the moment it's just making you look like a stick-in-the-mud.
Try again.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
The very article you have linked has:
A fan who's stuff I read posits that Federation Starfleet decided to designate its ships with the NX prefix as a tribute to the old United Earth NX-class, but of course this is not canon. That the NX-01 Enterprise was a ship of the NX-class, however, is canon.
...
I get the feeling that half of y'alls problems with Enterprise is stuff you've misremembered and thereafter blown out of proportion because it's been so long since you've seen it.
That explanation makes absolutely no sense. A ship prefix is not the same as a ship class. For instance, the registry of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is not Nimitz-[random number], it's CVN-[random number].