Posted on 02/25/2003 11:14:23 AM PST by pabianice
After launching at warp speed in the fall of 2001, Enterprise, the UPN prequel series designed to reenergize the aging Star Trek franchise by attracting younger viewers, is limping along on impulse power. Midway through its second season, ratings are down 24 percent from last year. "What can you say?" executive producer Brannon Braga says. "We're bummed." And in clear violation of the series's prime directive, viewership is actually skewing older.
The news is even worse at the box office. Despite good reviews and generally enthusiastic fan response, Star Trek Nemesis, the most recent — and likely final — adventure to exclusively feature the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast (more about that in a moment), took in just over $40 million, making it the lowest-grossing Trek movie by far (translation: with production costs of $ 113 million, "Nemesis" was a financial disaster).
After five live-action series, 10 feature films, stacks of book titles and Q knows how many mass-produced trinkets, has the multibillion-dollar sci-fi franchise founded by the late Gene Roddenberry lived too long to prosper?
Corporate executives maintain that a warp core breach is far from imminent. Despite its ratings woes, Enterprise is still the top-rated drama on perennially struggling UPN and is in no danger of being canceled, says network president Dawn Ostroff. "Hit shows often take years," she says.
As for Nemesis, Paramount Pictures vice-chairman and chief operating officer Rob Friedman attributes the movie's flameout to tough competition from other holiday films. "I think we probably got 'Lord of the Ring'-ed," he says of the blockbuster Two Towers sequel that opened the following week. "Would we have preferred to have another $20 million at the box office? Sure. But that doesn't foretell any concerns about the future of Trek."
Maybe not. But it doesn't take a positronic brain to recognize that droves of fans have deserted in recent years. Movie ticket sales have declined from about 21 million for First Contact (1996) to 15 million for Insurrection (1998) to less than 8 million for Nemesis. On TV, the Trek audience has been shrinking since Next Generation's peak 11 years ago, when it averaged 17.7 million viewers a week in Season 5. Today, 4.3 million people watch Enterprise.
The series may be going where no man has gone before, but some Trek fans say the producers forgot the "boldly" part — those steamy decontamination-chamber scenes with Archer (Scott Bakula) and T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) notwithstanding.
"Enterprise has potential," says Jamahl Epsicokhan, a 27-year-old Web designer who has posted Trek episode reviews at Star Trek Hypertext Online since 1994. "But it doesn't take risks." Steve Krutzler, editor of TrekWeb.com, an Internet site that gets 150,000 visitors a month, says the series "was being hyped as a radical departure, [yet] everything feels like the same Star Trek we've gotten for 15 years."
Although Braga is not ready to divulge details, he says "epic challenges... that better exploit the sense of awe and danger" are ahead for the crew. "Let's just say there will be a slight revision in our mission, and a slight revision in the part of space that Enterprise is heading into," says executive producer Rick Berman, who has overseen the franchise since Roddenberry's death in 1991.
As to where the movies are headed, Berman is less certain. "I doubt because our box office fell off on Nemesis that it's going to be the end of Star Trek films," the producer says. "I can't imagine numerous other movies won't occur."
Though there have been no discussions as yet, Berman hints at one tempting scenario: combining characters from the various series in one grand adventure. "There are a lot of interesting possibilities," he says.
Berman's remarks suggest Trek is in an adjustment period; some fine-tuning is needed. "I don't think that there's any television franchise that people love to take potshots at as much," Berman says. In fact, he refuses to concede that Trek will ever run its course entirely. "Would anybody have guessed when the original series went off the air in 1969 that 34 years later it would still be part of the American mythos?" Berman says. "It's part of our lexicon."
Adds Braga: "You've got to keep an optimistic viewpoint. It's come this far, and it ain't goin' anywhere."
HOW TO FIX TREK
1. MAKE IT OBVIOUS It's cold and dark in space. Enterprise needs real peril, dread and fear so that characters are tested to within an inch of their lives. Introduce a chilling, powerful, wholly original threat that can't be vanquished in an hour. The Suliban aren't bad, but they're no Borg.
2 MAKE IT MORE REAL Let the crew make grave mistakes. Let them argue and be driven by less-than-moral impulses. Let the phaser beams rip through metal and bone. And let there be dangling emotional threads that weave through the lives of these otherwise bland characters.
3 LET CAPTAIN ARCHER BE HEROIC As written, Scott Bakula has as much commanding presence as Cap'n Crunch. Archer, like his beagle, is benign and a little too cute. He has an annoying tendency to second-guess, which trickles down to the rest of his whiny crew. Either light a fire under this laconic guy or kill him in a blaze of glory that explains why starships, planets and star systems should one day be named Archer. (And while you're at it, take out that annoying Ensign Hoshi with him.)
4 OPEN FIRE AND CLOSE THOSE PIE HOLES Enterprise should expand our belief about what is possible and transport us to realms unimagined with its ideas. But if it can't also be packed with action and adventure, move it to Lifetime. We're weary of the endless Trek babble on the bridge, the shuttlecraft, the crew quarters. Enough!
5 GET US ON THE EDGE OF OUR SEATS You shouldn't be able to figure out what the general direction and ending of any given episode is by the first 12 minutes. "Oh, here's where Hoshi overcomes her fear of failure..." "Well, it looks like Trip and that belligerent alien are going to work together to save both their hides..." Why not try some longer, unpredictable story arcs? Cliff-hangers, big and small, give a series purpose, poignancy and punch. Make us miss you this summer.
And at the movies...
It's no secret why Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the whale tale) was a fan favorite. It had humor, nostalgia and intelligent cast interplay. Why did Nemesis leave us wanting? It zipped through the Riker-Troi wedding, a payoff fans had long awaited. Worse, the film didn't include a farewell scene for Picard and his crush, Beverly. The heart of Trek is heart, and Trek's best films tap into relationships.
You got that right ... one thing I absolutely DO NOT MISS is the STUPID holodeck
Stargate SG-1 is cool. It amazes me how much this show, the most popular SF show on TV, gets overlooked in Internet forums, even though its mythology is orders of magnitude better and more consistent than anything to plop out of X-Files.
A tough thing to do with a gay actor.
In fact, most of the shows episodes have little in the way of testosterone.
It is a very feminine show throughout.
Not impressed by this series at all!
Bear in mind that the original Klingons were not beyond cheating, lying, and killing innocents to get their way. They poisoned the grain in The Trouble with Tribbles and used a disguised agent. Kor was killing large numbers of Organians to terrorize them. And let's not forget Kang's crew had agonizers to cause pain. Honorable? That's all the fault of that bloody music from the opening from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The Cardasians followed a similar path from scummy to OK.
That's what made Babylon-5 excellent. They had a story to tell. They told it, episodically, over the course of five seasons, and then they ended it. They did the one thing far too many authors, producers, etc. in the SciFi/Fantasy realm cannot seem to do: STFU.
(I know, there was an abortive attempt at a follow-on series. It went nowhere. It also wasn't very good.)
Trek has had some great moments, but I long ago grew tired of TNG's blandness and repetition. Years after I abandoned it, I'd occasionally tune in to see how it was. It was ALWAYS, ALWAYS yet another lame episode based on a holodeck malfunction, or a mysterious planet covered in lava and noxious gases, EXCEPT for this one teeny little spot which - voila! - was inhabited by 20th-century humans. Puh-LEASE! That stuff works once, not fifty times.
Around that time (mid-late '90s), I'd seen bits and pieces of this then little known series called Babylon 5. What I saw was very very good, but I realized the underlying story was extremely deep, far-reaching, and complex. The ONLY way to watch it is from the very start, so I borrowed some tapes and did so. In a word: AWESOME! Complex storylines, terrifying alien races, characters with flaws, unpredictable and sometimes tragic outcomes, blood, guts, a**-kicking action - it's all there. I even read once that that B5 had raised the bar so much that the Trek writers were forced to take notice and act, since Trek's blandness was a stark contrast to the depth and fast pace of B5. (I never bothered to check if Trek improved; by this time I was forever spoiled!) If you have not seen B5, and want to do so, I say again: Begin with the very first episode, and watch it all in order. Questions raised in the first season or two are sometimes not answered until the fourth or fifth, so be patient. However, it's worth the wait, and one helluva ride along the way. It just gets better as you go, too.
By the way, the series was written as a 5-season arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. Sadly, it is no more. However, SciFi runs the series on weekday mornings, and it is about to start over from season 1, episode 1, beginning March 31.
The best source of Babylon 5 info is here.
I liked Firefly but it tried to hard to mirror Westerns. And Farscape spent too much time on disgusting bodily fluids and lost too much of its audience. Too bad, too, because it finally seemed to be getting back on track.
There are some other issues. They need to review their logic. Please recall an episode wherein the weapons officer fell down a cliff on a comet and broke his leg. Oh, come now. A comet? And the gravitational acceleration is what? Utter nonsense.
Then two episodes ago, we have T'pol getting some sort of MTD (mentally transmitted disease) due to being psychically raped by some mind melder. This is a ludicrous distortion of the original concept of mind melding; and the propaganda message was so blatant that I simply switched off the show. I didn't bother to watch the end of the episode.
The most recent episode has Archer arguing that the Vulcans and some other race should have peace and not fight anymore. One wonders if he's considered transmitting Kumbaya on all frequencies. I haven't erased it yet, but the previous episode, along with the previews of this episode, has convinced me to delete it...unwatched.
To fix the show, cut the social propaganda nonsense. Make it an interesting story. Quit making the Enterprise a warp-capable social service agency.
Maybe they could hire General Norman Schwarzkopf to teach Archer how to command...and how to talk and act like a commander.
And, next time Archer is in a fight for his life with some Suliban or other, phaser the (expletive deleted) and dispose of the body through the garbage chute!
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