November 15, 2001
On the block today is Enterprise. A few other people have made comments along the lines of "pleasantly surprised after Voyager," so I'll spare you my iteration of it. (Or not.)
Anyway, better writing and acting aside, here's a few Good Things that I've noticed:
- Earth Views in the opening credits. Notice that when Earth is on the screen you can't see any stars. That's actually the way it works -- Earth is so much brighter than any star that its light drowns them out. Nice touch.
- Human-acting humans are all over the place. The exploring humans offer up a very noticeable dichotomy: They don't trust the Vulcans (and vice versa) yet they rush into any first encounter with open arms, basically declaring, "We're here and we're friendly!" In other words, about how someone from our time would probably act.
- To expand on the last point, there's Terran-Vulcan friction. The two races just met a few decades ago in the series' time, and they don't get along real well. The Vulcans think the humans are arrogant and overly emotional. The humans think Vulcans are overbearing and condescending. And they're both right. You can see where a lot of work has to be done on race relations in the 100 years or so before the original series' time.
So all in all, I think it's a good show. My only real gripe is that the ship is too spacious. The original series' USS Enterprise was fairly cramped -- only the senior officers had a lot of living space. On the 22nd-Century USS Enterprise, everyone seems to have more space in their quarters than I have in my apartment. There are other things like sound in space and "streaking" stars passing by at warp speeds, but I've just gotten used to those.
So to summarize, good show. Watch. UPN needs the ratings ;)
