In reply to:

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I don't dislike Sisco

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I'm going on record saying that Avery Brooks is one of my favorite actors. I think I can watch him in anything. I mean come on, he's Hawk..

The amazing thing about him in DS9 is that he can go from Hawk-like intensity as the captain to remarkable tenderness with Jake, and all the range in between, in the blink of an eye, and it's all believable as the same character.

And I somehow managed to forget Brock Peters as Sisko's dad in my list of amazing supporting actors.

DS9's ``The Visitor'' is probably the best episode of Trek ever.

I'm not much of a Star Trek fan... but nonetheless I must take issue with your assessment, above. Best ever episode has to be this one.

tanstaafl.

Hmmm. Themes of brotherhood and betrayal. (Plus, in the guise of the ever popular ``torture O'Brien'' theme.)

Ever seen any John Woo movies? Or Reservoir Dogs? How about DS9's Sons of Mogh?

I'd totally disagree, but maybe you have brother issues where I have father issues.

Where they encounter the Ferengi long before the TNG make first contact with Ferengi. In fact in the TNG episode, they don't even know what Ferengi look like.

My contention exactly - I only saw about 8 episodes and I can't call other incidents to mind, but this is a prime example of what causes me to loose interest - they didn't do the job properly.

Of the forty-one episodes of Enterprise aired thus far

God, I hope they've changed the title sequence and shite music since the first few episodes, that alone has put me off watching.

We don't want retro-style intros to our Sc-Fi, we want fast gadgets & things that go "ping" & "swoosh" and lots of strobing (gets the adrenaline going you know ) and not forgetting a worthy uplifting musical score to top it all off.

Cheers, Sim

Nope, but since I record it on the TiVo, I've managed to hear it only once or twice.

It makes me very sad to hear they haven't changed it ,......but on the other hand, very glad that I've just bought a TiVo

Cheers, Sim

I never had a problem with the acting in DS9. And some of the characters were very well written. The problem is the show was just plain hateful. Was anyone really friends with anyone else? It seemed the show focused on cast members fighting amongst themselves most of the time, and I am sorry, I just don't want to see that. Of course we need conflict, but DS9 decided all the conflict should come from within, in contrast to TOS or TNG where it comes from without. It was a soap opera, in every sense of the word, and I hate soap operas.

That was why I didn't like TNG that nuch. Everyone was perfect all the time except for the occasional episode where someone was taken over by an external force. That's not interesting. No one ever grew. They were basically the same characters at the end of the series tha they were at the beginning.

On the other hand, DS9 people were, in many cases, very different. Things that happened to them affected them and their views of other people, and not just for that one episode.

Was anyone friends? Sure, but not all of them. You had different people brought together that had wildly opposing ideals, and the show was about how that worked, or didn't. In addition, I don't know that people in a military situation of varying ranks become friends. It's hard to view someone as your friend who might order you to your death tomorrow. And it would be pretty dumb for that commander to become your friend, as he might have the need to order you to your death. Respect is the name of the game.

As for all the conflict being internal, there was some of that, certainly more than on TNG, but there was also an invading force that was the driving force of the last four or five seasons. There were recurring characters from the enemy's side, as well, but I don't see how making them different characters each time would have helped.

As to your appelation of ``soap opera'', while I understand where you're coming from (that much of the action was internally driven), I totally disagree. Soap operas are usually defined by their high melodrama, and DS9 was hardly melodramatic. Actions had real consequences, not just immediate temporary peril, and the characters, again, grew and changed, something that soap operas tend to avoid.

Well, let me dig this one up from the grave, now that Enterprise is in it.

This last season was not bad. It had a few clunkers, but it was largely entertaining. In all, what an average season of a Star Trek show (or any show, for that matter) should be like.

First let me comment on one thing before I get to the finale: the two-part mirror universe story. Or should I say "story"? What the hell was that? It had none of the "real" universe characters, and more importantly, had basically no plot, and certainly no resolution. Can anyone fill me in on why this thing existed? On the other hand, it was still wildly better than all of the other episodes due to the lack of the theme song.

Now, onto the finale. As you can tell, I've never been a big fan of the show, despite my masochistic desire to watch every episode waiting for a good one. But you could at least have the decency of making the last episode of Enterprise be an episode of Enterprise instead of a thrown-away plot element of a minor episode of Next Generation. What was with that? So Riker is watching this historical footage to determine whether or not to tell Picard about the cloaking device? What was it he saw that led him to any sort of conclusion? And why did they have to kill off someone to fend off the same attacks that the Enterprise has withheld dozens of times before? At least we didn't get to see a funeral, or really even anyone being upset over it, at least any more than being forced to tidy up his quarters. And then they cut short the whole beginning of the Federation thing as if to say "That crap isn't important. What's really important is this other show we worked on fifteen years ago. This minor plot point is much more interesting."

Augh! This is what frustrated me about the show. The fact that Berman and Braga just didn't care about it or the Star Trek universe at all.

I read that Coto had plans to continue the mirror universe story in the 5th season. They found out that they were canceled during the filming of the second to last episode and had rewrite some of it.

As for the last episode Bevis and Butthead (Berman and Braga) only know how to F'up start Trek. The only season to be remotely any good was this one and they weren't involved until the final episode.

One interesting possibility, though, is in the fact that there seems to be quite a large gap (years, I guess), between the last real episode of series 4 and the kill off the series episode. So, in theory, if at some point someone wished to go back and do it right they could presumably insert more episodes, or even series, in before that last one without breaking anything.

pca

The point is, I don't care about the mirror universe except as part of the antagonism of a regular show. I suppose that you're right that there couldn't have been any regular characters in it so that Kirk will have been the first person to see the mirror universe. But to me, that's just a reason to not make the episode. The fact that the closest real Star Trek thing it ties to is from another series, just like the finale, is another dismissive swipe at Enterprise, in my opinion.

Add on to that that the story was dull, which may, in part, be due to the fact that I don't care about any of the characters, but more likely due to the fact that the plot was overwhelmingly simple and lacking in actual intrigue, especially considering that it was two hours, and I think you've got a bad episode of Star Trek. Then there's the fact that there were basically no science fiction elements to it. This could just as easily have taken place on an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, or whatever other CBS show your grandmother is interested in, with exceedingly minor changes. (Now I'm not saying that every episode of Star Trek has to be a SFX extravaganza or deal with Einsteinian physics, but this was a mirror universe episode, and any character development is pointless due to the fact that they're characters we'll never see again.)

Argh. Can you tell that story made me angry. Oh, here's a way to tie it back to the "real" universe without having anyone in the show know about it. Have one of the mirror universe characters become stuck in the real universe. Heck, make one of them part of the show's regular cast. Anyway, I'll let it go now.

In regards to the Xindi soap opera thing: I disagree. The Xindi storyline sucked because it sucked. The fact that new viewers can't get into it is a problem, but it's irrelevant. Babylon 5 was tremendous (well, at least the first four seasons), and it was much more integrated than the Xindi story was. Here's an example of why Enterprise sucks from that very storyline. In one episode, Archer is forced to decide whether to turn to piracy in order to save the Earth and, by so doing, committing a ship and her innocent crew to death. He chooses to save the Earth and kill them. This is a great setup, I think. Archer might become conflicted about all sorts of decisions in the future; he might turn completely cold-hearted; he might start to reconsider Humanity's place in the Universe, and whether they should be exploring. There are a lot of things that could develop from that. What do the writers do instead? They completely ignore it, as if nothing had happened -- as if Archer hadn't sentenced dozens of innocent people to their deaths. What is the point of putting him in that situation if it doesn't have any ramifications? It's basically the psychological side of Trip making the engine do things that it's not supposed to be able to do -- Treknobabble when you get down to it. It's just a conflict that we don't understand that will be dismissively resolved without any sort of ramifications. (They did a much better job with the first season episode of "Dear Doctor", which raised similar points and actually dealt with them in some way.) This sort of complete lack of character development is what killed the show for me. Things got better when they hired Manny Coto as showrunner, but they still didn't give him much of a chance.

Anyway, apparently Berman and Braga saw that people actually liked shows with long storylines, so they created one themselves. But the reason that the long storylines work isn't because the story is long, but because you get the opporunity to throw away one of episodic TV's prime tenets, namely that every episode must end with the characters being exactly like they were at the beginning. It was a plot-oriented long storyline, but what they needed was a character-oriented long storyline. What I'm getting at is demonstrable through this exercise, I think: Pick a main character from Enterprise and tell me everything you can about them, and I don't mean a litany of events in the episodes. Then do the same thing with a major character from Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9. I think you'll find that the description of the Enterprise character will be fairly short and succinct, whereas a character from one of those other shows will be long and full of contradictions. They have actual conflict in their lives, not just a series of obstacles to overcome.

Again, sorry. This stuff just gets me frustrated. This is why science fiction TV will never be well accepted; the vast majority of it is just blowing stuff up. Of course, lots of non-SF TV is exactly the same.