Faith Of The Heart - How 'Enterprise' Nearly Killed Star Trek

You know, a lot of Star Trek fan hate the theme tune for Enterprise. It's true. They're so indoctrinated into what a Trek theme should be (bombastic, orchestral, full of rising crescendoes and strings) that a soft rock ballad sits ill with them.

Am I one of them?

Well, yes and no. I don't think it's a particularly good theme song, but I applaud the decision to do something a little different. If only that philosophy had continued on over into the show itself.

I've recently been reading a book in the BFI TV series about Star Trek, by Ina Rae Hark. She starts out with a lot of good stuff on the original series, TNG and especially DS9, then trails off when it comes to Voyager and has clearly exhausted herself by the time she comes round to discussing Enterprise. And it's really not her fault, because there's very little to talk about concerning Enterprise. Despite the alleged efforts of Berman and Braga, it's a very vacuous show. It doesn't even have the strong backbone of characters that saved Voyager (even if those characters only accounted for a third of the cast). Archer is a dullard, continuing on Trek's seeming obsession with giving characters obscure hobbies. In this case water polo.

Water polo. Fucking water polo? This is a series which, it was claimed, would get back to basics and make the characters more like us than the idealised versions from the 24th century. And what sport do they make the captain a fan of? American football? Hockey? Hell, by this point I would even accept basketball. But water polo? I mean, do you even know anybody who likes water polo let alone watches matches religiously?

Hark also points out that each of the writers of TNG who went on to DS9 and Voyager all had their own little niches - Ron Moore would do the big military stuff, Joe Menosky would handle the relationship things - and by the time of Enterprise, most of them had moved on, leaving Enterprise with a writing staff composed of two very old hands - Berman and Braga, who took writing credits on well over half the first season) and a bunch of newbies. It's telling that when they get people in who do know Trek, as when the Reeves-Stevenses are hired for the fourth season, the quality of the storytelling improves dramatically.

Enterprise's biggest flaw is that it is dull. And I'm halfway through watching Season 2 of it now. Unlike Stargate, where I was enjoying myself so much I was binging and watching a dozen or so episodes a day, I can barely watch two episodes of Enterprise back to back. They suck my will to live. And I'm speaking as a hardcore dyed in the wool Trekkie here. It's painful to see the Trek name get dragged through the mud by a show which obviously only survived as long as it did because of the network it was on and the fact that it was stamped with the brand. Had it been around instead on TNG in the late eighties, Trek would have been dead long before now.

Except it's not dead, is it? We have the movie to look foward to. Another reboot. But hopefully one that will return us to what made Trek great in the first place (and it's worth pointing out that the Trek movies still haven't surpassed Wrath Of Khan, a movie which is now twenty seven years old). And it's worth hoping that this movie brings us into the present, because modern Trek has always been a product of the eighties; like it or like it not, those first formative years of TNG established a great deal, some of which was very much a product of the time (the presence of a counsellor, the overwhelming biege-ness of it all, Picard's proclivity to call meetings while the Enterprise is under attack) and some of which was sound judgement (the Federation-Klingon alliance, the Romulans).


Mark Ritchie


(Author's Note: This was originally written for another website prior to the cinema release of the new movie)

Star Trek: The Movies - An Overview 1-10

There's conventional wisdom in the world of Star Trek, perhaps more so than any other fandom that I am involved in, with the possible exception of James Bond, and even with Bond, you do get the odd rallying cry to the true greatness of Moonraker or Licence To Kill.

Trek, on the other hand, is so rigidly organised that every movie has a set verdict already imposed on it. So here goes:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Worthy but dull
Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan - Brilliant
Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock - Unworthy
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home - The pinnacle of mainstream Trek
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier - Bobbins, and probably all the fault of Shatner
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country - A worthy final voyage for the original crew
Star Trek: Generations - Two Captains in search of a plot
Star Trek: First Contact - Brilliant
Star Trek: Insurrection - An overlong episode of the TV show
Star Trek: Nemesis - Shite.

Now, by and large I do actually agree with most of the judgements, with two notable exceptions (and I have been known to watch TFF and enjoy it immensely on occasion, but that doesn't render it any less bobbins). They are The Search For Spock and Insurrection. Both of these films, it has been argued, are like overlong episodes of the TV show, with no real cinematic value. Which is kinda true. It's also true that they both follow on from tub-thumpingly balls to the wall action movie entries into the Trek canon and isn't variety the spice of life? If either TWoK or FC had been followed up by a film which had tried to do the same thing but bigger and better, they would have been doomed to failure. Look at the movie franchises which have tried that:Pirates Of The Caribbean, Batman, Terminator - it's a case of diminishing returns because you can only go so far before it just gets ridiculous.

So, TSfS and I turn the heat down a little. It's a good thing. It lets the characters breath. As good as FC was, the only character who got a look in was Picard, with his Moby Dickhomaging subplot. Everyone else in that film was simply acting out their plot function. I brings the cast of The Next Generation back for the first time since - arguably, the holodeck sequence at the start of Generations. Because no one would have watched the series for the epic space battles and action. As a weekly syndicated series, TNG was amazingly light on action. It was about character. We fell in love with Star Trek (and The Next Generation in particular) because of the characters, not because we turned in each week to see shit getting blown up. That's not what the TV show was about. It's not what the movies are about either. Both The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are anomalies in the ten-film sequence, much in the way that Tomorrow Never Dies is an anomaly in the Bond canon in that it doesn't feel like a Bond film. It feels like a common or garden action movie that just happens to have James Bond as it's hero. The Trek universe of The Wrath of Khan is subtly different to anything that has gone before in Trek and anything that will come after it. Even TSfS and TVH which follow on from Khan take place in a different universe. Not massively different, but enough to ensure that Khan'smilitaristic Napoleonic era sea battle transposed to space has a unique place. While First Contact isn't as drastic a departure - by this time the Trek universe was much more defined and rigid as it was when Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett were carving out new territory - it still carries with it a different mood - again, it's a much more militaristic Starfleet we see here (and it's ironic that First Contact,made before the start of the Dominion War over on Deep Space 9 is a much more militaristic film than Insurrection, which takes place during the war), emphasised by the new uniforms and the design of the new Enterprise-E. It also rewrites Trek lore to introduce the Borg Queen (and back in 1991, Peter David, that bastion of quality tie-in fiction had to have a disclaimer in his Borg novel Vendetta as it featured a female Borg and - according to Paramount at the time, such things did not exist). In much the same way thatAliens symbolically castrated the threat of the xenomorphs by having so many of them (and having them suddenly so easy to kill, a far cry from the one indestructible alien in Ridley Scott's entry) having a spokesman (or in this case, spokeswoman) for the Borg - giving an enemy whose facelessness was on of its most appealing factors - removed much of the threat and was an all too easy concession to the apparent need for the film to have an identifiable foe who could go up against Picard. And give Data a blow job in the most literal sense.

The Search For Spock is essentially Part 2 of the Genesistrilogy (although Part 3 - The Voyage Home is less concerned with what happened in the previous two films and more bothered about having a good time and delivering its eco TSfShas a lot of mopping up to do, although why they felt they had to bring back Spock is beyond me. It is, at it's core, an unnecessary action. I know Spock is the most loved of the Trek characters (although McCoy will always be my favourite - while Kirk is the fist and Spock the brain, McCoy is the heart of the original crew) but having him brought back, and by such an obvious plot McGuffin cheapens the character and robs us of what could have been an interesting new crew dynamic. Picture this: following the events of Khan, the Enterprise crew stay together, the ship being repaired. Taking Spock's place as Kirk's first officer is Saavik, it's obviously command that she's been groomed for when she takes the Kobayashi Maru test and her inexperience would have created a lot of interesting conflict and taking over at the science station is David Marcus, Kirk's son, who was all but wasted in TSfS, aside from the one short scene where he's talking with Kirk over the intercom and he says 'I knew you'd come'. Now, it's fairly clear from the closeness of Saavik and David in TSfS that they have some sort of relationship bubbling over so you have the chance to do what no Trek series did till DS9 did - you can tell stories about long-term relationships and father-son stories. Obviously, this wouldn't work in the context of the movies because there wouldn't be enough room to develop those relationships to a sufficient degree, and anyway, I'm not here to regret what might have been. I'm here to defend the third film.

And it is worth defending. There's a lot of good in there, a lot of humour despite the rather grim plot, a beautiful restatement of what Trek is all about when Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Now, you have to remember how Kirk felt about the Enterprise. It wasn't just a ship to him. It was his home, his life, hell, it was almost like his lover. How many women did he fall in love with, only to leave them behind because he was more in love with the Enterprise? Exactly. Losing the Enterprise, and losing it in the way he did (especially so soon after losing his son) is - to me - a greater loss than that of Spock at the end of the previous movie. As Kirk himself says at the end of the movie, when Spock has been returned to him, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." He's not talking about Spock's needs there. He's talking about his own. Having never faced death until losing Spock, he's come to realise that the Enterprise means a lot to him, but it means less than Spock does, than David does, because you can't deny that Kirk's actions are primarily motivated by revenge. He blows the Enterprise up to kill the Klingon bastards that killed his son. It's telling that he doesn't even realise what he's done until he sees the hulk of the Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet and it's up to Bones to tell him, or to mollify him, saying that he's done the only thing he could do. In essence, The Search For Spock is all about one man's greed and what it costs other people. And that man is Jim Kirk. Picard goes on a similar emotional journey in First Contact. Having been tortured and dehumanised by the Borg, he is prepared to go to any lengths - even sending his entire crew on a suicidal mission - to defeat them. The main difference between the two captains is that Kirk's greed is motivated by a desire to get his friend back - David's death and the destruction of the Enterprise are simply two unfortunate consequences of that desire - while Picard, like Ahab, is driven purely by a desire for revenge, and revenge, in the universe of TNG is not something that is tolerated.

Insurrection is, in my opinion, probably the second best of the TNG movies. Nemesis obviously brings up the rear, it's poorly thought out plot, flat direction and basic lack of understanding of the characters/concepts that make Star Trek what it is cripple it and the good in it - and there is some; Riker and Troi's wedding, Dina Meyer as the Romulan Commander, the battle between Shinzon's vessel and the Enterprise - is not enough to tip the balance. Generationslikewise suffers. The first twenty minutes or so - the portion with Kirk essentially - is wonderful, but the easy rapport between Kirk, Scotty and Chekov casts into sharp relief the cold formality that exists between the crew of the Enterprise D. Only Will Riker comes across as a genuine human being while Patrick Stewart is crippled by a plot which kills off his brother and nephew and then asks him to be a gung-ho hero, which is impossible, even for an actor of Stewart's calibre. Plus the bizarre decision to introduce elements like Data's emotion chip - which, for an audience who hadn't slavishly followed The Next Generation on television would have seemed out of place at best and mawkish at worst - it's clear that Ron Moore and Brannon Braga (G's writers) didn't have much of an idea about the differences between film and TV. Ironically, had it not been so bound up in the mythology of the TV show, All Good Things..., the series finale, has more scope and potential for action than Generations. And they waste Kirk, in more ways than one. And they got it wrong twice.  First Kirk dies by getting shot in the back, then in the reshoots, they killed him by having him on a bridge that collapsed. Kirk should have died sacrificing his life, choosing to die, rather than in some stupid accident. It's no wonder Shatner had second thoughts and resurrected Kirk in the novels.

In many ways, the naysayers of Insurrection are right. It's a story which - Generations aping finale excepted - could have been done as a two parter on the TV show. But does it really matter? There's more essential Trekkiness inInsurrection than in all the other TNG films put together. There's more humour... there's more heart. And that is what Trek was all about, in the final analysis. It's just that the fans expected something a little more bombastic after First Contact - a film in which the entire galaxy was at stake - than Insurrection which is a more personal story on every level.

It reminds me of a comment I read somewhere concerning the deaths of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. Tom Baker was better, they said, because he died saving the universe while Davison died saving just one person. In my humble opinion, they got it the wrong way round. Davison was a far better hero than Baker because he was willing to sacrifice himself just to save one friend (and it's telling that Eccleston does much the same thing in the rebooted Doctor Who). Insurrection is much the same. It's not hard to try to save the universe. Saving one person? That's much harder. As Kirk himself says at the conclusion of The Search For Spock after Sarek asks him if the sacrifice was worth it, given the cost of his ship and his son: "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."


Mark Ritchie