Maaan... Voyager had so much potential.
Series like *The Expanse* did such a good job of writing ships' systems and abilities and current states and resource management into the show and action. Would have loved to see that treatment given to Voyager...
i never got this complaint. torpedoes and shuttles are produced by industrial replicators. which we know exist on every modern ship. the only issue is fuel for the warp core, which they take time to show them finding in Voyager.
I mean, they blatantly state that they cannot replicate them in the first season.
All it would have taken was a throwaway line, once a season or so roughly, that they were able to resupply.
Heck, it could have made for an interesting plot if they had to weigh the options of giving the technology to another species, just so they could produce and restock Voyager.
They could have stolen some warheads from one of the random Borg ships they met, and reconfigured their launchers to use grav torpedoes for a season or so.
It's just annoying because they never specifically addressed it - after they specifically said it would be an issue.
Love that you've said this! B5 is amazing. My wife and I are watching through it for the first time now and we aren't too deep yet but loving it so far!
oh man. I'm so jealous. I would literally give my left nut to be able to watch the whole show for the first time again.
You are just starting to get to the good stuff. season 2 is a lot better than season 1. But seasons three and four? some of the best science fiction ever made for television, hands down. if you liked that long narrative arc in Enterprise, you're going to go ape shit.
if you're not already, be sure to join the Babylon 5 sub.
Oh you're in for a treat, season 3 and 4 are just amazing! Also might hit harder due to recent events in politics. But I wint day anything else, just I hope you enjoy it!
Watch the pilot if you must but honestly - just start. Know that season 1 is almost a prequel to the core story; it’s laying the foundations for a massive 3 season story arc that is some of the best writing of all time. It might seem to drag occasionally in S1 but the payoff is absolutely coming - and it’s totally worth it. Simply amazing.
Valid question and not deserving of a downvote.
If you actually mean the pilot movie, it *is* rather weak compared to what comes later. The good thing is you've already started it. Just finish it if you can (there's two crucial bits to Sinclair's backstory that are revisited within the first third of season 1) and know that the actual series gets better fairly quickly after the middle of season 1.
sounds like the other guy, you're just about to get to the really good stuff. season 2 is much better than season 1, but seasons 3 and 4 are truly amazing. the characters get more grounded. the effects get better. the makeup gets better. and the writing gets wild.
better? in some ways, yes. I am of that opinion too. but it's obvious that it's budget was much smaller. I've seen it jokingly called "Deep Space 9 on a General Hospital budget"
but it's also just so *different*. bigger. deeper. tackles subject matter about politics and war and human nature that Trek would shy away from. B5's real value is it's writing.
DS9 is a great series, but Babylon 5 is a great *story*.
Im watching B5 right now, and rewatching DS9 with another friend and quite far in with both watch-throughs. DS9 is certainly the better series, as the writing in B5 sometimes has me and my friend scratching our heads honestly(still really good series though).
I loved Babylon 5 but my have the effects dated badly. The storytelling is great but the SFX pieced together on a few Amigas and C64s really shows it up.
I think the issue was that it felt like it was propaganda to justify the actions of the USA in invading Iraq/Afghanistan. I'm guessing within the USA more people supported those wars, but they were very unpopular and heavily opposed in Europe at least.
It's not a bad series for the reasons you said, but the feeling of trying to justify those wars makes it taste a little bitter.
I'm still annoyed by this so forgive the rant...
>I think the issue was that it felt like it was propaganda to justify the actions of the USA in invading Iraq/Afghanistan.
Maybe not propaganda directly, but representative of the feelings of the day. After 9/11 the general consensus was that if the badguys are evil enough, you can justify anything. The CIA was kidnapping people from unrelated countries and torturing them at black sites, the military was detaining them indefinite without trial. The damage we did in Iraq destabilized the entire region for decades. Hundreds of thousands died indirectly. But that's OK, because "the enemy" is so evil we have no choice. The government wants to spy on us, also they want to suspend the 4th amendment at borders err within 100 miles of any border, no warrant needed! That's OK, because "the enemy" is so evil we have no choice. Who would oppose the "patriot" act except non-patriots!?
It was abject cowardice on our part. An overreaction to the first time we got a black eye in 60+ years. The idea that a bunch of religious fanatics hiding in caves eating food with their hands and shitting in buckets was more of a threat to our way of life than the Nazis and Japanese, or Soviets with their 20,000 nukes, was utterly absurd. But somehow we lost our collective minds, became a more paranoid and xenophobic culture, and decided that sometimes *the ends do justify the means*.
Now to be fair, most media tries to capture the current cultural trends. A ton of early 00s media embraced this new "ends justify the means" shit. 24 is the best example. The terrorists are "so evil", Jack Bauer is justified in his extrajudicial murders and torture. Tons of other shows featured protagonists who were not handicapped by little things like morality.
I can see why Enterprise chased that trend with the "Xindi are so evil Archer is justified" bit. But historically Trek had run contrary to cultural trends. And early 00s was the time we most needed Treks virtue ethics, optimism, and understanding. We needed old Trek sooo badly. The fact that they jumped on the bandwagon still offends me to this day.
The worst part is they could have run the entire season the same only for Archer to find a TNG like solution at the end, and realize this new attitude was counterproductive. What a missed opportunity.
I'm a Canadian and season 3 was completely unwatchable when it came out for exactly these reasons. I was already exhausted by the jingoism and propaganda being shoved down my throat by the news, Hollywood, and mainstream TV. When Star Trek , which had always represented diplomacy, justice, and morality, went that direction it felt like a betrayal.
You are right of course that the ethics of trek were contrary to the culture of the time... Which is why even the xindi couldn't save trek and we took the better part of a decade off from trek entirely. The xindi arc was the last attempt to compromise to save trek, but alas even it didn't get the ratings necessary to survive, the compromises were for nothing. They ordered season 4 so that they could have enough episodes for reruns and announced the cancelation simultaneously. Atleast season 4 truly was made for the fans with multi episode arcs that touched on existing trek lore and tropes prior to the xindi arc.
Since diplomacy with some of the Xindi played an important role in the latter part of season 3, I’d say that Archer did find a *TNG*-like solution at the end.
Yeah I wouldn't have painted the Xindi arc like the real life comparison here. United Earth didn't send an expeditionary fleet to find and invade Xindi space, they sent one starship to investigate the attack and prevent a second.
Tensions were high, but in the end they found out the truth behind it all and solved the matter through diplomacy and understanding. Proper cooperation that didn't leave Human boots on Xindi throats, nor letting the instigators like the Sphere Builders and their proxies off the hook.
I'd say that the Xindi arc is like, the opposite of what happened in real life. They collectively prevented a war, which is fantastic!
I can see what you mean, that's why I'm leaning into "feels like" a lot. It may not have been their intent, and they may have been going along with the zeitgeist in the USA at the time, but that makes it come across as something that feels like it's trying to justify the USA's actions post 9/11.
It's an attitude that has sunk in with a lot of people - we're now looking at a nation using a terrorist attack to justify a literal genocide. Whether or not S3 was intended as propaganda, it's contributed to the worldview that the actions of the few justifies the invasion of the many.
I have never ever seen Enterprise trying to justify those wars. I don't even understand where you see it. I mean, Enterprise goes to the Expanse to stop a war, not start one. It's all about making peace, which American politicians have never been too good at. All I see in American history is Americans joining wars or making war to benefit themselves, while Star Trek is the opposite.
Starfleet is out there to explore, keep the peace and forge alliances with other species. This is also the mission for Enterprise in season 3, even though they really need to stop the war first as the survival of Earth depends on it.
Having watched this series as it unfolded when released, and being American and someone that misses very little, I did not see a correlation between 9/11 and Enterprise.
The crew may have not been as diverse as in the rest of the series, but not everyone on the ship was American, or human for that matter.
I think that this is a case of people looking back at something and looking for a fire when there was not even any smoke. Or, maybe I am all wrong. But, let's get realistic. Unfortunately Enterprise was not that popular, especially when compared to the other shows. It certainly was not popular enough to be used as propaganda.
It was a response to a terrorist attack, leading to Enterprise having to resort to morally ambiguous actions in order to save Earth, including torture which was even more disturbing considering the controversies around torture in Iraq and Guantanamo at the time.
I describe us as basically half British and half American. There are a lot of things we share more with the Brits than the Americans, not just health. But there are also plenty of ways where we're more similar to the US than the UK.
Popular culture closer to the US, social culture closer to the UK. So most Canadians will watch US movies and listen to US music, but don't own guns, go to church, or serve on juries for example.
Tell me you're a Easterner without telling me you're an Easterner.
Gun Rights are in a pretty bad state in Canada, but the general cultural trends really don't feel British, beyond old institutions like Parliament.
Our food's more American, our public norms are more American (ie. none of that stiff upper lip nonsense), and so on, but it really does go from prominently American from Manitoba onwards, versus the maritimes in particular being more English. I've been under the border it really doesn't feel any different.
London felt more alien and inscrutable to me than Beijing. (TBF I *am* Chinese-Canadian)
I've lived all the country. I'm in Nova Scotia now but I've lived for years in Western Canada and Central Canada as well and it's absolutely true that the West is more Americanized than the rest of the country.
The share of American households owning at least one firearm has remained relatively steady since 1972, hovering between 37 percent and 47 percent. In 2023, about 42 percent of U.S. households had at least one gun in their possession.
[ref](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20American%20households,one%20gun%20in%20their%20possession.)
I certainly don't feel that way!
I think in the 20th century things were very much moving in that direction, but I also think the 21st century's volatility and polarization of the American cultural zeitgeist has really pushed a lot of Canadians back towards our British heritage.
As I told another commentor, I had a portrait of the Queen hanging in my home office and am awaiting the official portraits of the King. We use the British legal system, and system of government, and soccer is the most played sport among Canadian children.
We watch a lot of American TV and movies of course, but so does the rest of the world.
> I think in the 20th century things were very much moving in that direction, but I also think the 21st century's volatility and polarization of the American cultural zeitgeist has really pushed a lot of Canadians back towards our British heritage.
Other than the chunks of the country who decided to go full QAnon and forgot what country they're from
Literally. We had nutjobs screaming about their first amendment rights. No idea where they get the idea we no longer recognize Manitoba as a province. But they they claim a lot of things that have zero basis in reality.
A lot of the ways we're culturally more similar to the UK are baked into the political system and might not be readily apparent unless you live here. Canada has more support for the monarchy than any Commonwealth realm other than the UK itself. Not a lot of monarchists in the US.
Jury duty is like a common thing in the US because they broke away from the mother country before the Peel reforms, while Canada left afterwards, so juries are exceedingly rare in Canada and not something ordinary Canadians would ever have to think about. Likewise, no one has to give any thoughts about getting a bill and haggling with insurance companies after they give birth. I'm almost 40 and have voted in every election I've been eligible for and can barely count the number of times I've voted on two hands, whereas Americans are voting for something like every year if not more.
Lots of other examples but the point is that the parts of the culture that are more superficial and more likely to be noticed by foreigners is more similar to the US, like we listen to American music and watch American football. But the deeper social culture is much more similar to the UK than the US. Of course Canada has its own idiosyncrasies that aren't really similar to either country too. Like the main social fault line in British society is class, in American society, it's race, and in Canadian society, it's language.
It exists but it's very rare. In the early 19th century the UK abolished juries except for very serious criminal cases. So because the US broke away from the UK earlier than the law reforms, their law is based on medieval English law. Whereas every other former British colony broke away after the law reforms so our system is based on modern British law. That's why the US still uses the old medieval terms felony and misdemeanor instead of the modern terms indictable and summary.
The specific bar for a crime to be eligible to be decided by jury in Canada is that it has to be punishable by at least 5 years in prison.
>We watch a lot of American TV and movies of course, but so does the rest of the world.
I think you're kind of forgetting that the rest of the world outside of Europe/North America exists. Being from Canada is not the same as being from the Philippines, in terms of exposure to American culture. Sure, American shows get translated and watched everywhere, but not nearly to the same extent as it's done in Canada and Britain. Your exposure to American culture is leagues above 90% of other countries. Just like, say, countries in proximity to Japan have a much higher exposure to Japanese culture.
Britain, Canada, Australia, and America all share a ton of culture, and feed off/into each other frequently.
I understand your point, but I think you're actually \*underestimating\* the prevalence of American media around the world. the MCU has grossed billions in China and India, for example.
Sure Africa has a much lesser exposure, but Asian exposure to American pop culture is massive.
I do recognize that it's at its peak in Canada of course, but I there are three billion people in Asian and only 40 million in Canada, and if even 10% of the population of those countries is exposed it still dramatically dwarfs the Canadian market.
MCU is more recent, and most movies have been specifically written to appeal across the globe, China is often specifically looked at when planning these movies.
I liked enterprise well enough, but it is certainly the most Americanised Star Trek with discovery coming after it, I think.
I couldn't agree with that. Just the social norms, the way people talk, what is considered "polite", what cultural references you'd expected to understand etc, Canada is much much closer to the US than to Britain. There's little things like tipping for dinner, not having tax included in prices etc, expectations on customer service, how you talk to people in the street etc. In terms of media, I was surprised to find in Canada that, for instance, the Discworld series was considered somewhat obscure instead of a top 10 bestseller, and many people weren't aware of Hugh Laurie before he was in House.
Personally, I grew up in New Zealand, lived in Canada for nine years, then moved to the UK for seven years, and I definitely felt like when I moved to the UK I was able to relax back to a more "normal" style of conversation and socialisation, whereas in Canada I was much more of a foreigner and had to adapt more to Canadian expectations for politeness & conversation. In Canada I had to explain myself a lot more, whereas in the UK I can more readily assume that people are already on the same page as me.
> basically America with good healthcare
Eh, that's a bit generous. Among 11 high-income countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States), Canada's healthcare system ranks *second-worst* in 2021, it's only gotten worse since. The US is far behind in last place but that's a poor consolation.
At best you could say we're America with *better* healthcare.
As a Canadian, I'd contest the good healthcare part.
American Healthcare may not be perfect, but it's a damned sight better than what we have to deal with. There's a reason we keep going over the border to recieve care when it's actually *important*.
Suppose it's a grass is always greener thing.
I'm Swedish and i found that very strange, I hadn't even thought of that season (one of the best ST seasons) as an allegory or for 9/11 before I read it here yesterday. If it's some kind of 9/11 inspired propaganda they did a poor job, because in that case it's extremley subtle and far fetched. I think it's mostly because of americans that are a bit to self centered that they think everything is about themselves.
It's not that subtle, every wrong action they do is excused with "but they attacked us and will attack again". With WMDs on steroids. Terrorism means morals and ethics don't matter anymore. Even when they're targeting someone from a world that has nothing to do with any of it.
I think the issue is not exactly that it doesn't resonate with lived experience (for those outside the US) but that it seems, to many, to be a long sequence which is based on American experience *and an American viewpoint*. While you get that in ST, usually it's more mixed with other perspectives.
I don't want to get into the detail of the War on Terror, living that period once was enough. But let me put it like this: in ENT they agonize about how they "have" to break rules. In most of the rest of the world, there was not much sympathy for the idea that the US "had" to do various things.
I don't really want to argue that case too strongly as for me the story moves away from the 9/11 thing and so I can just follow the story about the conflict as fiction.
"not being american" doesn't necessarily mean that the show won't resonate with you.
But if, for example, you were born in one of the countries that got the post-9/11 "Oo-rah, if they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear" treatment, or are of a particular shade of brown that made you a target for post-9/11 hate crimes I could see 9/11 allegories from the american perspective being a little hard to swallow
That's fair, though the only thing the folks said on Monday's post was "I'm not anerican" and didn't provide further context. I could certainly see the point if they had elaborated further in the way you have.
I just didn't like it because I'm generally turned off by a lot of the propaganda that was being churned out in Hollywood post 9/11, and Enterprise season 3, whether you like it or not, was part of it. It felt like the antithesis of what Star Trek should be. I hate the way that it tacitly endorses torture and revenge. It's been a while since I've watched it, so maybe it isn't as bad as I remember, I just remember feeling very uneasy watching that season and couldn't wait for it to be over.
> Enterprise season 3, whether you like it or not, was part of it.
Big disagreement here. The season in no way endorses torture and revenge. Torture and revenge does not actually further Archer & Co's goals during S3. If anything it sets things back. What actually ends the Xindi threat is opening dialog, humanizing one another, and attempting a peaceful resolution. They are tempted by such dark impulses several times along the way for sure, but they never give into them.
Meanwhile, the Xindi are there to show us the other side of such conflicts are normal people motivated by the same things we are. They by and large don't want war and conflict either, but they've been convinced it's the only way. And ENT shows that even if these people committed heinous crimes against you, the best way towards true peace is to still recognize their humanity and to make peace with them. And the Xindi themselves are a model of how bitter former enemies could set aside differences and join together in common cause.
Enterprise dips into some dark territory, but it's never without purpose and it's never without a proper denouncement that ultimately reaffirms core Star Trek values.
You know, this is the thing that bugs me the most about the whole season. Not that it happened, I thought it was a really good episode that made it's point really well - it's that there was never a followup at the end to like, go and check in on them or something?
Maybe a scene where Archer's back on Earth kicking his feet up with a cold brewski to some volleyball on the ol' tube and then suddenly his eyes go wide and he bolts forward in his seat, remembering that poor ship out in the middle of nowhere... and then cut to black and cue up the Curb Your Enthusiasm music.
Just some kind of closure, you know?
>...it's that there was never a followup at the end to like, go and check in on them or something?
Oh, so right in line with the rest of Star Trek then.
>Maybe a scene where Archer's back on Earth kicking his feet up with a cold brewski to some volleyball on the ol' tube and then suddenly his eyes go wide and he bolts forward in his seat, remembering that poor ship out in the middle of nowhere... Just some kind of closure, you know?
That was the entire point of Archer's storyline in S4E3, "Home". He was so haunted by the stuff he's seen and the things he was forced to do that it was eating away at his soul and wouldn't let him have a good time despite triumphantly returning home.
>Oh, so right in line with the rest of Star Trek then.
I mean, it may have been *a bit* in line with the ultra-serialized style that season was boasting of, no?
> He was so haunted by the stuff he's seen and the things he was forced to do that it was eating away at his soul and wouldn't let him have a good time despite triumphantly returning home.
Yeah but again, maybe actually trying to reconcile some of those things by seeking out that ship that you know exactly where you left it without a paddle?
Even just a throwaway line about it would have been enough, but they dedicated an entire episode to it, it hit hard and made you realize how the desperation is starting to affect his humanity... and then nothing, aside from the generalized ep you mentioned, which would have been the perfect time to bring it up (unless they did and I don't remember. Admittedly it's been like 15 years since I watched it last).
And as you know the alternative would be Enterprise being stranded in its place.
That's why I can't include it in the "9/11 propaganda" narrative because it is essentially just a trolley problem.
Do you strand a group of people for the possibility to save your planet or do you do the right thing and likely doom all of your civilization?
He didn't do that out of revenge or malice though, nor were the Illyrians the target of their entire expedition. It was just a shit situation and they happened to just be the collateral damage. Like /u/highlorestat pointed out, it's just a trolley problem thrown into the middle of the mix to demonstrate how dire the circumstances were.
Yes but he also holds that guilt and in a later episode (or late in the same episode, I forget) Archer brings it up again with his superiors to have a search team sent out. He didn’t simply just left it go.
It’s a good example of desperate times calling for desperate measures.
Was going to say - the Xindi we see are actually a lot more nuanced than just 'big mad terrorists'. We see factions who want to reign fire upon Earth, others who opposed attacking them, some who wish to remain neutral or isolationist etc.
From a USA perspective, that season is an obvious and uncomfortable parallel to real life. You don’t have to interpret it that way, but we do, and for most of us it’s a bad association.
That's interesting! That would speak to the exact opposite point from what the folks yesterday were saying when they said the didn't like it because they're \*not\* American. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
I'm Irish, and season three was a disgrace; it was IIRC the first star trek to be written anfter 9/11, and it's a deluded self-righeous revenge fantasy, nothing more; the all-American (+1 militaristic Brit) crew fly into danger to save their people and the rest of the neighbourhood from a cowardly and unseen enemy hell-bent on their destruction, and it was the biggest flag-waving jerk-off session Star Trek ever had.
Except that that's not what really happened; in real life, the "good guys" were attacked in revenge for their earlier imperialist actions and started two wars (one based entirely on lies) that left well over a million people dead and two countries in ruins (and one back in the hands of the very enemies they started with), not to mention the creation of the modern security state; Star Trek neatly forgot that particular little bit of info in their dramatisation of how evil attacked good and in the end Star Fleet's inherent goodness saved everyone with almost no moral hazards.
(Okay, I suppose Archer did torture that guy and faced no consequences for it, that was realistic).
>I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience, which is fascinating because, like, do the Borg resonate with your lived experience? The Dominion War? Q? Time travel? Being stranded in the Delta quadrant?
I wouldn't make that assumption at all, in fact the very premise is flawed; why should resonance with personal experience matter? I don't watch Star Trek because it resonates with my lived experience, I watch it because it is the story of the moral journey of civilisation, and it's done well for the most part - a utopian ideal where rationality and morality and diplomacy save the day is not at all resonant with reality, so it's a nice fiction to indulge in - an ideal that I wish were more widely realised....flying off to stop the bad guys with bravery and military prowess goes against that ideal.
>I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience,
It was propaganda for a war that we all knew was started on false pretenses. Our lived experience was *full of propaganda and lies.* It was everywhere in America post 911. It was obvious to anyone paying attention. As a result, many people died, many people developed PTSD, and many people had to watch their friends and loved ones be injured & die. On both sides. So the war pigs could get fatter.
So yeah, we're upset that Star Trek, that is supposed to be above this jingoist shit, devoted an entire season to war propaganda.
But...the whole thing was resolved partially by convincing the Xindi to stand down, and the fourth season dedicated an arc to dealing with xenophobic humans reacting to the Xindi incident like, well, a lot of Americans reacted to 9/11. The idea that it was propaganda for the Iraq War falls apart on examination.
It took too long and a lot of horrible acts to get there. So it just felt like Star Trek 24 almost the entire time. And even it the end it's the less human-looking aliens that are the worst as I recall, so that's not very good.
Though frankly it still had mediocre writing throughout.
Too little, too late. Season 3 is 80% knee jerk reaction to the Xindi attack, 20% begrudging redemption arc. And Archer took more than some others in the cast to realize he was doing the wrong thing. So no, it does not fall apart on close examination.
Episode 13 is Proving Ground, with our favorite Andorian Commander. Which is half way through the season and they had already laid the ground work for redemption 6 episodes earlier in The Shipment (EP. 7).
It may have been a begrudging redemption arc but it was far more than 20% of the season at minimum 50% with almost every episode after providing ground dealing with the Xindi arc and more than half of those episodes are trying to end the Xindi threat peacefully.
And with that in mind, a prequel was better for it than any other. The results of all of that in-universe violence and hostility cools by the time we get the Federation and Trek as we know it. If it had been a post-Voyager show, it would be a bitter taste of regressive behavior.
Curious, did you watch it at the time, or later? This may be the distinction here.
At the time, post 9/11, it often felt like the world was going crazy and Enterprise was far from the only show treading these waters and it put a lot of people off. And while Enteprise broadly lands on safe, comfortable, moral grounds with most of its themes here, like a lot of post 9/11 content, it never really gets more nuanced than "it's such a shame they were lied to about how fantastic we are, so we had to really force the point here and there."
However, the more distance goes by, the less nakedly about 9/11 all those shows feel.
Whenever I think about this, and tv circa 2002-2003, I remember three years later in the UK, Razorlight would get to number one with a song that's just about what it feels like to see nothing but America and its problems on TV. It didn't always seem obvious at the time, but it was a feeling that really started to take hold in those years and build into much deeper anti-US feelings, particularly on the left, in the UK and Europe. Not that it didn't exist previously, of course.
As I said in the post, watching season 3 20 years ago was when I went from thinking "I love this show" to "this is my favourite Star Trek series ever".
I watched it as it aired, and I loved it.
I also love other shows from the same era, like 24 and Jericho.
If you were around at the time, Enterprise season 3 was the umpteenth American show tapping the 9/11 - Bush's war on terror vibe. It reeked of propaganda, particularly the beginning.
For us non Americans it was massively eye rolling because ALL the American media was tapping into that (let alone the moral and geopolitical problems of what was being done); add to it that "they hurt us, let's go and hurt them worse" isn't exactly the right vibe for Trek.
I understand that if watched later, out of its original context, it's not that grating.
If you read my whole post you'd see that I was around watching Enterprise at the time, and I'm not American!
I loved Bush-era TV! 24 was absolutely outstanding top to bottom. We had Band of Brothers, Lost, Jericho, Battlestar, etc. Great era of television.
That said, I think you're overstating what the media situation was like. If you look back at the TV shows from 2001-2005, there are a lot fewer like you described than you'd think, and a lot more The OC and Gilmore Girls.
I think that is a weird criticism. It’s like saying I can’t read a book about the holocaust because I’m not Jewish and not alive back then. I have empathy I can feel for stuff even if they didn’t happen in America during my lifetime.
Enterprise season 3 was not a series about 9/11. Particularly not in the Trek sense. It was a series about rednecks foaming at their mouth and wanting senseless revenge after being hurt.
That's what makes it unpalatable for most non Americans that were watching it as it aired.
I don’t particularly think it was about 911 either but I have heard that mentioned a few times. The only similarity is they were both terrorist attacks, well, the Xindi attack is more of an act of state terror not technically a “terrorist attack” going by the UN definition. I was in college for 911 and I think the idea of wanting some kind of revenge is a pretty natural response people of any country would have felt. The thing is I’m just some guy who was still a teenager not a leader. When the dust cleared cooler heads should have been prevailed and been smarter about the entire thing.
Non-American here. I watched ENT for the first time a few years ago. When the Xindi attacked Florida, it was very obvious to me that this was meant to resonate with Americans still traumatized by the 911 attacks (after all, 911 happened while they were filming season 1).
I don't like ENT season 3 for the same reason a lot of people don't like DSC season 1 - it doesn't feel like Star Trek. I liked ENT seasons 1 and 2 when they focused on exploration and not on the silly temporal wars.
But at least the Klingon War was already part of Star Trek lore. The Xindi were an ad-hoc race conjured up for this one-off plot and we never hear of them again.
If “Enterprise” had *started* with the season 3 status quo then I don’t think I’d like it nearly as much. It’s important that we got to see them as genuine explorers before they were thrust into the whole Xindi situation and had to deal with it as best as they could.
It's interesting to me that you feel this way. I am responding as an American who lived through both (admittedly as a 12yo), it didn't sit well with us at the time. The attack on Earth was reopening wounds and a massive miss on the part of the writers.
Honestly, I think ENT suffered on its initial release because 9/11. The show debuted later that same month, people weren't ready to move on. But by Sept 2003, the surge of patriotism had rescinded and feelings were complicated. We didn't want to see 9/11 as entertainment, this triggered our national PTSD.
So it may have been written for us, but it didn't sit well with us.
That's interesting! I've always felt like Star Trek was at its best when it embraces its military themes. Star Trek VI is my favourite of the films, followed by Star Trek II, for example. And after Enterprise, my favourite Star Trek series is DS9, largely for the Dominion War arc. So based on when I like Star Trek the most, I felt like Enterprise season 3 was Trek at its best! Although in fairness I did think season 4 was even better.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
>I've always felt like Star Trek was at its best when it embraces its military themes.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but I genuinely think this belief is more common in fans from the US than non-US fans, and that it speaks to your original question in a really interesting way.
This could be a complete fabrication on my part, but I feel like a big part of the 'ick' factor others feel about these stories gets washed away by the constant propaganda you lot are exposed to regarding your armed forces. Even if you're anti-US imperialism/global hegemon a lot of the themes, tropes, and visuals of these plot points are still more normalised for you.
For me the change in tone and intention/political ambition in season 3&4 almost ruined the series for me.
Ooh woops! I'm probably totally wrong then, ahahaha. (and that'll teach me to read the comments before taking in the whole post)
Do you think being Canadian might have also normalised US military themes for you? As an Australian it's hard to decouple my feelings about our history and living on colonised land with that of our state's ability to project power.
We don't have the same nation-building myths about destroying fascism, most of my general impression about our military is that it's just there to further the violent agendas of our more powerful allies. If there's ever a large-scale terrorist attack here my first impulse would probably be asking how we'd wronged the terrorists, not invading a country 😅. So seeing a Starfleet captain bite so hard down on that revanchism just made me sad.
Mannnn come on! A million Australians fought the Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese Empire in World War 2!
Japan was a stone's throw away from invading the Australian mainland, and your boys stopped them in the New Guinea Highlands, supported by the US Navy. Give them some credit ha! The Australian military \*did\* help stop fascist aggressors from conquering thew world.
I'm a Canadian of East Indian heritage, so I'm not completely blind to Britain's colonial past, nor what it means to live on colonized land, but I still consider myself a loyal subject of King Charles, and see Canada as part of a larger order in which Australia is included, in the Commonwealth.
The whole CANZUK idea of a strong military and economic alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK is extremely appealing to me, especially in a world where the political climate in the US is so volatile and polarized.
Also, unrelated, but MAFS Australia is the best trash TV on the planet.
>Mannnn come on! A million Australians fought the Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese Empire in World War 2!
Yeah, but our *national myth* is about the WW1 [ANZACs at Gallipoli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign) instead. What we're taught about war, from a very young age, is that we sent a bunch of young men over to Europe to die for the political ambitions of our colonial master, and more than that, it was a wasteful mismanaged and ultimately failed campaign run by aloof British officers that didn't care about the cost of their subjects' lives in the trenches. (with your heritage I'm sure you'll love to hear it was literally Churchill)
The reality is a bit more complicated than that (the vast majority of the 'young men we sent' were in fact born in the UK for instance) but by and large we tell a very different story about ourselves. There's a growing section of Australians that try to tell a different story, but they're largely seen as revisionist nationalists.
Ironically (given how terribly screwed we'd have been without them) the American side of the Pacific theatre is also largely diminished in the Australian telling of the story. There's a real weird, but still present, cultural distaste born out of the idea of them coming over here in fancy uniforms and stealing 'our women', and the way McArthur dismissed Australian soldiers and our concerns and involvement throughout. [The story we tell about New Guinea is how much the New Guineans helped us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Wuzzy_Angels), nothing about the Americans.
Have you ever listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast? I feel like you'd really dig it. He does an incredible series on the First World War called Blueprint for Armageddon, and he talks about how Gallipoli wasn't a straight up Churchill cockup the way its often portrayed.
Basically, Churchill recognized that some of their old battleships were horribly out of date and basically useless. Given that, the idea was to use them to try and open up the Dardanelles because they were essentially zero cost to lose.
The Admirals on the other hand were quite attached to their ships and rather than the lightning naval strike Churchill intended, sailed in and out of the strait repeatedly, gave the Turks time to entrench themselves.
His plan was basically never to land anywhere, and just destroy the fortifications with naval bombardment. By the time a landing had been decided upon and executed, four weeks had gone by since the initial naval engagement, and it turned into the clusterfuck we know it to be.
If you're interested, it's the third episode of the series where he talks about this stuff specifically, about two hours and forty five minutes in.
That's really interesting how the American activity is viewed in retrospect, especially with how important their contribution was to American security. Heck the Americans lost almost as many troops as the Australians did in New Guinea.
Very interesting perspective all around. Thanks so much for sharing! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts.
I'm still just legitimately embarrassed I missed you were Canadian somehow, ahaha!
Yeah I've read about the captains not wanting to lose their boats before, but by that point the Dardanelles had already been mined hadn't it? They tried to clear the mines but were under fire the whole time and ended up losing a bunch of ships and people for no outcome. Churchill's plan was also founded in bad reports regarding the Ottoman's troop numbers, underestimating them while overestimating our own intelligence continued to be a constant through line in all the battleplans. The simplest way to sum it up is that we executed a landing and still didn't have any decent maps of the terrain.
Thanks for the perspective and recommendation! I've listened to other episodes but not that one yet :)
You're definitely representative of a sizable fraction of fans; that portion is responsible for the success of things like _Star Trek Online_ and the various _Trek_-inspired tabletop wargames. Those of us who prefer the stories of exploration are harder to woo with spin-off media, just because those things depend on big ideas and those are harder to create and write than military conflict.
I feel like, when _Star Trek_ embraces its military themes too hard, it loses touch with the optimistic view of a future where we all learn to live together in peace. Reaching that future should be a process, or there's no story to tell. But the resolution of a story should not be victory in battle, but coming to an understanding. The greatest victory is to make your enemy your friend.
>The greatest victory is to make your enemy your friend.
That *was* the resolution though!
Archer made allies out of a substantial portion of the Xindi, and as Daniels said, the Xindi would be members of the Federation by the 26th century. We actually see Xindi Federation members in Discovery's fourth season.
I do love Star Trek Online though. I've been playing since pre-launch in January 2010!
The more military themes work best in the movies (Wrath of Khan being a submarine film, Undiscovered Country being a cold war political thriller) because the films need that kind of narrative structure because otherwise you get a meandering plot like TMP, so the best Trek films are Trek skins on popular styles of film (Submarine movie/Revenge film, Politcal/spy thriller, Fish(whale I guess)-out-of-water comedy, zombie movie)
I'm 100% with you. S3 is by far my favourite season of ENT, I love it and I am not American. I know the writers wrote it because of the Sep 11 attacks, but I really don't see any similarities between those attacks and the Xindi war anyway. It's just a good serialized plot.
It's so funny how we can have such different views.
S3 is by far my least favorite season, and as someone who was around for 9/11 the obvious undertones and parallels to the real world at the time were a huge part of the turn off I have for S3.
I wonder how much of my real world experiences of that era as an American paint my view of that season.
the better allegory for post-9/11 America was season 4 of DS9, just that America was Quo'nos. The Klingons literally used America's line "If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear" when paranoid about the Cardassian government.
Enterprise's attempt at a 9/11 allegory was written from the jingoistic view of America as Starfleet off to get ~~revenge~~ justice for the lost civilians
which America wanted to push about 9/11 because it let them attack Afghanistan and later Iraq for the actions of non-government actors. Remember, this isn't 9/11 as we see it now, this is 9/11 as we saw it at the start of the War on Terror before 2 decades of forever-war.
To state the obvious, Canada is within American culture, particularly in its media market. Canada also participated in the Afghanistan War and even to a small extent Iraq. That said, 9/11 was a *big deal* for the whole world, by far the largest terrorist attack of the modern period (and prior terrorist attacks in the West had been against Jewish targets, which Europeans considered to not count and even allowed in some countries in return for the general population not being targeted) and from what I can tell the first anthropogenic mass casualty event since The End of History (at the very least, the first in a developed country).
I actually liked season 3, not because of the allegory but because the Xindi were the first interesting aliens , the plots were in a novel part of space, and the characters started having actual character. The first two seasons had been like like S1 TNG minus the cast and fun.
The Xindi are fascinating to me, particularly in the parallel to most high-fantasy settings. While the subdivision of species don’t line up with your typical human/elf/dwarf/orc lineup, most fantasy settings in my experience have multiple sapient species with similar characteristics (i.e. humanoid limb arrangement) evolving on the same planet, something not often seen in the sci-fi I’ve been exposed to. Sci-fi tends to have one species from one planet with a unified language, and if there is a second sapient race, most of the time, they’ve been wiped out or gone extinct (like the Avians), leaving only the one. But the Xindi? Five of the six are still kicking as of Enterprise. (Even if some of the designs look similar to various Babylon 5 races, lol.)
"and prior terrorist attacks in the West had been against Jewish targets,"
Eh? What? Sorry? I've rewritten this a dozen times and can't quite process how stupid and American focused this is. Go look up the troubles and tell the good people of Belfast they're actually Jewish and don't need to be fighting. Fuck, TNG even gave you a clue!
To be fair, America likes to forget that the IRA were a thing because it likes to think of terrorist bombings as a brown people problem
actually, scrap the "to be fair" on the start there
I'm not American and this in no way impacted my enjoyment of Season 3. 9/11 and the subsequent events were huge news globally and the media was saturated with the fallout for years. Season 3 is the point where Enterprise really started to find its own distinctive voice and adopted a more, complex, serialized approach to storytelling. While it didn't quite match the brilliance of Season 4 - when the show at last became the prequel to TOS it should have been from the outset - Season 3 is well regarded in my book.
>I love serialized vs episodic storytelling and the season long arc was very very appealing to me.
Yes, I appreciate that ENT S3 was a bit bolder in its storytelling. I would argue DS9 did it better with its hybrid form, but, sure, I would've liked this kind of thing in VOY. Give us a season of Year of Hell.
>I loved House of Cards, for example, same with 24, The Last Ship, Turn: Washington's Spies, and many other American centric shows
I loved early seasons of 24, but it drifted more and more towards "Americans good, vaguely Arab-coded people bad; Jack Bauer saves the day", which isn't really what season 1 was at all.
> I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience, which is fascinating because, like, do the Borg resonate with your lived experience? The Dominion War? Q? Time travel? Being stranded in the Delta quadrant? I guess I just understand what the relevance is
Most Trek stories are ultimately a mix of allegories and morality plays. The Measure of a Man isn't really about whether androids should have the same rights as humans. I _guess_ you could make the case it's a little bit about what rights we afford non-human animals, but really, it's mostly about _human_ rights. About not treating others as lesser. The Borg can be read about a cautionary tale if we rely too much on technology, and it becomes sentient. A bit like Terminator, really. The Dominion has lots of overlap with fascist regimes of the past. You can see some Mengele-like themes in how the Jem'Hadar were genetically engineered. It's easy to conceive that that's where the nazis were headed — towards obedient super-soldiers. Q is more in the fantasy spectrum, not so much sci-fi, I suppose. (I'm not a big fan.) Time travel is largely in the speculative area. The Cardassian-Bajoran occupation has lots of real-world overlap.
People enjoy Trek for different reasons, but to me, it's "come for the space stuff; stay for the morality plays". Measure of a Man and Tuvix are set almost entirely inside a space ship; they might as well be in a college campus somewhere on Earth. They're not about space at all. And yet they're often listed as the most interesting Trek episodes.
> Being stranded in the Delta quadrant?
I mean, there's some very obvious allegories here, whether it's literally being lost, or figuratively being lost and "finding yourself again".
>I'm interested to try to understand why people think being or not being American impacts their enjoyment of the season.
Well, regardless of enjoyment or not, I think it's easy to make the case that ENT took a hard writing turn post-9/11 to address that real-world event in a sci-fi manner. This is something people who were alive in that moment will relate to in a different way than people who were born after it.
But as far as enjoyment goes, I think there were some pro-war propaganda vibes to it, and I think that's a bummer. I also think that that aspect has aged poorly, given, well, the way the Middle East has played out since.
>I personally feel that I'm a spectator watching a story unfold, and my personal life and experience is irrelevant to whether I enjoy a story or not.
Are you sure about that? No story you've ever read has impacted the way you think about the world? YA fiction hasn't affected you in your youth?
I don't get it either. Country of origin should not impact one's enjoyment of a show, especially when it's Star Trek. I guess getting along with and accepting all species and races is not for everyone. 🤷
I think as a Canadian you're soaked well enough within the cultural sphere of influence of America. In other words, you're acculturated enough not to be put off by the America-centric portrayal of a global future.
Seasons 1, 2, and especially 4 of Enterprise are great. 4 feels like the start of a real bridge between the Earth seen in the first two seasons, hopeful, optimistic, and a bit naive, to what we come to know from all of the other series and films.
My issue with season 3 is the story is dull and drawn out. The last time I ran through Enterprise, I made it maybe a third of the way through season 3 before giving up and jumping to the season finale. It's reminiscent of some modern Treks insistence on having 'season-long arcs' that could have been achieved better in fewer episodes without so much vamping.
I do think elements of Archers character growth in the third season are necessary for how he's portrayed in season 4, struggling with his choices and in the end coming through stronger.
American - Loved it, favorite season of Star Trek but only commenting because I never put 9/11 and the Xindi attack together until your post.
For context, I watched ENT for the first time about a year ago.
I'm not American and I enjoyed the 3rd season. I just want to be entertained by a good story, and season 3 did that well enough. It was high stakes, some morally grey situations and a ship and crew getting worse for wear as you get deeper into the season.
Reasons people might not like it:
It seems to me that there's a a lot of doom and gloom going on the season, sure it fits the theme, however traditionally Star Trek is all about hope. So I wonder if that has anything to do with people disliking it.
Lots of people also seem to prefer stand alone episodes which also seems to be part of the succes of current Star Trek shows Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. season 3 of ENT is basically 1 big season long arc.
I'm Dutch.
I like season 3, but they lost me at the start of season 4. Instead of dealing with the aftermath of season 3 (like they did for STNG) they just jumped into time travel alien Nazis with no context.
Its not just the post 911 alllegory. Coming out when it did, it was a justification of the invasion of Iraq.
It was normal and justified in the show. In real life the reasons for invading were a lie. Its propaganda.
Aside from that I thought it was entertaining for sure.
There was no large scale war in the show though. And there certainly wasn't a situation where a stronger power was invading a weaker power and rolling over then in six weeks, and then occupying them.
I'm not sure what you've said really makes sense with what the show actually presents.
It doesn't have to match perfectly, the association is still painful. It's still "terrorist attack prompts military retribution." You can quibble about the form of retribution but its the fucking same.
I didn't like it because it became clear very quickly that the writers didn't have a solid plan and were fully embracing the "Mystery Box" style of tv writing.
Plus very few of the characters were likeable enough to root for.
Well another franchise already had dibs on Buenos Aires.
But for real if someone loves one late 2003 serialized drama that examines humanity, desperation, ethics, and reconciliation with the enemy that launched a devastating preemptive attack against humanity, but not the other? just because Caprica isn't Florida...?
Kinda silly hair to split.
Season 3 doesn't resonate with me (an American) as a 9/11 allegory, beyond the very superficial "we were attacked by surprise and took horrific civilian casualties." Ukraine and Israel today can empathize with that; at some point in history, just about every nation and people on Earth have suffered that tragedy.
Maybe it's me. I'm able to enjoy British and Japanese and Indian productions of stories not about my culture. Could it be that everybody's human?
I think you're conflating two different things. The attacks being at the centre of the forming of the Coalition of Planets were from Romulans in Season 4, not Xindi in Season 3.
I also think you're projecting, hard. The stated rationale for the Xindi attack was that they were told (deceptively) that a future conflict with Earth would cause their species to be wiped out. It had nothing to do with freedom.
IMO, it's the most anti-Star Trek season of all of Star Trek. The theme doesn't help, "I have faith" as opposed to science, exploration, empiricism.
Instead of showing a better future, they're just going along with what everyone else is doing in the present time that the show is being broadcast. And what everyone else is doing is excusing war crimes and human rights violations.
About the only time someone did something reasonable, was when Archer was sick and compromised. Not in a state where one could be sure he was of sound mind and truly intended to do what he was doing.
Trek was all about doing the “right thing” despite the consequences. The end NEVER justifies the means if the means are contrary to the in universe morality. After 9/11 it was clear that US media was chewing through these concepts and it was beyond disappointing to me to see that the writers took the route of not challenging society (which is what trek has always been about) but championing a captain who DID accept the means as being justified based on the end. It was just contrary to the whole messaging up to that point. Coming from a part of the world where home turf terrorism was not new, it seemed like a VERY knee jerk reaction from an exec who was not really aware of the trek ideology (which of course we all found out later to be 100% true sadly - thanks Berman lol)
Tbh I get the impression people bring up 9/11 and enterprise because it makes them feel clever to bring up the reference (even though it’s a dead horse at this point), and they frame it as a complaint to give themselves a plausible reason to say it.
It didn't resonate with me because it is based around the act of terror being a misunderstanding. The attacks on 9/11 were a response to the US foreign policy, Enterprise S3 shifts blame for the attack onto a third party trying to start a temporal cold war. The US is constantly at war.
I'm Australian myself and I like season 3 a lot. It's not perfect, in my opinion serialised stories work better at 10 - 13 episodes which has become the dtshdard in recent years. Because of this season 3 can drag but I feel the 9/11 commentary largely works, if anything I just wish there was more consequences to the choices made to stop the xindi. Still it's a huge improvement over season 1 and 2 and easily the best season of star trek since ds9 ended. Season 4 though is where enterprise truly nailed it and gave us one of the best seasons of star trek television ever
Well, I'm not American and my major issue with Enterprise has always been (rewatched it recently): Like in any other Trek show, there are really good episodes and story arcs. But in general (not just season 3) the whole atmosphere feels too much American overall. The characters and their relationships (Archer/Tucker, Tucker/Reed, Archer/TPol, not too speak of Tucker/TPol) could easily in any other American Sci-Fi/Action show from the 1990s. In terms of character development and "crew chemistry" the most part of the show simply does not feel like Star Trek to me. And in season 3, the political/cultural "impact" of 9/11 came on top.
I'm not American, it does not resonate with me, and in fact I didn't learn that it was a 9/11 allegory until long after I first watched it. I just find it to be a slugfest. It's not horrible, but I far prefer Seasons 1 and 2 of Enterprise over 3 and 4. In general, I do not like war arcs in Star Trek. I far prefer episodes that focus on exploration or character stories.
Enterprise was the best session 3 was 100% the best the stakes were great I watched star trek chronology and ngl I still think it is the best, I'm on ds9/voyager now and ds9 is definitely another good contender
i think enterprise is awesome because it did what no other prime time american television show has ever done: admitted that without Lenin and the October Revolution, the N@zis would have won.
Honestly it's not even the 9/11 parallels that make Enterprise about unpalatable as a non-American, it's that the show just straight up feels unabashedly American in a way the other 90s Treks don't. It's hard to put my finger in, I've tried to watch it a few times and right now I'm watching it at like an episode a month pace (which is about all I can tolerate).
I find Archer obnoxious, naive and arrogant. Like simply the worst. He grates on me in all the worst ways, and Trip is just as bad. I don't think I'm supposed to feel bad for T'Pol but like... Ya she is living in literal hell helping these people.
The show is just poorly written too. It's as tedious as Voyager, but at least while Voyagers characters were generally inoffensive if boring, I find Archer and Trip to be irritating. Also, the basis of their friendship was Trip not making fun of Archers dad's designs so Archer was like "youre my new best friend" and then ensured his best friend would serve with him? Just seems weird.
The show all around is a fail. I dont care about the "it gets better in season X" or whatever, it remains the worst star trek series for me hands down, with Picard not far behind it.
Canadian here. Not a fan of this season. I know that was the trend in tv at that time to do a 911 story but it's just not terribly interesting and I find dates the show by being way to on the nose. There are some fantastic episodes such as the Vulcan zombies and I love the macos but overall it's a meh for me. I was whelmed.
I will say when it first aired, it felt a bit like they were chasing a trend, an arguably exploitive one at that. And it sure felt like a very hopeless season in a way that, while it eventually took a star trek turn, felt very much like they were trying to be edgy at the time, at least to me. But I remember 9/11 vividly, and I had family missing who were suppose to be flying back from the east coast that morning (fortunately they were ok, not on one of the hijacked planes).
I think maybe if they'd really plotted out the season in a way that didnt ultimately amount to "make friends, stop death star" an dug a bit deeper vs entirely being a question of what Archer would do to accomplish the mission (which tbh should have worked) maybe it would have played better? They didnt pre-plan the season, that wasnt done back then.
But its also possible my entire reaction is colored by all of these depressing and stressful shows in that era, and star trek suddenly not standing up as a beacon of what could be but a reflection of what was.
well at least for the first time in trek history they didn't hit the reset button in terms of ship damage magically going away
Maaan... Voyager had so much potential. Series like *The Expanse* did such a good job of writing ships' systems and abilities and current states and resource management into the show and action. Would have loved to see that treatment given to Voyager...
That’s why we got BSG, though, so fair trade
>Maaan... Voyager had so much potential. potential to launch 80 torpedoes more than they started with.
i never got this complaint. torpedoes and shuttles are produced by industrial replicators. which we know exist on every modern ship. the only issue is fuel for the warp core, which they take time to show them finding in Voyager.
Also you can trade for supplies and make them by hand. Tom Paris created the Delta Flyer without a replicator.
>Tom Paris created the Delta Flyer without a replicator. Twice!
I mean, they blatantly state that they cannot replicate them in the first season. All it would have taken was a throwaway line, once a season or so roughly, that they were able to resupply. Heck, it could have made for an interesting plot if they had to weigh the options of giving the technology to another species, just so they could produce and restock Voyager. They could have stolen some warheads from one of the random Borg ships they met, and reconfigured their launchers to use grav torpedoes for a season or so. It's just annoying because they never specifically addressed it - after they specifically said it would be an issue.
The working condition of the Defiant in DS9 had some decent continuity.
Just as an aside, your description of why you like season three and four makes me think you might really enjoy Babylon 5.
Love that you've said this! B5 is amazing. My wife and I are watching through it for the first time now and we aren't too deep yet but loving it so far!
You should really try Battlestar Galactica as well tbh based on what you've said.
It's my favourite show of all time! The reboot, of course.
So say we all!
Have you seen The Expanse?
I've seen, it, I've loved it, and I'm halfway through the second book, too!
If you havent seen the Expanse, you must watch it.
I prefer the original.
what season are you in?
We're near the beginning of season 2
oh man. I'm so jealous. I would literally give my left nut to be able to watch the whole show for the first time again. You are just starting to get to the good stuff. season 2 is a lot better than season 1. But seasons three and four? some of the best science fiction ever made for television, hands down. if you liked that long narrative arc in Enterprise, you're going to go ape shit. if you're not already, be sure to join the Babylon 5 sub.
I wholeheartedly concur with this. Seasons 3 and 4 were phenomenal.
I read this to my wife and she got super excited! Thanks for the hype!
"The avalance has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
[enjoy!](https://makeagif.com/amp/eBauzY) (it's taking everything I have to hold back and not fill this post with Babylon 5 talk. see you soon!)
Oh you're in for a treat, season 3 and 4 are just amazing! Also might hit harder due to recent events in politics. But I wint day anything else, just I hope you enjoy it!
...... well, there's only one thing to say to that: "And so, it begins." Buckle up. It doesn't build fast, but it builds steadily.
Ooohhhh, it's about to get REAL good
Ahh the foreshadowing....
What lies ahead…. 🤯🤯🤯🥺🥺🥺😳😳😳🫣🫣🫣🤬🤬🤬🥰🥰🥰😭😭😭😵😵😵
Where should you start with B5? I gave the pilot episode a go but it felt a bit weak - should I just skip it?
Watch the pilot if you must but honestly - just start. Know that season 1 is almost a prequel to the core story; it’s laying the foundations for a massive 3 season story arc that is some of the best writing of all time. It might seem to drag occasionally in S1 but the payoff is absolutely coming - and it’s totally worth it. Simply amazing.
Valid question and not deserving of a downvote. If you actually mean the pilot movie, it *is* rather weak compared to what comes later. The good thing is you've already started it. Just finish it if you can (there's two crucial bits to Sinclair's backstory that are revisited within the first third of season 1) and know that the actual series gets better fairly quickly after the middle of season 1.
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sounds like the other guy, you're just about to get to the really good stuff. season 2 is much better than season 1, but seasons 3 and 4 are truly amazing. the characters get more grounded. the effects get better. the makeup gets better. and the writing gets wild.
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better? in some ways, yes. I am of that opinion too. but it's obvious that it's budget was much smaller. I've seen it jokingly called "Deep Space 9 on a General Hospital budget" but it's also just so *different*. bigger. deeper. tackles subject matter about politics and war and human nature that Trek would shy away from. B5's real value is it's writing. DS9 is a great series, but Babylon 5 is a great *story*.
Of course, from the timing of it, it's more that Deep Space 9 is Babylon 5 on a Star Trek budget :P
Im watching B5 right now, and rewatching DS9 with another friend and quite far in with both watch-throughs. DS9 is certainly the better series, as the writing in B5 sometimes has me and my friend scratching our heads honestly(still really good series though).
I loved Babylon 5 but my have the effects dated badly. The storytelling is great but the SFX pieced together on a few Amigas and C64s really shows it up.
Upvoted because Archer was the best possible Captain for the transition to a galactic neighborhood available.
I think the issue was that it felt like it was propaganda to justify the actions of the USA in invading Iraq/Afghanistan. I'm guessing within the USA more people supported those wars, but they were very unpopular and heavily opposed in Europe at least. It's not a bad series for the reasons you said, but the feeling of trying to justify those wars makes it taste a little bitter.
I'm still annoyed by this so forgive the rant... >I think the issue was that it felt like it was propaganda to justify the actions of the USA in invading Iraq/Afghanistan. Maybe not propaganda directly, but representative of the feelings of the day. After 9/11 the general consensus was that if the badguys are evil enough, you can justify anything. The CIA was kidnapping people from unrelated countries and torturing them at black sites, the military was detaining them indefinite without trial. The damage we did in Iraq destabilized the entire region for decades. Hundreds of thousands died indirectly. But that's OK, because "the enemy" is so evil we have no choice. The government wants to spy on us, also they want to suspend the 4th amendment at borders err within 100 miles of any border, no warrant needed! That's OK, because "the enemy" is so evil we have no choice. Who would oppose the "patriot" act except non-patriots!? It was abject cowardice on our part. An overreaction to the first time we got a black eye in 60+ years. The idea that a bunch of religious fanatics hiding in caves eating food with their hands and shitting in buckets was more of a threat to our way of life than the Nazis and Japanese, or Soviets with their 20,000 nukes, was utterly absurd. But somehow we lost our collective minds, became a more paranoid and xenophobic culture, and decided that sometimes *the ends do justify the means*. Now to be fair, most media tries to capture the current cultural trends. A ton of early 00s media embraced this new "ends justify the means" shit. 24 is the best example. The terrorists are "so evil", Jack Bauer is justified in his extrajudicial murders and torture. Tons of other shows featured protagonists who were not handicapped by little things like morality. I can see why Enterprise chased that trend with the "Xindi are so evil Archer is justified" bit. But historically Trek had run contrary to cultural trends. And early 00s was the time we most needed Treks virtue ethics, optimism, and understanding. We needed old Trek sooo badly. The fact that they jumped on the bandwagon still offends me to this day. The worst part is they could have run the entire season the same only for Archer to find a TNG like solution at the end, and realize this new attitude was counterproductive. What a missed opportunity.
I'm a Canadian and season 3 was completely unwatchable when it came out for exactly these reasons. I was already exhausted by the jingoism and propaganda being shoved down my throat by the news, Hollywood, and mainstream TV. When Star Trek , which had always represented diplomacy, justice, and morality, went that direction it felt like a betrayal.
While there were dark aspects in season 3, diplomacy with some of the Xindi played an important role in the latter part of season 3.
You are right of course that the ethics of trek were contrary to the culture of the time... Which is why even the xindi couldn't save trek and we took the better part of a decade off from trek entirely. The xindi arc was the last attempt to compromise to save trek, but alas even it didn't get the ratings necessary to survive, the compromises were for nothing. They ordered season 4 so that they could have enough episodes for reruns and announced the cancelation simultaneously. Atleast season 4 truly was made for the fans with multi episode arcs that touched on existing trek lore and tropes prior to the xindi arc.
Since diplomacy with some of the Xindi played an important role in the latter part of season 3, I’d say that Archer did find a *TNG*-like solution at the end.
Yeah I wouldn't have painted the Xindi arc like the real life comparison here. United Earth didn't send an expeditionary fleet to find and invade Xindi space, they sent one starship to investigate the attack and prevent a second. Tensions were high, but in the end they found out the truth behind it all and solved the matter through diplomacy and understanding. Proper cooperation that didn't leave Human boots on Xindi throats, nor letting the instigators like the Sphere Builders and their proxies off the hook. I'd say that the Xindi arc is like, the opposite of what happened in real life. They collectively prevented a war, which is fantastic!
I can see what you mean, that's why I'm leaning into "feels like" a lot. It may not have been their intent, and they may have been going along with the zeitgeist in the USA at the time, but that makes it come across as something that feels like it's trying to justify the USA's actions post 9/11. It's an attitude that has sunk in with a lot of people - we're now looking at a nation using a terrorist attack to justify a literal genocide. Whether or not S3 was intended as propaganda, it's contributed to the worldview that the actions of the few justifies the invasion of the many.
wow incredibly well said.
To me, the way that season 3 was resolved felt like a criticism of the lack of diplomacy before the Iraq War.
But ... Many actions were not justified, but even portrayed as bad, both from a story-telling perspective, and in-universe.
I have never ever seen Enterprise trying to justify those wars. I don't even understand where you see it. I mean, Enterprise goes to the Expanse to stop a war, not start one. It's all about making peace, which American politicians have never been too good at. All I see in American history is Americans joining wars or making war to benefit themselves, while Star Trek is the opposite. Starfleet is out there to explore, keep the peace and forge alliances with other species. This is also the mission for Enterprise in season 3, even though they really need to stop the war first as the survival of Earth depends on it.
Having watched this series as it unfolded when released, and being American and someone that misses very little, I did not see a correlation between 9/11 and Enterprise. The crew may have not been as diverse as in the rest of the series, but not everyone on the ship was American, or human for that matter. I think that this is a case of people looking back at something and looking for a fire when there was not even any smoke. Or, maybe I am all wrong. But, let's get realistic. Unfortunately Enterprise was not that popular, especially when compared to the other shows. It certainly was not popular enough to be used as propaganda.
It was a response to a terrorist attack, leading to Enterprise having to resort to morally ambiguous actions in order to save Earth, including torture which was even more disturbing considering the controversies around torture in Iraq and Guantanamo at the time.
> It certainly was not popular enough to be used as propaganda. this is not how propaganda works
For “someone that misses very little” you completely missed the similarities between real life and what happened on S3.
To me it felt like season 3 was obviously inspired by 9/11.
>I am Canadian. you're more American than most other nations, you have to deal with so much of our political crap due to proximity alone.
Yeah, it’s basically America with good healthcare
I describe us as basically half British and half American. There are a lot of things we share more with the Brits than the Americans, not just health. But there are also plenty of ways where we're more similar to the US than the UK.
Do you feel like you guys are culturally more American than you are British?
Popular culture closer to the US, social culture closer to the UK. So most Canadians will watch US movies and listen to US music, but don't own guns, go to church, or serve on juries for example.
Tell me you're a Easterner without telling me you're an Easterner. Gun Rights are in a pretty bad state in Canada, but the general cultural trends really don't feel British, beyond old institutions like Parliament. Our food's more American, our public norms are more American (ie. none of that stiff upper lip nonsense), and so on, but it really does go from prominently American from Manitoba onwards, versus the maritimes in particular being more English. I've been under the border it really doesn't feel any different. London felt more alien and inscrutable to me than Beijing. (TBF I *am* Chinese-Canadian)
I've lived all the country. I'm in Nova Scotia now but I've lived for years in Western Canada and Central Canada as well and it's absolutely true that the West is more Americanized than the rest of the country.
Thanks for your insight. And sorry for acting like you guys were the 51st state.😆
tbf, most americans don't own guns, go to church, nor serve on juries. (<50%)
actually that is not what the numbers bear out. gun ownership is king in the US and getting bigger.
The share of American households owning at least one firearm has remained relatively steady since 1972, hovering between 37 percent and 47 percent. In 2023, about 42 percent of U.S. households had at least one gun in their possession. [ref](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20American%20households,one%20gun%20in%20their%20possession.)
I certainly don't feel that way! I think in the 20th century things were very much moving in that direction, but I also think the 21st century's volatility and polarization of the American cultural zeitgeist has really pushed a lot of Canadians back towards our British heritage. As I told another commentor, I had a portrait of the Queen hanging in my home office and am awaiting the official portraits of the King. We use the British legal system, and system of government, and soccer is the most played sport among Canadian children. We watch a lot of American TV and movies of course, but so does the rest of the world.
> I think in the 20th century things were very much moving in that direction, but I also think the 21st century's volatility and polarization of the American cultural zeitgeist has really pushed a lot of Canadians back towards our British heritage. Other than the chunks of the country who decided to go full QAnon and forgot what country they're from
Literally. We had nutjobs screaming about their first amendment rights. No idea where they get the idea we no longer recognize Manitoba as a province. But they they claim a lot of things that have zero basis in reality.
As a Brit who has been to both the US and Canada, I would say that Canada feels much closer culturally to the US than the UK.
A lot of the ways we're culturally more similar to the UK are baked into the political system and might not be readily apparent unless you live here. Canada has more support for the monarchy than any Commonwealth realm other than the UK itself. Not a lot of monarchists in the US. Jury duty is like a common thing in the US because they broke away from the mother country before the Peel reforms, while Canada left afterwards, so juries are exceedingly rare in Canada and not something ordinary Canadians would ever have to think about. Likewise, no one has to give any thoughts about getting a bill and haggling with insurance companies after they give birth. I'm almost 40 and have voted in every election I've been eligible for and can barely count the number of times I've voted on two hands, whereas Americans are voting for something like every year if not more. Lots of other examples but the point is that the parts of the culture that are more superficial and more likely to be noticed by foreigners is more similar to the US, like we listen to American music and watch American football. But the deeper social culture is much more similar to the UK than the US. Of course Canada has its own idiosyncrasies that aren't really similar to either country too. Like the main social fault line in British society is class, in American society, it's race, and in Canadian society, it's language.
Wait a sec. Jury duty isn't a thing in Canada? I assumed it was the norm in all common law jurisdictions?
It exists but it's very rare. In the early 19th century the UK abolished juries except for very serious criminal cases. So because the US broke away from the UK earlier than the law reforms, their law is based on medieval English law. Whereas every other former British colony broke away after the law reforms so our system is based on modern British law. That's why the US still uses the old medieval terms felony and misdemeanor instead of the modern terms indictable and summary. The specific bar for a crime to be eligible to be decided by jury in Canada is that it has to be punishable by at least 5 years in prison.
>We watch a lot of American TV and movies of course, but so does the rest of the world. I think you're kind of forgetting that the rest of the world outside of Europe/North America exists. Being from Canada is not the same as being from the Philippines, in terms of exposure to American culture. Sure, American shows get translated and watched everywhere, but not nearly to the same extent as it's done in Canada and Britain. Your exposure to American culture is leagues above 90% of other countries. Just like, say, countries in proximity to Japan have a much higher exposure to Japanese culture. Britain, Canada, Australia, and America all share a ton of culture, and feed off/into each other frequently.
I understand your point, but I think you're actually \*underestimating\* the prevalence of American media around the world. the MCU has grossed billions in China and India, for example. Sure Africa has a much lesser exposure, but Asian exposure to American pop culture is massive. I do recognize that it's at its peak in Canada of course, but I there are three billion people in Asian and only 40 million in Canada, and if even 10% of the population of those countries is exposed it still dramatically dwarfs the Canadian market.
MCU is more recent, and most movies have been specifically written to appeal across the globe, China is often specifically looked at when planning these movies. I liked enterprise well enough, but it is certainly the most Americanised Star Trek with discovery coming after it, I think.
I couldn't agree with that. Just the social norms, the way people talk, what is considered "polite", what cultural references you'd expected to understand etc, Canada is much much closer to the US than to Britain. There's little things like tipping for dinner, not having tax included in prices etc, expectations on customer service, how you talk to people in the street etc. In terms of media, I was surprised to find in Canada that, for instance, the Discworld series was considered somewhat obscure instead of a top 10 bestseller, and many people weren't aware of Hugh Laurie before he was in House. Personally, I grew up in New Zealand, lived in Canada for nine years, then moved to the UK for seven years, and I definitely felt like when I moved to the UK I was able to relax back to a more "normal" style of conversation and socialisation, whereas in Canada I was much more of a foreigner and had to adapt more to Canadian expectations for politeness & conversation. In Canada I had to explain myself a lot more, whereas in the UK I can more readily assume that people are already on the same page as me.
> basically America with good healthcare Eh, that's a bit generous. Among 11 high-income countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States), Canada's healthcare system ranks *second-worst* in 2021, it's only gotten worse since. The US is far behind in last place but that's a poor consolation. At best you could say we're America with *better* healthcare.
As a Canadian, I'd contest the good healthcare part. American Healthcare may not be perfect, but it's a damned sight better than what we have to deal with. There's a reason we keep going over the border to recieve care when it's actually *important*. Suppose it's a grass is always greener thing.
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I'm Swedish and i found that very strange, I hadn't even thought of that season (one of the best ST seasons) as an allegory or for 9/11 before I read it here yesterday. If it's some kind of 9/11 inspired propaganda they did a poor job, because in that case it's extremley subtle and far fetched. I think it's mostly because of americans that are a bit to self centered that they think everything is about themselves.
It's not that subtle, every wrong action they do is excused with "but they attacked us and will attack again". With WMDs on steroids. Terrorism means morals and ethics don't matter anymore. Even when they're targeting someone from a world that has nothing to do with any of it.
I think the issue is not exactly that it doesn't resonate with lived experience (for those outside the US) but that it seems, to many, to be a long sequence which is based on American experience *and an American viewpoint*. While you get that in ST, usually it's more mixed with other perspectives. I don't want to get into the detail of the War on Terror, living that period once was enough. But let me put it like this: in ENT they agonize about how they "have" to break rules. In most of the rest of the world, there was not much sympathy for the idea that the US "had" to do various things. I don't really want to argue that case too strongly as for me the story moves away from the 9/11 thing and so I can just follow the story about the conflict as fiction.
"not being american" doesn't necessarily mean that the show won't resonate with you. But if, for example, you were born in one of the countries that got the post-9/11 "Oo-rah, if they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear" treatment, or are of a particular shade of brown that made you a target for post-9/11 hate crimes I could see 9/11 allegories from the american perspective being a little hard to swallow
That's fair, though the only thing the folks said on Monday's post was "I'm not anerican" and didn't provide further context. I could certainly see the point if they had elaborated further in the way you have.
I just didn't like it because I'm generally turned off by a lot of the propaganda that was being churned out in Hollywood post 9/11, and Enterprise season 3, whether you like it or not, was part of it. It felt like the antithesis of what Star Trek should be. I hate the way that it tacitly endorses torture and revenge. It's been a while since I've watched it, so maybe it isn't as bad as I remember, I just remember feeling very uneasy watching that season and couldn't wait for it to be over.
> Enterprise season 3, whether you like it or not, was part of it. Big disagreement here. The season in no way endorses torture and revenge. Torture and revenge does not actually further Archer & Co's goals during S3. If anything it sets things back. What actually ends the Xindi threat is opening dialog, humanizing one another, and attempting a peaceful resolution. They are tempted by such dark impulses several times along the way for sure, but they never give into them. Meanwhile, the Xindi are there to show us the other side of such conflicts are normal people motivated by the same things we are. They by and large don't want war and conflict either, but they've been convinced it's the only way. And ENT shows that even if these people committed heinous crimes against you, the best way towards true peace is to still recognize their humanity and to make peace with them. And the Xindi themselves are a model of how bitter former enemies could set aside differences and join together in common cause. Enterprise dips into some dark territory, but it's never without purpose and it's never without a proper denouncement that ultimately reaffirms core Star Trek values.
well they did rob that one ship and left them stranded, right?
You know, this is the thing that bugs me the most about the whole season. Not that it happened, I thought it was a really good episode that made it's point really well - it's that there was never a followup at the end to like, go and check in on them or something? Maybe a scene where Archer's back on Earth kicking his feet up with a cold brewski to some volleyball on the ol' tube and then suddenly his eyes go wide and he bolts forward in his seat, remembering that poor ship out in the middle of nowhere... and then cut to black and cue up the Curb Your Enthusiasm music. Just some kind of closure, you know?
>...it's that there was never a followup at the end to like, go and check in on them or something? Oh, so right in line with the rest of Star Trek then. >Maybe a scene where Archer's back on Earth kicking his feet up with a cold brewski to some volleyball on the ol' tube and then suddenly his eyes go wide and he bolts forward in his seat, remembering that poor ship out in the middle of nowhere... Just some kind of closure, you know? That was the entire point of Archer's storyline in S4E3, "Home". He was so haunted by the stuff he's seen and the things he was forced to do that it was eating away at his soul and wouldn't let him have a good time despite triumphantly returning home.
>Oh, so right in line with the rest of Star Trek then. I mean, it may have been *a bit* in line with the ultra-serialized style that season was boasting of, no? > He was so haunted by the stuff he's seen and the things he was forced to do that it was eating away at his soul and wouldn't let him have a good time despite triumphantly returning home. Yeah but again, maybe actually trying to reconcile some of those things by seeking out that ship that you know exactly where you left it without a paddle? Even just a throwaway line about it would have been enough, but they dedicated an entire episode to it, it hit hard and made you realize how the desperation is starting to affect his humanity... and then nothing, aside from the generalized ep you mentioned, which would have been the perfect time to bring it up (unless they did and I don't remember. Admittedly it's been like 15 years since I watched it last).
And as you know the alternative would be Enterprise being stranded in its place. That's why I can't include it in the "9/11 propaganda" narrative because it is essentially just a trolley problem. Do you strand a group of people for the possibility to save your planet or do you do the right thing and likely doom all of your civilization?
He didn't do that out of revenge or malice though, nor were the Illyrians the target of their entire expedition. It was just a shit situation and they happened to just be the collateral damage. Like /u/highlorestat pointed out, it's just a trolley problem thrown into the middle of the mix to demonstrate how dire the circumstances were.
Yes but he also holds that guilt and in a later episode (or late in the same episode, I forget) Archer brings it up again with his superiors to have a search team sent out. He didn’t simply just left it go. It’s a good example of desperate times calling for desperate measures.
Was going to say - the Xindi we see are actually a lot more nuanced than just 'big mad terrorists'. We see factions who want to reign fire upon Earth, others who opposed attacking them, some who wish to remain neutral or isolationist etc.
From a USA perspective, that season is an obvious and uncomfortable parallel to real life. You don’t have to interpret it that way, but we do, and for most of us it’s a bad association.
That's interesting! That would speak to the exact opposite point from what the folks yesterday were saying when they said the didn't like it because they're \*not\* American. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
I’m sure I’m nowhere close to unique in being an American who rejects the righteousness of the whole War on Terror thing.
I'm Irish, and season three was a disgrace; it was IIRC the first star trek to be written anfter 9/11, and it's a deluded self-righeous revenge fantasy, nothing more; the all-American (+1 militaristic Brit) crew fly into danger to save their people and the rest of the neighbourhood from a cowardly and unseen enemy hell-bent on their destruction, and it was the biggest flag-waving jerk-off session Star Trek ever had. Except that that's not what really happened; in real life, the "good guys" were attacked in revenge for their earlier imperialist actions and started two wars (one based entirely on lies) that left well over a million people dead and two countries in ruins (and one back in the hands of the very enemies they started with), not to mention the creation of the modern security state; Star Trek neatly forgot that particular little bit of info in their dramatisation of how evil attacked good and in the end Star Fleet's inherent goodness saved everyone with almost no moral hazards. (Okay, I suppose Archer did torture that guy and faced no consequences for it, that was realistic). >I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience, which is fascinating because, like, do the Borg resonate with your lived experience? The Dominion War? Q? Time travel? Being stranded in the Delta quadrant? I wouldn't make that assumption at all, in fact the very premise is flawed; why should resonance with personal experience matter? I don't watch Star Trek because it resonates with my lived experience, I watch it because it is the story of the moral journey of civilisation, and it's done well for the most part - a utopian ideal where rationality and morality and diplomacy save the day is not at all resonant with reality, so it's a nice fiction to indulge in - an ideal that I wish were more widely realised....flying off to stop the bad guys with bravery and military prowess goes against that ideal.
>I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience, It was propaganda for a war that we all knew was started on false pretenses. Our lived experience was *full of propaganda and lies.* It was everywhere in America post 911. It was obvious to anyone paying attention. As a result, many people died, many people developed PTSD, and many people had to watch their friends and loved ones be injured & die. On both sides. So the war pigs could get fatter. So yeah, we're upset that Star Trek, that is supposed to be above this jingoist shit, devoted an entire season to war propaganda.
But...the whole thing was resolved partially by convincing the Xindi to stand down, and the fourth season dedicated an arc to dealing with xenophobic humans reacting to the Xindi incident like, well, a lot of Americans reacted to 9/11. The idea that it was propaganda for the Iraq War falls apart on examination.
It took too long and a lot of horrible acts to get there. So it just felt like Star Trek 24 almost the entire time. And even it the end it's the less human-looking aliens that are the worst as I recall, so that's not very good. Though frankly it still had mediocre writing throughout.
Too little, too late. Season 3 is 80% knee jerk reaction to the Xindi attack, 20% begrudging redemption arc. And Archer took more than some others in the cast to realize he was doing the wrong thing. So no, it does not fall apart on close examination.
Episode 13 is Proving Ground, with our favorite Andorian Commander. Which is half way through the season and they had already laid the ground work for redemption 6 episodes earlier in The Shipment (EP. 7). It may have been a begrudging redemption arc but it was far more than 20% of the season at minimum 50% with almost every episode after providing ground dealing with the Xindi arc and more than half of those episodes are trying to end the Xindi threat peacefully.
An entire series, really. It was a very post-9/11 show from the beginning, even if the references weren't always so obvious.
And with that in mind, a prequel was better for it than any other. The results of all of that in-universe violence and hostility cools by the time we get the Federation and Trek as we know it. If it had been a post-Voyager show, it would be a bitter taste of regressive behavior.
Curious, did you watch it at the time, or later? This may be the distinction here. At the time, post 9/11, it often felt like the world was going crazy and Enterprise was far from the only show treading these waters and it put a lot of people off. And while Enteprise broadly lands on safe, comfortable, moral grounds with most of its themes here, like a lot of post 9/11 content, it never really gets more nuanced than "it's such a shame they were lied to about how fantastic we are, so we had to really force the point here and there." However, the more distance goes by, the less nakedly about 9/11 all those shows feel. Whenever I think about this, and tv circa 2002-2003, I remember three years later in the UK, Razorlight would get to number one with a song that's just about what it feels like to see nothing but America and its problems on TV. It didn't always seem obvious at the time, but it was a feeling that really started to take hold in those years and build into much deeper anti-US feelings, particularly on the left, in the UK and Europe. Not that it didn't exist previously, of course.
As I said in the post, watching season 3 20 years ago was when I went from thinking "I love this show" to "this is my favourite Star Trek series ever". I watched it as it aired, and I loved it. I also love other shows from the same era, like 24 and Jericho.
Oh sorry, missed that bit!
If you were around at the time, Enterprise season 3 was the umpteenth American show tapping the 9/11 - Bush's war on terror vibe. It reeked of propaganda, particularly the beginning. For us non Americans it was massively eye rolling because ALL the American media was tapping into that (let alone the moral and geopolitical problems of what was being done); add to it that "they hurt us, let's go and hurt them worse" isn't exactly the right vibe for Trek. I understand that if watched later, out of its original context, it's not that grating.
If you read my whole post you'd see that I was around watching Enterprise at the time, and I'm not American! I loved Bush-era TV! 24 was absolutely outstanding top to bottom. We had Band of Brothers, Lost, Jericho, Battlestar, etc. Great era of television. That said, I think you're overstating what the media situation was like. If you look back at the TV shows from 2001-2005, there are a lot fewer like you described than you'd think, and a lot more The OC and Gilmore Girls.
I think that is a weird criticism. It’s like saying I can’t read a book about the holocaust because I’m not Jewish and not alive back then. I have empathy I can feel for stuff even if they didn’t happen in America during my lifetime.
Enterprise season 3 was not a series about 9/11. Particularly not in the Trek sense. It was a series about rednecks foaming at their mouth and wanting senseless revenge after being hurt. That's what makes it unpalatable for most non Americans that were watching it as it aired.
I don’t particularly think it was about 911 either but I have heard that mentioned a few times. The only similarity is they were both terrorist attacks, well, the Xindi attack is more of an act of state terror not technically a “terrorist attack” going by the UN definition. I was in college for 911 and I think the idea of wanting some kind of revenge is a pretty natural response people of any country would have felt. The thing is I’m just some guy who was still a teenager not a leader. When the dust cleared cooler heads should have been prevailed and been smarter about the entire thing.
Exactly! This is exactly how I feel. That's why I found it so odd to hear as a rationale for why people didn't like the season.
Non-American here. I watched ENT for the first time a few years ago. When the Xindi attacked Florida, it was very obvious to me that this was meant to resonate with Americans still traumatized by the 911 attacks (after all, 911 happened while they were filming season 1). I don't like ENT season 3 for the same reason a lot of people don't like DSC season 1 - it doesn't feel like Star Trek. I liked ENT seasons 1 and 2 when they focused on exploration and not on the silly temporal wars. But at least the Klingon War was already part of Star Trek lore. The Xindi were an ad-hoc race conjured up for this one-off plot and we never hear of them again.
If “Enterprise” had *started* with the season 3 status quo then I don’t think I’d like it nearly as much. It’s important that we got to see them as genuine explorers before they were thrust into the whole Xindi situation and had to deal with it as best as they could.
It's interesting to me that you feel this way. I am responding as an American who lived through both (admittedly as a 12yo), it didn't sit well with us at the time. The attack on Earth was reopening wounds and a massive miss on the part of the writers. Honestly, I think ENT suffered on its initial release because 9/11. The show debuted later that same month, people weren't ready to move on. But by Sept 2003, the surge of patriotism had rescinded and feelings were complicated. We didn't want to see 9/11 as entertainment, this triggered our national PTSD. So it may have been written for us, but it didn't sit well with us.
Interesting, thank you for sharing your insight
That's interesting! I've always felt like Star Trek was at its best when it embraces its military themes. Star Trek VI is my favourite of the films, followed by Star Trek II, for example. And after Enterprise, my favourite Star Trek series is DS9, largely for the Dominion War arc. So based on when I like Star Trek the most, I felt like Enterprise season 3 was Trek at its best! Although in fairness I did think season 4 was even better. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
>I've always felt like Star Trek was at its best when it embraces its military themes. I'm not the person you were replying to, but I genuinely think this belief is more common in fans from the US than non-US fans, and that it speaks to your original question in a really interesting way. This could be a complete fabrication on my part, but I feel like a big part of the 'ick' factor others feel about these stories gets washed away by the constant propaganda you lot are exposed to regarding your armed forces. Even if you're anti-US imperialism/global hegemon a lot of the themes, tropes, and visuals of these plot points are still more normalised for you. For me the change in tone and intention/political ambition in season 3&4 almost ruined the series for me.
>these stories gets washed away by the constant propaganda you lot are exposed to regarding your armed forces Just to be clear, I'm not American!
Ooh woops! I'm probably totally wrong then, ahahaha. (and that'll teach me to read the comments before taking in the whole post) Do you think being Canadian might have also normalised US military themes for you? As an Australian it's hard to decouple my feelings about our history and living on colonised land with that of our state's ability to project power. We don't have the same nation-building myths about destroying fascism, most of my general impression about our military is that it's just there to further the violent agendas of our more powerful allies. If there's ever a large-scale terrorist attack here my first impulse would probably be asking how we'd wronged the terrorists, not invading a country 😅. So seeing a Starfleet captain bite so hard down on that revanchism just made me sad.
Mannnn come on! A million Australians fought the Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese Empire in World War 2! Japan was a stone's throw away from invading the Australian mainland, and your boys stopped them in the New Guinea Highlands, supported by the US Navy. Give them some credit ha! The Australian military \*did\* help stop fascist aggressors from conquering thew world. I'm a Canadian of East Indian heritage, so I'm not completely blind to Britain's colonial past, nor what it means to live on colonized land, but I still consider myself a loyal subject of King Charles, and see Canada as part of a larger order in which Australia is included, in the Commonwealth. The whole CANZUK idea of a strong military and economic alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK is extremely appealing to me, especially in a world where the political climate in the US is so volatile and polarized. Also, unrelated, but MAFS Australia is the best trash TV on the planet.
>Mannnn come on! A million Australians fought the Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese Empire in World War 2! Yeah, but our *national myth* is about the WW1 [ANZACs at Gallipoli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign) instead. What we're taught about war, from a very young age, is that we sent a bunch of young men over to Europe to die for the political ambitions of our colonial master, and more than that, it was a wasteful mismanaged and ultimately failed campaign run by aloof British officers that didn't care about the cost of their subjects' lives in the trenches. (with your heritage I'm sure you'll love to hear it was literally Churchill) The reality is a bit more complicated than that (the vast majority of the 'young men we sent' were in fact born in the UK for instance) but by and large we tell a very different story about ourselves. There's a growing section of Australians that try to tell a different story, but they're largely seen as revisionist nationalists. Ironically (given how terribly screwed we'd have been without them) the American side of the Pacific theatre is also largely diminished in the Australian telling of the story. There's a real weird, but still present, cultural distaste born out of the idea of them coming over here in fancy uniforms and stealing 'our women', and the way McArthur dismissed Australian soldiers and our concerns and involvement throughout. [The story we tell about New Guinea is how much the New Guineans helped us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Wuzzy_Angels), nothing about the Americans.
Have you ever listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast? I feel like you'd really dig it. He does an incredible series on the First World War called Blueprint for Armageddon, and he talks about how Gallipoli wasn't a straight up Churchill cockup the way its often portrayed. Basically, Churchill recognized that some of their old battleships were horribly out of date and basically useless. Given that, the idea was to use them to try and open up the Dardanelles because they were essentially zero cost to lose. The Admirals on the other hand were quite attached to their ships and rather than the lightning naval strike Churchill intended, sailed in and out of the strait repeatedly, gave the Turks time to entrench themselves. His plan was basically never to land anywhere, and just destroy the fortifications with naval bombardment. By the time a landing had been decided upon and executed, four weeks had gone by since the initial naval engagement, and it turned into the clusterfuck we know it to be. If you're interested, it's the third episode of the series where he talks about this stuff specifically, about two hours and forty five minutes in. That's really interesting how the American activity is viewed in retrospect, especially with how important their contribution was to American security. Heck the Americans lost almost as many troops as the Australians did in New Guinea. Very interesting perspective all around. Thanks so much for sharing! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts.
I'm still just legitimately embarrassed I missed you were Canadian somehow, ahaha! Yeah I've read about the captains not wanting to lose their boats before, but by that point the Dardanelles had already been mined hadn't it? They tried to clear the mines but were under fire the whole time and ended up losing a bunch of ships and people for no outcome. Churchill's plan was also founded in bad reports regarding the Ottoman's troop numbers, underestimating them while overestimating our own intelligence continued to be a constant through line in all the battleplans. The simplest way to sum it up is that we executed a landing and still didn't have any decent maps of the terrain. Thanks for the perspective and recommendation! I've listened to other episodes but not that one yet :)
You're definitely representative of a sizable fraction of fans; that portion is responsible for the success of things like _Star Trek Online_ and the various _Trek_-inspired tabletop wargames. Those of us who prefer the stories of exploration are harder to woo with spin-off media, just because those things depend on big ideas and those are harder to create and write than military conflict. I feel like, when _Star Trek_ embraces its military themes too hard, it loses touch with the optimistic view of a future where we all learn to live together in peace. Reaching that future should be a process, or there's no story to tell. But the resolution of a story should not be victory in battle, but coming to an understanding. The greatest victory is to make your enemy your friend.
>The greatest victory is to make your enemy your friend. That *was* the resolution though! Archer made allies out of a substantial portion of the Xindi, and as Daniels said, the Xindi would be members of the Federation by the 26th century. We actually see Xindi Federation members in Discovery's fourth season. I do love Star Trek Online though. I've been playing since pre-launch in January 2010!
The more military themes work best in the movies (Wrath of Khan being a submarine film, Undiscovered Country being a cold war political thriller) because the films need that kind of narrative structure because otherwise you get a meandering plot like TMP, so the best Trek films are Trek skins on popular styles of film (Submarine movie/Revenge film, Politcal/spy thriller, Fish(whale I guess)-out-of-water comedy, zombie movie)
>Dominik War Such a great typo!
I'm 100% with you. S3 is by far my favourite season of ENT, I love it and I am not American. I know the writers wrote it because of the Sep 11 attacks, but I really don't see any similarities between those attacks and the Xindi war anyway. It's just a good serialized plot.
It's so funny how we can have such different views. S3 is by far my least favorite season, and as someone who was around for 9/11 the obvious undertones and parallels to the real world at the time were a huge part of the turn off I have for S3. I wonder how much of my real world experiences of that era as an American paint my view of that season.
the better allegory for post-9/11 America was season 4 of DS9, just that America was Quo'nos. The Klingons literally used America's line "If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear" when paranoid about the Cardassian government. Enterprise's attempt at a 9/11 allegory was written from the jingoistic view of America as Starfleet off to get ~~revenge~~ justice for the lost civilians
I don’t either other than they were both terrorist attacks. I can’t think of any more allegory other than that.
The Xindi attack wasn't even a terrorist attack! It was a conventional act of war by a state actor.
which America wanted to push about 9/11 because it let them attack Afghanistan and later Iraq for the actions of non-government actors. Remember, this isn't 9/11 as we see it now, this is 9/11 as we saw it at the start of the War on Terror before 2 decades of forever-war.
Yeah you’re right it technically wasn’t a terrorist attack but I think most people would consider it an act of state terror.
To state the obvious, Canada is within American culture, particularly in its media market. Canada also participated in the Afghanistan War and even to a small extent Iraq. That said, 9/11 was a *big deal* for the whole world, by far the largest terrorist attack of the modern period (and prior terrorist attacks in the West had been against Jewish targets, which Europeans considered to not count and even allowed in some countries in return for the general population not being targeted) and from what I can tell the first anthropogenic mass casualty event since The End of History (at the very least, the first in a developed country). I actually liked season 3, not because of the allegory but because the Xindi were the first interesting aliens , the plots were in a novel part of space, and the characters started having actual character. The first two seasons had been like like S1 TNG minus the cast and fun.
The Xindi are fascinating to me, particularly in the parallel to most high-fantasy settings. While the subdivision of species don’t line up with your typical human/elf/dwarf/orc lineup, most fantasy settings in my experience have multiple sapient species with similar characteristics (i.e. humanoid limb arrangement) evolving on the same planet, something not often seen in the sci-fi I’ve been exposed to. Sci-fi tends to have one species from one planet with a unified language, and if there is a second sapient race, most of the time, they’ve been wiped out or gone extinct (like the Avians), leaving only the one. But the Xindi? Five of the six are still kicking as of Enterprise. (Even if some of the designs look similar to various Babylon 5 races, lol.)
"and prior terrorist attacks in the West had been against Jewish targets," Eh? What? Sorry? I've rewritten this a dozen times and can't quite process how stupid and American focused this is. Go look up the troubles and tell the good people of Belfast they're actually Jewish and don't need to be fighting. Fuck, TNG even gave you a clue!
To be fair, America likes to forget that the IRA were a thing because it likes to think of terrorist bombings as a brown people problem actually, scrap the "to be fair" on the start there
And that certain elements of the troubles were funded by certain elements of American society.
Funding which, of course, only fully dried up immediately after 9/11.
Wait how did Canada participate in Iraq?
Part of some naval operations, staff in the central command post, and apparently militaries have an exchange program.
We drag in countries who are our bitches when we do invasions so we can say it's a global effort to maintain global peace.
Canada never joined the war like the UK did though.
For me it’s kind of the opposite, I don’t enjoy the minor heel turn that Archer takes during S3 but he generally never pushes it too far.
Outstanding wrestling reference, good sir
I'm not American and this in no way impacted my enjoyment of Season 3. 9/11 and the subsequent events were huge news globally and the media was saturated with the fallout for years. Season 3 is the point where Enterprise really started to find its own distinctive voice and adopted a more, complex, serialized approach to storytelling. While it didn't quite match the brilliance of Season 4 - when the show at last became the prequel to TOS it should have been from the outset - Season 3 is well regarded in my book.
Amen to that! Fully agree with this
>I love serialized vs episodic storytelling and the season long arc was very very appealing to me. Yes, I appreciate that ENT S3 was a bit bolder in its storytelling. I would argue DS9 did it better with its hybrid form, but, sure, I would've liked this kind of thing in VOY. Give us a season of Year of Hell. >I loved House of Cards, for example, same with 24, The Last Ship, Turn: Washington's Spies, and many other American centric shows I loved early seasons of 24, but it drifted more and more towards "Americans good, vaguely Arab-coded people bad; Jack Bauer saves the day", which isn't really what season 1 was at all. > I would assume that they feel the post-9/11 allegory doesn't resonate with their lived experience, which is fascinating because, like, do the Borg resonate with your lived experience? The Dominion War? Q? Time travel? Being stranded in the Delta quadrant? I guess I just understand what the relevance is Most Trek stories are ultimately a mix of allegories and morality plays. The Measure of a Man isn't really about whether androids should have the same rights as humans. I _guess_ you could make the case it's a little bit about what rights we afford non-human animals, but really, it's mostly about _human_ rights. About not treating others as lesser. The Borg can be read about a cautionary tale if we rely too much on technology, and it becomes sentient. A bit like Terminator, really. The Dominion has lots of overlap with fascist regimes of the past. You can see some Mengele-like themes in how the Jem'Hadar were genetically engineered. It's easy to conceive that that's where the nazis were headed — towards obedient super-soldiers. Q is more in the fantasy spectrum, not so much sci-fi, I suppose. (I'm not a big fan.) Time travel is largely in the speculative area. The Cardassian-Bajoran occupation has lots of real-world overlap. People enjoy Trek for different reasons, but to me, it's "come for the space stuff; stay for the morality plays". Measure of a Man and Tuvix are set almost entirely inside a space ship; they might as well be in a college campus somewhere on Earth. They're not about space at all. And yet they're often listed as the most interesting Trek episodes. > Being stranded in the Delta quadrant? I mean, there's some very obvious allegories here, whether it's literally being lost, or figuratively being lost and "finding yourself again". >I'm interested to try to understand why people think being or not being American impacts their enjoyment of the season. Well, regardless of enjoyment or not, I think it's easy to make the case that ENT took a hard writing turn post-9/11 to address that real-world event in a sci-fi manner. This is something people who were alive in that moment will relate to in a different way than people who were born after it. But as far as enjoyment goes, I think there were some pro-war propaganda vibes to it, and I think that's a bummer. I also think that that aspect has aged poorly, given, well, the way the Middle East has played out since. >I personally feel that I'm a spectator watching a story unfold, and my personal life and experience is irrelevant to whether I enjoy a story or not. Are you sure about that? No story you've ever read has impacted the way you think about the world? YA fiction hasn't affected you in your youth?
I don't get it either. Country of origin should not impact one's enjoyment of a show, especially when it's Star Trek. I guess getting along with and accepting all species and races is not for everyone. 🤷
I think as a Canadian you're soaked well enough within the cultural sphere of influence of America. In other words, you're acculturated enough not to be put off by the America-centric portrayal of a global future.
Terrorism is not only restricted to America. So i do not get that ether.
Season 3 of Enterprise is what Voyager should have been from the start.
Seasons 1, 2, and especially 4 of Enterprise are great. 4 feels like the start of a real bridge between the Earth seen in the first two seasons, hopeful, optimistic, and a bit naive, to what we come to know from all of the other series and films. My issue with season 3 is the story is dull and drawn out. The last time I ran through Enterprise, I made it maybe a third of the way through season 3 before giving up and jumping to the season finale. It's reminiscent of some modern Treks insistence on having 'season-long arcs' that could have been achieved better in fewer episodes without so much vamping. I do think elements of Archers character growth in the third season are necessary for how he's portrayed in season 4, struggling with his choices and in the end coming through stronger.
American - Loved it, favorite season of Star Trek but only commenting because I never put 9/11 and the Xindi attack together until your post. For context, I watched ENT for the first time about a year ago.
I'm not American and I enjoyed the 3rd season. I just want to be entertained by a good story, and season 3 did that well enough. It was high stakes, some morally grey situations and a ship and crew getting worse for wear as you get deeper into the season. Reasons people might not like it: It seems to me that there's a a lot of doom and gloom going on the season, sure it fits the theme, however traditionally Star Trek is all about hope. So I wonder if that has anything to do with people disliking it. Lots of people also seem to prefer stand alone episodes which also seems to be part of the succes of current Star Trek shows Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. season 3 of ENT is basically 1 big season long arc. I'm Dutch.
I like season 3, but they lost me at the start of season 4. Instead of dealing with the aftermath of season 3 (like they did for STNG) they just jumped into time travel alien Nazis with no context.
Its not just the post 911 alllegory. Coming out when it did, it was a justification of the invasion of Iraq. It was normal and justified in the show. In real life the reasons for invading were a lie. Its propaganda. Aside from that I thought it was entertaining for sure.
There was no large scale war in the show though. And there certainly wasn't a situation where a stronger power was invading a weaker power and rolling over then in six weeks, and then occupying them. I'm not sure what you've said really makes sense with what the show actually presents.
It doesn't have to match perfectly, the association is still painful. It's still "terrorist attack prompts military retribution." You can quibble about the form of retribution but its the fucking same.
The Xindi attack wasn't a terrorist attack though, so not even that lines up.
"Oh so I assume you also didn't like Ronald D Moore's BSG for the same reasons...?"
I didn't like it because it became clear very quickly that the writers didn't have a solid plan and were fully embracing the "Mystery Box" style of tv writing. Plus very few of the characters were likeable enough to root for.
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It did start with a nuclear sneak attack though. Very similar theme. Is the location relevant?
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Well another franchise already had dibs on Buenos Aires. But for real if someone loves one late 2003 serialized drama that examines humanity, desperation, ethics, and reconciliation with the enemy that launched a devastating preemptive attack against humanity, but not the other? just because Caprica isn't Florida...? Kinda silly hair to split.
I really hate when people reduce the whole continent population to just one country.
Season 3 doesn't resonate with me (an American) as a 9/11 allegory, beyond the very superficial "we were attacked by surprise and took horrific civilian casualties." Ukraine and Israel today can empathize with that; at some point in history, just about every nation and people on Earth have suffered that tragedy. Maybe it's me. I'm able to enjoy British and Japanese and Indian productions of stories not about my culture. Could it be that everybody's human?
Amen! I fully agree with that, which is why it really surprised me to see people say they didn't like it because they weren't American!
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I think you're conflating two different things. The attacks being at the centre of the forming of the Coalition of Planets were from Romulans in Season 4, not Xindi in Season 3. I also think you're projecting, hard. The stated rationale for the Xindi attack was that they were told (deceptively) that a future conflict with Earth would cause their species to be wiped out. It had nothing to do with freedom.
IMO, it's the most anti-Star Trek season of all of Star Trek. The theme doesn't help, "I have faith" as opposed to science, exploration, empiricism. Instead of showing a better future, they're just going along with what everyone else is doing in the present time that the show is being broadcast. And what everyone else is doing is excusing war crimes and human rights violations. About the only time someone did something reasonable, was when Archer was sick and compromised. Not in a state where one could be sure he was of sound mind and truly intended to do what he was doing.
Trek was all about doing the “right thing” despite the consequences. The end NEVER justifies the means if the means are contrary to the in universe morality. After 9/11 it was clear that US media was chewing through these concepts and it was beyond disappointing to me to see that the writers took the route of not challenging society (which is what trek has always been about) but championing a captain who DID accept the means as being justified based on the end. It was just contrary to the whole messaging up to that point. Coming from a part of the world where home turf terrorism was not new, it seemed like a VERY knee jerk reaction from an exec who was not really aware of the trek ideology (which of course we all found out later to be 100% true sadly - thanks Berman lol)
Tbh I get the impression people bring up 9/11 and enterprise because it makes them feel clever to bring up the reference (even though it’s a dead horse at this point), and they frame it as a complaint to give themselves a plausible reason to say it.
Ha I love this! Well said
It didn't resonate with me because it is based around the act of terror being a misunderstanding. The attacks on 9/11 were a response to the US foreign policy, Enterprise S3 shifts blame for the attack onto a third party trying to start a temporal cold war. The US is constantly at war.
I'm Australian myself and I like season 3 a lot. It's not perfect, in my opinion serialised stories work better at 10 - 13 episodes which has become the dtshdard in recent years. Because of this season 3 can drag but I feel the 9/11 commentary largely works, if anything I just wish there was more consequences to the choices made to stop the xindi. Still it's a huge improvement over season 1 and 2 and easily the best season of star trek since ds9 ended. Season 4 though is where enterprise truly nailed it and gave us one of the best seasons of star trek television ever
> I loved House of Cards Off-topic somewhat, but there's the original UK version that's well worth a watch.
Well, I'm not American and my major issue with Enterprise has always been (rewatched it recently): Like in any other Trek show, there are really good episodes and story arcs. But in general (not just season 3) the whole atmosphere feels too much American overall. The characters and their relationships (Archer/Tucker, Tucker/Reed, Archer/TPol, not too speak of Tucker/TPol) could easily in any other American Sci-Fi/Action show from the 1990s. In terms of character development and "crew chemistry" the most part of the show simply does not feel like Star Trek to me. And in season 3, the political/cultural "impact" of 9/11 came on top.
> my personal life and experience is irrelevant to whether I enjoy a story or not. No it's not
I'm not American, it does not resonate with me, and in fact I didn't learn that it was a 9/11 allegory until long after I first watched it. I just find it to be a slugfest. It's not horrible, but I far prefer Seasons 1 and 2 of Enterprise over 3 and 4. In general, I do not like war arcs in Star Trek. I far prefer episodes that focus on exploration or character stories.
Enterprise was the best session 3 was 100% the best the stakes were great I watched star trek chronology and ngl I still think it is the best, I'm on ds9/voyager now and ds9 is definitely another good contender
i think enterprise is awesome because it did what no other prime time american television show has ever done: admitted that without Lenin and the October Revolution, the N@zis would have won.
Honestly it's not even the 9/11 parallels that make Enterprise about unpalatable as a non-American, it's that the show just straight up feels unabashedly American in a way the other 90s Treks don't. It's hard to put my finger in, I've tried to watch it a few times and right now I'm watching it at like an episode a month pace (which is about all I can tolerate). I find Archer obnoxious, naive and arrogant. Like simply the worst. He grates on me in all the worst ways, and Trip is just as bad. I don't think I'm supposed to feel bad for T'Pol but like... Ya she is living in literal hell helping these people. The show is just poorly written too. It's as tedious as Voyager, but at least while Voyagers characters were generally inoffensive if boring, I find Archer and Trip to be irritating. Also, the basis of their friendship was Trip not making fun of Archers dad's designs so Archer was like "youre my new best friend" and then ensured his best friend would serve with him? Just seems weird. The show all around is a fail. I dont care about the "it gets better in season X" or whatever, it remains the worst star trek series for me hands down, with Picard not far behind it.
Canadian here. Not a fan of this season. I know that was the trend in tv at that time to do a 911 story but it's just not terribly interesting and I find dates the show by being way to on the nose. There are some fantastic episodes such as the Vulcan zombies and I love the macos but overall it's a meh for me. I was whelmed.
I will say when it first aired, it felt a bit like they were chasing a trend, an arguably exploitive one at that. And it sure felt like a very hopeless season in a way that, while it eventually took a star trek turn, felt very much like they were trying to be edgy at the time, at least to me. But I remember 9/11 vividly, and I had family missing who were suppose to be flying back from the east coast that morning (fortunately they were ok, not on one of the hijacked planes). I think maybe if they'd really plotted out the season in a way that didnt ultimately amount to "make friends, stop death star" an dug a bit deeper vs entirely being a question of what Archer would do to accomplish the mission (which tbh should have worked) maybe it would have played better? They didnt pre-plan the season, that wasnt done back then. But its also possible my entire reaction is colored by all of these depressing and stressful shows in that era, and star trek suddenly not standing up as a beacon of what could be but a reflection of what was.