April 6, 2002
Since I started watching Enterprise on UPN, there's something that hasn't quite been sitting right. Nothing wrong with the show itself (although like any show it's had a few stinky episodes), something else. I think I've got it now: It's not in the Star Trek universe's past.
What I mean is, when they created the show they had to reverse-engineer a lot of things to make them look more primitive (it takes place about 100 years before the original series). But they didn't do it right.
The uniforms are believeable -- I've always wondered why they didn't wear jumpsuits all the time. But they ran backwards from the newer series -- the ranks are shown by markers on the collar (with four for a captain), admirals have markers on both sides of the collar, the shoulders are set off from the rest of the torso. Those are like the uniforms from Next Generation onward; the original series' uniforms had mono-color shirts with black collars and rank shown with stripes on the sleeves. The only thing they got right were the reversal of Command and Services colors -- The captain wears yellow and the engineers wear red, which is consistent with TOS.
The other major problem is with the ship itself. Ships in the original series were blockier than in the newer shows; this one is very sleek. The sad thing is, the "Technical Manual" they put together for Next Generation showed some "older" designs that looked like backwards extensions from TOS. I can't help but wonder why they didn't use them.
As a corollary, the warp nacelles are all wrong as well. In the original series, the Boussard collectors were multicolored and the nacelles themselves were completely enclosed. It was done that way in the movie First Contact, too. So we have to now accept that warp engines started out looking one way, then looked another way about 100 years later, then went back to the old way 100 years after that, then went back again 50-80 years after that.
There are things that are good as well, but we don't see them as often (at least one of the things above is in every scene).
Their hand-held weapons are phase-pistols and have only two settings, stun and kill. The Vulcan word? "Pha-sahr." (OK, I don't know how it's spelled -- you get the idea.) Maybe the humans made "phaser" a retronym?
Shipboard weapons are torpedos. Not photon torpedos, regular plain-ol' torpedos. The Klingons have photon torpedos, and they ain't sharing.
Again, nothing there to make me dislike the show. It's just something that grates on my geekiness a little. And it's something that could have been prevented with just a little work.
