Nov 23 | Chuckreturns to NBC with a special two-hour show on Sunday, Jan 10, 2010, before returning to its regular time slot, Mondays at 8pm on the following night. It's return to prime time television can be attributed to a successful fan renewnal campaign last year. CHUCK is a one-hour, action-comedy series that follows Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi, "Less Than Perfect") -- a computer geek who is catapulted into a new career as the government's most vital secret agent. This upcoming season will include some special guest stars, including Brandon Routh of "Superman Returns" who will play CIA agent Daniel Shaw in an episode, and the addition of SUBWAY restaurant as a major advertiser to the show. Chuck averaged a 4.0/6 rating last season, about eight percent better than the recently cancelled "Trauma". Ratings-challenged Heroes moves back an hour when Chuck returns on Monday nights. STAR TREK VOYAGER's Robert Duncan McNeill serves Chuckas a supervising producer and director.
Nov 17 | Originally hired as co-executive producer to help with the second half of the show's first season, Kevin Murphy has now taken the reins of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel on Syfy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He now serves as an executive producer along with Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson and oversees the day-to-day functions of the show.
Nov 12 | Star Trek star Zachary Quinto is loosely attached to star in the romantic dramedy Whirligig, reports Risky Business.Quinto would play the lead role in the independent Canadian film, which is aiming to shoot early next year. The movie centers on a man who, in a misguided attempt to woo an older woman, befriends the woman's adopted son.Chaz Thorne is directing the pic, based on a screenplay by Michael Amo, creator of the Canadian supernatural series "The Listener."
Nov 11 | The CNS Foundation, is hosting an on-line charity auction at www.charitybuzz.com. One of the items they are auctioning is a signed movie poster of the new Star Trek movie which has all the cast members and writers. The president of our organization is Carol Abrams, JJ's mother, and she arranged for the donation from Bad Robot Production Company. J.J. Abrams is also a major donor to their organization. The funds raised will go to help find a cure to neurological disorders in children. The auction link is here.
Nov 10 | Candice Bergen, Charles Lisanby, Don Pardo, Gene Roddenberry, Tom and Dick Smothers and Bob Stewart have been selected as the next inductees into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. They will be honored at a Jan. 20 ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "This year's inductees have challenged and shaped popular culture, changed television for the better and entertained us royally while doing so," TV Academy Chairman-CEO John Shaffner said. More info at the Hollywood Reporter
Once the first season of ENTERPRISE was in the history books, fans began to wonder about the status of the beloved STAR TREK franchise. The series was on shaky ground, having lost many of the 12-15 million viewers during the course of the first season due to tired, worn out storytelling that rehashed many of the same plots from previous TREK series. Add to it the growing reliance upon sex to promote the series, a lack of connective tissue to the Original Series, a dependence upon all things NEXT GENERATION, and the growing threats from other popular series such as SMALLVILLE and AMERICAN IDOL, and you've got the perfect recipe for disaster.
"Shockwave, Part II", which was actually the second episode filmed, picked up the threads from the first season with Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) caught out of time in a world decimated by the Temporal Cold War and seemingly no way to return home. But just as Archer is facing problems of his own in the far-flung future, the Enterprise crew face their own troubles at the hands of the Suliban, with T'Pol tortured and drugged into revealing Archer's fate. "Shockwave, Part II"
is one of those rare episodes in television, and the only STAR TREK episode in the saga's 40-year history, where the repeat telecast ran longer than the original telecast; about a minute of additional dialog and scene extensions were restored for the repeat telecast.
This was followed up with the head-scratching episode 'Carbon Creek", which showed Vulcans on Earth over a century before their crucial first contact with humanity. A freak accident sends a Vulcan space probe crashing to Earth with only three survivors, one of them T'Pol's great-grandmother (who happens to astonishingly look just like Jolene Blalock), who must somehow integrate among the 'primitive" humans while phoning home. Of course, you wonder during the whole time whether or not T'Pol is simply pulling Archer's leg in telling this story, and with the Vulcans' penchant for wry humor it could easily be a tall tale on her part. I call this one a head-scratcher because Berman and Braga once again dipped into the revisionist well to have the notion that Vulcans were secretly checking out Earth at the dawn of the space age in 1957, despite their continued comments that they had no intention of rewriting STAR TREK history. They could have fooled me.
Still, ENTERPRISE managed to pull a few surprise rabbits out of its hat, with two quite intriguing episodes. 'Minefield", written by John Shiban, cleverly addressed the recurring threat of the Romulans without actually having them shown on screen. In 'Minefield" we learn more about Malcolm Reed's (Dominic Keating) character and his commitment to duty and sacrifice for the good of the crew. This was followed up with the equally eerie 'Dead Stop", written by Michael Sussman and Phyllis Strong, which picked up the pieces of 'Minefield" and took it into a visually cool-looking episode. A battered and crippled Enterprise arrives at an automated space station that looks and sounds too good to be true. But you know the rest of the old adage, and for Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), he apparently learns it a bit too late.
You'd think that with two great episodes back to back, ENTERPRISE would apparently have its act together. Not so, as they followed up with one of the most critically drummed episodes of them all, 'A Night in Sickbay", which shows Archer at his most distressed over a first contact mission gone wrong that takes a toll not only on him but also on his beloved dog Porthos. Instead, we're given more sexual allusions, as Archer begins to have tempting thoughts of T'Pol. With inane comments like 'I'm doing the breast that I can," fans were nonetheless displeased at this huge step backward in creativity.
In early 2003, all television series addressed the issue of the AIDS epidemic, and ENTERPRISE was no exception. In "Stigma", T'Pol encounters a group of Vulcan scientists with a racial bigotry and intolerance for those fellow countrymen who had been suffering from a rare untreatable neurological disease, only to find out that one of the scientists on the research team is among the carriers. Where other series sought to sensitively address the AIDS issue, ENTERPRISE seemingly did a blatant job of hitting the viewers front and center with the topic. (On a more sensitive note that moved viewers, "Stigma" began with a touching on-screen tribute to the crew of the space shuttle Columbia who had perished only four days before. More on this later...)
Another interesting episode, 'Regeneration", also written by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, brought back the Borg in quite a convincing way that ties in to FIRST CONTACT. Apparently, once the Enterprise-E had destroyed the Borg sphere, some of the wreckage laid buried on Earth for nearly a century, only to be unearthed by curious scientists and brought back to life like futuristic Frankenstein's monsters. While pulling it off very stylishly, some fans took ENTERPRISE, along with Berman and Braga, to task by continually relying upon previously established elements from the Berman era without acknowledging the Original Series at all.
'First Flight" is an exciting romp in the vein of THE RIGHT STUFF that truly gets back to ENTERPRISE's original intentions of looking at the beginning of the STAR TREK universe. Archer receives an untimely word that an old rival from his past, Captain A.G. Robinson, has died in a mountain climbing accident, leading Archer to reflect on the time he and Robinson were test pilots for Starfleet's warp two project and the leading choices for command of the Enterprise. Guest star Keith Carradine more than holds his own as Robinson in this moving episode, splendidly directed by LeVar Burton. If ENTERPRISE had produced more episodes of this caliber, perhaps we could have gotten a much better series.
That's not to say that ENTERPRISE didn't have its share of major clunkers: the aforementioned 'A Night in Sickbay", along with another sexually charged romp in 'Precious Cargo", the bland and uninspiring 'Horizon", and yet another sexually charged tale with the season's penultimate episode 'Bounty", did very little, if any, to keep interest in ENTERPRISE alive. Having the crew run around the ship in their underwear or rub up against each other over and over again is definitely not what Gene Roddenberry had in mind for his 'Wagon Train to the Stars" concept back in the 1960's.
The second season ended in quite a bang with "The Expanse", a 9/11-inspired parable that changed the face of ENTERPRISE forever. When an unknown alien ship attacks Earth and kills over seven million people, among them Tucker's sister, the Enterprise is summoned back to Earth with new orders: find the beings responsible and bring them to justice. T'Pol, however, is faced with the dilemma of divided loyalties to her captain or to her home world. But just as the Enterprise embarks on its most dangerous mission yet, an old enemy of Archer's waits to exact vengeance. By this time the ratings had continued to further slip, and Berman and Braga were charged to come up with something quick that would ensure the series' continuation. And as UPN pondered ENTERPRISE's future, this highly dramatic season finale set the stage for what was to come: a season-long arc that would resolve the events of "The Expanse", if not the entire series, once and for all.
I would start a petition to ask (or demand, depending on one's point of view) for Paramount to redo the fourth disc to include "STIGMA" with the Columbia tribute, but I'm not that eloquent with words. But if anyone wishes to start one, I'd definitely sign it.
Season 2 has always been what, in my mind anyway, really killed Enterprise. I still remember that there was a cautious optimism at the start of Season 2 following what had been a solid block of episodes at the end of Season 1. People felt the show had it together and was about to take off.
And then the exact opposite happened. Following Dead Stop, one of the most loved episodes of the series at that point, the show just bottomed out with stale, derivative episodes that instead of trying to build any kind of arc, be it TCW or otherwise, were unremarkable stand alones.
I don't recall a real stand-out episode until the next February when Future Tense aired (although I think the under-rated Singularity was in there somewhere). Even now, that episode only excelled at the "cool factor" and the events in the episode played absolutely no part in any future TCW episodes. Other episodes that managed to generate some excitement, such as Cogenitor, were interesting upon first viewing, but held no repeat value.
At this point, I only distinctly remember Dead Stop, Future Tense and Regeneration as the real great episodes of the season. There was still time to pull it together in Season 2 when many people were still on the fence and they just didn't do it. It's so damn perplexing how everything fell apart right when it shouldn't have. It was timing and that Season 2 slump proved to be the only real bad stretch of episodes the series suffered. I suppose there's never a good time to have a slump, but certainly not during sweeps that's for sure.
You just mentioned two of the most controversial episodes in your post. Dead Stop showed Romulans with cloaking devices and Regeneration had The Borg.
That is partly what killed the series, the pissing on continuity. B & B just did not care. They were in it for the "wow" factor and did not care whether or not what they were doing would annoy or upset long time fans.
And Future Tense? More Temporal Cold War, more time travel, going back to that tired old plot device we have seen far too much of where 'Trek is concerned.
Season two just showed a thorough lack of creativity, a lack of regard for continuity, and a lack of good taste with crap like A Night In Sickbay and Bounty.
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"Oh, I'll wake up
To any sound of engines,
Ev'ry gull a seeking craft..."
Quote: You just mentioned two of the most controversial episodes in your post. Dead Stop showed Romulans with cloaking devices...
You're thinking of Minefield. :-) And yeah, I do agree they could have simply fixed that continuity gaffe by having the ship's sensors down and Reed looking the other direction. That would have satisfied me on that issue.
Quote: That is partly what killed the series, the pissing on continuity. B & B just did not care. They were in it for the "wow" factor and did not care whether or not what they were doing would annoy or upset long time fans.
I never had much of a problem with the continuity of the series so much as I did with the bland and rehashed stories. Regeneration reinstilled that sense of dread that had been missing from the Borg for so long. For me, the Romulans having cloaking technology was the only out-and-out continuity violation that ever bothered me.
Quote: Season two just showed a thorough lack of creativity...and a lack of good taste...
I see it's listed here at $99, I ordered mine a few weeks back for $90, and I'd bet DeepDiscountdvd ist still at $92 or so. So does $9 go in Steve's pocket?
Actually, it appears that the $99.99 price is just a mistake. Amazon is actually selling it for around $90, and if you follow the link at the top of the review, that's the price you get.
"A billion robot lives are about to be extinguished! Oh, the Jedis are going to feel this one..."
-Hubert Farnsworth (Futurama: Crimes of the Hot)
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"The Andorian Mining Consortium runs from no one!"
-Shran (ENT: Proving Ground)
I didn't find the story as bad as what most articles claim it to be. Maybe it's becauee I'm an animal person that I felt bad for Archer (and of course Porthos) and I found the byplay between Archer and Phlox amusing. And the end where Archer gets dressed up and made up and saws the tree is hilarious. As far as I'm concerned, Precious Cargo is the turkey of the season (blatant ripoff of The Perfect Mate).
Am I reading that correctly, or is that zero stars? If it's 5, there's not much of an explanation as to why it got 5 stars. Certainly the content of the episodes wouldn't warrant it since it was up there with the worst seasons in Star Trek history and simply a poorly executed rehash of TNG. At the very least it was the worst season of the series. The extras don't seem to be particularly interesting either. A feature on A Night in Sickbay? Might as well have audio commentary on Precious Cargo. And they left out the Columbia tribute. This is the one of the few times I've actually thought a DVD set got a review *higher* than it deserved. Much higher than it deserved.
Maybe the audio and visuals sounded and looked good, but I pay more attention to the episodes, and I'd say this set deserves nothing more than two stars.
It was meant to be a cumulative 4-star review, with a 5/5 for the overall DVD presentation, 3/5 for the lack of more audio commentaries and the caliber of episodes for this season. It's been corrected to a 4-star review. Sorry for the confusion!
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