Voyager felt a lot like Lost In Space but with photon torpedoes and a bipolar captain (Kate Mulgrew's own interpretation of Janeway).
I hate Mulgrew's Captain Janeway with a passion. Every time she leans on Chakotay I want to scream and throw things. First female Captain and
of course she needs a strong, silent type at her side.
Enterprise had the same problem as Voyager, the writers and showrunners not having a clue of what to do. We could have seen Starfleet's first contacts with some of the classic Star Trek races. Instead we got 2 and a half seasons of "Vulcans are Jerks, but they're actually Romulans" and the Xindi season. I wasn't against the Xindi arc, but it dragged on. And then we get a finale focusing on Troi and Riker, which felt like a cheap shot.
I seem to be one of the few people who genuinely enjoyed that show. I loved the time devoted to the exploration of Vulcan history and the evolution of their philosophy and mental discipline. I didn't feel them to be jerks - thought there were the strong hints that individual Vulcans were being jerks who can't admit to their jerkitude, which in turn enables the jerkitude - but rather still dealing with the collective trauma of their near self-extinction, and projecting those memories of failure, guilt and loss onto the humans they keep patronizing (also their struggle with the compromised reproductions of Surak's teachings). Which totally makes sense to me as a German, as there is a school of criticism alleging we are doing pretty much the same. I felt that Trip & T'Pol broke those underlying currents nicely, since initially, Trip was the bumbling, bubbly sum of all Vulcan fears about humanity, and T'Pol's struggle with her complex loyalties and later with her attraction to Trip gave nuance to the Vulcan Jerkitude. To me, Trip was initially the male version of Firefly's Kayleigh - the adorable, cheerful hornball genius mechanic. He gets more shadows and depth later on (especially during the Xindi-arc), but initially, he was the guy who manages to get himself preggers the second the adults let him out of their sights.
I felt that Flox was a genuinely new character rather than a reference or contrast to a character that had already appeared earlier in the franchise. Enjoyed his screentime very much.
Archer's character was a bit ... like Pre-ROTS Luke Skywalker: Originally destined for romance with T'Pol (Leia), the writers suddenly had shifted much of the emotional exploration onto Trip, so Archer became 'just the (American) Captain' (That face really
screams American "Leadership!" McSpaceshipCaptain). I thought that Jolene Blalock did a great job in Season 1 subverting her own role as SevenOfNine Mk.2 (especially
that uniform
) and through that gained a lot of freedom to develop the character later on.
The Xindi-arc was long, true, but I felt that appropriate, as it put into question the entire character-development of the nascent Federation (that has largely been taken for granted in most franchises. See below). Initially the humans' attitude was like that of the FBI-team in
The Kingdom: 'We will kill them all' - totally un-Trek. It wasn't at all clear how they'd go from
that to the do-gooder Federation of Picard's times.
And I liked the Enterprise's
Enterprise - how weak and vulnerable it was initially. They spend the bulk of the first season shouting 'We come in peace!' to the Universe and getting the shit kicked out of them for their trouble, mostly barely surviving conflicts with grumpy impoverished traders. And I loved how utterly
unimpressed the other races were with the wide-eyed newcomers - just as T'Pol had told them.
The first contact with the Klingons was disappointing, true, but methinks that may have been down to continuity concerns - a lot of that had already been explored in earlier series. Otoh, we got a nice first contact and conflicted relationship with the Andorrans, who ... haven't been anything but a redshirt race since that one episode in TOS?
And the Vulcans being (tamed) Romulans? That felt more like an idea that TOS never managed to flesh out.
Then there's Discovery, which to be fair, I haven't seen, but from what I gather, its too dark and too grim to be a Star Trek.
Ok, now I have to watch it. Post-TNG Trek always felt a
little bit too heavy on the "UN in space"-side to me - which is the biggest criticism I have of everything except
Enterprise (The only series that featured humans actually having to
work against their dark impulses when in a state of shock and fear, instead their innate goodness just being taken for granted, courtesy of some mythical historical process:
"'We have moved past all that' - Shiny! HOW?"). TOS was a
cold-war series. Humanity in the 1960s
genuinely and reasonably feared extinction at its own hands. TOS is an unabashedly unrealistic
utopian fantasy - Roddenberry
had to 'dream big', because reality was so horrible. That pressure was much weaker after the Cold War, and I felt that later franchises, especially Voyager (Ugh!) were far too sugary in their sweeping assumptions about human ethical standards.
