Linda Park was one of the absolute best actors on the show -- secondly only to John Billingsley, IMO -- and she was
criminally under-utilized.
Looking at how Travis was used in the show, the character reeks of "token black guy".
Worse than that: He was little more than
Stepin Fetchit in space. Always servile, always smiling; the character was basically written as a walking anti-black stereotype.
The most experienced spacer among the human crew, whilst also being one of the youngest in the cast, could've been really interesting to play on. If they'd made more of him actually being a boomer, born and raised in space and been to more worlds than anyone (bar T'Pol and Phlox) then the character could've really stood out and had a lot to contribute, but the attempt to make a new "big three" shot him (and the others) in the foot.
100% agreed.
Boomer life wasn’t really fleshed out as a whole though. We got a couple of glimpses of it – and Mayweather being a peacemaker of sorts between Boomers and Starfleet – but nothing major. Its something that would have worked really well as a three part story arc displaying long simmering tensions between the two coming to ahead.
There is a case to be made that Mayweather, like T’Pol in the beginning, should not have had a commission with Starfleet. Instead, he should have been there as a representative of the Earth Cargo Service, to help them find new cargo routes. Sato should have had a commission with the United Earth Diplomatic Corps and been a liaison for them on the ship, which would have made sense given her background of linguistics and her being dismissed from Starfleet. And could have fleshed out Starfleet’s relations with the rest of United Earth, which was only touched upon in their interactions with the MACOs.
I really like all these ideas -- something to make it clear that the idea of how to effectively run a starship did not just emerge fully-formed after the admiralty watched an old episode of
Galaxy Quest or whatever. Something that makes it clear that the different departments and functions of the later Starfleet had to be developed through trial and error.
It would have probably been better if it was established that Reed had worked as both a member of Starfleet Security and Starfleet Intelligence early on.
Personally, I really don't like the idea that the folks on Earth had even imagined a need for something like "Starfleet Security" or "Starfleet Intelligence." If the 2150s United Earth Starfleet is just this space organization that's putting a starship out there into the galaxy for the first time, the idea of having a "Starfleet Intelligence" should be as alien to them as the idea of "NASA Intelligence" or "Canadian Space Agency Intelligence" is in real life.
Liking your ideas here. I know that Starfleet predated the Federation, but did we need to have Starfleet already formed on ENT? Starfleet could've been created out of the Coalition of Planets.
I would have preferred that. I don't
really think Starfleet predates the Federation per se -- like, does the United States Navy pre-date the United States just because some of the states had their own navies before they united? "Starfleet" seems as generic a name to me as "Navy." I view the United Earth Starfleet as being a separate legal institution from the Federation Starfleet, and I consider it to be no more ancestral an organization than the Andorian Imperial Guard.
But having said that, yeah, if I had been in charge, the United Earth Starfleet would have had a different name. Maybe, "United Earth Space Agency" or "United Earth Exploration Corps" or some such.
And ENT's first seasons could've really dug into the prequel concept by allowing us to even see that happening, as we see different strands coming together that would've eventually merge into Starfleet and then the Federation. I really liked Friedman's Starfleet: Year One book and how he took the differing philosophies and how eventually they blended.
100%.
ENT undercut its premise by being too familiar at times. Already there was Starfleet, we had TNG Klingons, and eventually TNG Romulans, etc. Even Nausicaans.
This. This this this this this. ENT constantly undercut its own premise by depicting institutions that were too fully-formed already.
I think its more that there was an unwillingness to make the distinction between United Earth Starfleet and Federation Starfleet.
That goes back to establishing and fleshing out the concept of United Earth within Trek. As it went from being a part of the declaration in the New United Nations of the 2030s, to being adopted for use for the space probe agency a few years after First Contact, to being abolished as a concept altogether a decade later due to the post-atomic horror, to coming back into favour as a concept by the time Starfleet was founded in the 2130s, to being an actual political entity by the time the NX-01 launched.
United Earth just was not at the forefront as it should have been for the series. Everything was too centralized with Starfleet. Various United Earth branches working together should have been the main idea. Even using UES – United Earth Ship – as a registry prefix could have helped differentiate the time period altogether from the rest of Trek and clearly establish what the show was about.
This. This this this.
