I watched the series despite its plethora of issues because I love Star Trek. Am I the only one that tolerated captain Archer and his shipmates? Am I the only one who feels that Star Trek Enterprise was just another chance for Hollywood to revamp the series with new special effects and makeup without stressing whether the plot would correlate with the previous series.
Watching ENT despite the continuity flaws.
- Thread starter Viva Sativa
- Start date
I love Trek also, and I never cared about the ENT continuity issues... but I still didn't like the show.
Watch the Youtube videos in my signature. Enterprise certainly hasn't got the monopoly on continuity errors. The entire Trek saga is packed with HUGE universe-breakers (like the difference in warp speeds between TOS and Voyager)
IMO, if the errors (most of which were deliberate changes) ruin it for you, you're watching Trek wrong. Because you're not gonna have any fun!
IMO, if the errors (most of which were deliberate changes) ruin it for you, you're watching Trek wrong. Because you're not gonna have any fun!
Thanks for pointing out the videos!
All Trek has continuity problems, as King Daniel points out. Enterprise's are no worse than those of any prior series or movie. It's just that it covers a period that we had decades to build up assumptions and expectations about. Most of the things that people saw as "continuity errors" in ENT were really contradictions of their preconceptions and beliefs about the 22nd century, rather than any actual canonical information.
Really, it would've been a total waste if all ENT had done was confirm our existing assumptions about the era. That would've been boring and pointless. It's good to be surprised.
Really, it would've been a total waste if all ENT had done was confirm our existing assumptions about the era. That would've been boring and pointless. It's good to be surprised.
I like the turbo-lift stuff.
I don't have any serious problems with Enterprise, but it's because I assume the series is the result of changes starting with Cochrane, Sloan, and the Vulcans in ST:FC (or perhaps even earlier from some part of the Temporal Cold War) and leading to NuTrek, not to the Prime. In the Prime, I assume that Archer and company and their ship were somewhat different (and more in line with TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY).
As far as warp factors go there is no controversy. In "Journey to Babel" that Orion ship was going warp 10. It was speculated that other than life support, since they would not be returning home they could attain such velocity by using all energy reserves. 24th century warp theory said that warp 10 is infinite velocity because the rapid folding of space would give the ship an inertia at such a high magnitude that there wouldn't be enough stopping power to exit warp 10. That theory was broken several times in TOS, TNG and VOY. The theory however had not been theorized yet during TOS. Theories are plausible and when outside intelligence is involved it's all possible because their technological advances were not documented by the federation e.g. The Kelvans, kalandans, and NOMAD. That's just in TOS canon. TNG had the traveler and Voyager had the Nacene among others. It's the unknown clause/ loophole and that is not comparable to ENT's continuity flaws.
I suggest you read Star Trek: Memory Prime(No.42). There is a point where Scotty is giving a tour of the engine room to Nobel and Zee-Magnees prize nominees. Someone argues that science may one day create trilythium and he counters by pointing out that they still haven't created DiSodium. Then gives a thorough lecture on accelerator fields and warp factors. Give it a read and correct thine error.
That would seem to be contradicted by In A Mirror Darkly and These Are the Voyages.
Thank you.
In A Mirror Darkly isn't necessarily inconsistent, because there's nothing saying that the U.S.S. Defiant from the Prime Timeline wasn't shunted to the past of the NuMirror Universe.
(This also presumes, which I do, that the Nu Timeline has it's own NuMirror Universe that is approximately the same "distance" across the quantum realities from the Nu Universe as the original Mirror Universe was from the Prime Universe.)
As to These Are The Voyages, that episode isn't part of my personal canon (as someone else cleverly put it here recently, Deanna Troi's holodeck fanfic isn't canon
), and Berman and Braga can eat a big bag of {censored}. 
The intent was always that ENT would lead into the Trek universe we knew. But since it's fiction, it reinterpreted a few things, just like TOS itself was constantly reinterpreting and revising its ideas as it gradually built the universe (Spock was originally a Vulcanian, the Enterprise was originally an Earth ship, Kirk originally had little interest in women, etc.). Every canon rewrites itself over time.
The Defiant has data in its memory banks that indicates Enterprise, as we've seen it, is part of the history of the Prime Universe.In A Mirror Darkly isn't necessarily inconsistent, because there's nothing saying that the U.S.S. Defiant from the Prime Timeline wasn't shunted to the past of the NuMirror Universe.
(This also presumes, which I do, that the Nu Timeline has it's own NuMirror Universe that is approximately the same "distance" across the quantum realities from the Nu Universe as the original Mirror Universe was from the Prime Universe.)
As to These Are The Voyages, that episode isn't part of my personal canon (as someone else cleverly put it here recently, Deanna Troi's holodeck fanfic isn't canon
I'm no fan of TATV either. ( Worst. Episode. Evah.) If I was inclined to have a "personal canon", Enterprise would end with "Terra Prime", but creator intent trumps personal canon, so I have to accept TATV as canonical.
But canons often disregard individual parts of themselves. "The Alternative Factor" treated antimatter and dilithium in a way that contradicted what prior episodes had established, and it was ignored by all subsequent episodes. The Final Frontier's quick jaunt to the center of the galaxy was ignored by TNG, DS9, and VGR, which all assumed it would take decades to cover such distances via warp drive. "Threshold" was explicitly renounced and decanonized by its own writer.
Canon is fiction, not fact. It's the pretense of a consistent reality, but since it's still a story being told, it's flexible. It can make mistakes and it can correct or ignore those mistakes later on.
So canon does not require you to accept every last episode, every last line, as indisputable fact. No canon does that with itself, so there's no reason why we should have to. A canon is a story that people are telling you, and it's a story you tell yourself. On both levels, there is choice involved. You choose, just as they do, how to fit the disparate and conflicting details into an overall narrative, and sometimes that means just ignoring some of the details. And that is creator intent, because it's the intent of just about any creator to keep tweaking and refining a creation as long as possible.
But that was the problem. ENT, stylistically, structurally, and writing-wise, really wasn't all that different from Voyager which came before it.
I have no problems with changing preconceptions, but for the first two years the show was simply about a crew on a ship visiting planets/aliens-of-the-week. They even had a Seven-of-Nine clone. Every script for the first two seasons could have easily been written for Voyager.
It wasn't that my preconceptions of the 22nd century had changed, it was that I was basically being shown that Star Trek's past wasn't all that different from Star Trek's future. Stylistically and structurally, Forbidden Planet was a better Star Trek prequel than ENT was.
Except the original series and movie Enterprise zipped around the galaxy like it was nothing (rim of the galaxy, centre of the galaxy, 1000 light years in 12 hours at warp 8.4 in "By Any Other Name"etc), whereas in Voyager's world, Starfleet's fastest ship travelling at maximum speeds (given as warp 9.975 in "Caretaker") would take 75 years to cross the Milky Way. It's an enormous fundamental change which breaks the universe and means that much of TOS couldn't possibly have happened going by Voyager's speeds, or that Janeway ludicrously thought a month-long journey would take a lifetime.Viva Sativa said:
I don't agree. Granted, UPN put pressure on the producers to make a show that was similar to Voyager, against the producers' wishes. (Berman and Braga wanted the whole first season to be like "First Flight," a Right Stuff-style narrative gradually building toward the start of the mission.) But despite that, I feel that ENT season 1 did a great job conveying a sense that these were pioneers doing everything for the first time, just beginning to feel their way as deep-space explorers and figure it out as they went. The VGR crew were out of their depth because they were in new territory, but they were seasoned veterans at space exploration in general, so it didn't capture that pioneer flavor quite as well.
Also, the astropolitical situation was relatively reversed. Even though Voyager was on its own, it was generally more advanced than the cultures around it, aside from a few isolated exceptions. It was traveling through a lawless region of the galaxy where its technology was coveted (at least in the early seasons). It was more a traditional American/European "frontier narrative" formula where the peoples on the frontier are backward or savage compared to the protagonists expanding into it. (The Borg were certainly advanced, but they were basically space zombies rather than a civilization per se, so they fit into the traditional "frontier savage" trope.)
But NX-01 was a vessel of a nascent starfaring people expanding into a space already dominated by more advanced and powerful states, and having to deal with the realpolitik that it faced there. It was a more modern, post-colonial approach to the frontier narrative, giving more agency to the nations that already occupied the so-called "frontier." And thus it was an interesting deconstruction of Star Trek's longstanding human-centrism and implicit America-centrism.
It doesn't "break" the universe, because the universe is just a story being told, and stories are mutable. It just revises the narrative. Storytellers should be allowed to fix past mistakes.
One of the pieces of advice given to writers in the TOS series bible was that they should not treat deep space as a local neighborhood -- that interstellar travel should be depicted as something that takes a lot of time and effort. Those occasional episodes and movies that depicted travel over such great distances as quick and easy were in contrast to what Roddenberry wanted. After all, this was a narrative whose creators were making it up as they went, discovering the rules gradually and making mistakes. And there aren't a lot of television or movie writers who have any real grasp of the immensity of the galaxy. So occasionally some unrealistic depictions slipped through. By TNG and its successors, the show had technical advisors on staff who laid down a firmer set of ground rules for how the universe worked, a refinement and formalization of principles that had been applied in a more slapdash manner in the past.
As a writer myself, I am very bothered by the attitude some fans have that every last detail in a series, even the mistakes and bad ideas, needs to be slavishly obeyed, that writers should be forbidden to correct their past mistakes or try to improve their worldbuilding. That's a terrible attitude. Sure, fixing past mistakes in an ongoing series creates continuity problems, but that's because you don't get to go back and revise what's already been released (except on occasion when you do, like in revised novel reissues, directors' cuts of movies, etc.). But it's better than being perpetually bound by those mistakes and bad ideas.
I like ENT. As others have pointed out all of the series are full of flaws (Warp 13 anyone?). I suggest you sit back, enjoy the ride and stop finding flaws for no real reason. It's fiction written by dozens of writers.
But ENT's 4th season did the most (IMHO) to try and weave all of the lingering plot holes together. Early Vulcans before finding the writings of Surak, the Klingon head ridges, the Augments. Manny Coto was doing some good work before they got cancelled.
But ENT's 4th season did the most (IMHO) to try and weave all of the lingering plot holes together. Early Vulcans before finding the writings of Surak, the Klingon head ridges, the Augments. Manny Coto was doing some good work before they got cancelled.
Thank you, Christopher.
Now, what, exactly, is this Voyager thing people keep talking about? Never heard of it.
(Kidding. I acknowledge Voyager. I wince a bit, but I acknowledge Voyager. But "Threshold"? Nuh uh.)
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