Continuing in my week (life?) of irredeemable geekery: ENTERPRISE ended last week. I watched it. The last, last, last STAR TREK episode for (probably) a good long while. It wasn’t good, and if I were the cast, I’d be pissed, since the entire “finale” was framed as a holodeck diversion for Riker during an episode of NEXT GENERATION.
Really. As in, they took one of the stories they’d done fifteen years ago, brought back Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis in fifteen-year-old costumes, rebuilt fifteen-year-old NEXT GEN sets, and shot the “new” scenes to conform with things that had happened in that old show. So now, when you watch that old episode of NEXT GEN, you can think to yourself, “Hey, this is the point where Riker goes and pretends to be the chef on ENTERPRISE.” Which, y’know, is cute, but seems kind of like a slap in the face for the current show.
Anyhoo. I gave up watching ENTERPRISE long ago; I’d come back to it every now and then, just for the hell of it, but never for good. Like VOYAGER before it, there was something so… bland?… about it that you just kind of lost interest. (Sacrilege to my inner fifteen-year-old, I suppose, but them’s the breaks.) So it was mostly out of a sense of duty that I caught the finale — it’s the last one, they aren’t doing any more, how can you not watch, yadda yadda. Too bad it stunk.
The reason I bring all of this up is to link you to this absolutely marvelous and very funny appreciation of ENTERPRISE and STAR TREK itself from James Lileks — which I found at, of all places, Volokh. Of course, Lileks says the opposite of pretty much everything I just said, but that doesn’t make it any less worth reading — his is much better, actually. But don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself.
