Boldly going
Just got home from watching the premiere of Enterprise. Not bad, I thought, particularly for a Trek first episode. Some very nice moments, including several nice nostalgic awwww moments of references to Classic Trek. (The communicators, the science-station viewer, Zefram Cochrane's speech (which I admit gave me shivers even as I laughed at the correction of "to boldly go"), the fact they don't have shields(!), the "phase guns," the amazement at going Warp 4.5, giving a speed in kph, the painted table dancers, Archer channeling Kirk repeatedly, Archer experimenting with the time-dilation field, just all sorts of cool tidbits.) Some bad moments, too, but hey, this is Star Trek.
Mary Anne had noted that the two white male officers were nigh-indistinguishable. I thought to myself, "I'll keep a close eye on them and I'll be able to tell them apart," but no. Or rather, by about halfway through I could tell which face went with which accent, but I never did figure out their jobs. I've now looked it up on the UPN site; apparently Lt. Cmdr. Tucker, aka Trip, the one with the Southern accent, who's a bad pilot and is friends with the helmsman (Ensign Mayweather) and the captain, is the chief engineer. Apparently the Lieutenant with the British accent is Lt. Reed, the weapons officer. They both seemed to spend half their time on the bridge and half their time in the engine room, which made it awfully hard to tell what their jobs were.
I had kinda hoped for a more military feel—one of the things I thought B5 did very well was to show us more realistic military officers. But in retrospect, I think I like what they actually did better than what I was hoping for: the Enterprise crew are barely military (though Reed is apparently a real soldier-type, but we didn't see that this episode), sort of feeling their way, trying to figure out exactly what their role should be. In particular, I was mildly annoyed by Ensign Sato's screamy-girl moments, but not nearly as annoyed as some people, because despite her rank, Sato is not a military person. In fact, she's not a communications officer. Her official title is apparently Translator, which is exactly the role she's filling. I expect it to be somewhere between Deanna Troy and Uhura. And I imagine that I'll eventually get over being annoyed that Trek is as bad as everyone else at distinguishing between a polyglot (one who speaks many languages) and a linguist (one who studies the structure of language).
Summary: dunno how long I'll keep watching, but I'll probably give it a few episodes before the initial enjoyment wears off and I start to get annoyed by the same old Trekisms.
Oh, yeah, one other thing: Susan G. asked at one point, "How many episodes do you think it'll be before they do it?" I assumed she meant the captain and T'Pol, so I said I figured they were gonna go with the Moonlighting approach: keep the tension up, never let 'em sleep together. But it turned out she meant Tucker and T'Pol. I think Tucker's interested in T'Pol and T'Pol's interested in the captain. But we'll see. Could be interesting.
(But remember, at the start of TNG, Troi and Riker were ex-lovers who were still attracted to each other; they spun that out for an awfully long time, iIrc, which I may not.)
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