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journey of innocents
UPN Star Trek series explores beginning of it all
By Elizabeth White
The fifth show in the Star Trek franchise, "Enterprise," which debuts with a two-hour movie tonight at 8 p.m. on UPN, may at first be off-putting to hardcore fans of the series.
"Enterprise" feels the least like a Star Trek show, but that’s to its credit.
It takes a back-to-the-future approach.
Set 100 years before the original "Star Trek," "Enterprise" follows the adventures of the first ship to leave Earth to explore other inhabited planets.
At the time of the Enterprise’s departure, vulcans have been on Earth for about a century, supervising humans’ entry into space travel, and much of the first episode focuses on the tensions between the more advanced vulcans and the humans eager to explore the universe.
Scott Bakula, famous from "Quantum Leap," sits in the big chair as the ship’s Captain Archer.
Much has been made about how the deck now has knobs and buttons and how the uniforms have zippers for the first time (gasp!).
But to anyone but a hardcore Trekker, these things are insignificant and unnoticeable.
The biggest and best change is in the attitude of the Enterprise crew.
Gone is the holier-than-thou perspective of previous Star Trek crews, with their concern for the prime directive (i.e. respect and don’t meddle with other, lesser-developed cultures), and in its place is a more humble and innocent view of the universe.
In "Enterprise," humans are the less-developed culture. They’re the newbies on the space travel circuit, and almost every alien they encounter has better weapons and a more sophisticated knowledge of the universe than they do.
That makes "Enterprise" more of an exciting action show than the preachy explorations of multiculturalism that other "Star Treks" often were.
The crew gets scared when the ship shudders, they’re both amazed and repulsed by alien species, and every close encounter poses a real danger because the Enterprise has comparatively primitive weapons.
Bakula and his chief engineer Charles Tucker (Connor Trinneer) also form a genial pair of space cowboys along the lines of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and their initial chemistry paves the way for interactions among the rest of the crew.
"Enterprise" knows from its Star Trek predecessors that characters carry the show, and the pilot immediately introduces several other compelling characters.
The vulcan onboard, a science officer named T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), is the female in the Butch-Sundance trio and the voice of logical reason for the two men.
Anthony Montgomery plays a pilot who grew up in outer space and is unnaturally comfortable in zero gravity, while Linda Park is an ensign who picks up alien languages quickly but is more or less afraid to fly.
The tone of the show might also resonate better with viewers in light of recent events than some early action-drama favorites like ABC’s "Alias," CBS’s "The Agency" or Fox’s "24."
Much of "Enterprise" focuses on how the crew faces its fear of the unknown, as well as its fear of fighting an enemy it doesn’t yet know. But at the end of the episode, that enemy is a little green man with neat special effects that no one on Earth will actually run into anytime soon.
September 26, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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