I'll admit that at some point people need to realize that concessions must inevitably be made if you're gonna get twenty-something episodes per season out of an established franchise. the only real problem I had with enterprise was that they approached the trek the same way I often approached our vanguard stories back in the day: "holy shit I've got an awesome idea! I'm gonna work this in here whether it meshes with the rest of the story or not!" they were just trying so damn hard to outdo absolutely everything that came before that crucial elements of the franchise's conceptual and even literal aesthetic were disregarded. I dislike the continuity abuses because I see them as a symptom, not as the disease itself - the creators of enterprise were so focused on telling their stories that they didn't seem to go to very great lengths to make them star trek stories. when abrams cranked out the reboot, there were plenty of aesthetic and storytelling concessions made (though the back to the future 2-esque 'alternate timeline' explanation excuses any potential continuity errors), but abrams was careful to respect everything that came before and in the end was always striving to keep that story a star trek story.
Hmmmmmm. I don't know, man. We've never seen anything further back than Kirk UNTIL Enterprise. So, how can you say they "disregarded" the aesthetic aspects or the continuity? There was NO continuity to disrupt, other than the obviously ridiculous TOS idea that the Feds had gone to war with the Romulan empire.....but NO ONE knew who they were or what they looked like?? Riiiiiiiiiiight.
That was dumb and deserved to be ignored.
Other than that, Season One was cool in showing us the "boring" or "routine/basic" aspects of getting into space and finding our feet. That's why Archer was so awesome. That was a REAL person. Not a superhero like James T. That was a man fumbling his way through the galaxy the best he good, being led by a good heart. I LOVED that aspect of ENTERPRISE. The struggle, you know?
Season 2 was, like ALL Trek shows, pretty lame. They made all the same sophomore mistakes that TOS, TNG, & DS9 made. Season 3 and 4, though, were their own damn show. Season 3's Xindi is where they found their identity and feet. Season 4 was the literal pre-cursor to TOS, hands down.
So, I honestly don't understand all this fan nonsense about ENT being bad or disrespectful. I've heard it many times, but no one has ever been able to convince me of it. I mean, without referencing non-canon shit like the novels or the cartoon or whatnot. Otherwise, it was a wide-open era to tell stories in, and I thought it was a damn good effort overall. They never had the studio support that their predecessors had, though. And that's the biggest crime of all of ENT's era...
