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Cue Orchestral Fanfare September 28, 2001

God help me, I watched Enterprise last Wednesday night, and I loved it.

I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really have high hopes for the show. Sure, I have an inexplicable soft-spot for Scott Bakula’s work, and I was a pret ty serious follower of the old Star Trek , ever since the early 70s when I lived in the wilds of rural Vermont. The only thing on at six pm was ten chan nels of news, ZOOM on PBS, and Star Trek on WPIX out of New York City. It was hard not to follow the show when it was the only thing on that was even vaguely palatable to a nine year old kid out in the sticks. But you know the drill: time marches on, other things take precedence, and the day comes when I realized that even if Paramount hadn’t driven their golden goose to exhaustion with all the various permutations of the concept, that enough ticks of the clock had passed by that I wasn’t really their target audience, anymore. So, because I’m interested in pop culture, I’d tune in every once in a while, but I didn’t really keep up with those who boldly go. But I started to hear some stuff about it like "the words ‘ Star Trek ’ aren’t in the title," and "bold new reimagination of the early days of the Federation," and "why don’t they just call it Star Trek: Roots ?" and "James Cromwell reprises role as inventor of warp drive," "Scott Bakula cast as the captain"… and God help me, I couldn’t help myself: I set the TiVo up to record the pilot episode because I couldn’t not watch it. And you know, I was really quite charmed by it. Sure, the need to intro duce characters and situations, coupled with the need to tell an interest ing story seemed to yield a mish-mash of direction; yes, Linda Park’s char acter was dopey and shrill; yes, the bio-decontamination rub-down was the very definition of "gratuitous." But you have to admit that the set design is quite impressive, the costumes are pretty, the lead actors are likable and the main villains are, if not strik ing, at least inventive, what with their ability to literally change shape by disjointing their bodies… …all in all, I was impressed with the same old cats over at Paramount cor porate allowing their creative departments to force a little air into the tired concept by taking a look at why audiences have reacted so positively to It just simply came down to me not be willing to invest time into somebody else’s entertainment when I had entertainment of my own to produce.

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