Thirty Days of TV: Day Twenty-Six

[selenak]

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4: These are the voyages... comes immediately to mind.

Some background first: I had watched the first few Enterprise episodes when they were broadcast and then decided the show wasn't really for me. Not that it was staggeringly incompetent or something like that, but it came at the

Comments

[abigail_n]

Enterprise's 9/11 storyline is actually one of the few points on which I think the show did good - well, good for Enterprise. Especially when you compare it to what BSG did with the same material - where the characters and the writers behave as if a 9/11 analogy is appropriate but the actual event they've described is basically the Holocaust times one million - I was impressed with how relatively restrained Enterprise's handling was. So you've got a brutal attack on Earth that leaves everyone on the ship reeling and furious, but once the shock wears off, their lives are basically the same as they ever were, and because the - admittedly horrifying - death toll is still only a tiny percentage of Earth's population, there's only one person on the ship who is directly affected by the attack, and his uncompromising anger is contrasted with other characters' more measured variety

[selenak]

I'm totally with you that the BSG premise isn't anything like 9/11, but I'd say "it's a genocide on a twelve planets scale" rather than "Holocaust", because of the "Cylons were invented by man and enslaved, rebelled, developed, committed horrible genocide" narrative that really doesn't fit with anything in German history. (Actually I can't think of one particular human history genocide that would provide a good parallel, unless maybe Rwanda and there would would have to be the Belgians getting massacred instead of the Tsutsi for the parallel to work, so no, not Rwanda, either.)

Also, I'm ever more curious about Person of Interest now.

[londonkds]

I thought that for a while, but it's really not true. Maybe the fact that I watched BSG so quickly made it easier for me to get the implications of the plot. But the genocide was *not committed by Cylons who were taking revenge on their former enslavers*. Firstborn!John took control of the Cylon civilisation, lobotomised the machine Cylons, and created a whole new culture of organic Cylons who did not actually have any experience of being enslaved by humanity, even though he brought them up to hate humans.

[selenak]

Point taken, though the first Cylon war (in terms of Caprican history) was of course conducted by the metallic Cylons before the Final Five ever arrived, and they also had already developed hybrids for the base stars, though they couldn't manage independently walking organic Cylons on their own. There is a brief moment in No Exit when Tyrol, Tigh and Tory discuss whether or not that makes them responsible for the genocide (on the basis that the organic Cylons did it, and whether the mechanics ever would have, nobody knows), but of course they're unaware that Cavil might it impossible for the mechanical Cylons to act against the will of the organic ones for the longest time. Which also supports your point that the Cylons fighting the second war (or: conducted the genocide, then fought the war with the surviving colonials) were a whole new culture.

I rewatched The Plan the other day with the audio commentary by Jane Espenson on, and thus I noticed something that had escaped or which I had forgotten. What I had remembered was that the

[4thofeleven]

Amusingly, I’ve heard the official Enterprise novels have completely ret-conned the ending away, using the excuse that Riker’s holodeck program is no more historically accurate than the average film made today would be about events from two hundred years before

[selenak]

I don't know why Pegasus, either. Nothing about the episode makes sense. But I do love the comparison to the accuracy of historical movies. :)

I should say that I did love the ENT reference in the Star Trek reboot, but that's one funny line from Scotty which even works if you haven't watched the show.

[amenirdis]

I was warned and I still haven't seen it. Thank you for adding to the clamor of warnings! Yep, I'll be skipping this one....

The worst season ender I've seen was Enemy at the Gate ending Stargate Atlantis. On the other hand, I figured out how to fix it....

[selenak]

You didn't miss anything. And as 4thofeleven says, it can be easily handwaved because it's Riker's holoprogram and thus as accurate as historical movies are (Lamas in Troy, anyone? *g*)

[amenirdis]

Oh God the llamas! *hides face* That was the point where I started screaming and penknife had to turn the tv off.

[leviathan0999]

Sidenote: I was fine with killing Kirk. Drive stake into his heart and keep him in the ground while you're at it. But three middle-aged men indulging in fisticuffs as a grand movie finale was just ridiculous.

I do like, though, the way, as Peter David put it, that differentiated between the cores of Picard and Kirk:

Scene: Evil Doctor Soran is hunched over doing his evil work. A Starfleet-booted foot steps into the frame in foreground. Reverse angle, and we see that it's a very pissed-off Jean-Luc Picard. Oh, boy, the audience chuckles, There's going to be a fight!

Scene: Evil Doctor Soran is hunched over doing his evil work. A Starfleet-booted foot steps into the frame in foreground. Reverse angle, and we see that it's a very pissed-off James T. Kirk. Oh, boy, the audience chuckles, Soran's going to get his ass kicked!

[selenak]

And that, you know, is why I not only prefer Picard but also like reboot Kirk better, who gets his ass kicked in every single physical fight he engages in throughout the film. (Without letting that discourage him.) Because I actually don't like it when the grand climax of a story that pretends to be something a bit more than a simple action film depends on who is better at a brawl, and I prefer characters who are human enough that you can see them defeated at brawls, so you feel for them and fear for them, and who win their victories most often by using their brains.

...and now I'm stepping off my soap box, I promise.