Analysis - Making Star Trek: Enterprise Even Better (Second Edition)

Star Trek: Enterprise was really the story of two different television shows. The first featured super-moral characters who could spend much of an episode talking about Malcolm Reed's favorite food or writing letters to school children back home, still leaving time to solve an important ethical issue that was vexing the captain.After two seasons of this, the ratings did not reward the show quite as much as producers would have hoped, so Enterprise became that second, very different kind of television show. The ship was given a life or death mission, the characters became serious, and antagonists suddenly appeared. Gone were the episodes full of moral masturbation, and in every episode Captain Archer seemed to compete with himself to become even tougher than in the previous one. The third season was one long story arc, and for the most part was quite a good one.The fourth season was a mixture of the first and the third, sometimes relying on the standard morality plays, and sometimes harkening back to the action and adventure of the third season.The purpose of this book is twofold: (1) to show how the weaker episodes could have become good episodes, and (2) to show how the good episodes could have become great episodes, by analyzing the plots and characterizations in each episode.