Give It a Rest

Somebody purchased a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times last week urging TV viewers to demand that Paramount continue producing episodes of its fourth Star Trek spin-off, "Enterprise," despite lackluster ratings and artistic exhaustion. I credit these die-hards with their loyalty and persistence but I'm afraid this was money foolishly spent. It's really time that the franchise goes into hibernation.

Now I 'm not embarrassed to confess my "Star Trek" allegiance. I consider it one of the great TV pulp phenomena of the last forty years--a humanistic, science-based future myth, of creditable scope and insight, however it has morphed from its origins as a proposed "Wagon Train to the Stars," as Gene Roddenberry pitched to NBC back in the mid-'60s, through its allegorical initial incarnations to its latter-day adventures. Its cultural idealism and reliance on creative character relationships has kept me engaged, and I've probably seen 95% of the episodes. I can wander through the "Star Trek" annex at the Las Vegas Hilton and nod knowingly at references to tribbles, Garak, targs, the Dominion, both Borg queens and the Organian Peace Treaty. Yes, all that Trekiana and a mythology as voluminous as the Mahabarata has emerged after 800 or so episodes spanning five different series and twenty seasons.

But that's 800 episodes! Eight hundred hours (not even including the twenty hours of "ST" movies)! Nothing can sustain interest that long. All the James Bond movies equal 40 hours. The "Godfather" films, 10 hours. "Star Trek" has more chapters than the Bible. And the quality has finally begun to erode significantly. "Enterprise" should not have been developed, though its always nice to see Scott Bakula employed (his "Quantum Leap" performance was one of TV's great underrated star turns). In fact, "Star Trek" has been on the slippery slope ever since the mystical final episodes of "Deep Space: Nine," the most intriguing and complex of all the ST series.

The dedicated fan base encouraged Paramount to continue spewing out Trek episodes even after the "Voyager" series revealed serious story-development anemia (half the episodes took place in the Holodeck). "Enterprise" hoped to re-engage the audience through its prequel strategy, promising to fill the gaps left in its mythology from the first contact with aliens (the Vulcans) to the emergence of the Federation, the Space United Nations to which Captain Kirk and his crew would swear their fealty in 1966--oh, I mean 2260. But prequels are tricky. Look what a mangle George Lucas made of his "Star Wars" I and II. Audience expectations are formidable; they demand both innovation and the comfortably familiar. In films, only "Godfather II" accomplished this; on TV, "Smallville" has done a servicable job including elements of the entertaining Superman mythology (red kryptonite! Mr. Myxlptlk! Krypto the Superdog!) so that audiences can clearly connect the past and future.

"Enterprise" promised to do the same, but got bogged down in misadventures, the complex maneuverings of time travelers and the grubbiness of primitive (by Jean-Luc Picard standards) spacecraft. When a serial plot involving morphing aliens called the Sulamen faltered and character relationships failed to gel, the writers attempted a year-long story line about the Xindi trying to destroy Earth. This is what we call in sitcom writing "false jeopardy." If they succeeded, what would Captain Kirk do in eighty years? (Actually I liked the five-species Xindi race, and wonder whatever happened to them in the future). But like most Trek fans I'd be more interested in the connective tissue that led to the Federation and Kirk's "five-year" mission.

"Enterprise's" fourth season' strategy has been to hold the audience with trilogy plot lines and their requisite cliffhangers, but not even the return of Brent Spiner as the progenitor of Data's creator could energize the storytelling. It did represent some last-ditch effort to bridge the three hundred year Star Trek history. I was also amused by a recent episode that demonstrated why certain Klingons would lose their ridges and look like swarthy humans in the first-generation Captain Kirk series (it has to do with a virus commingling human and Klingon genomes, as opposed to reality-reality, which was low-budget make-up). But it's all too little too late.

It's time to shut down the warp engines for a while, and let our real civilization catch up a bit. In fact, I heard a teaser on a news show claiming the Pentagon was looking into the feasability of transport technology. Now that's something worth investing in. If I could find a way to get to San Diego by avoiding the freeway I'd surely go where no man had gone before.