Wednesday 18 August 2021

Enterprise Season 4: A Trek In Episodic Substitution

Well then. What in the hell is this? That's not just a question you may be asking yourself right now. It's a question I'm asking myself. Why am I back here, of all places? The answer is that I'm being a cheeky little gremlin, an agent of chaos getting revenge in what, to borrow a turn of phrase from El Sandifer, is a text-based magical ritual to destroy nostalgic pandering. Ah. There's that old Nintendo Project-styled esoteric gonzo waffling. Enough of that for a second. Let me set the scene and explain what the hell I'm doing here.


From February to April 2019 I ran a project on this blog called To Boldly Step Forward, in which I watched the show Enterprise for the first time and offered bite-sized thoughts on every single episode. All the words are right there in the hyperlink if you wish to delve into my deeper thoughts, but I will for once show brevity and give a quick summary of the long road I had, getting from there to here(Sorry not sorry.). Star Trek: The Next Generation was an important part of my interior landscape, a show that moved and changed and inspired me. Enterprise turned out to not be that show for me, but it was so tantalizingly close to being it that it still frustrates me. The short version of the path that To Boldly Step Forward led me down was a show with wildly fluctuating ups and downs; the downs were hella down, but the ups tingled with possibility and intrigue. Through its first two seasons Enterprise's most resonant moments involved its "Temporal Cold War" arc, in which people from the future mucked around in the past. I took it as a metaphor for Star Trek's utopian future seeking enlightnment and inspiration from its flawed but good-hearted past.