Star Trekking - Redux

Hmm, I liked First Contact.

Insurrection has the Star Frek spirit more than most TNG movies, but at that point they'd committed to making movie/CBS All Access a totally different crew than the show.

That sounds familiar.

I'm going off a memory of watching the move 15+ years ago, and will defer to you. I probably confused them in my head.

Neverending Motion Picture has a lot of merit to it to be sure. It's probably the most well photographed and some of its moments are pretty incredible to watch. They're clearly 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired, but that's certainly not a bad thing.

But it also just doesn't fit with the rest of the films. Robert Wise made a lot of good movies in his career, but he feels like a director-for-hire with Motion Picture and is more enamored with spectacle than story and characters. The central storyline is pretty bland, and while you're right that it fits the mold of the show, the budget and added attention to special effects and space grandeur proves they weren't looking to just make an expensive episode, so the storyline being as generic as it is really just doesn't cut it.

Motion Picture isn't bad. The best? No way in hell.

Tough to argue with that, Wise directed some great films. The Day the Earth Stood Still and West Side Story alone are better credits than anyone else who touched the series.

And yeah I'd say Meyer. Honestly I've only seen the two Star Trek films he did and Time After Time, which was a fun romp but nothing more. Figured he'd have a bigger career since I like all three of those films.

They're the most relevant, yes. The Borg introduction is Q Who? but I wouldn't call that required viewing.

The Locutus backstory should suffice. Plus it's just a damn good two parter.

The last TNG Borg story is the Descent two-parter which continues I Borg, but those three episodes kind of go in their own direction and don't have much relation to First Contact.

The Borg Queen is in a few episodes of Voyager though (Alice Krige only reprises her in Endgame). But...I hesitate to recommend much of anything from Voyager. The Regeneration episode of Enterprise is kind of fun though, if a little continuity breaking.

Are y’all shitting on Voyager? The Jeri Ryan Show.

Disclaimer on my stance on Enterprise: It was the Trek show that was airing when I was getting into Trek, so I do admittedly have a nostalgic bias, and I kinda love it as much as I love TNG.

Other people tear that show a new one, but I just can't not like it no matter how hard I try to understand their stance.

I watched most of it when airing, and am afraid to revisit a lot of it. I have an everlasting fondness for Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap that has probably given me rose tinted glasses.

The show would be about 150% better remembered if not for that theme song.

The theme song sticks out like a sore thumb, but I never hated it. It was just this really weird thing they tried and that resulted in "But why?"

It does blow that every Trek show has a memorable instrumental opening except Enterprise (even the closing instrumental sucks). Enterprise's wound up memorable for the wrong reasons.

I like the imagery of the opening though.

From my understanding, UPN had a lot of shit things they were trying to force on the show, to the point it's a miracle Enterprise wound up being watchable at all. The interviews with Rick Berman and Brannon Braga on the blu-ray have pretty juicy accounts of how the series was being screwed over.

I always really liked that story were UPN wanted to feature a hot up-and-coming band on the series every week, and Braga's like "Do you even watch our show? How the hell are we supposed to do that?" They told him "You can just put them in that bar place." and Braga's like "The mess hall?" "Yeah!" "We're in space! Where are these bands coming from?" "Nobody will care."

My impression is that UPN wanted the audience that came with Star Trek, but they didn't want to be associated with Star Trek. They were really aggressively branding itself toward the youth market when Enterprise was on-air. The fact that Enterprise is as adult as it is and feels like Star Trek at all is something of a victory.