LogFAQs > #933319159

Good luck.

Season 7 is clearly where they just ran out of ideas in general, at least until the final episode.

24. Jonathan Archer
I just read an article on dailymail.com that says people with elf ears are 12% more likely to be evil.

I think I understand Archer. More specifically, I think I understand why he exists.

We need a captain, said someone. Kirk is an adventurer, Picard is a diplomat, Sisko is a warrior, and Janeway pretends to be a scientist. What does that leave? The answer was adventurer again. Okay, okay, Archer is supposed to be an explorer. Hes in it just to see whats beyond the current borders of a map. But it leaves you as a viewer a little vague on the details of how his skillset differs from any of the other captains.

All of the other captains so far were very professional. What if our new captain is casual and chill? So Archer refers to most of the crew by their first names and just gives off a more casual vibe.

He needs to have some kind of conflict. What if he hates Vulcans? So Archer gets annoyed easily when he talks to Vulcans. I bet the writers thought they were being clever, that Archer would learn as the series goes on why the Vulcans have made the choices theyve made, and undergo some self-reflection and become a better man for it. And that soooooort of happens, but not really. It happens two times: when Archer refuses to save the planet of diseased people so another species can survive and says I WONDER IF WELL HAVE SOME KIND OF DIRECTIVE THATS GIVEN PRIME IMPORTANCE IN THE FUTURE and admits the Vulcans neutrality makes sense sometimes, and another time when he meets emotional Vulcans and is like okay yeah I agree with the emotionlessness now, my bad.

Archers standout moment is in season 3, when his ship is broken and he needs a part to save Earth. He finds an alien ship and is like dudes want to give me your warp drive and theyre like lol no. Archers been pretty adamant about doing The Right Thing up to this point, but out of options, he finally just steals their warp drive which looks like a donut, and leaves them enough food to get home at sublight speeds in two years. Then, after defeating the Xindi a few episodes later, he goes back, apologizes, and gives them a new warp drive so they were only inconvenienced by a few weeks naaaah haha.

If wed had more of this Archer, the Archer who has his beliefs challenged by the difficulty of the crazy space stuff he encounters, he would have been way more interesting. Thats what Ill give him, he was teetering on something cool and interesting.

One of my favorite elements of Archer is that the previous captains rarely lost fistfights. Scott Bakula was like I will absolutely get beaten up on screen, so the writers wrote way too many Archer is beaten up episodes. The result is that Archer successfully wins exactly one fistfight in four years: against a monk. And he doesnt even really win, he just survives long enough to grab a phaser.

So much of Enterprise feels like a weaker version of TOS, which is largely intentional (not the weaker part, of course). The greatest shame in Star Trek is Enterprise being cancelled just as it was finding its footing. That alternate dimension where we get a season 5 might be laughing at us right now. Maybe Star Trek never went through a dry spell there, and so it never had to deal with Discovery.

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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig.
Started: July 6, 2005