The wife has always made fun of my TV viewing habits, particularly my infatuation with all things Star Trek.
"Oh, you're watching your precious geek television again...." she'll say with the type of disdain that can only come from a person who has watched all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in chronological order. Twice.
While I've always been quick to defend whichever series I was watching with the retort "Damn good show" the folks at Paramount have, indeed, produced their fair share of cringeworthy episodes.
Star Trek admittedly has some pretty lame episodes, but we're looking at them nearly 40 years after the fact. The special effects and makeup are hysterically awful by today's standards, and we've seen the episodes parodied so many times that it's difficult to view them in their original context. But there are some great ones in there.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had "Code of Honor," an episode about African-like tribes whose women fight to the death over a mate, and "Justice", an episode where young Wesley Crusher is sentenced to death for walking on the grass of a planet inhabited by people in unitards who run everywhere as their only means of locomotion. To be fair, after the first season, the great episodes far outweigh the terrible.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine didn't really produce too many flat-out stinkers, but the lighting and costume directors at times really seemed to be using color just for the sake of using color. Way too much neon and silk brocade. Sometimes I felt like I was watching an episode of Silk Stalkings, set several hundred years in the future.
Star Trek: Voyager had many awful episodes, perhaps the worst of which involved Captain Janeway and Lt. Paris evolving into fish-like creatures and mating after they hit high warp speeds. Even I can't justify crap like that.
Which brings us to Star Trek: Enterprise. I am now 88 episodes into the series, and aside from Jolene Blaylock providing some good material for the masturbatory archives, I'm not sure what the show has to offer. I just can't get into it. While there aren't any really terrible, terrible, terrible episodes, there really aren't any that are really good, either. The show just kind of....is. Which is, I suppose, why it now exists solely in the past tense. Maybe it needed better aliens than the Andorians and Tellurites. And who the hell are these Xindi people? Why is there no mention of them in any of the other stuff. I mean, they killed half of Earth.
T'Pol wants me.
Oh well. I'm sure this post has all of (both) my readers thinking "Geek" and vowing not to return. But I can't even imagine the hits I'm going to be getting here based on the words "Jolene Blaylock" and "masturbatory". A new day has dawned!
