Friday, April 19, 2013

Our nerdly duty.

Suit up boys and girls, I'm about to get trekkie. Like very trekkie. You might want to bail out now. Still with me? Ok, inspired by the Kickstarter campaign for a Veronica Mars movie, there's a chance of bringing back Star Trek: Enterprise as a Netflix series.
Of course, by 'suit up' I mean slip in to
your ill-fitting, homemade future onesie.
"Fuck the Prime Directive!"
-Jean-Luc Picard
Holy shit? Awesome right? Apart from J. J. Abrams' entertaining, yet explosion-heavy reboot movie, there hasn't been any new Trek since 2005 when the UPN Firefly'ed Enterprise (it's a verb I made up meaning 'to prematurely cancel a sci-fi TV series'). Its cancellation, along with the movie franchise being sunk by the objectively terrible Star Trek 10: The One Where Picard Goes Off-Roading on a Pre-Warp Planet, put an end to the 18-year stretch of Star Trek episodes that began with The Next Generation all the way back in 1987.

UPN's move forced many of us to, you know, go outside and have a social life...it hasn't been easy, but the prospect of new episodes offers trekkies a ray of hope. A 'ray' in this instance being strictly metaphorical as we'd be watching it indoors, away from the harsh glare of the surface world.
"Yup, this is the life...a rickets-filled, lonely existence likely ending in heart disease."
And then this happened.
So you're probably confused and wondering which of the eight or nine dozen Star Trek spin-offs was Enterprise? I'm glad you asked. Enterprise was the most recent and probably the least popular, it lasted only four seasons whereas TNG, DS9 and Voyager all ran for seven. Despite staring nerd-icon Scott 'Quantum Leap' Bakula, the fans were kind of divided on it. Some loved it for its grittier, near-future setting, fancy-schnamcy special effects and for reasons best left unexplored, scenes of the crew smearing decontamination gel all over each other.

Other fans however, took issue with the quasi-Christian rock theme song, the writer's tendency to recycle plot lines and the aforementioned decontamination scenes which really are about as creepy as they sound.
That's Evil Parallel Universe Captain Archer fighting a Gorn abord a Starship stuck
in-between dimensions thus ripping off three (one, two and three) Kirk episodes at once. 

You heard me, Zombie Vulcans!
So why bring it back? Well, despite some weak entries, most notably the episode where Scott Bakula fights lizard-men in 2004 Detroit, (seriously? Detroit?) the series was pretty good and managed to get better as it went on. Season three had an episode with zombie Vulcans, and if it made it to season five we would have seen live-action Kzinti (a bloodthirsty race of cat-people from Larry Niven's Ringworld). Doug Drexler, one of the effects artists, set up Facebook page which you can, and should, go like, and supposedly Netflix is tracking the number of people streaming it, so go do your nerdly duty and watch because for real: zombie Vulcans.

2 comments:

  1. If Lizard Men were to be found in a major metropolitan area in 2004 without it getting into the history books (or anyone knowing about it at all) it would pretty much HAVE to be Detroit.

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