Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I haven’t killed the couple that refuses to die lately, but if you want to see them broken up then go read and vote in Die J/C Die 2005.

Seema wants to wax nostalgic. I’m really too post-fandom to put any work into gathering titles and links, but fortunately I did it back when I cared. So let me redirect you to The Jemima’s Trek Fanfic Awards. I think it’s all old enough to qualify as Classic Voyager fic.

Star Trek: The Lost Books lists all the tie-in novels that never were.

If you haven’t gotten your fill of Enterprise-bashing, Haasim Mahanaim takes a final swipe at the show we loved to hate. He says:

Science fiction film and television typically does not aspire to be intelligent, instead there’s an entirely different mentality for sci-fi unlike any other genre. With science fiction there seems to be a campiness that is always present, permission to be goofy and immature.

I think he needs to watch BSG, but beyond that, camp is in the eye of the beholder. While I appreciate the classic camp of Trek, I think it was a symptom of the medium rather than of a different mentality. Rock creatures just don’t come off as well as cowboys on the small screen–but technology is catching up fast.

Jolene Blalock never fails to entertain, at least off the set:

[…] asked about the series finale, written by longtime executive producers Rick Berman & Brannon Braga, Blalock said, “I don’t know where to begin with that one…the final episode is…appalling.”

The ellipses apparently represent stammering rather than genuine elisions. Read all about it at TrekToday.

ENT link of the day: Tachyon TV on the cancellation.

Slashdot is having a field day with the Save Enterprise rallies.

Thanks to Rocky for sparing me the effort I might have made if I still cared enough to write a post-mortem on Trek. I agree with her and disagree with Kelly Chambliss on most of their points. Since disagreements are always more interesting, I’ll run through those:

The alleged external problems:

1. UPN was no worse for VOY and ENT than syndication was for TNG and DS9.
2. Stargate, Atlantis, and BSG have all run on Friday nights without suffering any. Friday is no longer the kiss of death for a show, except by way of heavy competition.
3. Yes, there are too many choices, but the problem for ENT wasn’t the range of sci-fi per se, but that there were too many better choices.
4. For a company that doesn’t know its traditional audience, Paramount has certainly managed to recycle the traditional material often enough. The little ratings ploys (Seven Huge Hooters Save the Franchise and her Slinky Vulcan Successor) haven’t done that much to damage the ratings. ENT wasn’t so much misdirected as boring.

The alleged internal problems:

1. It’s hard for me to comment on a show that proved too boring to watch, but ENT was never enough of a throwback to TOS for me. The humans were whiny and oppressed, not God’s gift to the universe like Kirk or Picard.
2. Yes, the characters were bland, predictable, and unmemorable, but that doesn’t distinguish ENT from the more memorable TNG.
3. VOY and SG have thrived on throwback sexuality–I’m thinking J/C and Sam/Jack, especially, but the overall nothing-happens approach to sex works just fine for sf shows. As in #4 above, I don’t think the attempt to add sexual tension hurt (or helped) ENT to any significant degree.

The allegedly good stuff:

1. Season-long arcs are a bad idea. If anyone had been interested in the occasional ENT episode, this (and the rumor of Nazis) was sure to scare them off. DS9 was a great show, but it was not popular as Trek series go; going the way of DS9 was not going to save ENT, not without writers to support an entirely different approach to plotting. And anyway, it was too late to go from an episodic show to a more arc-based show–they’d just disappoint the fans who’d stuck around without convincing the rest of us who’d fled screaming to come back.
2. Again, it was too little, too late for ENT to go for continuity. The people who cared were too turned off by the character assassination of the entire Vulcan race. Technically, the last-season push was one to cash in on canon references, rather than to bring ENT in line with Trek continuity. Only the Big Reset Button in the Sky could fix ENT continuity at this stage.

Well, that went on a bit longer than expected. I hope it doesn’t fool anyone into thinking I care…

…you go an entire year without posting to ASC. Last year at this time I was posting some last-minute filk, though my Trek output was otherwise restricted to a few drabbles and a Stargate crossover. This year I posted nothing. At least this means I can sit out the ASC Awards guilt-free (though I probably will vote in any categories involving either Khan or filk).

On the other side of the gate, the SJFA awards are coming up soon, and the SG-1 Awards sometime after that.

Modern Drunkard Magazine compares the hard-drinking TOS crew with the sensitive synthehol imbibers of TNG in Space Winos. Don’t drink and read… [Via Geek Press]

/. quote of the day: Enterprise got quite a bit better the last two seasons, but it never actually got very good. In a lot of ways, it’s like watching a clumsy kid playing sports or President Bush giving a speech — you know they’re going to screw up, so each minute that they don’t is like a little victory. Given that, it’s hard for me to imagine that there are actually people looking to save the series. I mean, why? –Skyshadow

There’s a lovely filk up at Slashdot, too, on the occasion of more Enterprise cancellation rumors.