posted
For purposes of research and black humour, I caught the closing episodes of STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE last night.
The show's been renewed, as much by pressure from the producers to get their 100 episodes for syndication than anything else.
Now, these episodes weren't as bad as the closing pieces of ANDROMEDA, which has gone beyond incoherence into the rarified realms of senseless gibberish. It's been a long time since I've seen television that pompously bad. (For those who bailed on the show, the Kevin Sorbo character now turns out to be a mythic immortal being from beyond the birth of the Universe called The Paradine.)
But ENTERPRISE, bless it, has had its own classic Jumping The Shark moment.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to TV shows that have gone into the territory of total fucking nonsense in misguided attempts to keep concepts past their sell-by date creatively alive. Fonzie on water skies jumping over a shark.
So Scott Bakula, as tough and expressive as a balsa wood plank, is "killed" at the episode's climax. Not too convincingly. And Enterprise returns to earth. No radio noise from Earth. They send a shuttle down, obviously not having seen enough TV to know what this means, and old Scott not having told the crew that his old mate the time traveller popped by to inform him that if he dies the Federation will never happen.
They send the shuttle down, and it's attacked by WW2 fighter planes, and Scott is found in a medical unit on the ground being menaced by...
...Nazi space aliens.
Shark bukkake is when the sharks get out of the water wearing SS uniforms and jerk off in Fonzie's face.
And mine.
If ENTERPRISE had gone off the air, a great many good people would have been out of work, and that would have been a great shame.
posted
How annoying. Why would someone put line breaks after every five words?
Anyway, judging a cliffhanger episode without knowing anything about the second part seems a little... premature? Perhaps even... pompous? "The resolution of this plot isn't so obvious that I know immediately what it's going to be, so it must suck."
I mean, TOS did an alien Nazi episode, too, and it had a perfectly reasonable explanation. I'm not sure why Nazis + aliens is supposed to automatically equal complete badness.
Oh, and a couple of factual issues: Archer's "death" didn't need to be convincing. If we were really supposed to believe he was dead, they wouldn't have shown him alive five minutes later. Also, there was only one alien Nazi, and he wasn't menacing anyone.
Registered: Mar 1999
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-------------------- joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh (some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning) The Woozle!
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posted
Since everyone would assume Danials would yank Archer out anyway, yeah the death didn't need to convince anyone
Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
(I have never read The Authority. My only actual comic book encounters with Ellis have been X-related. For which he would probably hit me with a brick. I would like to read, say, Orbital, though. A lot.)
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posted
I do keep meaning to buy Hostile Waters though, if that's any help.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Warren Ellis is one of those rare special people who in the space of one paragraph can totally restore my faith in humanity from the lowest of humanly reachable lows.
"I do keep meaning to buy Hostile Waters though"
Schmuck.
-------------------- ".mirrorS arE morE fuN thaN televisioN" - TEH PNIK FLAMIGNO
Registered: Nov 1999
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-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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