I’ve been falling behind in my TV watching. I guess I have better things to do. Anyway, I was in a couch potato mood yesterday, so I went through what I had taped and watched some shows.
I have a love/hate relationship with Enterprise. I like the primitive starfleet, but I hate the frequent time travel. It feels like some executive got his hands into it and wants the show to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator, instead of Star Trek fans. Understandable, but also stupid.
But it seems that since they know that this is their last season, all the stupid executives have bailed and gone to ruin other shows. Since the producers have nothing to lose, they are doing VERY Star Trek shows. I just watched a two part episode set completely in the mirror universe. Where everyone is mean and nasty (and Spock has a beard), and it parallels the original universe. And they did it right from the start, even the opening credits were military in nature. (I hate that DS9 ruined the mirror universe by getting rid of the empire and making humanity a bunch of scrungy refugees.)
And they did the episode with references to classic trek shows. Stuff that would be completely lost on a casual viewer, but mean everything to someone who knows Star Trek. In classic trek there was the episode “The Tholian Web” (Yes I am enough of a geek to still remember the names) where a starship, the Defiant, was dragged into another dimension, and Captain Kirk nearly went with it. Well, apparently that ship travelled to the mirror universe and into the past, so that the mean and nasty Enterprise counterparts got their mitts on it.
So here we have the classic trek starship in a new episode. The mirror universe people flew it around, even started wearing the classic trek uniforms. It brought back so many memories. All the usual sounds were there, right down to the twitter when someone on the bridge intercoms the captain. They were in the classic Jefferies tube, but this time, they went to the top. So many memories. But while the sounds were the same, the effects were modern. When the phaser was set on kill, the person disintegrated in such an eye-pleasing manner. They even threw in a Gorn for good measure. Complete CGI, but still… Gorn!
I miss classic trek.