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I was all prepared to write something this month about the release of the Star Wars movies on Blu-Ray this month, but since my editor threw down the edict that we had to write something Star Trek related in honor of the 45th Anniversary of the Original Series for this month's Collector Times; I decided to write something about my favorite show out of the franchise Enterprise. Enterprise was the latest television show to come out for the Star Trek franchise and instead of being forward looking like The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, the producers and writers decided to go back to when humanity was just getting its first Warp 5 capable ship. I was a bit weary at first and really did not pay that much attention to the show because after Voyager, I was just all Trekked out. Last year (or was it the year before last?) when SyFy began running the repeats of the show I tuned in for the pilot 'Broken Bow' and was hooked. I was so hooked that when Amazon was having one of their semi-annual sales of television series on DVD for up to 50% off I picked up the first season of Enterprise. I have yet to watch it, but I have yet to watch a lot of the DVD's that I have on a shelf at my house. I think that one of the things that attracted me to Enterprise was that the show did not drag out tropes made up for The Next Generation that became standards for the rest of the series set in that time. You know the stuff like the holodecks that would break down and put everyone in danger and preachy stories that were good for the little ones, but when you look back at them they were really poorly done. They did delve into some things that were unheard of in the older incarnations of the show like the Denobulan's having polyamourous relationships and that Vulcans were still looking upon Humans as a less advanced species and holding back humans advances in warp technology. I also liked the fact that not everything was perfect on the ship. No universal translator, people were afraid to use the transporter since it was only used to transport cargo for the longest time and when the show started, it was only finally approved for use on living things. This meant that they had to use a shuttlepod to go down to a planet or they had to dock the pod with the ship if they were in space. Instead of having a holodeck, they had movie nights where the crew that was not on duty would gather in the mess hall for popcorn and beverages as well as an old movie. The mess hall was something that the show had that I liked. It had an actual chef on staff and would cook everything rather than walking up to a replicator and saying what you wanted. The show delved into some topics that were left hanging from the Original Series (TOS). For example the whole thing with the USS Defiant from TOS that was caught in some spacial anomaly in Star Trek and ultimately disappeared from our universe. It was taken to the Mirror Universe (also introduced in the Original Series) and helped the Terran's wipe out anything that stood in their way since it was so far ahead technologically than anything they had in the Mirror Universe at that time. The show also explained what happened to the Borg that were not connected to the collective from the movie First Contact. The only thing that I really hated about the whole thing was the series finale. It turns out that the whole episode was a holodeck simulation that Riker was going through to deal with a situation they were facing on the Enterprise-D. That just made it seem like the whole show was just Riker visiting the Holodeck for every episode that was made. It made me cringe, but I can look past it because otherwise it was an entertaining show.
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