Star Trek Enterprise
(Longer more complainy Post here)
I'm going to keep this relatively short. I'll have a paragraph about complaints, one about cast, and one about plots.
The complaints are numerous and I'll give my opinion on if its justified. The first complaint is the opening song, and yes its justified as the worst crap to start a scifi show ever. The cast is complained about as being wooden and un-likeable. I have to disagree; aside from Jolene Blalock trying to figure out what a Vulcan was, the cast is very good at what they do. Some say Seasons 1 and 2 are garbage. I would not call them garbage but I would call them entire seasons of pretty much no character development. Its not quite Seinfeld in space, but there is a whole lot of nothing going on in these seasons. The Finale sucked. Oh yea it did.
The cast is not the problem. The writing is the problem. Bakula is better than Sisko and is a great actor, particularly for taking "silly" sci-fi things as "serious business". He's a veteran sci-fi actor and does his job well, though he's more characterized by not knowing what he's doing than by getting things done. You will grow to like Trinneer, he's a bit hamfisted at the start, but in the end he's probably the most complex and likable of the 3 headliners. Ignore Jolene Blalock till about 1/2 through season 4. The B team also has some great people. The problem with Sato(played by Linda Park), Malcolm(played by Dominic Keating) and Travis(played by Anthony Mongomery) is that they do so little with them aside from being side dressing. I'm sure Park and Montgomery were weary of asking for a larger role when Keating's "character push" was either expounding on how little a personality he has(literally whole episodes about how he has no opinion on food) or how much of a jealous dick he is about the new security crew. Two characters shine as bright as any of the Data, Quark, or 7 of 9 stuff from the other series though. One is the ship's doctor, a worthy person to hold the Doctor title as its a hallowed position in Trek. Phlox(Peter Billingsly) is awesome and always makes an episode better. He's sort of a "chinese medicine that works" sort of alien doctor. Yep, an alien doctor with a crew of Humans. The 2nd character, Shran(Jeffery Combs), is only a guest star in the series, but his part grows as the story goes, and you'll love disliking, but respecting him. Combs has played 9 characters in Trek, you'll likely know him as the Weyoun clones in Deep Space 9. Shran is a much better character that you'll wish had more screen time. He should have been the first Andorian in Starfleet.
Now we have the plots. Yes, I said earlier season 1 and 2 kind of go nowhere. With Season 3 you get a season wide movie in the style of Deep Space 9, but that makes it very hard to watch any episodes out of order or as "one shots" because they are so tied together. Season 4 things get broken into smaller plots of 3-4 episodes long. The last half of season 3 is easily the best, they relent a little on "give them guns, its exciting" and get more into the political intrigue. There are entire parts of season 4 better left unremembered, particularly the bullshit about Klingon genetics, but hey, at least in Season 4 they "fix" the shitty Vulcan characterizations in season 1 and 2... but its like 100 episodes too late to fix that. Do yourself a favor, if you ended up liking the characters or the show, skip the finale. Use Terra Prime as the final episode. All the character and story arches conclude, the Federation is well under way to being real, it ends there well. The Finale literally takes place as part of a Next Generation episode, and pretty much everyone gets either left behind or worse in the plot. There's even a part where the actor knows its bullshit, so they pull off the worst scene in the TNG era, easily up there with "Spock's Brain" of the original series. The Finale left a bad taste in my mouth when I was ready to come on here and recommend that Enterprise might be better than Deep Space 9. Because of the Finale... forget it.
I think later I'll do a post, probably not shown here, about the suggest "abbreviated series" I'd do. A list of maybe 15 episodes(out of 98) you could watch and feel like you've watched the whole thing well enough.
22nd of Thrimidge
I don't really have an update on the bird situation. Either they are really good at being quiet or they are quiet when the mom is there. I tried to take pictures, but its not the easiest thing to do, and there's no room for my real head to get near to look inside the nest. I guess I'll give it a few more days, there should be some sign of life in there some time by then. I can't really do anything to help, but at least I'm not hindering them. I've borrowed my mother's car so they wouldn't be disturbed while I do my errands.
We're having a 2nd Spring lately, the clover has just erupted for a second time this year and its all over the place. I guess its the little bit of extra rain we had near the start. I love clover and would have my entire yard plastered with it instead of grass. It smells better than grass, is softer on the feet, and is entertaining to observe as you walk through it. It even has a built in game of "find the 4 leaf clover", its like the pre-installed app of the natural world.
Oh yea, I was supposed to update about the Yogscast additions. I did add Pyrion Flax to my subscriptions and I have to say that I think he fits in. Sadly, I mainly know this because of the Civ 5 games he is playing in with the main cast because his channel shockingly has very little content. He is a funny guy, I'd say in half way in between Lewis and Sips when it comes to humor and vulgarity. Even if he had more on his channel, I'd keep him on the list, I think he's a fine addition to the cast. I added Will Strife this week and I"m going through his stuff, he has A LOT more content and seems to add a couple of videos a week.
I had a little bit of inspiration and played some Minecraft yesterday. I have a world with my girlfriend that we only play together and I have TONS and TONS of stuff for her to find and even storylines to go through. I just can't play it very easily with her lately and its left me too depressed to really get back into the game. For the first time I used creative mode to build. Usually I think of a new "character" to be, and start from scratch and build something. There's a carpenter, a bansai tree farmer, a greedy miner, a laboratory professor and quite a few more. This area has no "character". Its a place to find and interact with, and maybe do a lot of neat stuff with. I guess it would sort of be a new "quest" hub and its about 1/3rd finished. Its huge and massive and hopefully would be a lot of fun. Only thing I'll say about it is that its a "Lost Kingdom". Yes, a whole Kingdom.
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