#043 - The Hamburglar is actually Ferengi, was saying “Dabo Dabo!” all along

man what is even going on in this game i don’t even–

Apropos of nothing, I’ve been watching Enterprise the last couple months, a few episodes a week with my wife, as a sort of grudging capstone to our having gone through TNG and DS9 and Voyager in the last two or three years. And it’s weird because on the one hand the show has problems (even setting aside the theme song which, oy, that is a discussion for another day), but on the other hand it’s definitely doing a better job in season three than it was at the start, which is heartening, but on the the tertiary hand I have heard consistently that it goes downhill again, and obviously it did get canned which isn’t a great sign.

But it’s weird watching it and feeling partly like I want to root for it just because it’s Star Trek. If you changed the show to Unfamiliar Future-Earth Space Exploration Franchise, I don’t think I’d have given it the time of day after the first few episodes because, you know, blarg. It was a pretty rocky start. I have a few other strained franchise loyalties in my life — Resident Evil has tested my good will a lot, for example, and man was RE6 a frustrating disappointment — but mostly I tend to focus my media consumption more on Actually Liking A Thing than on Sticking With A Thing Because I Should.

There’s something kind of scrappy and charming about Bakula and co. that keeps me from getting properly bitter. At least for now. But I honestly can’t tell if that’s a worthy charm on the show’s part or just weird loyalty on mine, or some mix of the two.

I was making a pretty significant effort by the end of Voyager, too; I actually went into the series recently with a pretty bad attitude based on limited watching when it was originally airing, and I found to my surprise and delight that, hey, I actually like what they’re doing here, sort of a return to the Weekly Random Adventures feel of TOS in some ways after the somewhat more diplomatic TNG and the long-arc drama of DS9. But by the end, they’d sort of burnt out that positive feeling with the terrible lack of story continuity or character development. Like a Battlestar Galactica without any real sense of danger. Squandered promise. I’m kind of afraid that’s going to be the same deal as Enterprise finishes up.