Star Trek Enterprise

My faithful linux computer Baphomet, she of aborted OS upgrade, has decided I should watch Star Trek Enterprise, like Firefly, Lost, Battlestar Galactica and 24, I show I missed while it was running. It looked really stupid from what I saw, and I had no desire to see any of it.
Found a torrent out there and Baph has been building up Season 4 piece by piece, bit by bit. BitTorrent doesn’t bring in things all at once; the file comes somewhat randomly.
It was interesting watching “24” come down. I show I had never watched. A fragment of a conversation; a bit of a car chase; someone dying. Who are these people? Then it would implode in a burst of static. Sometime yesterday it had pieced together enough of the first episode of the fifth season to show me most of it. And you know, it was all these people I didn’t know, being killed, blown up and stuff. It didn’t make much more sense than the pixellated scenes I’d glimpsed along the way.
ST:Enterprise was more tantalizing. BTorrent had blown it into fragments, and I’d only get a still, or a few seconds of motion, before the heroic I-Can-Play-ANYTHING program mplayer just gave up (with little winky error messages like “I can’t move backward in time 2 bits! ;)”. A Star Trek alien (you know, identical to human, except with a bumpy forehead, speaking English of course) doing something. Something in space. Kaboom.
This morning I checked in to find Baph had assembled most of the first episode. Time travel! Nazis! Why is it ALWAYS NAZIS? Why couldn’t they have gone back in time to find that, I dunno, the FRENCH had invaded the US? That this alien guy, stranded on Earth, had been supporting the FRENCH all along? Or heck, mix things up. Land in Iceland and have VIKINGS come back to follow up on old Leif’s discoveries.
But no. Nazis.
Maybe they got a deal on the uniforms or something.
They still could have drawn me in. Have the US divided between Japan in the west and Germany in the east, like in Dick’s “Man in High Castle”. Or have the Nazis actually NOT be paper villains; show them rebuilding war-torn US or Europe or something, making good on the thousand year Reich.
Not that I agree with the whole WWII thing. That’s not it at all. I’m talking about how Nazis are dragged in to replace any THOUGHT in FICTION. It’s LAZY.
It’s supposed to be a science fiction show. Why can’t it take chances? Well, because it’s Star Trek, I guess. The socially aware show of the 60s replaced with styrofoam in the new millenium. Star Trek, the original, had the first interracial kiss on network television! Russians and Asians in the crew as equals! This was pretty unusual back then – Green Hornet only let Bruce Lee/Kato be his servant.
All ST:E had to do was be a little innovative and I would have been right there. Batlestar Galactica – I have shiny DVDs in my library. Firefly – sitting right next to BG, and I saw the movie twice in theaters. Enterprise – glad I could check it out before buying it. Dodged a bullet there.

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