Easily the silliest and lamest of the Berman/Pillar/Braga Trek shows, not a mean feat after the way ST:TNG was conducted. Start with the theme song, a sappy Rod Stewart lite-rock ballad that would pass as deep for junior high. The school analogy is apt because in this show, the familiar faces of the soon to be born Federation are the cool older kids the silly, geeky sophomoric humans want to hang out with but have nothing to offer. Nonetheless, the human geeks show up everywhere and can't be ignored, so the older alien kids parcel out goodies (technology, crew, etc.) just to keep the sophomores quiet and occupied. Unlike the original Trek, in which humanity found its way in spite of itself and was an equal partner at the start of the Federation, the Enterprise Earthers must be shown how to be learned by the more sophisticated spacefaring peoples and really have nothing to offer the much more learned alien races, revealing more than a bit of anti-American & anti-Western political bias in the process.
Now about the plot lines. This Trek era should be a rich field of built-in scripts of a stumbling Earth making contact with other stumbling species, ultimately to band their strengths and weaknesses in common cause as the Federation. Instead, Berman and Braga lead off and keep resorting to the most hackneyed of all SF plot devices, time travel, ruining Enterprise the same way they undermined their other ST collaborations. There were some quality scripts in the first season (especially the introduction of the Andorians). That quality is destroyed by a Temporal Cold War story arc, in which two future races drop in on the Enterprise to raise havoc with the crew and allow the writers to artificially introduce conflict without needing to follow such simple rules as physics, plot continuity or character development. The glory of the original Trek came from the writers being forced to operate within a defined structure of circumstances, which limits the writer's options but at the same time provides built-in tensions a good writer can exploit. Yes, TOS used time travel sometimes, all exceptions (bad ones almost aways, with "City On The Edge Of Forever" a good Harlan Ellison story with Trek characters overlaid) and none being central to the development of the show. Like all bad sci-fi writers, the Berman/Braga crew leans on the crutch of time travel the way Sam wrinkled her nose on Bewitched to magically make things appear or reappear, or Bobby showed up in the shower to negate an entire season of Dallas.
For Berman & Braga, wave the magic wand of time travel and anything you want to happen can happen. Bad writers (like the Berman/Pillar crew) use such devices so they don't have to spend time crafting plots and characters. No need to actually work on plots when you can just drop new bad guys in and out with a time machine. No need to actually pay attention to series continuity as a writer, either, because time travel undoes it all anyway. Much like a chess game where you can move a piece (or multiple pieces) to any space on the board, or off the board, whenever you want, time travel relieves the sci-fi writer of need to structure a universe or episode because there literally are no rules, nor do the characters need to be developed because there are no rules for them, either. The structure of the show and its characters can change to fit the writer's needs to produce an individual script. With the time travel plot device, there are no consequences to character actions because they can all be undone magically instead of having to live with the experiences of previous episodes. Time travel makes for easy writing and bad episodes. As for me, give me a sci-fi universe where the characters have to make decisions and face the consequences of those decisions in the following episodes. Give me a reason to invest my time in the show and its characters instead of the episodes being cartoons where Wile E. Coyote always comes back intact from the fall into the canyon.
For my money, if you want Scott Bakula to time travel, be honest and make Quantum Leap II instead of renaming the Sam Beckett character as Jonathan Archer. Would somebody at Viacom please, please fire Berman, Braga and Pillar and order the Trek office to never again write a time travel script? They are making generic sci-fi with Trek names. I can see generic sci-fi on dozens of shows. Give me a reason to watch a Star Trek show instead of all the rest.
Now about the plot lines. This Trek era should be a rich field of built-in scripts of a stumbling Earth making contact with other stumbling species, ultimately to band their strengths and weaknesses in common cause as the Federation. Instead, Berman and Braga lead off and keep resorting to the most hackneyed of all SF plot devices, time travel, ruining Enterprise the same way they undermined their other ST collaborations. There were some quality scripts in the first season (especially the introduction of the Andorians). That quality is destroyed by a Temporal Cold War story arc, in which two future races drop in on the Enterprise to raise havoc with the crew and allow the writers to artificially introduce conflict without needing to follow such simple rules as physics, plot continuity or character development. The glory of the original Trek came from the writers being forced to operate within a defined structure of circumstances, which limits the writer's options but at the same time provides built-in tensions a good writer can exploit. Yes, TOS used time travel sometimes, all exceptions (bad ones almost aways, with "City On The Edge Of Forever" a good Harlan Ellison story with Trek characters overlaid) and none being central to the development of the show. Like all bad sci-fi writers, the Berman/Braga crew leans on the crutch of time travel the way Sam wrinkled her nose on Bewitched to magically make things appear or reappear, or Bobby showed up in the shower to negate an entire season of Dallas.
For Berman & Braga, wave the magic wand of time travel and anything you want to happen can happen. Bad writers (like the Berman/Pillar crew) use such devices so they don't have to spend time crafting plots and characters. No need to actually work on plots when you can just drop new bad guys in and out with a time machine. No need to actually pay attention to series continuity as a writer, either, because time travel undoes it all anyway. Much like a chess game where you can move a piece (or multiple pieces) to any space on the board, or off the board, whenever you want, time travel relieves the sci-fi writer of need to structure a universe or episode because there literally are no rules, nor do the characters need to be developed because there are no rules for them, either. The structure of the show and its characters can change to fit the writer's needs to produce an individual script. With the time travel plot device, there are no consequences to character actions because they can all be undone magically instead of having to live with the experiences of previous episodes. Time travel makes for easy writing and bad episodes. As for me, give me a sci-fi universe where the characters have to make decisions and face the consequences of those decisions in the following episodes. Give me a reason to invest my time in the show and its characters instead of the episodes being cartoons where Wile E. Coyote always comes back intact from the fall into the canyon.
For my money, if you want Scott Bakula to time travel, be honest and make Quantum Leap II instead of renaming the Sam Beckett character as Jonathan Archer. Would somebody at Viacom please, please fire Berman, Braga and Pillar and order the Trek office to never again write a time travel script? They are making generic sci-fi with Trek names. I can see generic sci-fi on dozens of shows. Give me a reason to watch a Star Trek show instead of all the rest.