[TriLUG] Off Topic: Enterprise...

[Scott Chilcote]

Jon Carnes wrote:

<snippage>
> Overall, I was very surprised by the premire.  All of the series seem to 
> start poorly and then grow.  This one started out very good (well a little 
> rough, but I thought ScottB really pulled it off).  Hopefully it will only 
> get better.


What concerns me is that the last three ST series have had to struggle 
with the resolve-everything-in-one-hour-so-we-can-syndicate-the-reruns 
format.  The temptation to revisit old plots has been obvious, and you 
can use a stopwatch to time the plot developments after a while.  There 
is the occasional creative episode that departs from the format, but I'm 
guessing they save the few of these they make for sweeps weeks.

Babylon 5 was breathtakingly different with its storyline "arcs"; each 
episode had threads that resolved, but there was a background story that 
unfolded over a series of weeks and months.  Central characters left the 
show and new ones entered, and it actually made things more engaging.

I don't expect "Enterprise" to adopt this concept, but they do have some 
advantages that the later shows lacked.  They can introduce species, 
planets, inventions, and even some individuals that have interesting 
tie-ins to future events we've seen in the other shows.  They can use 
these devices to build larger stories from their early beginnings.

There's a lot of opportunity for them to do some creative plots that 
build into deeper stories than they've done so far.  What I'd hate is 
for them to fall back on the same plots and formats that have made 
things become formulaic.  I'll stop now, before I start singing "Lets do 
the time warp again!"  ;-)

ObLinux: I just found out that vim has built in "grep", with added 
goodies.  Cool!

Scott Chilcote / scottchilcote at earthlink.net