At long last, the Star Trek franchise has brought its much-anticipated new series to the small screen and millions of fans couldn't be happier. While Voyager was certainly not a failure, it was met by diehard Trekkies with mixed results, as was reflected in the turbulent ratings during its seven-year run.
Looking back on the the recent incarnations, each series has had an appearance by a guest actor in its two-hour premiere. The Next Generation had DeForest "Bones" Kelley, Deep Space Nine had Patrick "Picard" Stewart, and Voyager had Armin "Quark" Shimerman. The latest installment Enterprise, however, is decidedly devoid of guest actors, with the exception of James Cromwell in a microscopic cameo as an aged Zefram Cochrane, the character he played in the feature film First Contact. I guess this means creators Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are confident they don't need to carry over fans from any of the other series, and from what I've seen they're partially correct.
The debut episode is entitled "Broken Bow", and it refers to the area in Oklahoma where a human encounters a Klingon for the first time (and shoots him, go figure). The Klingon has important information about a new alien race called the Suliban, a bunch of heavily-freckled, shape-shifting wallcrawlers who are controlled by a mysterious, unseen figure that communicates to them from another time. This shadowy villain will probably be shown in later episodes (if at all), and will hopefully be an appearance by someone we've seen before in the Trek universe. Scott Bakula plays Jonathan Archer. He aggressively campaigns to return the injured Klingon to his homeworld and takes the Enterprise out of dock ahead of schedule to attempt the mission. There's a lot of resistance to this decision from, ironically, the Vulcans. They send an officer of their own, T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), whose character name sounds an awful lot like an obscure 80s girl band. There's also a lot of humans onboard, and an alien doctor called Phlox comes along for the ride too. It's a two-hour offering with an almost movie-quality feel. The sets and costumes are quite impressive and it's presented in letterbox format.
So, how does Archer measure against captains of the future? Somewhere between Captain Kirk and Benjamin Sisko. He's got the impulsive chutzpah of the first, but a lot of the blander qualitites of the second. There is a lot of potential in this series to stay away from "unexplained phenomenon" episodes and focus more on the development of the Federation (at this stage in the Trek timeline there is a Starfleet but no Federation as of yet).
I was disappointed that many of the gizmos are already introduced. The transporters, though relatively untested at this stage, have already been invented. Warp travel is possible, up to Warp 4.5. "Phase pistols" exist, very similar to phasers. I was hoping these inventions would be gradually introduced as the series progressed, but this is a small quibble because the trade-off is that a lot of the old technology is still in place, including the old cell-phone communicators from the Original Series, and the Viewfinder scanning device that Spock was renowned for.
All in all, Enterprise brings a lot of action and exploration to its debut. There isn't a lot of philosophy and certainly no Prime Directive that exists at this point. It's Earth's "Roughing It" stage of development and on first glance, this series boldly goes where no one has gone before.
