I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
ENT gets a ton of flak for this in general, but I’m not quite sure how else might a prequel to TOS look? Kirk and the band were space cowboys without a lot of rules, then a few decades later we have the super-professional Federation…
The trajectory is clear, if you go some decades back, to humanity that is only starting to do space exploration, then it has to be very very rough.
Besides, humans even in the TNG era have the reputation of being reckless, unpredictable and emotional. So I think ENT quite nailed that more often than not.
Yes I know SNW is doing it differently, but it just rehashes stories from other shows, and I do quite question its positions as a prequel. It could be set at any time really.
(And let’s not talk about how DIS works as a prequel…)
I liked the sort of blundering honesty that the ENT crew approached galactic politics with. The Vulcan temple that was being used as a cover for a spy operation being the big incident.
Even seasons later, the Vulcans still complained about the ENT cowboy antics causing the loss of the temple, but quietly didn’t acknowledge the Vulcan spy activities.
The ENT crew’s choice to side with the truth over political allegiance convinced Shran to trust the humans to be honest negotiators and set a path to Andorian-Vulcan peace.