re: #58 Targetpractice

My impression of B&B has always been that Berman took over with the aim towards putting his mark on the franchise, while Braga was not exactly a hack writer, but he never seemed to move far out of his comfortable niche. DS9 largely succeeded because they just gave it over to the writing staff headed by guys like Ron D. Moore and moved on. Voyager was…it had it’s moments, but overall it was pretty clearly a pet project. And Enterprise was a disaster before the premiere had even aired, only to become more so in retrospect when info comes out like how the Enterprise design for the series had been a shameless copy of a fan favorite ship design instead of the proposals that hewed closer to franchise lore.

Not to say that Abrams’ reboot of the franchise is without sin, but it’s a lot like the new Doctor Who series in that it takes what has worked about the series in a new and interesting direction. B&B just kept going over the same ground and hoping that lighting would strike three times.

I can’t say that I disagree with you about Berman and Braga; they deserve a lot of credit for keeping Star Trek alive after Roddenberry died, but they almost killed the entire franchise off themselves before it was all over.

As for Enterprise, if B&B had let someone else like Coto run the show from the get-go, it’s very possible that it could have succeeded like TNG or DS9 and gone out after a long run. But, for the first season or two, they let the writing get downright sloppy (Temporal Cold War? Now, that was a kludge…); however, to B&B’s credit, the cast was very decent (I was a fan of Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer, because I think that it fit him, much like Shatner, Stewart, and Brooks’ respective captain’s roles suited them IMO).

In any case, you can have the best cast, but if the scripts they have to film are lazy, uninspired, or just plain shitty and the direction from on high is just as bad, everything else isn’t worth a hill of beans.