The new Trek......

[Bico]

Bashir:  "Was it some sort of viral outbreak?  A genetic mutation?"
Worf:  "We do not discuss it with outsiders!"

There was an interview with the DS9 producers about the making of 'Trials and Tribble-ations', which is the DS9 episode mentioned above, and they said that they deliberately didn't give any explanations as to why Klingons looked different between old Trek and DS9 because "any explanation we could come up with would have been ridiculous."  Enterprise, with the complete lack of wit and imagination that typified it, took the two suggestions meant as a throwaway gag and mashed them together to become a canon explanation of the disparity between the budgetary potential of a production-line 1960s sci-fi action-adventure series and a multi-million-dollar 1978 movie.
If you enjoyed it, fair enough, but I'm having a bitch about it:

I can offer no more damning comment on Enterprise than this - in the end, even Star Trek fans wouldn't watch it.

[Tweak72]

sorry Bico but I am a Star Trek fan. And I watched Enterprise happily. SOME fans didn't like it. This is true but, as I have said before a lot of "fans" Bitched about Voyager in the first two years. And it  didn't stop me watching it and loving it all the way through. :) It was a very good attempt at giving a look at the spirit of the early Start Fleet even before the Federation really existed.

[Tweak72]

sorry Bico but I am a Star Trek fan. And I watched Enterprise happily. SOME fans didn't like it. This is true but, as I have said before a lot of "fans" Bitched about Voyager in the first two years. And it  didn't stop me watching it and loving it all the way through. :) It was a very good attempt at giving a look at the spirit of the early Start Fleet even before the Federation really existed.

[TordelBack]

I must confess a liking for parts of Enterprise, although I think it was at heart a pretty poor concept - prequels by their nature either re-tread old ground or stomp on the toes of fans of existing material.  It seems to be very hard to inject a sense of relevance and freshness to a prequel.

That said, the tone was sound - the first season had a good excited sense of exploration, the third riffed quite successfully on 9/11 and the 'War on Terror', and I've never seen more than a few bits  of the fourth season.  

The design of the ship was, I thought, neat.  It was a pity they brought in the transporters so early, but everything else was groovy and (dare I say it) convincingly seat-of-their-pants-y.

The real problem (for me) was a real lack of interesting characters (compare with DS9, where almost everyone was interesting from the first episode on), to carry me through the inevitable dull patches:

Archer was a bit of a an overly serious plank, but serviceable.  Porthos, on the other hand, was a treasure

 T'Pol was suitably yummy, although her Seven-of-Boobies costumes and tendency to end up partially disrobed and sweaty were a bit heavy-handed (said the man who adores Primeval).  

Trip "Dubya" Tucker was probably the most complex and engaging character in it, despite initially appearing to be unlikeable.

Phlox was well-acted, and pleasingly alien, but never seemed to have much to do, except in his 'own' episodes.

As for the rest...

The English bloke was a carping whiner.

The Communications woman was a wimpy whiner.

The space-trash Helmsman was... I have no idea what he was.  Apart from hanging upside down in a gravity sweet-spot in one episode, I never really worked out what he brought to the table.

Were there others?

[Tweak72]

The Communications woman was a wimpy whiner.

you mean The Communications woman was an incredibly HOT wimpy whiner. Don't you?

[The Adventurer]

Klingon ridges are were caused by a genetic allergy to tribbles.

True story.

[TordelBack]

you mean The Communications woman was an incredibly HOT wimpy whiner. Don't you?

I might at that.

[Mardroid]

As far as ship design is concerned, I liked it and I didn't think it looked much like the Enterprise D (possibly a bit like the more industrial Enterprise E, but only remotely.)

That being said I think they should have gone for the original submarine look idea and left the saucer shaped ships for the Federation time period.

I liked the more tactile look of the sets (too silver panels and buttons etc) but I don't think they should have called the ship Enterprise as everyone thinks of Kirk's ship as the first Enterprise. Yes I know they get around it as this is the Enterprise NX-01 (or something like that ),a pre-federation ship whilst Kirk's is the USS Enterpise NCC-1701 (crikey what a geek I am) but even so. Course that means they would need a different name for the show, but that's fine with me.

As for the ladies, they were lovely but the sexiness was overhanded. Putting T'Pol in colourful jumpsuits in season 3-4 (despite the beleivable explanantion, she's left the Vulcan Science wotsit and thus has given up the uniform) was rather silly. (Her new eyebrows made sense in keeping her in line with other Vulcans from other series though, but they should have given her those from the start.)

[Bico]

"sorry Bico but I am a Star Trek fan. And I watched Enterprise happily. SOME fans didn't like it. This is true but, as I have said before a lot of "fans" Bitched about Voyager in the first two years. And it didn't stop me watching it and loving it all the way through. :) It was a very good attempt at giving a look at the spirit of the early Start Fleet even before the Federation really existed."

I'm a Trek fan, too, but Enterprise was where I drew the line - there's only so much retreading of other people's material on other Trek shows I can take before I have to say that the producers aren't emulating better material, they're just pilfering it and dumbing it down to hammer it into their own show (see Enterprise's E2 and DS9's Children of Time - identical stories in every way).
Fair enough that you enjoyed it, all opinions (yes, even mine) are subjective by their nature, but the majority - not the minority - of Trek fans abandoned Enterprise as it got stuck in an endless cycle of Captain Plank doing everything Kirk, Sisko and Picard did, except because the show was set in the past, Plank was technically doing it *first*.  Enterprise recycled the same old crap without an iota of shame - it was supposedly set before the Federation and the attendant technology, but humans were still the focus of change in every major event in the galaxy, there were transporters in use from the very first episode, the ship's armor worked exactly like the shields did in every other Trek show, and the crew was comprised of a template lifted without an ounce of irony from Galaxy Quest (without the producers ever once noticing that GQ was supposed to be making fun of lowest-common denominator sci-fi tv).  Even Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda - being based wholesale on the Trek universe from day one - managed to take a stab at the odd new idea here and there, and that was written by an actual human corpse.
Hoshi looked nice, though, so I suppose that makes it all right.  A pity they never explained why a Korean woman had a Japanese name - or how Harry Kim from Voyager was Chinese, but had a Korean name.

[Buddy]

The Communications woman was an incredibly HOT wimpy whiner

Pic please.. I can't remember who this is.

[Tweak72]

Well, there's this one...http://www.wednesdayschild.de/tg/ent/ent_hoshi.jpg">

[Tweak72]

Or this onehttp://www.gomtuu.de/data/Hoshi%20Sato%202.jpg">

[Tweak72]

or this onehttp://www.scifiunited.com/home/images/stories/profile/Linda_Park_8.jpg">

[Floyd-the-k]

A pity they never explained why a Korean woman had a Japanese name - or how Harry Kim from Voyager was Chinese, but had a Korean name.

 it's the future! umm, so (thinking on his feet here*) ethnic groups decided to swap names as an expression of world harmony or something

yours sincerely,

Floydorico Kermodeallah


*looks like thinking with his feet

[Dark Jimbo]

Migration, my dear Floyd. I've got an Austrian surname, but my family's been English for more than a thousand years now.