Last Enterprise Episode, and More Bad SF Blogging

Wow. Just astonishingly, egregiously bad. For a series that was never that great to begin with... I mean, wow. Holy crap that's bad.

First off, I know Frakes and Sirtis need work, but is there even a single ST franchise that can be kept free of their presence? Do they know about Gene Roddenberry's black child, or something? Seriously, how do they manage to keep showing up in every single series??? Frakes was never that great, and Sirtis spent seven years adding nothing substantial to any story, ever. They must have some hex on the boys at Paramount.

Secondly, the last few seconds, where they try to connect Enterprise with the Enterprises of the past/future (i.e. Picard and Riker) was just horribly ham-handed. Apparently, Rick Berman was worried that without explicitly linking these series, his viewers would be all lost and confused. In Berman's mind, this is a typical ST Fanboy conversation:

"Gee, do you think that Kirk's Enterprise was named after Archer's Enterprise?"

"No, stupid. They're obviously two totally unrelated ships, dumbass!"

Whereas, in reality, your average ST Fanboy conversation is more like:

"So, do you think the protein synthesisers on Archer's Enterprise use an algae- or a mold-based feedstock? And if they have transporters, how come they can't leapfrog all the way to food replicators? And do you think I've got a chance with T'Pol?"

Or something.

On other bad SF matters, with a week and a half now past since Episode III came out, I've been giving a lot of thought to the weaknesses of the movie, and how it affects the series as a whole. The biggest single problem, as I see it, is that at most 20 years pass between episodes 3 and 4 - a rough estimate of Luke and Leia's age in New Hope. This gives us a timeline that looks really screwy - everyone in New Hope is talking about the Empire as if it's always been there, and the Jedi as if they're something you'd see in a museum. In 20 years? I find it really hard to believe that even the resources of a galactic empire could quash people's memory so completely. On the other hand, maybe the Empire has Fox News. In which case, Alderaan was supporting Bin Laden, and the Death Star is renamed "Freedom Sphere", or "Liberty Blaster."

With the demise of SW and ST, I guess it's time to take the B5 DVDs off the shelf again...