OK, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe B&B didn't learn much. The first episode of the third season shares many of the same flaws that the worst of the episodes from the first two seasons suffered.
Interestingly, they seem to have added the words "Star Trek" to the show's title, which now displays on the credits as "Star Trek: Enterprise" over a much sped up, more guitar-based version of the theme song. The gesture of adding "Star Trek" to the title seems to me to be a bit of a desperate effort to re-capture core Star Trek fans.
Instead of moving back toward the core approaches, plots and philosophies that earlier versions of Star Trek used to attract and retain so many intelligent fans, however, Enterprise's show runners instead bump up the military focus, the male dominance, the violence and the unnecessary sexualisation of the female characters.
In other words, episode writers Braga and Berman choose, instead of coming up with an interesting, intelligent and thoughtful plot, to have a lot of men shouting at each other (starting with Archer treating Reid to an extended lecture), a lot of fist-fights and weapons fire and, of course, T'Pol taking off her clothes.
Remarkably, the episode is incredibly slow in developing, with the action climax taking place 10 minutes before the end of the show.
There are many things that don't work and don't make sense about the episode, both as a stand-alone story and as the introduction to the season-long Xindi arc, and I don't really feel like listing them here.
Suffice it to say, this introductory episode proved a significant disappointment to me and I'm sure to the 4.2 million viewers who apparently tuned in. B&B seemed to have been given an opportunity to start to rebuild their audience but chose instead to continue making the same mistake they made during the first two seasons that drove their viewers away: they disrespected the intelligence of their viewers and their commitment to all that Star Trek stood for.
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