Star Trek: Enterprise/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Archer. SF Debris loves to riff that he's actually an insane homeless man Starfleet found living in a box somewhere. Given some of his orders during the show's run, Chuck's theory actually might be too far off.
    • Future Guy. While Word of God says he's probably a 27th century Romulan, some fans believe he's either an alternate-future Archer or possibly the Archer from the Mirror Universe.
    • Soval is also another candidate.
  • Author's Saving Throw: The Vulcans in Enterprise (particularly T'Pol) were criticized by viewers for acting very un-Vulcan-like. This was used as the basis of a three-episode story in the fourth season, involving the Syrannites (an orthodox sect of Vulcans, in contrast to Vulcan society which has "strayed from Surak's teachings") and the discovery of the Kir'Shara (the original copy of Surak's writings).
    • It is said that Season 5 would have revealed that T'Pol was actually half-Romulan, which would have gone some way to explain some of her un-Vulcan-like behaviour.
    • Another complaint was how the show did nothing to show the formation of the Federation. Again, this was addressed in the fourth season with a three-episode story that showed the beginnings of alliance between Humans, Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites (the Federation's four founding species) as well as the formation of the "Coalition of Planets" in the penultimate two-part story.
    • Also, the greatest one of all, "Judgment", which turns the entire Klingon race from a gigantic flanderization to a retroactive Tear Jerker that shows that the warrior caste took over the Klingon's entire culture slowly over several hundred years. By the time of Star Trek: Voyager, the warriors are all that's left.
    • Basically, Season 4 can be seen as one really long Author's Saving Throw...because they got a new head writer, who promptly set the writers' team to cleaning up the mess of his predecessors. It wasn't perfect, but there was reasonably only so much they could do in one season, as well as fitting it in with the previous three clunky seasons.
  • The Chris Carter Effect: Many fans doubted whether the Temporal Cold War arc would ever make sense. It never did.
  • Cliché Storm: "Precious Cargo"
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Shran--so much so that he would have joined the ship's crew in the planned season 5 as a regular character.
  • Epileptic Trees: A theory that existed as far back as the pilot episode was that Enterprise was actually a Show Within a Show in the world of TNG-era Trek, which explained the more advanced-looking technology and supposed continuity errors. This remained a fringe theory in Enterprise fandom for several years, until the series finale was shown to have a holonovel of the Enterprise as a framing device, and all of a sudden the theory was taken a lot more seriously.
  • Erection Rejection: The blatant fanservice appeal of the decontamination scenes turned away quite a few potential fans.
  • Evil Is Sexy: the Mirror Universe Empress Hoshi-- make that Empress HOTTIE.
  • Fanon: Bakula himself suggested Archers middle name is Beckett.
    • Not to mention the whole issue of "What timeline is it a part of?" that's cropped up since Abrams' Star Trek came out. The answer varies depending on who you ask.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: A large portion of the fanbase rejects the series finale "These Are The Voyages". Some people reject it entirely, while others reject it as a historical fabrication thanks to the fact that it took place on the Enterprise-D's holodeck. The Expanded Universe novels take this latter route.
  • Fan Dumb: Before the new Enterprise was revealed, there was an interview with Rick Berman with an image in the background that showed an overhead silhouette (and thereby a sneak peek) of the Enterprise. Fans were in an uproar not because it looked bad, but because it had some slight resemblence to a lesser known Akira-Class ship design of The Next Generation shows (It can be seen briefly in the Star Trek: First Contact Borg battle). It ended up being the overhead was about the only resemblance between the two and not only did the Enterprise turn out to be radically different, it was a vastly more aesthetically pleasing design.
    • And yet they found more reasons to complain when it was shown the NX-01 looked more advanced then the one from the original series.
  • Growing the Beard: Season 3 or 4. Both seasons (particularly the latter) were far and away better received than what came before.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In a first season episode, someone is amazed at how far Archer and his crew have come, and asks him what things have been named after him back on Earth. Archer laughs this idea off, but it's revealed later that, eventually, two planets were named after him.
  • Iron Woobie / Stoic Woobie: Reed. Really, the guy should be given a medal for the number of times he's been shot, concussed, crushed under rocks, pinned to the hull of the ship by a Romulan mine, almost hanged, etc.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Silik. Mirror Universe Forrest, Archer, and Empress Hoshi.
  • Running the Asylum: Season Four alone has more explicit references to the original series then all previous Star Trek series combined. "In a Mirror, Darkly" restaged some events from a TOS episode frame by frame, also featuring a faithful reconstruction of a bridge similar to the original Enterprise.
    • This is also a rare case of this sort of thing dramatically improving the show on all fronts. Since the new staff really cared about making a good Trek show, they worked a lot harder at making the show good than previous teams had.
  • Snark Bait: SF Debris makes its living off of how many Wall Bangers are in this series.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: In Fortunate Son we're obviously supposed to disagree with the humans on the freighter who are trying to attack a base of Nausicaan pirates because the humans tortured a prisoner for information and the man in charge, Matthew Ryan, is clearly obsessed. However Ryan has a point. So far Starfleet and the Vulcan's haven't done a single thing to stop the pirate attacks and the freighters have to endure constant attacks by far stronger pirates. The episode itself seems to unconsciously admit this when Archer can't think up a good counter to Ryan's complaints.
    • It gets better. Just two episodes after this episode is "Silent Enemy". A bunch of alien repeatedly attack Enterprise without provocation, injure their crew members and make it very clear they aren't going to stop. Archer's response to someone doing this to his ship? Righteous anger and threatening to fight back with everything they've got! Why does that sound familiar?
  • Tear Jerker: The death of Elizabeth in "Terra Prime".
  • Unfortunate Implications: In "Terra Nova" a colony made of white people with only one black person seen in the original roster, devolved into subterranean cavemen played by mostly black actors.
    • Apparently in "Shockwave Part 2" we're supposed to be happy that Enterprise is able to continue its mission... and forget the whole plot of the first part, was that 3000 colonists were horribly vaporised when they hadn't been in the original timeline... Daniels seems to think time travel is only apparently useful to stroke the ego of Captain Archer.
    • Many have openly wondered what it says about Tucker's personality that when he's exposed to the inhibition-removing toxin in "Strange New World," he starts going off on rather inflammatory anti-Vulcan rants. However, it's also been pointed out that not only are these rants not really any worse than the ones that Archer spews put practically Once an Episode, Archer indulges in his rants without being under the influence of any such intoxicants.
    • The aliens from "Unexpected". Technically, what the female engineer did was rape Tucker, even having the gall to lie to his face about what she was doing, calling it "a game". The reason Tucker was on the vessel in the first place was because they had broken down and they needed someone to fix their engines. This takes a rather creepy undertone that later in the episode, no more than a couple days after this, Enterprise finds them tailing a Klingon vessel, seemingly suffering the exact same mechanical problem. Coincidence... or the modus operandi of a bunch of serial date-rapists?
  • Values Dissonance: The clashing style of a pre-The Original Series with modern Twenty Minutes Into the Future sensibilities.
  • What an Idiot!: Several in "The Expanse".
    • Duras waits until Enterprise reaches the solar system until he attacks, allowing Starfleet to quickly deploy reinforcements and drive him off.
    • The Xindi attack Earth with the prototype superweapon for no apparent reason. They didn't have any way to predict Future Guy cheating and telling Archer about them, but if they hadn't attacked at all, there never would have been any search for the weapon and Earth would have been destroyed.
    • How about the fact that Starfleet didn't seem to mobilize its Solar System Defense Forces until after the weapon was destroyed! The twenty or so ships we saw welcoming Enterprise back would have been helpful against the Xindi weapon and the ONE ship escorting it!
  • The Woobie: Tucker.
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