Thirty Days of TV: Day Twenty-Six

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4: These are the voyages... comes immediately to mind.

Some background first: I had watched the first few Enterprise episodes when they were broadcast and then decided the show wasn't really for me. Not that it was staggeringly incompetent or something like that, but it came at the tail end of the production team having more or less written Star Trek in various variations for sixteen years, and it showed. Especially since Enterprise had the bad luck to come at a time where there were several other good sci fi shows around. Give it a rest for a while, thought I, meaning both myself and anyone producing Star Trek. The fact that fannish rumour told me subsequent seasons reflect 9/11 happening and Star Trek suddenly going all gung ho (and not in a self critical way, unlike, say, the relevant DS9 episodes where Sisko & team are confronted what the Dominion threat has made of them and Starfleet at large) didn't encourage me to tune in again.

However, the show did have its champions. And I often have a soft spot for the fannish underdog. (By which I don't mean the in-story underdog, I mean those characters unpopular by fandom at large.) So when I began to hear, from bimo and others, that Enterprise offered some genuinenly good stuff, like fleshing out the Andorians the way TOS had done the Vulcans, TNG had done the Klingons and DS9 had done the Cardassians, Bajorans and Ferengi, that the fourth season in particular was eminently watchable, other than the finale, which everyone hated (including, as I heard at FedCon from Jolene Blaylock, the actors), I thought, come on, why not? So I watched the fourth season, which I was assured I could do without having watched the previous ones, and didn't regret it. But boy, could I ever see what the complaints about the finale (which wasn't just the season but the series finale) had been about. I didn't hate it, I just thought it was the most misguided idea ever for a series finale. If it had been a mid season inter-Trek crossover episode (which TNG, DS9 and Voy had all done), it would have been not stellar, but okay.

( Here are the spoilery reasons why as a FINALE, it is my choice for the WTF? category above all other candidates )

Poll of rage

Some more rewatching of s4 BSG, and checking on my old reviews of the original broadcast, I find my emotions about pretty much everything haven't changed - I still like or even love what I did back then, and still dislike/am irritated by/loathe what I did back then. No, not just Adama, but to exorcise my Bill feelings so I can reach the state of fannish zen once more, I decided on a poll. For said poll about Adama's most infuriating actions in s4, I'm taking the Watsonian, not the Doylist perspective, so "Roslin stopped getting scenes unconnected to him in the last third" is not an option, as this is no fault of Bill's. There are, however, plenty of in-universe actions to choose from!

( Spoilery poll is spoilery for season 4 )

To repeat something I've said before, I think the reason why I find Adama so galling while liking characters like Tigh and Baltar, who share several of his bad traits (though not the same ones), is that with Saul Tigh and Gaius Baltar, the show never gives you the impression of being unaware of their numerous flaws; the characters get called on them and every bad decision they make. And, well, in the larger picture, they actually learn something and improve. Whereas with Adama it's a downward slide that's not admitted as such. Plus, of course, there's the way said flaws express themselves. ( Which is spoilery. )