[NGTM-1R]

And what about Picard?

If anyone asks you "Kirk or Picard?" the correct answer is "Sisko."

_{"Mister Worf! Prepare a Class II Quantum Torpedo and write on it 'Don't **** with The Sisko!'"}

[Luis Dias]

I never got this Sisko love. The guy is completely unhinged and deranged. Emotionally unstable and the actor doesn't even perform all the emotional waves that well.

Picard is by far the best acted star trek captain. He may well be the most boring though, he is mostly one-key. Still, the nuances of his character are played so well he deserves to be the best. By a mile.

[MP-Ryan]

Picard remains my personal favourite, and, I think, the one with the most depth.  Sisko is very well-written, however, and a completely different sort of captain with considerable complexity as a character as well.  He also has more personal growth through the series than does Picard.  I like them both a great deal, albeit for different reasons.

By the way, I'm Picard.

[Phantom Hoover]

i got sisko but that felt irreverent so i did it again until i got archer (i think stealing the balloon from the child was what clinched it)

[AdmiralRalwood]

I never got this Sisko love. The guy is completely unhinged and deranged. Emotionally unstable and the actor doesn't even perform all the emotional waves that well.

don't you talk **** about my man Avery Brooks

[Hades]

I never got this Sisko love. The guy is completely unhinged and deranged. Emotionally unstable and the actor doesn't even perform all the emotional waves that well.

I guess he could look that way by comparison to the TNG cast, most of which is robotic most of the time, but unhinged isn't what I'd call The Sisko. I also disagree about the acting performance too, but that's just my opinion.

[Bryan See]

Robotic means being an android, which is Data himself.

[NGTM-1R]

I never got this Sisko love. The guy is completely unhinged and deranged. Emotionally unstable and the actor doesn't even perform all the emotional waves that well.

Sisko is given hard duties and we are allowed to see him struggle with both that and the people around it. He cannot escape them. DS9 is not going around putting out fires, waiting for the next challenge. The challenge is there, a seemingly immutable part of the landscape, and something Sisko deals with every day without pause or rest. Picard is almost inhuman in his relentless calm certitude, has a crew that's been filtered through trying to get on the flagship, and gets to go find a new problem almost every episode rather than let the current one grind him down. In the end this all makes him a bit difficult to relate to as a captain and a leader, though he's imminently likeable as person.

Actually unstable and deranged would be if Eliot Stabler from SVU was a starship captain.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah if only the actor would be good enough to convey that in a believable way. Instead what we have is a situation wherein Sisko is constantly shouting and half of those times I am almost thinking that it is Sisko himself faking it. An actor faking a fake shout. But no, it's just Avery not being believable himself. Stewart is amazing in this regard: he never lets you off the suspension of disbelief.

Except in the movies. Then again, TNG movies are.... well... TNG movies.

[Ghostavo]

I don't know about that, I kind of like him.

Stewart chewing the scenery is amusing.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah that line is totally out of Picard's character. Hate it.

[LaineyBugsDaddy]

I don't find it out of character for the situation he is in. He already got assimilated once, and now the Borg are trying to take away his history. He has slowly been getting more and more angry, to the point where he nearly beat the hell out of the corpse of the thoroughly borged Ensign Lynch with a holographic tommygun, then suddenly shifted to cold detachment after Lily stopped him. He clearly is displaying some PTSD level stuff that has surfaced as a result of this conflict. Starfleet Command was correct. Him being involved introduced an unstable element to the situation. The only reason he pulled back from that was because Lily called him on it and did it in a way that got him to LOOK at himself and step back from the precipice. Yes, on its own the scenery chewing spiel he gives about the Borg and drawing the line is out of character, but in context of the film and his experience in The Best of Both Worlds, IMO, it fits. (Mind you, the bit about always falling back is at best confusing, seeing as how the Borg have only entered Federation space overtly once prior to this movie. I think the script writer went OTT there and ignored the established canon.)

[Mongoose]

I've watched all Star Trek asides from Enterprise and I must say that I really tried. I mean, I really really tried. But after enduring bad episode after terrible episode after horrible episode from season 1 and 2 in Enterprise I finally figured that sadomasochism wasn't my thing. You really endorse season 4 that much?

Absolutely.  Season 3 was far more of a mixed bag, with a pretty ham-fisted overarching metaphor for the Iraq War, and (as you saw) the first episode or two of season 4 was dedicated to wrapping it up in a fashion which I barely remember other than it being profoundly stupid, but after that was some pure gold.  There was a new showrunner for that season (Manny Coto, I think), and like Deepstar noted he finally focused on making the show an actual prequel to everything that came after, tying hard into some of the basic concepts of the overall mythos.  You may pooh-pooh the summaries you read, but apparently they aren't doing the material justice in any sort.  The augment episodes were certainly a thematic homage to Khan and had Brent Spiner doing some great guest work.  The Klingon two-parter turned Worf's throw-away joke line from "Trials and Tribble-ation" about the lack of makeup during the TOS era into legitimately-good backstory.  There was some quality content in there involving social upheaval on Vulcan, which combined with some Andorian/Tellarite focus later on really started laying the framework for the creation of the Federation.  The mirror-universe stuff was nothing if not unabashedly fun, basically reveling in the best sort of TOS cheese.  The final two-parter of the season has to be one of the best-executed Trek stories ever, with Peter Weller (Robocop!) turning in a spectacular guest performance.  And then...well, then they gave Rick Berman and Brannon Braga the reins for the series finale, which can be kindly described as a steaming pile of garbage that gave more screentime to ****ing Riker and Troi than the actual Enterprise cast.

In the end I think that Enterprise represents a massive missed opportunity, and that final season is proof positive.  Had the show started out tackling those sorts of stories, instead of meandering about with time-travel and other sorts of fluff,  I think it could have easily been a resounding success.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

In the end I think that Enterprise represents a massive missed opportunity, and that final season is proof positive.  Had the show started out tackling those sorts of stories, instead of meandering about with time-travel and other sorts of fluff,  I think it could have easily been a resounding success.

Quoting for truth. Both it and Voyager could have been so much better than they were.

Thematically, Entreprise should have been about how the Federation became what it is in the later series, how humanity got its **** together and rallied other species to create this utopian interstellar society we keep getting preached about.

From a story-telling perspective, it was an opportunity to do something different with the tech being shown - no shields, no phasers, no photon torpedoes, transporters being recent tech, no tractor beam. Instead, phasers get installed early, polarised hull plating get treated like shields and photon torpedoes arrive about halfway through the series.

Instead, we got another standard Trek show that had nothing new to show and nothing new to tell...

[Phantom Hoover]

All Voyager and Enterprise had to do -- all they had to do -- was to jump on the bandwagon at the time towards more long-form, arc-driven TV drama. Instead Berman and Braga kept the franchise in a creatively bankrupt episodic limbo like it was still 1990, where nothing ever happened and nothing mattered, and drove it into the ground; and Trekkies, eternally oblivious, blamed JJ for ruining Trek.

[Mongoose]

I would never even attempt to claim that Abrams "ruined" Trek...hell, if anything, he saved it from almost complete cultural irrelevance outside of sci-fi fandom and a few general pop-culture memes.  And everything else aside, the original casting for the films was flat-out inspired; Karl Urban in particular feels like the legitimate reincarnation of DeForest Kelley.  What I do regret is that Abrams took Star Trek and turned it into the epitome of a summer popcorn flick, full of shaky-cam shots and ridiculous lens flares and huge action set-pieces and Beastie Boys tracks and explosions and so forth.  Those elements aren't bad in and of themselves (well the lens flares maybe), but they're definitely not what made me fall in love with Star Trek in the first place, and there were precious few moments of introspection and philosophy that are central to the classic Trek experience.  Going that route may have been what was necessary to save Trek, but it still left part of me wondering if what we got could truly be called Star Trek anymore.  (And it's not like Abrams didn't have some pretty colossally stupid moments as well: the mess that was "red matter" for one, and then no so much homaging The Wrath of Khan as aping it wholesale for another.)  The reason I'm cautiously optimistic about this new series is that I hope it can provide a more traditional Trek experience.

[Phantom Hoover]

Red Matter was a great McGuffin, I don't get why it got so much hate (well I guess I do, nerds want to flex and show off how much they know about black holes).

[Scotty]

Beastie Boys is a fantastic inclusion in Star Trek and I will broker no argument on this subject.  Peaceful and post-scarcity doesn't mean boring.

[karajorma]

But let's face it, no Star Trek has been remotely as good as Babylon 5 when it comes to scale.

Fixed that for you.

I've read some synopsis on season 4 enterprise. First few episodes are really facepalmworthy material-wise.

So the first two episodes are "Go back to World War 2 Earth! With a twist!" - I love when Star Trek goes original like this.
There's a filler episode afterwards.
And then there's three other episodes that are about a different branch of "augmented" people who steal a ship and go on with a mad plan of theirs.
...

And IIRC, there's a "mirror mirror" double episode somewhere around the end of the series. No, really.

Now, the execution may well compensate for this, but I gotta say, it's hilarious. Just those synopsis of the alledged "best" season of a show shows exactly why it was the last Star Trek show for quite a while. It just didn't have anything interesting to say anymore.

Seriously though. Enterprise seems to be getting a lot of **** on here but as much as it had problems, I never hated it anywhere near as much as Voyager. Season 3 suffered from being uneven but it was an attempt to try to go over to an arc driven story and for that alone it was better than seasons one and two. I actually liked season three best of all because of that, even if some of the episodes were weak, the majority of the season was written by someone other than B&B and it showed.

Unfortunately B&B were given control back for the last episode of the season so after ending the series long arc, we get space Nazi's out of nowhere to set up probably the worst **** in Season 4. But after those two episodes, it looks like someone gave B&B some crayons, sent them to play in the corner and they were no longer a part of the show's writing until they were allowed back to completely **** up the final episode.

As for the mirror universe episodes, they're actually two of the best ones in the show. Like Tribblations in DS9 it's the cast getting to do something very different with their characters and just have some fun with it.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Red Matter was a great McGuffin, I don't get why it got so much hate (well I guess I do, nerds want to flex and show off how much they know about black holes).

I really didn't have a problem with Red Matter; what bothered me was that the "fastest" ship the Vulcans could send to try and save Romulus had a top speed of... warp 8? Did they really not have access to any Starfleet vessel made within the past, what, 50 years? Or did they rebalance the warp scale, again, and it just so happened that nobody had built anything that could go as fast as the new warp 9?