http://itsjustlanguage.livejournal.com/ (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
itsjustlanguage.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh_ooc2008-02-24 08:12 pm
itsjustlanguage.livejournal.com) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2008-02-24 08:12 pm
Entry tags:
Spotlight on Fandoms: Enterprise
Star Trek: Enterprise ran for only four seasons, just a little bit longer than the original series but three seasons less than all the other incarnations of Trek. I'll admit up front that like a lot of Trek fans, I quit watching it because it was bad. The show was loaded down with lots of eye candy but seriously lacking in good writing. Facing cancellation, the show made some drastic changes with a season-long arc in its third season and went on for a fourth season that was awesome, but just wasn't enough to survive cancellation the second time.
Enterprise (or ENT) is about the voyages of Earth's first ship capable of reaching Warp Five. It's been about a century since Star Trek: First Contact, and a century before the adventures of Kirk and Spock. The transporter hasn't been perfected, the universal translator doesn't really work, and the beginning of the United Federation of Planets is still a decade away.
Regular Characters
Jonathon Archer (Scott Bakula): The son of famous engineer who designed the Warp Five engine, Archer is impatient to explore space and carry out the work that his father started. He's not happy with the Vulcans, believing that they intentionally held back the development of human space exploration and he's ticked off that they've insisted on assigning a Vulcan officer to his crew. Over the course of their mission, Archer comes to rely on T'Pol, and one one alternate universe, she becomes his caretaker after he's incapacitated. Archer has close friendships with the other officers on his command crew. He brings his pet beagle Porthos with him, and the dog seems to get more screen time than some of the other cast members.
T'Pol (Jolene Blalock): The Vulcan science officer who thought she was going to be aboard Enterprise for just a few weeks. Instead, she becomes the first Vulcan to work closely with humans, eventually resigning from the Vulcan High Command to stay on Enterprise. T'Pol seems cold and unfeeling at first, but close contact with the humans exposes a vulnerable, emotional side.
Charles "Trip" Tucker III (Connor Trinneer): Enterprise's chief engineer is a close personal friend of Archer's. He's also mistrusting of Vulcans in general and view T'Pol with suspicion, but he eventually learns to work with her... and more. The attack on Earth in season three kills his sister and Trip turns to T'Pol for help coping. They eventually become romantically involved. Trip's best friend is Malcolm Reed.
Phlox (John Billingsley): A Denobulan physician serving in an exchange program on Earth, Phlox is pressed into service aboard Enterprise when human doctors are unable to treat a Klingon who crash lands on Earth. He opts to stay on board Enterprise because it gives him an opportunity to study humanity. Phlox's medical techniques seem a bit unorthodox. He raises a variety of creatures in Sickbay, and uses them in his treatments. Phlox is the first to admit that Denobulan family relationships are complicated. He has three wives, and each of his wives has three husbands. When threatened, he can also blow his face up like a pufferfish. Phlox's closest friendships are with T'Pol and Hoshi.
Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating): Malcolm comes from a long like of British naval officers, but he disappoints his family by choosing Starfleet. He believes in strict military discipline and resents Archer's attempts at fraternizing with the crew, but he eventually comes to find that the crew is the family he's never had. After Malcolm and Trip face death in "Shuttlepod One," they become close friends. Malcolm develops the tactical alert protocols, which later become yellow and red alerts. Malcolm is the reason I started watching Enterprise the second time around.
Hoshi Sato (Linda Park): Hoshi went through Starfleet training, but after a particular incident, she leaves to become a professor at a Brazilian university. Archer struggles to bring her when Enterprise sets out earlier than expected, but she refuses until he tempts her with a recording of their Klingon passenger. Hoshi is devoted to her captain and her closest friends on board are Phlox and Travis.
Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery): The son of cargo ship crewmembers, Travis has been further out from Earth than anyone else on Enterprise. He disappoints his father by joining Enterprise as the helmsman. Having grown up in a close family atmosphere, Travis is more approachable than his friends Hoshi and Malcolm.
Recurring Characters
Admiral Maxwell Forrest (Vaughn Armstrong): The leader of Starfleet Command and Archer's direct superior. He finds himself walking a delicate balance between human interests and the Vulcan High Command. He is killed in a terrorist attack on the Earth Embassy on Vulcan in season four, but his final act of bravery saves the life of Soval.
Soval (Gary Graham): As the Vulcan Ambassador to Earth, Soval is resented by Archer and many other Starfleet officers because he represents Vulcan interference in human affairs. He later becomes the biggest Vulcan supporter of Starfleet activities, and when he believes the Vulcan High Command has mis-led Archer after the death of Admiral Forrest, Soval joins the Enterprise on a mission to expose the truth of the attack on the Earth Embassy. I really can't leave out the fact that a number of female fans refer to Soval as HOVILF, which stands for "Hot Old Vulcan I'd Love to..."
Shran (Jeffery Combs): Shran is an Andorian Commander who leads a team to search the Vulcan monastery at P'Jem for evidence that the Vulcans are spying on Andoria. Archer, Trip and T'Pol pay a visit at the monastery at the wrong time and are captured by the Andorians, but then Archer and T'Pol help Shran find a long-range sensor array that the Vulcan High Command had concealed in the monastery. Shran vowed to repay his debt to Archer, and came to his aid again and again. Archer helped bring Shran and Soval together to negotiate a cease-fire between Vulcans and Andorians. Shran became a fan favorite who came back often, and it was rumored that he would join the cast as a series regular if there had been a season five.
Degra (Randy Oglesby): The designer of a weapon meant to destroy Earth, Degra is a member of the Xindi Council. Over the course of the third season, he crosses paths with Archer, who persuades him that humans are not a threat to the Xindi. He is responsible for bringing Archer before the Council so Archer can plead for Earth to be spared. When it fails and Degra is killed, his blueprints allow Archer, Malcolm and Hoshi to disable the weapon before it fires on Earth.
Major Hayes (Steven Culp): As Enterprise sets out on the Xindi Mission, Starfleet assigns a team of MACOs (Military Assault Command Operatives) to supplement Archer's crew. Major Hayes is a West Point-trained officer who leads the MACOs and butts heads with Malcolm, who resents having them on board. After a friendly sparring-match turns into a knock-down-drag-out fight, they find common ground when Hoshi is kidnapped by the Xindi and Hayes leads a mission to rescue her. He is mortally wounded in the process and dies with Malcolm by his side. The same week his death on Enterprise aired, Steven Culp's character on JAG was also killed. He went on to star in Desperate Housewives where he got killed yet again, and recently he got fed on by a wraith on Stargate Atlantis.
Season By Season
Season One: In the beginning, Enterprise is a few months away from launch when a Klingon crash lands on a farm in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. The Vulcans suggest that they can transport the Klingon's corpse back to Qo'noS in a few weeks, but Jonathon Archer feels that Enterprise can leave immediately and return him alive to be treated. The Klingon turns out to be a courier with evidence for the Klingon High Council. This lays the basis for the Temporal Cold War between warring factions of time-traveling aliens from the future. Archer finds a new enemy in the Suliban, especially one called Silik who takes orders from a shadowy figure from the future. No, it doesn't really make sense. Archer finds an ally when his steward, Daniels, claims to be a Starfleet officer from the 31st century who has been sent back to fight Silik.
Some of first season is clunky because of the Temporal Cold War episodes, but my must-see ones would be Unexpected, Silent Enemy and Shuttlepod One.
Season Two: After the Suliban change history to make one of Archer's first contact missions a failure, Daniels takes Archer to the 31st century, but they find themselves in a time stream that's been changed. After dealing with that mess, Archer gives the "Gazelle Speech" to convince the Vulcans that the Enterprise needs to continue their mission. Many fans point to this as a moment where you can see that something is just not working with the show, as Archer's performance is really iffy.
The crew continues on their merry way before a cliffhanger ending when they just barely get renewed and the producers decide to shake things up by having the Xindi attack Earth, setting the stage for a new direction. Episodes from season two that are worth watching include Minefield, Dead Stop, Future Tense and Cogenitor.
Season Three: Enterprise heads off to find the Xindi, a race no one's heard off that attacked Earth and killed millions of people in a preemptive strike. Turns out there's actually six sub-species of Xindi, all evolving on the same home world that has since been destroyed, and they've been given bad information from a Temporal Cold War baddie that humans are going to wipe out the Xindi. Archer and his crew risk their lives to stop them from launching a super weapon, and nearly a third of the crew is killed in the process. T'Pol is ordered to return to Vulcan but resigns to stay with Archer. The crew is forced to reinforce the hull with Trellium-D, which causes emotional instability to Vulcans and can be fatal. In a bizarre twist, T'Pol develops an addiction to Trellium-D. She starts injecting herself with it to help herself experience emotions and ends up falling in love with Trip.
Most of the main cast get new hairstyles and uniforms in an effort to shake things up, but the biggest change is Manny Coto joining the writing staff. The T'Pol/Trellium-D storyline was very heavily criticized by Jolene Blalock for essentially turned her character in to an intergalactic crack whore. Season Three is one big story arc and it's tough to pick out individual episodes that are must-sees, but I'd go with Twilight, Similtude, Proving Ground, Harbinger, Damage, E2, The Council, Countdown and Zero Hour. See, I told you it would be tough to pick just a few. E2 is the episode that got me hooked on Enterprise the second time around, and the final three form a continuous story arc that wraps up the Xindi mission. Zero Hour also has the worst possible cliffhanger ending, with Archer apparently dying on the super weapon, except he wakes up in WWII New York as a prisoner of aliens in Nazi uniforms. The show was barely renewed, for which fans were eternally grateful that they had another season to clean up that mess.
Season Four: Manny Coto took over as showrunner, and Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens joined Mike Sussaman on the writing staff to turn out the best season of ENT. Most of season four is taken up with smaller story arcs with a couple stand-alone episodes. It takes two episodes to get the crew out of WWII and back to their proper century, but they also bring an end to the Temporal Cold War mess. The crew return home to find that anti-alien sentiment is growing on Earth, and T'Pol takes Trip home to meet her mother but is forced to accept an arranged marriage. There's a story arc with Brent Spiner guest starring as Arik Soong as a mad geneticist and another where Archer and T'Pol help bring about a revolution on Vulcan. It all leads up to the return of Shran as Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites and humans work together to stop attacks on their ships by unmanned Romulan drones. Finally, Manny Coto answers the burning question of why TOS Klingons don't have forehead ridges, and then the action returns to Earth as the Enterprise crew fights a human terrorist group determined to stop treaty negotiations between the founding members of the Federation.
Oh, wait, there's one more episode, the finale. Series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga (henceforth known as Bermaga) wrote one episode for season four entitled These Are The Voyages (or TATV). They take Riker and Troi from the ST:TNG episode The Pegasus and have them running a holodeck simulation of Archer's final voyage on Enterprise. Riker's comedic tone doesn't match his seriousness in the TNG episode and the cast of Enterprise was resentful to find themselves as guest stars in their own series finale. Brannon Braga said that he did this as a "valentine" to the fans, but most ENT fans refer to this episode as the "f*cknale" and question Bermaga's concept of a valentine. If you are more of a TNG fan, you may enjoy it, and Mike Sussman tacked on an ending that ties everything together nicely, but the episode itself is one of the worst from the entire show.
My top picks for season four are Home, the Vulcan Trilogy of The Forge, Awakening and Kir'Shara and the Mirror Universe episodes, but pretty much all of season four is worth watching except for the final episode.
The Controversies
As studio support for ENT faded, Rick Berman was quoted as saying that he felt as early as Deep Space Nine that all the Trek sequels were a mistake but the studio forced him to do it. Brannon Braga, meanwhile, lost the support of fans during Voyager's run. Together, Bermaga proved that they really just weren't in touch with the Trek audience. They wanted to create Enterprise as something that would appeal to a general audience but never found it.
The show was billed as Enterprise for the first two seasons, another effort to approach the non-Trek audience, but by season three it was changed to Star Trek: Enterprise to bring back the Trek fans.
Almost everyone disliked the opening theme, which was a pop song called "Faith of the Heart" instead of an instrumental theme like the other Trek series. They did tinker with it in season three but most fans never warmed up to it. For the Mirror Universe episodes, they altered the credits and used a more traditional instrumental theme. Dominic Keating sings his own parody of the ENT theme at convention appearances.
Since they don't rely on the transporters as much, ENT crewmembers returning to the ship have to wait in decon until they're cleared to rejoin the regular ship's population. It makes sense, except Bermaga used this as an opportunity to have T'Pol and Trip strip down to their skivvies and rub decon gel all over their bodies. The decon scenes got a lot of flack.
One of the Enterprise regulars dies in the series finale, but because it all takes place on a 24th century holodeck, a lot of fans question whether or not the finale's account is accurate. Some Trek novelists have made a point of it by resurrecting this character in post-TATV novels.
Additionally, one can argue that the entire series was the result of alterations from the timeline and therefore it never took place. During its run, some Star Trek fans tried to argue that the show should have been canceled because it wasn't in keeping with Gene Roddenberry's vision.
Where can I find more?
Memory Alpha serves as the ultimate Star Trek wiki covering canon information while Memory Beta covers non-canon information from novels, video games, and all other Trek sources that are not the movies or television series. Trek Nation has an episode guide, links to episode reviews, and Trek news headlines. You'll find me as Thena in the Enterprise forum of their TrekBBS.
All four seasons of ENT are available on DVD, plus the SciFi Network currently runs a three-hour block of ENT episodes. Or, you might know someone who knows where to find it elsewhere.
As you can tell, I'm really pretty opinionated about my fandom and there's a lot more that I can talk about, so feel free to ask me any questions!
Enterprise (or ENT) is about the voyages of Earth's first ship capable of reaching Warp Five. It's been about a century since Star Trek: First Contact, and a century before the adventures of Kirk and Spock. The transporter hasn't been perfected, the universal translator doesn't really work, and the beginning of the United Federation of Planets is still a decade away.
Regular Characters
Jonathon Archer (Scott Bakula): The son of famous engineer who designed the Warp Five engine, Archer is impatient to explore space and carry out the work that his father started. He's not happy with the Vulcans, believing that they intentionally held back the development of human space exploration and he's ticked off that they've insisted on assigning a Vulcan officer to his crew. Over the course of their mission, Archer comes to rely on T'Pol, and one one alternate universe, she becomes his caretaker after he's incapacitated. Archer has close friendships with the other officers on his command crew. He brings his pet beagle Porthos with him, and the dog seems to get more screen time than some of the other cast members.
T'Pol (Jolene Blalock): The Vulcan science officer who thought she was going to be aboard Enterprise for just a few weeks. Instead, she becomes the first Vulcan to work closely with humans, eventually resigning from the Vulcan High Command to stay on Enterprise. T'Pol seems cold and unfeeling at first, but close contact with the humans exposes a vulnerable, emotional side.
Charles "Trip" Tucker III (Connor Trinneer): Enterprise's chief engineer is a close personal friend of Archer's. He's also mistrusting of Vulcans in general and view T'Pol with suspicion, but he eventually learns to work with her... and more. The attack on Earth in season three kills his sister and Trip turns to T'Pol for help coping. They eventually become romantically involved. Trip's best friend is Malcolm Reed.
Phlox (John Billingsley): A Denobulan physician serving in an exchange program on Earth, Phlox is pressed into service aboard Enterprise when human doctors are unable to treat a Klingon who crash lands on Earth. He opts to stay on board Enterprise because it gives him an opportunity to study humanity. Phlox's medical techniques seem a bit unorthodox. He raises a variety of creatures in Sickbay, and uses them in his treatments. Phlox is the first to admit that Denobulan family relationships are complicated. He has three wives, and each of his wives has three husbands. When threatened, he can also blow his face up like a pufferfish. Phlox's closest friendships are with T'Pol and Hoshi.
Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating): Malcolm comes from a long like of British naval officers, but he disappoints his family by choosing Starfleet. He believes in strict military discipline and resents Archer's attempts at fraternizing with the crew, but he eventually comes to find that the crew is the family he's never had. After Malcolm and Trip face death in "Shuttlepod One," they become close friends. Malcolm develops the tactical alert protocols, which later become yellow and red alerts. Malcolm is the reason I started watching Enterprise the second time around.
Hoshi Sato (Linda Park): Hoshi went through Starfleet training, but after a particular incident, she leaves to become a professor at a Brazilian university. Archer struggles to bring her when Enterprise sets out earlier than expected, but she refuses until he tempts her with a recording of their Klingon passenger. Hoshi is devoted to her captain and her closest friends on board are Phlox and Travis.
Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery): The son of cargo ship crewmembers, Travis has been further out from Earth than anyone else on Enterprise. He disappoints his father by joining Enterprise as the helmsman. Having grown up in a close family atmosphere, Travis is more approachable than his friends Hoshi and Malcolm.
Recurring Characters
Admiral Maxwell Forrest (Vaughn Armstrong): The leader of Starfleet Command and Archer's direct superior. He finds himself walking a delicate balance between human interests and the Vulcan High Command. He is killed in a terrorist attack on the Earth Embassy on Vulcan in season four, but his final act of bravery saves the life of Soval.
Soval (Gary Graham): As the Vulcan Ambassador to Earth, Soval is resented by Archer and many other Starfleet officers because he represents Vulcan interference in human affairs. He later becomes the biggest Vulcan supporter of Starfleet activities, and when he believes the Vulcan High Command has mis-led Archer after the death of Admiral Forrest, Soval joins the Enterprise on a mission to expose the truth of the attack on the Earth Embassy. I really can't leave out the fact that a number of female fans refer to Soval as HOVILF, which stands for "Hot Old Vulcan I'd Love to..."
Shran (Jeffery Combs): Shran is an Andorian Commander who leads a team to search the Vulcan monastery at P'Jem for evidence that the Vulcans are spying on Andoria. Archer, Trip and T'Pol pay a visit at the monastery at the wrong time and are captured by the Andorians, but then Archer and T'Pol help Shran find a long-range sensor array that the Vulcan High Command had concealed in the monastery. Shran vowed to repay his debt to Archer, and came to his aid again and again. Archer helped bring Shran and Soval together to negotiate a cease-fire between Vulcans and Andorians. Shran became a fan favorite who came back often, and it was rumored that he would join the cast as a series regular if there had been a season five.
Degra (Randy Oglesby): The designer of a weapon meant to destroy Earth, Degra is a member of the Xindi Council. Over the course of the third season, he crosses paths with Archer, who persuades him that humans are not a threat to the Xindi. He is responsible for bringing Archer before the Council so Archer can plead for Earth to be spared. When it fails and Degra is killed, his blueprints allow Archer, Malcolm and Hoshi to disable the weapon before it fires on Earth.
Major Hayes (Steven Culp): As Enterprise sets out on the Xindi Mission, Starfleet assigns a team of MACOs (Military Assault Command Operatives) to supplement Archer's crew. Major Hayes is a West Point-trained officer who leads the MACOs and butts heads with Malcolm, who resents having them on board. After a friendly sparring-match turns into a knock-down-drag-out fight, they find common ground when Hoshi is kidnapped by the Xindi and Hayes leads a mission to rescue her. He is mortally wounded in the process and dies with Malcolm by his side. The same week his death on Enterprise aired, Steven Culp's character on JAG was also killed. He went on to star in Desperate Housewives where he got killed yet again, and recently he got fed on by a wraith on Stargate Atlantis.
Season By Season
Season One: In the beginning, Enterprise is a few months away from launch when a Klingon crash lands on a farm in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. The Vulcans suggest that they can transport the Klingon's corpse back to Qo'noS in a few weeks, but Jonathon Archer feels that Enterprise can leave immediately and return him alive to be treated. The Klingon turns out to be a courier with evidence for the Klingon High Council. This lays the basis for the Temporal Cold War between warring factions of time-traveling aliens from the future. Archer finds a new enemy in the Suliban, especially one called Silik who takes orders from a shadowy figure from the future. No, it doesn't really make sense. Archer finds an ally when his steward, Daniels, claims to be a Starfleet officer from the 31st century who has been sent back to fight Silik.
Some of first season is clunky because of the Temporal Cold War episodes, but my must-see ones would be Unexpected, Silent Enemy and Shuttlepod One.
Season Two: After the Suliban change history to make one of Archer's first contact missions a failure, Daniels takes Archer to the 31st century, but they find themselves in a time stream that's been changed. After dealing with that mess, Archer gives the "Gazelle Speech" to convince the Vulcans that the Enterprise needs to continue their mission. Many fans point to this as a moment where you can see that something is just not working with the show, as Archer's performance is really iffy.
The crew continues on their merry way before a cliffhanger ending when they just barely get renewed and the producers decide to shake things up by having the Xindi attack Earth, setting the stage for a new direction. Episodes from season two that are worth watching include Minefield, Dead Stop, Future Tense and Cogenitor.
Season Three: Enterprise heads off to find the Xindi, a race no one's heard off that attacked Earth and killed millions of people in a preemptive strike. Turns out there's actually six sub-species of Xindi, all evolving on the same home world that has since been destroyed, and they've been given bad information from a Temporal Cold War baddie that humans are going to wipe out the Xindi. Archer and his crew risk their lives to stop them from launching a super weapon, and nearly a third of the crew is killed in the process. T'Pol is ordered to return to Vulcan but resigns to stay with Archer. The crew is forced to reinforce the hull with Trellium-D, which causes emotional instability to Vulcans and can be fatal. In a bizarre twist, T'Pol develops an addiction to Trellium-D. She starts injecting herself with it to help herself experience emotions and ends up falling in love with Trip.
Most of the main cast get new hairstyles and uniforms in an effort to shake things up, but the biggest change is Manny Coto joining the writing staff. The T'Pol/Trellium-D storyline was very heavily criticized by Jolene Blalock for essentially turned her character in to an intergalactic crack whore. Season Three is one big story arc and it's tough to pick out individual episodes that are must-sees, but I'd go with Twilight, Similtude, Proving Ground, Harbinger, Damage, E2, The Council, Countdown and Zero Hour. See, I told you it would be tough to pick just a few. E2 is the episode that got me hooked on Enterprise the second time around, and the final three form a continuous story arc that wraps up the Xindi mission. Zero Hour also has the worst possible cliffhanger ending, with Archer apparently dying on the super weapon, except he wakes up in WWII New York as a prisoner of aliens in Nazi uniforms. The show was barely renewed, for which fans were eternally grateful that they had another season to clean up that mess.
Season Four: Manny Coto took over as showrunner, and Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens joined Mike Sussaman on the writing staff to turn out the best season of ENT. Most of season four is taken up with smaller story arcs with a couple stand-alone episodes. It takes two episodes to get the crew out of WWII and back to their proper century, but they also bring an end to the Temporal Cold War mess. The crew return home to find that anti-alien sentiment is growing on Earth, and T'Pol takes Trip home to meet her mother but is forced to accept an arranged marriage. There's a story arc with Brent Spiner guest starring as Arik Soong as a mad geneticist and another where Archer and T'Pol help bring about a revolution on Vulcan. It all leads up to the return of Shran as Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites and humans work together to stop attacks on their ships by unmanned Romulan drones. Finally, Manny Coto answers the burning question of why TOS Klingons don't have forehead ridges, and then the action returns to Earth as the Enterprise crew fights a human terrorist group determined to stop treaty negotiations between the founding members of the Federation.
Oh, wait, there's one more episode, the finale. Series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga (henceforth known as Bermaga) wrote one episode for season four entitled These Are The Voyages (or TATV). They take Riker and Troi from the ST:TNG episode The Pegasus and have them running a holodeck simulation of Archer's final voyage on Enterprise. Riker's comedic tone doesn't match his seriousness in the TNG episode and the cast of Enterprise was resentful to find themselves as guest stars in their own series finale. Brannon Braga said that he did this as a "valentine" to the fans, but most ENT fans refer to this episode as the "f*cknale" and question Bermaga's concept of a valentine. If you are more of a TNG fan, you may enjoy it, and Mike Sussman tacked on an ending that ties everything together nicely, but the episode itself is one of the worst from the entire show.
My top picks for season four are Home, the Vulcan Trilogy of The Forge, Awakening and Kir'Shara and the Mirror Universe episodes, but pretty much all of season four is worth watching except for the final episode.
The Controversies
As studio support for ENT faded, Rick Berman was quoted as saying that he felt as early as Deep Space Nine that all the Trek sequels were a mistake but the studio forced him to do it. Brannon Braga, meanwhile, lost the support of fans during Voyager's run. Together, Bermaga proved that they really just weren't in touch with the Trek audience. They wanted to create Enterprise as something that would appeal to a general audience but never found it.
The show was billed as Enterprise for the first two seasons, another effort to approach the non-Trek audience, but by season three it was changed to Star Trek: Enterprise to bring back the Trek fans.
Almost everyone disliked the opening theme, which was a pop song called "Faith of the Heart" instead of an instrumental theme like the other Trek series. They did tinker with it in season three but most fans never warmed up to it. For the Mirror Universe episodes, they altered the credits and used a more traditional instrumental theme. Dominic Keating sings his own parody of the ENT theme at convention appearances.
Since they don't rely on the transporters as much, ENT crewmembers returning to the ship have to wait in decon until they're cleared to rejoin the regular ship's population. It makes sense, except Bermaga used this as an opportunity to have T'Pol and Trip strip down to their skivvies and rub decon gel all over their bodies. The decon scenes got a lot of flack.
One of the Enterprise regulars dies in the series finale, but because it all takes place on a 24th century holodeck, a lot of fans question whether or not the finale's account is accurate. Some Trek novelists have made a point of it by resurrecting this character in post-TATV novels.
Additionally, one can argue that the entire series was the result of alterations from the timeline and therefore it never took place. During its run, some Star Trek fans tried to argue that the show should have been canceled because it wasn't in keeping with Gene Roddenberry's vision.
Where can I find more?
Memory Alpha serves as the ultimate Star Trek wiki covering canon information while Memory Beta covers non-canon information from novels, video games, and all other Trek sources that are not the movies or television series. Trek Nation has an episode guide, links to episode reviews, and Trek news headlines. You'll find me as Thena in the Enterprise forum of their TrekBBS.
All four seasons of ENT are available on DVD, plus the SciFi Network currently runs a three-hour block of ENT episodes. Or, you might know someone who knows where to find it elsewhere.
As you can tell, I'm really pretty opinionated about my fandom and there's a lot more that I can talk about, so feel free to ask me any questions!