So since we're practically finished with it (minus the last episode but if you know anything about this series the last episode might as well be a bullet to the head and we're going to watch it anyways), some thoughts on the last piece of Star Trek media I'm really willing to watch.
Honestly expected worse of Enterprise. It doesn't get talked about as much and whenever I did end up hearing about it the feelings were always mixed at best. In my opinion though, years on and giving it a fair shot, the series is pretty good. It doesn't match the absolute peaks of some of the rest of what had come out of Star Trek, but I mostly enjoyed it the full way through and it did feel like a proper caring attempt to showcase the first Enterprise, before the United Federation of Planets, back when it was still just the Earth Federation. There are some complaints and issues you can definitely raise with continuity but it never really felt like the series was spitting in the face of Star Trek continuity, just trying as hard as possible to work with a franchise where the existence of a continuity was debatable at best in the first series and took a while to get established after the fact.
The actual NX-01 Enterprise itself is a ship I find pretty enjoyable. The thing is held together with sticks and glue, Starfleet genuinely slapped together whatever LCD screens they had access to onto a star ship. It's full of that feeling of just trying to get it to work, and being wildly surprised that it even does. Technologies like the universal translator are barely out of the testing phase.
The series also had a lot more focused plots, and of those I definitely feel mixed. The Temporal Cold War was kind of boring, the problem being our main cast has no real method of impacting the thing because it's a war between people using time travel. There were good moments with it, but whenever it was focused I felt a little checked out. Another recurring plot element I did like though was Vulcans as "antagonists." Throughout the series the Vulcans are still trying to help Earth establish their peaceful Federation, and the entire time the logically minded space elves are being subjected to endless humanity. They're never outright evil* (there's a few questionable things here and there) but instead it's a lot of Vulcans trying to plead to Starfleet to stop letting Enterprise do every foolish thing imaginable. Any time plots involved Andorians was great fun, especially since most of those episodes featured Jeffrey Combs. There's a lot more stuff like the Xindi war, honestly it was pretty good overall. Very much a war in the proper style of Trek instead of trying to dazzle with huge space battles.
Our main cast is pretty good, not going to dig too deep into everyone since this is already too long a post. Very unprepared people doing the best they can to be professional. Never ditches that ideal thankfully, could've easily turned to shit.
Oh, and I guess I should mention. The opening. This is actually the thing most know about the series. Yes, it has a cheesy kind of unfitting opening. I have Faith of the Heart stuck in my head actually now, but I have no idea what anyone was thinking pulling this. At least it's vaguely fitting of a song instead of using whatever pop hit or such track was around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9u9JKcmJmY I'm not able to find any images related to Enterprise specifically. Take this instead.
https://varishangout.net/media/0ba5bf80-a7fb-42b2-9edb-551bd8d22aef/Star%20Trek%EF%BC%9A%20Enterprise%20Theme%20but%20the%20theme%20is%20coming%20from%20inside%20the%20Enterprise%20NX-01%20%5BE9u9JKcmJmY%5D-%5B00.00.000-02.25.688%5D-audio.webm
