So, let's resurrect this old discussion, for kicks.

One point I kept making these past years is how the actors on previous Trek shows (DS9 and Voyager) got more comfortable with their characters and loosened up. They got over the weight of the franchise on their shoulders, played the characters as they were, and both shows were better for it once they reached their fourth season or so.

Enterprise is now in its fourth season, and I'm not seeing the same improvements. Connor Trineer, absolutely. He's great and he's really made Trip a full-out character. Billingsley, in the little screen time he gets, is also pretty good.

I guess I can make exceptions for the other actors, too. Park and Montgomery get little screen time to show us their characters. Blalock and Keating are supposed to be playing characters who are stiff and formal. So I guess I'm mostly complaining about Bakula. He really has failed to settle into this role. He still seems to be doing a Kirk impression, instead of making Archer his own character.

These last two seasons have been much more interesting from a writing perspective. But I'm still not feeling very connected to the characters, by which I mean Mr. Screentime himself, the Captain.

Just because it can't be said enough, Archer should die and Trip should become captain. I too have preciuos few feelings for Quantum. Well, precious few postiive feelings anyway.

I'm not sure what you mean about the Kirk impression. I don't really see that. But yeah, Archer hasn't quite come alive for me. And I'm more forgiving than most!

I think it's rather telling that everyone (TPTB, us, advertisers) seems to be focusing so much on the pretty--still. We don't know jack about this crew and so are forced to stay in the shallow end.

His stilted speech, mostly. It's like Bakula abandoned everything he was doing on Quantum Leap to try to be more like he thought we expected him to be, i.e. more like Shatner.

At first, I thought it made Archer seem kind of deliberately awkward, like the very first Warp 5 captain should be. But Archer should have settled in by now, and so should have Bakula.

I think Archer has loosened up a bit...but for me, I would have rather seen some serious post Xindi angst as opposed to the "he got laid and everything is OK now."

Trip has come the farthest; I can still recall this forum's season one mantra of "Shut up, Trip!"

I think what has been truly lacking on the past two seasons of ENT is growth. I agree with what people are saying about the actors becoming more comfortable with their characters, that kind of growth has happened in some areas and not in others.

The kind of growth to which I'm referring is the kind you see in specific episodes devoted to individual character's spritual, emotional growth. TNG had a lot of those. DS9 had a lot of those. The Tuvix episode of Voyager is a good example. Episodes that are designed to have a trifecta effect in my opinion. They help the actor better understand who their character is and why they do what they do. They help the viewer understand the same and are better able to understand where the series is heading and, perhaps even why. I also think they help the writers of future episodes develop deeper plotlines and more intriguing dialogue between the various characters. Take this season for example. Any evidence of the alien-nazi incident at all? Not that i've seen. Any leftovers from the Khannabes? Not that i've seen. True there is T'Pol's crackwhoredom, but they aren't using it to develop her, especially not with the current episodes showing all the rest of the vulcans acting the same way. Zero character developing episodes that i believe would help this series gain some respect and maybe even ratings in the process.

My two cents make any sense?

Try #3. Lousy, yet tolerable, board messages

ETA: 'yet tolerable'. Hooray for free. :-)

The TWOP ombudsman will refund your money.

Try to be a little more sensitive to the fact that Glark and his people are working really hard to make sure you don't get "lousy board messages" on this free site.

That's probably why Trip has come so far. They gave us Similitude and then The Forgotten. It would be nice if they could do that with some of the other characters. I think they've tried with T'Pol, but instead of good character development, we got CRACK WHOREdom.

I'm wondering if it's that, or some kind of strange, conscious effort not to be Sam Beckett Mk II.

What I find fascinating is the huge disconnect from what the show wants us to read, and what (as it would seem here) we actually read. The show wants us to see Archer as The Hero, and thus always does things like, say, put Surak's Katra in his head. You read Archer as The Hero, and this makes sense, storywise. But we (and I don't mean to speak for everyone, just a barometer of the general tone) don't see Archer as that. We read him as an uptight jerk who keeps getting handed the keys to the kingdom that he doesn't deserve.

I don't know what the writers can do to bridge that disconnect.

I think they need to bring Archer down a few notches before they try to raise him up even more. He's certainly being paraded around as king of the universe at the moment but if they were to take some time in the series to humanize him a little more, remember the 'darmok and gilad at tinagra' episode of TNG?, then it would be easier for the fan base to establish some kind of connection. Show the captain doing something for T'Pol, before you show him doing something for her entire race. Show him respecting Porthos a little bit before you have him meet the guy who begins the work on data. Just have him be a human being every once in a while before trying to turn him into a superhuman being. Most of my favorite episodes of any of the treks involved ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that gave me a chance to think 'what would i do?'. I personally cannot identify with having someone else's katra quantum leap into my head and have the responsibility of saving an entire civilization from mental destruction. This is why i think the writers have been warming us up to soval during the current episode arc. He's being [vulcan]ized, and with the comments about being away for 30 years, having him end up with Syrran's Katra would not be an objectionable thing to me. It's just a guess but i think people are already pretty happy with the way soval is at the moment so this would fall in line with what i like about Trek. Give a character some history, show them in ordinary circumstances dealing with dilemmas to which we can relate, and THEN make something extraordinary happen to them(in the world of TREK it's getting a Katra). The writers seem to have the order screwed up sometimes, and then get a lot of flak for it.

Though i suppose this is hard to do when, what, 10 episodes are left in the series? Maybe the last 5 or so haven't been written yet. Oh well. Porthos for Klingon High Command!