Time Travel is the new Holodeck

I watched the first episode of season 4 of Enterprise

last night.

Despite my protestations that I'm not a Trekkie I do have a soft spot for the show. I do not sit in awe of the plot, both Farscape and Babylon 5 did better, only DS9 got close. The episodes are more or less American-ised little morality tales about why you should do the

"right" thing. The Star Trek world is quite a rich and diverse one although they never seem to document any of their techno-bollocks solutions in case it would come in handy again. The main characters are well done however. Spock, Data, Quark, Seven, The Doctor and T'Pol are all favorite characters of mine and one thing I feel the show has got right*. As a show it has many faults however I watch it because its entertaining, not because its a religious experience.

Enterprise has not been the most stunning of shows so far. Granted it doesn't have aura of communist utopia that TNG had. Archer and his crew have been faced with some difficult moral choices and made some dodgy calls. The "no internal conflict" rule has been bent (and hopefully discarded for good). The track record with avoiding techno-bollocks solutions to their problems has been fair to middling.

However my main gripe is the excessive use of time travel. I'm with the Vulcans on this one, time travel should not exist**. It has shades of the hideously dangerous and unreliable Holodeck that kept getting rolled out as a plot stick in TNG. Except of course with time travel you can add that other jarring plot device, the big red reset button.

Unfortunately the plot-arc since href="http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-2498/epid-88250/">season

1 has been tied to the concept of the "Temporal Cold War" and the writers have seemed intent on pursuing it ever since. I severely doubt they will come up with a suitably clever work around to explain why Kirk et all don't take all this time travel stuff in their stride. After all in the universe they have created humans have been dealing with temporal anomalies since they took their first baby steps into space!

*most of the time

**unless your from Galifrey, in which case you can do what you like naturally ;-)