Enterprise: Season One

Just finished watching the first season of Enterprise. If nothing else, this show is a lot of fun to watch. I started watching Star Trek DVDs back when Enterprise was first on the air; the theory was that if I watched all seven hundred-odd epiosodes of Trek back-to-back, I’d be able to keep it all fresh in my mind and compare how the show has changed over forty years. It hasn’t worked, really. By the time I got to the end of The Next Generation, I’d pretty much forgotten the original series, and now it’s been over two and a half years since I first started watching DVDs. I just finished watching twenty-six episodes of Enterprise that I saw when they first aired back in 2001, but I have only a vague recollection of them. Oh well.

As I feared, the Enterprise DVDs aren’t any better than the other series’. You still have to wait through several minutes of opening warnings, credits and a video sequence before you can pick an episode. Actually, I think the Enterprise DVDs are a little worse than the other series in term of usability. Each disc has four episodes, and this is what the episode selection menu looks like (this is actually from season two since it’s what I have on-hand; season one is the same):

Although English does usually obey the rule of left-to-right before top-to-bottom, the visual divider between the left and right groups makes it look for all the world like two columns of selections, so that the correct episode order would be 028, 029, 027, 031 instead of the correct 028, 027, 029, 031 (the out-of-order episode numbers don’t help). But it is nice that the episodes are presented in widescreen, so my DVD player’s entire screen is filled. Also, unlike the previous series (but like the animated series), there are commentaries and deleted scenes for a few episodes.