25. Your Future Is Historically Inaccurate (ENT seasons 1-2)

We’re talking about Enterprise – specifically the first two seasons:

• Our first encounters with the series, and why it wasn’t a great introduction to Trek for Anika’s eldest daughter
• Liz unearthed her reviews on the Wayback Machine and was appalled by her attitude towards Jolene Blalock
• In this house, we love and support T’Pol
• Archer is the worst captain (but Anika loves him)
• Trek for the George W Bush era (complete with off-topic anecdote about Liz bringing a cardboard Lucius Malfoy cutout to an anti-war protest for reasons that weren’t clear even in 2003…)
• We try not to swear on the pod, but Liz drops an F-bomb and a full rant about “Cogenitor”
• We also talk about the stuff we actually liked, and not all of them are Andorians!

[At the end, we claim the next episode will be covering Trek news out of SDCC. That is, of course, a lie; we changed the order around. Like the Prophets of Bajor, we exist outside linear time.]

Links!

• Source for the claim that an early pitch for the series had it set entirely on Earth for the first half of season 1.
• Liz’s geocities review page, c2001. With content warnings for gross attitudes towards Jolene Blalock and weirdness around sexuality in general. Look, it was 2001, we all had a lot of growing to do. Not least in terms of web design.
• Anika’s “Broken Bow” recap
• And also Anika’s T’Pol fashion project

Additional notes from Liz:

I promised a fresh podcast sketch! Here’s what I was working on while we recorded this episode: a T’Pol redesign. Not original art – I traced a promo picture. And may have forgotten to make her eyes the same colour? I’m only just now noticing that. But you see what I was going for, right? (Are fingerless gloves the touch telepath equivalent of crotchless underwear? Please DON’T share your thoughts.)

Additional notes from Anika:

Hey I have art too! Or rather “art”. Remember my embarrassing old Voyager webpage kathryn.islonely.com? I found the Enterprise section! 

Yes, my Enterprise handle was ‘vulcandoll’ OBVIOUSLY. (I also found a listing of my handles at this time and there is a theme: anakinsdoll, dracodoll, imaginaryalice, imaginny, KawaiiBorgGirl, Kazamadoll, unicorngirl, vulcandoll, zechsdoll…and also the url for the site itself was ‘dolltears’.) But it wasn’t exactly a reference to T’Pol, oh no, she got her own section and title:

It’s SO TERRIBLE and I am so delighted at how earnest and awful little me was. Anyway it’s not even the most cringey part. The ‘vulcandoll’ in my ‘me’ banner is actually the model featured in the music video for Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me”.

A video I subtitled “Jesus and the Vulcan”, again, OBVIOUSLY. 

Finally, here’s proof my daughter didn’t always hate Enterprise and/or Star Trek – I also found the (adorable) website I made with/for her when she was 6 and took this screenshot. 

(She has no memory of this because she was 6.)