Star Trek Enterprise – The Complete Second Season

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: B-     Episodes: B

 

 

With the arrival of Star Trek Enterprise – The Complete Second Season, the show has been totally cancelled without the chance of a last-minute revival and the entire Trek franchise has been put in mothballs as far as new material is concerned, for now anyways.  That makes watching the show different, wondering whether to blame it for the death of the Sci-Fi world that changed the genre or just that it was beyond played out.  To see Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer just never works, no matter what he does.   I wondered if a different actor could have done better and even if one could have, it ultimately would not have made any difference to the fate of the franchise.

 

I spent much of the review for the first season addressing all the things that did or did not work about the show.  That goes down to its look, which was being shot on film until they switched to digital High Definition in the last season, a move that always shows a company is losing faith in a given program.  The episodes over the seven DVDs are as follows, with shows offering deleted scenes marked by an *:

 

1)     Shockwave, Part 2

2)     Carbon Creek

3)     Minefield

4)     Dead Stop*

5)     A Night in Sickbay*

6)     Mauraders

7)     The Seventh

8)     The Communicator

9)     Singularity

10)  Vanishing Point

11)  Precious Cargo

12)  Catwalk

13)  Dawn

14)  Stigma*

15)  Cease Fire*

16)  Future Tense

17)  Canamar

18)  The Crossing

19)  Judgement

20)  Horizon

21)  The Breach

22)  Cogenitor

23)  Regeneration

24)  Bounty

25)  The Expanse

 

 

Stigma and First Flight also has subtitle text commentary by Michael & Denise Okuda, while Regeneration has an audio commentary by Michael Sussman and Phyllis Strong.  For extras with the actual shows, that is about on par with the first set.  This season in quality is on par with the first, especially since Paramount backed the scripts with the budgets they needed at this point.

 

As for the performance of the shows on disc, the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1/16 X 9 image on all the shows are again consistent and clean, remaining some of the best transfers we have seen from any of the series boxes.  The color is definitely no match for the better episodes of the original 1960s series, reviewed elsewhere on this site.  However, for 16 X 9 TV series we have seen on DVD to date, if fares very well.  The digital visual effects are still also better than the usually bad and sloppy work we are seeing all over the place.  The Dolby Digital sound is available in 2.0 Stereo with Pro Logic surround and a somewhat better 5.1 mix, which may not be the epitome of 5.1 mixes, but is not bad and the preferred track choice here.

 

Extras this time include the deleted scenes, text commentary and audio commentary as noted.  DVD 7 also offers outtakes, Secrets and Moments for this season, a Jolene Blalcok profile, LeVar Burton – Star Trek Director, a look inside the episode A Night In Sickbay, photo gallery and outtakes.  That is almost as many extras as the last set, but feels like it falls a tad short.  The packaging is again top-rate, helping to justify the price tag outside of the loaded content in general.  This should make fans happy, but I would still recommend anyone wanting to take on the show start with the first season set.  Then, if you are impressed enough, move onto this one.  If you actually are a fan of this show already, you’ll find The Complete Second Season a worthy continuation of the first.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo