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