It's Star Trek Jim, but not as we knew it. Ed Power laments the latest episode in the sci-fi epic series
They are blaming George Bush for Enterprise, the gung-ho new Star Trek spin-off that beamed into living rooms this week. Led by a WASP-ish captain, cast firmly in the James T. Kirk mould, and a set in a near future that finds mankind besieged by hostile and unfathomable alien races, Enterprise has been roundly derided as wooden jingoism, the sort of flag-waving hooey that could only flourish in Dubya's shadow.
Unfortunately, those who tuned in anticipating Rambo-tinged bloodletting, lusty chauvinism and kick-ass interplanetary slug-outs, were deeply disappointed. Far from embodying the isolationist, craw-thumping America allegedly ascendant in the aftermath of September 11th, Enterprise felt drab and anaemic.
Divested of the cloying political correctness that enfeebled its predecessors, the show floundered in an ideological vacuum. Not that Enterprise should be condemned for jettisoning the franchise's oft eulogised PC trappings.
The penultimate generation of Star Trek offshoots were schmaltzy morality fables trussed up in Spandex jumpsuits. Their callow portrayal of racial harmony was fundamentally dishonest. While everybody looked different, the accents - and values - were unwaveringly American. There was no diversity here, only a grey listlessness that made for excruciatingly dull television. What's the point of intergalactic adventure if everybody you meet wants to be your friend?
Enterprise spurns its forbears' pat sermonising but doesn't know how to fill the void. If the series epitomises a political era then it is surely that of John Major; stunted, unimaginative, beset by a creeping, inarticulate fear of the unknown.
William Shatner's Kirk bounded across the cosmos with reckless abandon. Enterprise's Captain Archer is a grumpy stickler, a bean-counter motivated by a chip on his shoulder the size of Phobos. Veteran action TV actor Scott Bakula exudes a formidable screen presence yet there is too much styrofoam in his character.
Desperate to give us a rounded hero in place of the glib ciphers that populated Star Trek through the 1990s, Enterprise serves up a reheated cliché more appropriate to one of those cinematic video games that were all the rage five years ago.
Slovenly characterisation is the least of the show's problems. Taking place just 150 years from now - and several centuries before the events recounted in Star Trek's original 1960s incarnation - Enterprise sweats to establish a gritty atmosphere. The technology is clumsy and makeshift. Spaceships are claustrophobic warrens redolent of contemporary warships. Faster than light travel remains in its infancy. The transporters don't work properly.
Behind these cute retro touches hangs an air of unrelenting gloom. When producer Rick Berman promised an edgy Star Trek, he wasn't kidding. Swamped with doomy atmospherics and weighed down by lugubrious dialogue culled from a Bergman retrospective, vast swathes of this week's episode played out under an impenetrable murk. Is Berman trying to slash overheads by shooting in near total darkness?
Less palatable still is the soppy, sub-Bryan Adams signature tune, Faith of the Heart. Star Trek has always distinguished itself with zippy themes. Enterprise's sodden anthem inflamed fans who have petitioned the Paramount studio to bin it forthwith. Some diehards have even picketed the Paramount lot, demanding composer Diane Warren's head on a batleth (a Klingon torture device, as if you didn't know).
Despite its innumerable flaws, Enterprise has bucked a trend that saw ratings for predecessor, Voyager, slump worryingly in its closing seasons. Debuting in America a fortnight after September 11th, a two-hour pilot notched up a record audience for a Trek premier. Previous spin-offs were slow burners, only hitting their stride in their third or fourth season. Barely out of the starter's blocks, Enterprise is already in high orbit.
It's tempting to ascribe Enterprise's popularity to the patriotic fervour sweeping America. Some commentators have likened the show's central villains - a shape- shifting race called the Suliban - to Islamic fundamentalists.
Certainly Berman has not hesitated to tap into post 9/11 hysteria. A recent instalment opened with Captain Archer, clad in fatigues and baseball cap, saluting the crew of the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier recently deployed in the Afghan theatre. "From the Starship Enterprise to the aircraft carrier Enterprise," Bakula gushed, "welcome home." Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, an egalitarian who launched his project at the height of the Cold War, must be spinning in his space pod.
Enterprise goes out on Sky One on Mondays at 8 p.m.