Do not adjust your sets

Sparklestone and I have recently begun watching Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD. A year or so ago, we watched the entire 7-season series of The Next Generation. We geeked hard and we loved it. Still do.

For those of you not up to our geekiness quotient, Enterprise is the story of Earth's space exploration work prior to Captain Kirk's adventures. The captain of this Enterprise is Captain Archer - played by Scott Bakula. That's right, Mr. Quantum Leap himself... it really works. The ship is much smaller than any we have known - especially the interior, the Computer is not very smart yet, and most of the people on the ship are humans. It's very easy to relate to this crew as they are the first Earth team to go a-exploring - they're more like us now than any of the other crews we know. The Captain is wearing a baseball cap with the ship's numbers embroidered on it, for crying out loud.

But the lighting is really incredible. During the second episode that we watched, Sparkle stopped the DVD and put in a different movie just to make sure that nothing was going wrong with his (big, fancy, new) TV. Sure enough, the lighting for the show is different. It reminds me very much of the lighting in the original Star Trek series. The light is muted and there is a lot of soft-focus action. It certainly achieves the feeling that we're watching a little bit of pre-history - that we're looking back on events that have already happened, but that we just haven't yet seen. And that's fascinating because Enterprise is still a possible *future* for us, not old news.