Somedays a diamond ... and somedays a rock to go with the crow. It was rather nice for the powers to allow a few weeks to pass before popping the bubble of gushing puffery. But now the news is out: the deal closed when the price per episode dropped by over half. I imagine fancy studio mathematics must go into it but to my emptor's eye it seems Enterprise was priced twice what another would pay for it. Like improving the efficacy of a kind word with a gun, coupling fan efforts with a substantial drop in price got farther than just fan efforts alone.

The High Teer Akaar said, "Is it not best to have two who bargain for the same goods?" When you're selling diamonds (dilithium, whatever) that makes sense: the premise of bargaining requires a product worth bargaining for. Yet was it really easier as an alternate path to cut quality corners so that now the desired approach becomes "Is it not better to cut our price by half?" I can't be the only one troubled by the basic questions buried in the fancy mathematics. How will it be possible to produce quality programs for half the price, since even at full price not all eggs in the basket were Grade A? If they're already breaking even or actually losing money on it already, how do they justify the loss of even more?

And where's that money going to come from? Are we going to see bottle after bottle, and a return to cave after cave? (Something tells me though if the idea to eliminate T'Pol's wardrobe comes up they'll jump on it right away. "It's completely logical for me to go around naked.") I fear the sacrifice will come from the dimension in which ENT excels: its incomparable graphics. I hope there's lots of stock footage in the can already. And feel free to get rid of Daniels!

TOS got cut back financially in its final season, usually with less than satisfactory results. For every inspired "Spectre of the Gun" type set design we also suffered heavily stripped, overly padded episodes like "The Empath." Look, I'm not going out of my way to tell people to stop whatever keeps them busy and makes them happy. But it does cast the "success" of such efforts in an entirely new light. Maybe the fan effort did something to help secure the season we're about to enjoy. But I'm guessing the two-for-one clearance sale did a whole lot more.