Weekend Trek “These Are The Voyages…”

I knew, coming in, that Enterprise‘s finale was legendarily bad.  It’s not, but it isn’t good either.

Then again, cultural osmosis being what it is, I knew all of the episode’s flaws in advance.

Yeah, so, sometime during the TNG episode “The Pegasus,” Riker had a crisis of conscience and went to Troi for advice, and her advice was to use the holodeck to watch and interact with Archer and that crew to figure out the right thing to do.  How did he do that?  I don’t know.  Here’s what I do know: that plot line makes this finale about Riker, not a character on the show that is ending.

In fact, here’s a list of things that the series got wrong with the finale that, I am guessing, they weren’t really planning.

• Riker is the focus
• Trip dies an anti-climactic death
• Troi mentions Trip’s death well before it happens
• Archer is sweating some speech he needs to make for the meeting that will lead to the formation of the Federation, but we never hear it, we’re just told it’s great
• We finally see the mysterious Chef’s face, and it’s Riker playing the role for the holodeck so he can interact with each of the main cast one at a time
• Travis and Hoshi didn’t really get much to do
• We’re told Chef is the ship’s confidant, which seems to be a repeat of the old DS9 joke about Morn talking, and I never liked that joke much anyway
• Six years passed between episodes

And, in fairness, here’s what went right:

• Jeffrey Combs was back as Shran
• It is always nice to see Frakes, Sirtis, and in an uncredited vocal cameo, Brent Spiner as their Trek characters
• “Space, the final frontier” comes in at the end, but it’s Picard, then Kirk, and then Archer, and they mostly used the pre-recorded bits for the first two captains
• Yeah, I got nothin’

I get that the series probably didn’t have much planned.  I get that.  The ratings dropped.  Star Trek had been using this tone and style since TNG started, and I know I gave up on Enterprise about the time I discovered Babylon 5 reruns.  That stuff rocked my world.  I should revisit it sometime.  A co-worker insists the real killer was inexpensive reality television, but did that many people care about Enterprise?

So, it ended early and with a crappy final episode.  Not the worst I’ve ever seen, but compared to its contemporaries, whether its the time mess of TNG, the end of the war and the final fate of Sisko in DS9, or just Janeway finally getting the ship home in Voyager, these are satisfying endings.  Enterprise just delivered a flat and uninteresting final episode.  That’s actually too bad.  It’s not a bad show.  It does a lot of things right, and most of the characters, given a chance, were fun people to hang out with.  Sure, it did poorly by Travis, arguably worse than Voyager did by Harry Kim, but there was something there that the show could build on.  The Xindi plotline was brilliant.  They were building something, and then the network decided it didn’t need to anymore.  That’s a shame.  It might have been nice to see where, if anywhere, this series was going.

8.5 out of 10 bemused Phlox moments.

So, that’s it for this era?  What next?  Well, a short one:  the three-movie Kelvin timeline era.

I’m kinda curious how well these movies hold up.