Star Trek: Enterprise Episode 422

Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise Season 4

SPOILERS TOTAL.  You've been warned.

422: These Are the Voyages... 2005 May 13

Enterprise seasons 1 and 2 were a bit aimless.  Season 3's Xindi storyline, though, gave the series a focus, and one could finally start to understand why they were "Kirk's childhood hero<nowiki>[</nowiki>es]" as the promotional tagline went.  In Season 4 all sorts of little crises occurred that kept them busy relatively near Earth rather than the distant exploring of the first two seasons, giving it a sort of... "TNG without backup" feeling.  Sometimes its attempts to connect too much to TOS or TNG seemed a bit forced and goofy, like dealing with the Klingon forehead ridges... but considering the episodes themselves were quite fun, I won't damn them too much for that.  The ratings were still in decline, though, so it wasn't much of a surprise when it was announced that season 4 would be the last.  I was sad to see it go.  With the behind-the-scenes change of Manny Coto taking over main duties over Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, things seemed to be going up.  However, I was glad that at least there was season 4.  Through novels I could get an occasional new Enterprise fix, and surely some day a new Trek series would somehow reference what became later of some of the NX-01's crew; they just can't help themselves with that sort of thing.  But what a shitty, shitty taste that final episode left in my mouth.

As I mentioned above, Manny Coto had been main man for most of season 4, but as the nominal executive producers for Enterprise and Trek in general, Berman and Braga wrote the last episode, and wanted it to be a "valentine" for fans, as the end of not only Enterprise but 18 straight years of modern Star Trek television.  That is I think the first thing wrong with the episode.  I'm all for a bit of crossover, but this was Enterprise's final episode.  Is THAT the time to take the limelight away from those characters?  Especially since as a rushed finale, this was just a regular-length episode.  This episode taking place in the holodeck 200+ years later, we never even "really" see the Enterprise characters.

If it were not the finale, and was handled well, a future holodeck episode is actually not a bad way to get some interaction with characters from 24th century Star Trek without messing with time travel.  However, this episode gets bonus penalties for actually harming the story of a GOOD Next Generation episode, The Pegasus.  In that episode, Riker knows of an illegal secret he'd been keeping for his then-captain since he was an ensign.  Both having been promoted, he's a commander keeping an admiral's secret, and is caught in loyalties between the admiral and Captain Picard.  He ends up not sharing the truth with Picard until late in the episode, once they've returned to a ship that was part of the old illegal experiment gone awry.  The Enterprise episode is supposed to take place within The Pegasus.  Riker is unsure what to do, and his counselor's advice... play holodeck in this simulation of an old-old-old-old-old Enterprise mission that will somehow help him learn about loyalty!

That sucks for three reasons.  First, the NX-01 goings-on don't seem all that directly related to Riker's struggles.  Second, it makes Riker appear a less respectable man.  He's worried about a secret that could have interstellar consequences, and his productive activity on this front is to roll holographic dough and make holographic catfish while chatting up holographic legends with a big smile?  Third, it just doesn't jive with the original episode.  Going by the Enterprise episode, you get the idea that he's decided it's important to let Picard know what's going on.  However, in the TNG episode... he DOESN'T until much later.

There's the additional problem that, well, it doesn't exactly look like Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Sorry, but mid-2000s Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis can't pull off early-1990s Riker and Troi.  With that sort of time difference, it would be like putting the actors from Star Trek II back into a 1960s Trek episode.  The sets also aren't quite right, which is especially ridiculous considering some of the same people had been working on Trek since TNG was on the air, and that several times in the modern Trek shows they've recreated the TOS Enterprise more accurately, even though they had less source material to work with.

So it takes focus away from NX-01 for an NCC-1701-D story that doesn't work.  But how does the NX-01 portion fare?  Even worse.

10 years.  We'd seen ~4 years of their adventures, but this episode skips to ~10 years, when Enterprise is soon to be decommisioned.  This really hurts the possibilities of further adventures through novels or future Trek series.  We're not told much about the 6 years in between, but it's enough to severely limit what we can even imagine happening.  Noone gets a promotion.  We've seen Riker and Troi looking 12 years too old, now we see these people looking 6 years too young.  No major characters are gone or added.  Important recurring character Shran, who Manny Coto had talked about making a regular if season 5 happened?  He disappeared for most of the last 6 years.  The Trip/T'Pol relationship which had seemed initially forced and floundering, but was handled better in season 4?  The relationship that finally started to get somewhere in the NEXT-TO-LAST EPISODE?  We learn it went almost no further.

The speech.  For much of the episode, Captain Archer is anxious about a speech he's going to give at a Federation-beginning ceremony.  The buildup, and we cut away as he's walking up to the podium?

Trip.  ARGH.  Here's the real kicker.  All indications are that they merely wanted to have something to make the episode feel important, so they do it by killing off a favorite character of many fans, including myself.  After all the situations they tend to get out of on a weekly basis, Trip is killed off in a holodeck simulation to add an exclamation point to the episode and give Riker more to think about!?  Fantastic.

ALL of the characters involved deserved better than this.