Enterprise | Season 4

These are the Voyages

Directed By: Allan Kroeker
Written By: Rick Berman and Brannon Braga

Rating:

Reviewed on: 16 August 2005
Reviewed by: Michael Axe

In Brief:

Review: (Contains Spoilers)

It is with a heavy heart that I come to write this review. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Trek, and I’ve followed Enterprise from it’s promising start, through it’s patchy early seasons, to finally see it achieve what it set out to do in its fourth season. The previous episode, “Terra Prime”, worked as a fitting tribute to the show and its premise, and also managed to capture the spirit, depth and hope for the future that makes Trek so appealing. Unfortunately, the final episode, not just of Enterprise, but of Trek as we know it, is exactly the kind of dumbed-down, action-packed, thoughtless nonsense that has dogged Trek in recent years.

This episode could be judged on any of three levels – as an episode in its own right, as the finale of Enterprise, and as the finale of Trek. The sad news is, it doesn’t work on any level. As a standalone episode, it’s bland, shallow and uninteresting, relying on pointless action scenes and unconvincing villains and scenarios to distract the viewer from the paper-thin plot. As the finale of Enterprise, it’s just plain insulting (see below), and it’s not hard to see why the cast of Enterprise were less than impressed. And as the final episode of Trek, it’s a huge disappointment, as despite all of its superficially nostalgic touches, it fails to include what really makes Star Trek great – heart, emotion and intelligence.

To break this episode down, the reason why is just doesn’t work is that it fails on three crucial elements – plot, characters and theme. Without these, all that you’re left with are the decorative extras of special effects, action sequences and cheap nostalgia.

The first failing of this episode is plot. I know it must have been tempting to incorporate some elements from other Trek shows into this episode, given that it is the final episode of Star Trek as a franchise, but the Riker/Troi subplot just doesn’t work. Firstly, it takes up far too much time, which is a real insult to the cast of Enterprise who effectively become guest-stars in their own finale. But even that would have been acceptable if it had worked – but it doesn’t. We learn nothing new about Riker and Troi from the sub-plot, nor does it add anything to the story of the NX-01 crew. Like so much of Berman’s & Braga’s later work, the episode is full of pointless trappings and embellishments that add nothing to the episode.

The plot itself (what there is of it) concerns a flimsy storyline about helping Shran rescue his kidnapped child from some nondescript villains. While the rest of this season’s storylines have dealt with major events that are building towards the founding of the Federation, this kidnapping plot is like a weak episode from Enterprise’s early seasons or Voyager’s later seasons, and sticks out like a sore thumb as being all show and no substance. Even the fact that it is set on the eve of the signing of the Federation Charter is typical Berman/Braga lip-service, as the plot has nothing to do with the unity and progress made by bringing the four founding races together, and could just have easily been set at any point in Trek history and be about any crew and any half-arsed rescue mission.

The second, and in my opinion unforgivable, failing is in the characterisations of the crew. Many viewers, myself included, felt that the characters were poorly written, two-dimensional stereotypes in many of the early episodes of Enterprise – and yet in recent seasons, the actors have excelled themselves to really define their characters, while the writers have also fleshed out and developed the characters. But in this final episode, Berman & Braga have reverted to the initial stereotypes and have ignored all of the subsequent character development and evolution.

This really stands out when you compare this episode to the previous episode, “Terra Prime”. In TP, Hoshi was shown to have developed into a take-charge officer – in this, Hoshi has nothing to do but admit she thinks Trip is cute and she’ll go back to Brazil. In TP, Mayweather was considering growing up and settling down – in this he’s back to being a two-dimensional wandering pilot. In TP, Reed had become a confident officer who won the respect of his Section 31 superiors – in this he has little to do other than inexplicably fail to prevent cardboard villains board the ship, capture the captain, and kill a senior officer. In TP, Phlox reflected on how his time among humans had affected him – in this he does nothing but make what I felt was a deeply inappropriate comment to Archer shortly after Trip’s death. As for Archer himself, in TP you saw how he had developed into a leader and a believable historic figure – yet in this episode, he’s an unsophisticated cowboy, who treats everything as a joke and who also makes rather unsavoury comments about how he had “never trusted Vulcans” and how T’Pol still doesn’t trust “any” Andorians (neither of which were comments the Archer seen in the previous episode was likely to have made).

By far the worst characterisations however, were those of Trip and T’Pol. Trip, who for almost the entirety of the first two seasons was denied any decent character development, has reverted to the simpleton, redneck, hick persona that dogged his character for so long. All of the work that Conner Trinneer put into the last two seasons has been ignored, and after his powerful and moving performance at the end of Terra Prime, he’s forced to regress to the two-dimensional, catfish obsessed, Southern engineer characterisation. T’Pol is no better, as all of the evolution her character has undergone in the third and fourth seasons is thrown out the window, and she seems to be the same person now as she was in season one.

But it’s the treatment of Trip and T’Pol’s relationship that sums up where Berman & Braga have gone wrong. After the convincing and intelligent development of their relationship over the last two seasons, which culminated in the two of them briefly becoming parents in the previous episode, we’re told that NOTHING has happened between them in the six years between “Terra Prime” and this episode. And that’s true of all of the crew – they have done nothing with their lives, and have not developed or evolved in any way over a six year period.

The end result is that the NX-01 crew come across as caricatures of themselves, devoid of any depth or development – hardly a fitting tribute to the show. Thankfully, all of the characters were given a worthy send-off in the previous episode, but that still does not excuse their poor treatment here.

The final failure relates to the theme and subtext of this episode. While “Terra Prime” was ABOUT something, and conveyed the sense the Humanity could better itself (a central theme to Trek) – this episode is about nothing. It purports to be about choosing to follow your instincts above following your orders, but this is just tacked on to justify the flimsy storyline. The TNG episode “The Pegasus” was about this internal conflict, but this episode adds nothing to Riker’s dilemma, and Trip’s storyline had nothing to do with Riker’s situation. The truth is, this episode didn’t touch on any of the central elements that mean something in the Trek universe – even Trip laying down his life for a friend was stupid, unconvincing and utterly, utterly pointless.

The episode does have a couple of nice touches – Riker and Troi commenting on the differences between the NX-01 and the Ent-D, the multi-generational voice-over at the end, and the Federation Charter signing scene – but all of this is just window-dressing, and there’s no substance behind it all. When you think of what the best episodes of all of the Trek shows have taught the viewer about the human condition, you realise just how superficial and irrelevant this episode is.

This episode would have been a weak 2-star episode if it had been any other – but it loses half a star for being such a terrible tribute to Enterprise, and another half-star for being such a terrible tribute to Trek. Berman & Braga have done nothing but remind us why Trek has been haemorrhaging viewers for years now, and this shallow final offering makes me hope that if and when a new Trek series is commissioned, it will have some new creative blood behind it. Trek in Berman’s & Braga’s hands has become a shadow of its former self, as they continue to TELL the fans what they want, rather than doing as Coto and other have done, and LISTENED to what the fans want. In comparison to the other genre shows out there (e.g. Battlestar Galactica), previous Trek incarnations, and even last week’s Enterprise episode, this finale tribute to the Star Trek franchise is more like the final nail in its coffin.

It’s almost worth going back and rewatching “Terra Prime” again to remind myself how Enterprise SHOULD have ended…

Michael Axe is the author of a number of novellas and screenplays, and is a main reviewer for ST Universe. All his reviews are copyright © Michael Axe and are used here exclusively with his permission.