Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005), 98 episodes
Star Trek: Enterprise is the most recent Star Trek spinoff, and the first Trek series since the original to be canceled by its network. Enterprise begins in 2151, 114 years before Kirk’s original five-year mission. It follows Earth’s first warp five capable ship and humanity’s initial exploration of the galaxy.
The Writing, Part I
Enterprise begins with the Temporal Cold War, a running plot that features in all four seasons. It’s also the dumbest idea in the history of Star Trek. Time travel is always a cheap plot device – instead of world-building, it focuses on fleeting and ultimately irrelevant change. Here it’s a nonsensical serial storyline (never mind that we know the show isn’t going to permanently screw with our beloved Trek timeline – only J. J. Abrams gets to do that). And the show’s writers succeed in making sure that it’s never interesting. Every time Daniels appears, you can give up on the episode – that guy can’t die enough times. Quantum dating is stupid – it doesn’t even pretend to make an attempt to make sense. The show looks so silly waist-deep in time paradoxes, taking itself so seriously. Time travel made more sense in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Enterprise takes place in Star Trek’s distant past, but with the transporters, universal translator, advanced sensors and everything, it’s really not significantly different from any other Trek. Even the things that are different are exactly the same – polarized hull plating/shields, phase pistols/phasers, armory officer/tactical officer, and so forth. And honestly, it seems to draw as much from Galaxy Quest as it does from the old Treks.
The series does have an impressive effects budget – they probably used the savings from almost never showing any extra crewmembers (Malcolm and Travis are not engineers, but they’re the ones always helping Trip). We get a lot better looking aliens here than we usually saw on Voyager.
Enterprise is more sex-minded than all the other Treks put together – we get more people naked and more people in their underwear for no good reason – we see every single character in various stages of undress, frequently. Apparently they don’t wear bras in the future (“Shockwave, Part II”), and men shave their armpits (“The Xindi”). No excuse to take one’s clothes off is too cheap or contrived. In the decon chamber, they get to rub lotion on each other all the time – and even though five out of seven cast members are male, you never once get a man rubbing lotion on another man.
More than anything, Enterprise is a very eco-friendly show – it does a lot of recycling of ideas, stories and actors. How much recycling? They give us the Ferengi and the Borg, most egregiously. Come on.
Characters
Captain Archer is Diet Kirk. He’s kind of an oaf – short-tempered, not too quick on the uptake, and always ready with the cowboy diplomacy. But Scott Bakula doesn’t have anywhere near Bill Shatner’s force of personality, and Archer doesn’t have any of Kirk’s self-aggrandizing awesomeness. He’s just cranky (and often unethical). But he’s also bulletproof and he gets in plenty of fistfights.
Trip, the genial country bumpkin, is easily the best character on the show. He gets the most development, and he gets most of the best lines.
T’Pol is a wet blanket Vulcan in the spirit of Tuvok. The more people play Vulcans, the more I appreciate what a wonderful job Leonard Nimoy did as Spock.
The show focuses on these three primarily, trying to replicate the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triangle of rapport. But it’s not even close. And we don’t even get as much development of these three as you might expect – “Captain Archer likes water polo” isn’t character development.
Phlox, the ebullient doctor, and Reed, the fussy armory officer, are the secondary characters, much like Scotty was in the original series. And barring just a few episodes, Hoshi and Travis are undeveloped tertiary characters. They, more than anyone else, are a throwback to the original series – racial minorities who just drive the ship and answer the phone.
There’s really no excuse for the poor character development. Deep Space Nine had a number of recurring characters (i.e. not regulars) who got more development in a lot fewer episodes – Garak, Dukat, Nog, Rom. Heck, Nog got more character development and was more interesting than any other ensign in any Star Trek series.
The fact that most of these characters aren’t interesting doesn’t help. Enterprise has no dynamic characters, no one who can carry an episode, or even a scene.
There are a number of trek regulars and semi-regulars here in new roles – Ethan Phillips, Rene Auberjonois, Brent Spiner, Jeffrey Combs, J. G. Hertzler, and Robert O’Reilly. It’s nice to see them, but mostly, through no fault of their own, they don’t contribute much.
Season One
The series initially tries to bring back the wonder of space exploration. That’s well and good, but some of us have seen over 600 episodes of Star Trek already. There are a lot of unimaginative episodes here – certainly there’s nothing that couldn’t have been a Next Generation or Voyager episode given only minor tweaks. There’s an attempt to stylistically NASA-fy Trek, but it’s not enough to make Enterprise feel fresh. And Enterprise is frequently boring. There are some really poor B-plots, too: a crewman gets a cold; the crew tries to discover Reed’s favorite food – yawn.
“Oasis” is recycled from DS9’s “Shadowplay.”
Season Two
Season two is better and slightly more original, but again, just about everything here could have been an episode from another series. But unlike on TNG, every alien encountered here either has ulterior motives or is there to cause problems overtly. Everything comes down to the crew versus aliens, which gives the show a great deal of predictability. It’s a shock and surprise if aliens ever come on board and are genuinely friendly.
The series has unbelievably few fatalities on all sides. Countless times, Enterprise is half-destroyed, and we get, “oh, fortunately, there were no casualties.” I have no idea why they did this.
Here, humanity’s relative concept of morality (and Archer’s in particular) cramps the style of ethics-minded episodes (strangely, this didn’t happen in older Trek shows with the same ethics). “Cogenitor,” for example, could have been a great episode, if Archer wasn’t so amoral.
“Regeneration” manages to emasculate the Borg even more horrendously than Voyager did. Here, the 22nd-century crew takes out a ship of 24th-century Borg and cures assimilation, all without taking a single casualty.
“Precious Cargo” completely rips off the Leia-Han interplay from The Empire Strikes Back. “Dawn” rips off Hell in the Pacific, Enemy Mine, TNG’s “Darmok” and TNG’s “The Enemy.” “Judgment” rips off Star Trek VI. In two full seasons, Enterprise brings nothing new to the table. Nothing new and good, anyway.
Season Three
Season Three changes the show’s direction – it’s one long arc. Unfortunately, it’s fundamentally silly, beginning with a profoundly ill-conceived attack by the Xindi and heavily featuring the Temporal Cold War.
Evidently there were a bunch of Voyager scripts left over, because that’s what the first half of this season feels like. And like Voyager, it’s filled with convenient coincidences, contrived happenings, and downright silliness. The first half of the season is completely awful. Most of these episodes could take place in any other season, as the arc is very loosely tied together.
As the season progresses, it tries to be grittier, at times with shockingly poor results, most of which involving Captain Archer’s horrendously bad ethics. You see a person’s true character by the tough choices they make – that’s one of the fundamental aspects of character development. And now that we finally get some, we see that Archer’s not a good person. But at least he has the decency to feel bad about it – I guess that’s what’s necessary to be a good guy these days. He’s a man who asks a lot from others and offers little in return.
Archer’s ethics are so bad that in “Hatchery,” an alien chemical makes Archer display good ethics – he tries to save a shipload of babies – and the crew mutinies, to a man. But do they mutiny in “Damage” when Archer’s ready to commit flagrant piracy? Of course not.
Shocking as this may sound, Enterprise is frequently dumber than Voyager ever was. It doesn’t make any blessed sense that to universal translator-wielding humans who have deciphered all the languages, some of the Xindi communicate in English and others don’t (“The Council”). In “Zero Hour,” aliens are about to destroy earth – where’s the defense force? Where are the other Starfleet ships? They’re there in “Storm Front.”
And here we get a fit, attractive science officer in a skintight outfit struggling to deal with new emotions. Where have we seen that before? But I suppose “poor man’s Seven of Nine” is an improvement over “poor man’s Tuvok.”
Season three ends with a cliffhanger where, had the show been canceled, as rumored, I would not have cared in the slightest.
“Doctor’s Orders” recycles Voyager’s “One.”
Season Four
Season Four sees Manny Coto become showrunner. He takes the series in a different direction, but it’s not a substantial improvement. The season begins where season three ended – with time travelling idiocy. And Nazis. Nazis on Star Trek? That’s never happened before. Oh, wait, yes it has. More than once (TOS: “Patterns of Force,” VOY: “The Killing Game” I & II). Never mind how many times every single series has done “stuck in the past” stories. But praise be to God, the first two episodes end the Temporal Cold War. After that, T’Pol joins Starfleet, but doesn’t get a uniform for no other reason than that we’ve got to keep her in the skintight outfits.
The rest of the season is mostly comprised of two- and three-episode arcs, exploring the evolution of Vulcan ethics and government, Klingon forehead discrepancies, the ancestor of Data’s creator, and dealings among founding members of the Federation. Is it good television? Well, no, not exactly, but it is a slight improvement, and at least we’re finally getting stories specific to the time period.
The series finale is framed as a TNG episode, but it seems a little silly that those few devoted fans of Enterprise got so upset about the use of a nostalgic frame to show us the crew six years down the road (years in which, apparently, nobody got a single promotion – which makes ten years with no promotions for anybody). And we get a death that, coming here, is cheap and pretty meaningless.
The Writing, Part II
From Season One of Voyager until now, hundreds of episodes of underachieving Star Trek have battered my expectations so low that if an episode holds my interest until the end (it doesn’t happen often) I think it’s a classic. But even that doesn’t happen very often with Enterprise.
It’s high time to heap some blame on Brannon Braga. Yes, he wrote a number of good episodes for TNG back in the day, but every single time that Star Trek takes a turn for the worse – Generations, Voyager, Enterprise – he’s all over it.
Since Enterprise is the only Starfleet vessel around for most of the series, it often feels like Voyager. It spends two seasons rehashing the same worn-out ideas that Voyager rehashed. Voyager was a TNG clone, and Enterprise is often a Voyager clone. Which is pretty sad.
The show uses a lot of captured/rescue stories – these are the ultimate sign of a lack of ideas (they require minimal imagination), especially on a show that obviously has no intention of killing any of its characters.
Being set in the past, there are lots of little canonical discrepancies to irritate the hardcore fans. There are new species that are important to this show – Suliban, Denobulans – it would have been nice to know why they are not important (or even mentioned) in any other series. The Vulcans are a bunch of snobs and jerks uncharacteristic of the rest of the Trek world (Tuvok aside). Behaving as they do, it’s hard to imagine they would have initiated first contact.
And, annoyingly, Star Trek shows that it’s less able than ever to deal with religion intelligently (“Chosen Realm”).
Lesser Gripes
-There are more inexplicable situations where “we have a universal translator” just doesn’t get it done (“Civilization,” “The Communicator”)
-It’s ridiculous how easily enemy ships can dock with Enterprise, especially at warp.
-Why is the ship called “Enterprise” here when on every other series it was “The Enterprise”?
Other Thoughts
Here’s a question valid for all Trek series, but most notable here. Given the Star Trek world’s acceptance of the big bang and evolution and all that (a multi-billion year process), what are the odds that so many unconnected civilizations are more or less technologically equivalent? If the Klingons or Romulans, say, had evolved just one millennium or even five hundred years faster over a billion-year span – an infinitesimal fraction – they would have conquered the entire galaxy with ease.
Enterprise’s cheesy, awful theme song gets in your head and stays there. The down-home peppy remix that takes its place in Season Three makes it even worse. The alternate theme from “In a Mirror, Darkly” is eminently superior.
Let’s take a look at the two questions I had coming in to Enterprise:
-How does it compare to Voyager?
Oh, it’s worse. Yes, Voyager was often stupid, but at least it wasn’t usually boring. Enterprise, as a whole, had better actors, but Voyager had more interesting characters.
-Did it deserve to be canceled?
Heck yes. And if it wasn’t Star Trek-related, it would have been canceled a lot sooner.
In Conclusion
To wrap up, I would normally list here the episodes I thought were the best. But there aren’t any (obviously some are less bad than others – they technically are the “best” – but none are good enough to be singled out for attention).
And, since I can’t very well say “all of them,” here are the worst episodes:
“Bound”
“Chosen Realm”
“Rajiin”
“Vanishing Point”
Every single episode having to do with the Temporal Cold War
“Extinction”
“Dear Doctor”
At this point I’d like to congratulate myself for making it through 700+ episodes of Star Trek. The last couple hundred were tough to get through.
So again I’ll ask, is mediocre Star Trek better than no Star Trek? I’d love to say yes, I really would, but you can only go to the well so many times. Next Generation and Deep Space Nine reruns are preferable to most of this. Star Trek: Enterprise is, at best, watchable, but it’s always eminently disposable. I give it a 5 – sometimes that feels generous, but mostly, it’s well-deserved.
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