21 Years Ago, Star Trek’s Greatest Insult Ruined the Cancelled Series That’s Only Got Better With Age

21 years ago, Star Trek showed how not end a series. Envisioned as something of a Star Trek prequel series (akin to Star Wars’ prequel trilogy), Enterprise was supposed to set the scene for the more familiar stories of Kirk, Picard, and the rest. For viewers, part of the fun was about figuring out how everything tied together; the origins of the Federation, the discovery of technology Star Trek tended to take for granted, and the drama that comes from exploration at a time when you can’t simply call in backup or open a datafile on your enemies.

Star Trek: Enterprise didn’t originally get the reception it deserved. To be fair, there are reasons for that; Star Trek returned to the small screen in 1987, and Enterprise ended in 2005, meaning this was an incredibly long run. There was, perhaps, a certain “tiredness” that had crept in among the fanbase. This may well explain why Enterprise has aged like fine wine, developing a strong reputation with modern viewers. But, regardless, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: the series finale was a whimper, not a bang, and frankly an insult to the entire show.

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Enterprise’s Finale Was an Episode of Another Show

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The problem lay in the design. Enterprise‘s end would bring a close to entire age of Star Trek history. Creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga chose to honor this, instead of their own series finale. That meant they came up with the idea of a sort of “episode in a bottle” – a story set in the distant future, where Will Riker watched over a holodeck recreation of Archer’s Enterprise crew on a key mission. As Berman explained to SlashFilm years later, it was because Enterprise‘s abrupt cancellation left the creative team in something of a bind.

“We can’t get ourselves from the 97th episode to the 98th episode, story-wise,” he recalled. “There was no way we could do it. So the idea of doing a flashback, from the future, looking back with the help of a holodeck to see what happened. What the culmination was with Jonathan Archer and the United Federation of Planets. And there was no way doing that other than seeing it as a flashback, And we had holodecks that could do realistic flashbacks, unlike other kinds of television series. And somebody had to be looking at it, so the fact that we chose Marina and Jonathan’s characters from The Next Generation was just a convenience for us.”

Technically, “These Are The Voyages…” takes place during the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 7 episode “The Pegasus.” Even Berman eventually acknowledged that this was a disappointing choice for viewers. “I think the Enterprise fans would see it as a disappointing finale of Enterprise,” he noted in the same interview. “But Rick and I, for right or wrong or otherwise, Rick had been with this franchise for 18 years, and I had been there for 15, and we wanted to send a valentine to the franchise.” In other words, this wasn’t an Enterprise finale; it was a matter of self-indulgence, a farewell to the franchise as a whole.

Even Character Deaths Were Added Simply for Shock Value

And then we come to an equally controversial decision: the shock death of Connor Trineer’s popular character Trip Tucker, killed off in a frustrating way just to add drama to the story. This became Berman and Braga’s one regret in the series finale, which they admitted they added to give “These Are the Voyages…” some sort of emotional stakes. Trinneer himself was initially satisfied with Trip’s death, but his opinion soured over time. The rest of Enterprise‘s cast was known for being unhappy with this whole experience, although some enjoyed working with Jonathan Frakes.

In a way, though, the decision to kill Trip stands as a criticism of the entire concept. Bluntly, if the only way to give a story stakes is by killing someone off, then there’s a problem with the story. That’s especially true when this is a series finale, which should really be one of the most impactful moments in the show, a last hurrah for the entire cast and crew. Berman and Braga should really have reconsidered their entire concept when they realized it lacked emotional depth, not simply killed someone off in an attempt to create it.

In the end, “These Are the Voyages…” will always go down as one of the most unsatisfying Star Trek episodes of all time. Enterprise has aged well, and now has a devoted fanbase; “These Are the Voyages…” has not. It feels like a random episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which therefore diminishes the entire series. Strikingly, the entire story builds up to a speech by Captain Archer that we never actually see, one of the most remarkable storytelling decisions ever made in Star Trek – and not in a good way.

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