A Brief Guide to Star Trek

final episode had been essentially hijacked by
The Next Generation
to form a coda to the overall
Star Trek
television franchise. That the episode did not feature the actual characters from
Enterprise
but merely holographic re -creations on board the
Enterprise
from
The Next Generation
also rankled with loyal fans of the series. Although, across its four years on air, ratings for
Enterprise
had fallen from over 12 million to around 3 million, many fans appreciated an increase in storytelling quality across the last two seasons – mainly because the show became more
Star Trek
-like. For his part, final-year writer– producer Manny Coto regarded the penultimate episode, ‘Terra Prime’, as the end of the
Enterprise
story, as it wrapped up the final narrative arc he’d been producing.
    As previously with
The Next Generation
and
Voyager
, the final episode ended with the same words that had opened the show’s debut four years previously – ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’ – concluding a montage of opening narration linesfrom Captains Picard, Kirk and Archer (working backwards in time, narratively).
    ‘I would have never done it if I had known how people were going to react’, admitted producer Rick Berman to startrek. com. ‘We were informed with not a whole lot of time that this was our last season. We knew that this was going to be the last episode of
Star Trek
for perhaps quite some time . . . It was a very difficult choice, how to end it. The studio wanted it to be a one-hour episode. We wanted it to be special, something that would be memorable. This idea, which Brannon and I came up with – and I take full responsibility – pissed a lot of people off, and we certainly didn’t mean to. Our thought was to take this crew and see them through the eyes of a future generation, see them through the eyes of the people who we first got involved [with] in
Star Trek
eighteen years before: Picard, Riker and Data. [We wanted] to see the history of how Archer and his crew went from where we had them to where, eventually, the Federation was formed, in some kind of magical holographic history lesson.
    ‘It seemed like a great idea, [but] a lot of people were furious about it. The actors, most of them, were very unhappy. In retrospect it was a bad idea. When it was conceived it was with our heart completely in the right place. We wanted to pay the greatest homage and honour to the characters of
Enterprise
that we pos -sibly could, but because Jonathan (Frakes) and Marina (Sirtis) were the two people we brought in, and they were the ones looking back, it was perceived as “You’re ending our series with a
The Next Generation
episode.” I understand how people felt that way. Too many people felt that way for them to be wrong. Brannon and I felt terrible that we’d let a lot of people down. It backfired, but our hearts were definitely in the right place. It just was not accepted in the way we thought it would be.’
    Equally, in later years Braga was just as candid about what had gone wrong with the
Enterprise
finale: ‘I do have some regrets: it didn’t quite creatively align with the rest of the season. It had some great stuff in it and it was a cool concept, but I don’t know if it fully delivered and it really pissed off the cast. Rick[Berman] and I were involved in the franchise for years, Rick for eighteen, me for fifteen. We felt like we wanted to send a valentine to the show, but I do concur it was not a complete success.’
    T’Pol actress Jolene Blalock called ‘These Are the Voyages . . .’ ‘appalling’, while Anthony Montgomery felt ‘there could have been a more effective way to wrap things up for our show as well as the franchise as a whole. It seemed to take a little bit away from what the
Enterprise
cast and crew worked so diligently to achieve’. Even Jonathan Frakes recognised the folly of bringing in his character from
The Next Generation
: ‘It was a bit of a stretch having us shut down [their] show.’
    Critical reaction to the episode was the most negative that a
Star Trek
finale had ever received. Objections ranged from the inclusion of
The Next Generation
characters getting in the way of the
Enterprise
characters’ farewell, to the suggestion that
The Next Generation
cameos simply served as a painful reminder of a time when
Star Trek
on television had simply been better than it was in the twenty-first century. The
Toronto Star
claimed that the way
Enterprise
ended