Good bye!

For those of you who don't know me, witness the emergence of my supreme nerdiness. If you feel unable to handle this nerdiness, leave now.

If you are a Star Trek: Enterprise fan, do not read this post. It contains spoiler information from the series finale. If you've already seen the finale, I am sure you will agree with me.

Now that the formalities are out of the way, I can get started. Last night on UPN, Star Trek: Enterprise came to its end. One of the shortest-lived Star Trek series, it began to show a lot of promise toward the end, after its cancellation was announced. The final episode had the tantalizing title "These are the voyages..." but was an absolute let down. I spent much of the episode trying to figure out what was going on, in what timeline. We are taken back to the Enterprise-D, with Riker and Troi. But NCC-1701-D was destroyed, and has been replaced with the Enterprise-E. And Riker and Troi look a lot different. Older.

The producers put a lot of work into re-building a lot of the sets from ST:TNG, no small feat since its cancellation 11 years ago. We saw Ten-Forward, crew quarters, hallways, and the observation lounge. But they didn't put enough effort in. All of the sets are different. A smaller observation lounge, hallways that are obviously Voyager set re-dressed (with the smaller, narrower corridors and sharp corners), and the wierdest-looking turbolift I have ever seen!

As we learn part way through the episode, the 1701-D portion is set in the midst of Episode 264, when Riker is battling his personal demons regarding the violation of the Treaty of Algernon. He is viewing the last mission of the NX-01 on the holodeck in the hopes that it will help him make the right decision regarding whether or not to violate orders and reveal the Starfleet phasing cloak to Captain Picard.

All of this, and much more was covered in the series finale. It jumped back and forth through time (in 2369, the year that The Pegasus is set in), as well as jumping six years forward in time for the NX-01 sequences, to 10 years after the vessel was launched.

All in all, quite confusing and a let-down. But it wasn't all bad. The final moments of the episode, with all three Enterprise captains reciting "These are the voyages..." as each of three vessles (1701-D, 1701 {no bloody "A", "B", "C" or "D"} and NX-01) does a flyby, with Captain Archer finishing as the NX-01 sails off toward a gorgeous stellar-phenomenon was a stunning sequence, and a nice nod to the previous series.

It was interesting to note that Archer finshed with "To boldly go, where no man has gone before." On TNG, they had to change it from "no man" to "no one" in order to make it more politically correct. Did the writers of this final episode just forget?


As a final note to the producers and developers of Star Trek, DON'T DO ANOTHER PREQUEL! You almost killed the franchise with this current one. Let's see another series, but let's take a step back (or forward?) and continue the timeline. There are so many good stories left!

Anyways, this concludes my highly-nerdy rant about the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise. All the best to the cast and crew, and perhaps we shall see you again the next Star Trek Movie.