Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT)
Prequels are tricky to pull off. Star Trek prequels are even harder. ENT was faced with arguably the most difficult task of any Trek series: bridge the gap between First Contact and TOS, make do with less treknology than we're accustomed to seeing, look more futuristic than today but less futuristic than the 1960s, and maintain continuity with the rest of the franchise. Oh, and tell a compelling, Trek-worthy story while you're at it. What a tall order.
In many ways, ENT is successful in this monumental task. We get to see the aftermath of First Contact and the groundwork for some of the organizations and interplanetary relationships seen in TOS and beyond. Transporters are untested and for emergency situations only; shields, holodecks, and tractor beams are decades away. The NX-01's interior looks like an evolution of a modern submarine, and its exterior mixes the design principles of future Starfleet ships (most notably the Akira class) with surface elements of Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix—perhaps not a direct precursor to Kirk's Enterprise, but still a plausible ancestor.
In many other ways, ENT is sloppy about being a prequel. Naming the ship Enterprise and having its missions be so historic makes it difficult to explain why the NX-01 would be completely absent in any of the later Trek series' visual and spoken references to ships named Enterprise. There is no shortage of transporter malfunctions in every other Trek series, yet during the entire four-year run of ENT, the brand-new and barely tested transporter does not malfunction even once. Hull plating is functionally identical to shields; why bother differentiating between the two? The universal translator is unreliable and a linguistic specialist is needed on the bridge, yet the communication barrier is a "whenever it's convenient" plot device instead of a fact of life.
Many episodes deal with races, technologies, and phenomena that are clearly very new to Starfleet when they're first introduced in TOS, TNG, DS9, or VOY, which take place a century or two later. The Temporal Cold War plot could have been a way of excusing any continuity errors ("People are meddling with the past! Now anything could happen!"), but it's never really clear whether anything specific is really altering the history we know from the other series, and the whole premise of getting caught up in a conflict between time-travelers suggests a lack of confidence in the prequel setting to be interesting on its own.
Moreover, ENT demonstrates a lack of confidence in Star Trek being able to hold the attention of an audience anymore. There's still some measure of using sci-fi as a vehicle to explore the human condition, but the show doesn't even identify itself as Star Trek until the third season—it's just Enterprise. The opening credits include singing, as though a show with an instrumental opening can't appeal to the masses—nevermind the likes of The Simpsons, The X-Files, The West Wing, Twin Peaks, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy, ER, Doctor Who, or any other Star Trek. Star Trek has never been shy about sneaking in a bit of sex appeal, from Seven of Nine's curvaceous catsuits all the way back to the skimpy outfits and oft-shirtless captain of TOS, but ENT's use of sex appeal gets in the way of the storytelling—the first episode advertises the decontamination chamber as the place where your favorite characters get naked, and there's really no story-related reason for the main cast to appear in their skivvies (if they're even wearing that much) as often as they do. At the same time, the show borrows heavily from its predecessors, often painting a thin line between homage and remake. ENT is simultaneously too much and not enough like the other Trek series, and it's not until the final season that the show commits to being what it could have been all along. Individual episodes live up to the potential of the show, but the bigger picture is somewhat disappointing.
To be clear, I like ENT, but I want more from it. The main cast roster is a perfect example of what I mean. Every other Trek has a uniquely diverse cast, with characters who are meaningfully different from everyone who came before them. ENT rehashes the characteristics of the TOS crew with minimal variation. Archer is a cowboy diplomat like Kirk. T'Pol fills in for Spock, but is female and fully Vulcan rather than male and half Vulcan. Tucker is a Southern boy; so's McCoy. On TOS, these three characters have a strong dynamic that holds the show together; on ENT, the characters have a different chemistry that doesn't lend itself to the kind of triumvirate the show is trying to recreate. Hoshi is Japanese; so is Sulu. Reed and Scotty are both from Great Britain. Uhura is the one black person in the main cast; so is Mayweather, except he was born and raised in space (which, admittedly, injects some much-needed variety into the cast). Phlox is the one genuinely novel character, but even he shares some of Chekov's cheeriness. Once again, ENT is simultaneously too much and not enough like the other Trek series.
Putting aside their similarities to the heroes of TOS, the main characters of ENT have the potential to be just as interesting as any of Star Trek's other protagonists. The trouble is that they're not always given opportunities to become as fantastic and cohesive as they could be. Archer strikes me as the blandest of the captains; there's a strong enough foundation in place for him to grow from a completely inexperienced leader into a great one, and to see him struggle more with serving humanity's best interests while preserving his own humanity, but the show never quite commits to developing his character in one way or another. If anything, he changes from an imitation of Kirk to an imitation of Picard, but there are moments where Archer's potential shines through—he works best when he's a brother figure, or when his competitive nature comes out, which is why Shran is so vital to Archer's development. Archer and Tucker are supposed to be old friends, but you have to be told that; it's rarely apparent from their interactions; I think that missing camaraderie is a huge component of why this show's triumvirate doesn't completely click, and why Archer sometimes comes across as a little flat.
As for the rest of the crew: I like T'Pol, and I like that she's a different type of Vulcan than Spock or Tuvok—perhaps a little less mature in her self-control, especially late in the series when her emotions are closer to the surface than ever. Tucker ended up being one of my favorite characters on ENT, despite it taking some time to warm up to him; he's the O'Brien of the bunch, with plenty of good and bad points that make for interesting interactions with those around him. Hoshi is another of my favorites, the reluctant scholar who really isn't suited to this kind of mission, but proves herself invaluable and gradually overcomes her fears. Reed could have been another favorite, but so much of his character development either degrades his character (did we really need to nickname him "Stinky"?) or takes away his potential for further development—for instance, the first season seems to set him up as Star Trek's first homosexual main character, up until "Shuttlepod One" and "Two Days and Two Nights" clearly make him just another one of the guys. Mayweather brings an interesting perspective with his spacefaring background, and his upbeat personality is a nice patch of sunshine amid a generally dour cast (I hadn't realized just how serious everyone is until Soong points it out in the final season); I just wish he had more screen time. Phlox is one of my favorite characters from any Trek; the fresh perspective and positivity I like about Mayweather are tremendously amplified in Phlox, and he's responsible for some of the funniest and most thought-provoking moments in the show.
ENT needs as much funny and thought-provoking as it can get, too. Star Trek has always had some sort of underlying message or moral question with its stories, but ENT often skirts the borders of flat-out action and horror, and without same quantity of smiles and laughter that keep practically any other Trek from becoming too grim for too long. It doesn't help that the show's two most prevalent ongoing themes, racism and annihilation, are heavy stuff to begin with. DS9 might be gritty, but ENT is downright dark, at least for a large portion of its run. It's a definite tone shift for Star Trek, but unlike the Abramsverse or Discovery, it still feels like Star Trek. The costumes, set designs, music, sound effects—they all feel like Star Trek. Archer and his crew get into a lot of dangerous situations, but they're explorers at heart, not action heroes. They're supposed to be rough around the edges, not yet the paragons of TNG. They grapple with tough decisions, learn from their actions, and grow into more complex characters. Even the bits that feel nothing like Star Trek are there to entice people who wouldn't normally watch Star Trek, not to redefine the series entirely. ENT earnestly tries to be faithful to its forebears while catering to a modern audience, and it largely succeeds...but when it doesn't, it hurts.
Despite a number of solid episodes and some well-executed story arcs, the show as a whole is plagued by a host of issues, including a lack of focus, uneven writing, recycled plot ideas, continuity-bending storylines, and wasted potential. Between the Temporal Cold War, the seeds of the Romulan War, the unclear fate of several major species that are never heard from again (the Suliban, Denobulans, Xindi, and the mysterious Sphere Builders), the founding of the Federation, and the relationship between Tucker and T'Pol, the series leaves too many things unresolved or underdeveloped. Granted, the show was canceled before it had a chance to tie up some of its loose ends, but it might not have been canceled in the first place if it had committed to being the origin story it set out to be.
What I expected from the first season of ENT was a lot of first-contact scenarios with familiar races, a lot of struggles with brand-new technologies, the development of one or two major story arcs, and glimpses of Earth becoming a progressively larger part of the intergalactic community. What we got was a series of fluff episodes with races never seen before or again, and the beginning of several different story arcs that take at least another season to get off the ground, if they go anywhere at all. The first episode almost turned me off to the whole series when it first aired; "Broken Bow" smashes together so many elements that it's bewildering to try to figure out where the show intends to go, let alone how it fits into the greater Star Trek picture, especially when the first thing you see is a Klingon with forehead ridges (which they shouldn't have until The Motion Picture!) being shot by a farmer. The rest of the first season proceeds in the same manner, bombarding the viewer with stories that, collectively, fail to paint a clear picture of the direction of the show or how it's laying the groundwork for the adventures of later captains.
"Fortunate Son" is exactly the kind of episode I was hoping would be the standard for the first season—a little taste of Earth's other spacefaring endeavors, a first contact with a race the Federation had already met by the time we first saw them, and the kind of thought-provoking conflict you expect from Star Trek. "Silent Enemy" and "Fusion" and "Desert Crossing" as well—episodes that remember the NX-01 isn't a battle-ready warship, that draw from the vast pool of existing Star Trek lore, and that think about the consequences of Archer's actions in previous episodes. Although not perfect, perhaps my favorite episode of the first season is "Two Days and Two Nights", which uses good ol' pleasure planet Risa as an excuse for the show to have some fun and give every main character some quality air time, furthering one of its many nascent plotlines as well.
The plotline that gets the most attention this season is the Temporal Cold War, but the more it's developed, the more distant and unlikely a comprehensible and satisfying conclusion seems. There's also a whole lot of senseless destruction (Reed gleefully blowing up part of the monastery in "The Andorian Incident" when there were SO many other options); mindless shootouts ("Broken Bow", "The Andorian Incident", "Shadows of P'Jem"), people running around in their underwear ("Broken Bow", "Acquisition", "Two Days and Two Nights" "Shockwave"); mystery diseases ("Strange New World", "Civilization", "Dear Doctor", "Sleeping Dogs"); and people being captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc. ("Terra Nova", "The Andorian Incident", "Shadows of P'Jem", "Acquisition", "Detained", "Vox Sola"). We also get a few significant breaches of continuity—for instance, a huge plot point of Star Trek VI is that basic Klingon anatomy is completely unknown to McCoy, yet Earth's physicians had plenty of time to study Klaang in "Broken Bow", so it makes no sense that the knowledge wouldn't be passed on. The first season makes me wonder how much planning went into the series, and how much attention was being paid to the big picture.
The second season is a significant improvement over the first, but it still leaves much to be desired. On the plus side, there's a great variety of episodes—a visit to 1950s Earth in "Carbon Creek", man versus machine in "Minefield", a high-tech mystery in "Dead Stop", a Wild West showdown in "Marauders", an homage to TOS with "The Communicator", an apparent transporter accident (though not a real one) in "Vanishing Point", a combination disaster show and hostile takeover attempt in "The Catwalk", a thinky follow-up on T'Pol's first-season mind meld in "Stigma", noncorporeal aliens in "The Crossing", a visit to Mayweather's old home in "Horizon", a tie-in with First Contact in "Regeneration", and the start of the Xindi conflict in "The Expanse", to name...well, about half the episodes in the season. We get some Trek-worthy philosophical questions and moral choices with the likes of "Dawn", "Stigma", "The Breach", and "Cogenitor". The writing is generally stronger than before (it's at least up to VOY standards now), with fewer low points and more high points; there are more frequent and better connections with other Trek (and any continuity errors feel more like honest mistakes than blatant carelessness); and the series starts to resolve its identity crisis by committing to TNG-style episodic television with occasional callbacks to previous episodes. All this is good, but it's where the show should have started.
Unfortunately, the recycling of story ideas persists, despite the great diversity of episode premises. Haven't had your fill of people getting captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc.? Lucky for you, there's "The Communicator", "Precious Cargo", "Canamar", "Judgment", and "Bounty"—and that's to say nothing of the other episodes where people get trapped, possessed, or otherwise deprived of their autonomy. There are still plenty of lapses in common sense among the characters (and the writers)—the whole premise of "The Communicator" is flawed, for example: transporters typically lock onto communicator signals, so why not just beam the communicator back instead of wasting a whole episode on an ill-conceived recovery attempt? The mindless action persists as well—I like explosions and space battles as much as the next guy, but on Star Trek, there needs to be a purpose to combat aside from looking cool, and that's not always the case with ENT. Perhaps most importantly, there's very little that could only happen in a Star Trek prequel; "Regeneration" and "First Flight" are among the few episodes this season that embrace ENT's time and place in the greater Star Trek universe. Oh, and that whole Temporal Cold War plot that was shaping up to be the primary conflict of the show is almost reduced to a MacGuffin in this season, falling into the background instead of getting any serious development.
Every Trek takes at least one season (usually two or three) to hit its stride, but ENT barely knows how to walk until the start of the second season. If the first season is a misfired attempt to shoehorn the essence of TOS into the mold of modern Trek, and the second season is one big flirtation with being like TNG, then it makes sense that the third season is a collision of DS9 and VOY. Fortunately, there is a steady trend that each season of ENT is better than the last, but the third season especially is another example of how the show is simultaneously too much and not enough like the rest of Star Trek.
Enterprise is sent into an unstable region of space to stop a mysterious race known as the Xindi from constructing a superweapon intended to destroy Earth. If the militaristic storyline sounds a bit like the Dominion War, if Enterprise being cut off from Starfleet in unknown territory sounds a lot like VOY, and if the whole premise sounds all too close to that of Nemesis, then you and I are on the same wavelength here. Heck, the Sphere Builders even look like the Founders, and that's one too many androgynous and facially featureless races to have masterminded a war in the Star Trek universe for my taste.
It also bothers me that, of all the Trek series to send a lone ship behind enemy lines to wage war, it has to be the one with a fragile flagship that, realistically, shouldn't be able to survive repeated combat encounters and devastating spatial anomalies without more advanced technology (eg, shields, replicators) or a starbase at which to repair and resupply. Also, of all the Trek series to introduce a hugely important new race that resides in a noteworthy area of space within range of Earth, it has to be the prequel series that knows we're never going to hear about the Xindi or the Expanse again.
To its credit, the third season contains a few of the series' best episodes ("Twilight" "Similitude", and "Proving Ground", for my money), a gripping overarching narrative with terrific continuity, an intriguing new race, important character development, some great story-centric action sequences, and a few hints that the Temporal Cold War storyline may finally be going somewhere. I like the addition of MACOs to the ship (a proto–Hazard Team, anyone?), and Major Hayes is a welcome foil for Reed. Likewise, Shran becomes a superb foil for Archer, and he matures into a well-rounded secondary character (and one of my favorites in the series, alongside Soval and Hernandez). Memorable, Trek-worthy moral struggles are more prominent than ever before. It's a good season.
Still, it's not a great season. Archer's character development is all over the place, with a murderous streak that comes and goes without any rhyme or reason. T'Pol's addiction to Trellium-D comes out of nowhere, and it's incredibly contrived. If they wanted an emotionally unstable Vulcan and didn't think of the idea early enough to lay the proper groundwork for it, they could easily have made it a delayed repercussion of that first-season mind meld. For an entire season devoted to the Xindi, we learn very little about their history and culture, and we learn even less about the criminally underdeveloped Sphere Builders, who are less of a race and more of a plot device. No less than a third of the season still involves people getting captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc. At one point toward the end of the series, I announced to my wife that I was going to start breaking things if I heard anyone claim they had no choice or that something was out of their hands. Seriously, Star Trek is about grappling with choices, not watching destiny run its course. This season also contains what I consider to be three of the worst episodes of the series, "Extinction", "Impulse", and "Chosen Realm", which dwell on two themes I strongly dislike (mindless transformations and righteously irrational zealotry) and fail to deliver anything of substance. I'm also not fond of the season finale interrupting the denouement with Nazis (how many times does Star Trek have to revisit World War II?), but at least it's for a good cause.
The fourth season, picking up right where the third left off, rather unceremoniously brings an end to the Temporal Cold War plot. I might balk if it were any other story arc, but I firmly believe that the Temporal Cold War stifled ENT's development from the very beginning. Freed from the shackles of someone else's conflict, the fourth season boldly goes where a Star Trek prequel should have been going all along.
The Augments. The Vulcan revolution. Alliances with the Andorians and the Tellarites. The origin of TOS's ridgeless Klingons. The Mirror Universe. Terra Prime. These are the kinds of stories you tell with a Star Trek prequel, episodes that paint a vivid picture of the time period and develop the roots of stories yet to be told. There are still episodes that suffer from some of the problems that have plagued the series ("Cold Station 12", "Daedalus", and "Bound" being the biggest offenders of the ones I acknowledge as canon), but overall, the fourth season of ENT is as strong as any given season of any other Trek. The opening sequences of "The Forge" and "In a Mirror, Darkly - Part I" are unforgettable. Archer's moving speech at the end of "Terra Prime" perfectly encapsulates what Star Trek is all about. There are truly great moments this season, and every other episode is one of the best in the series. Any one of these story arcs would have been a perfect fit for the first or second season, and even cutting out the Xindi arc and telling these stories a season sooner might have helped the show to survive for another year or two.
An even greater tragedy than the show being canceled in its prime is how the final episode turned out. ENT ends as it begins, getting caught up in someone else's conflict. "These Are the Voyages" is neither an ENT episode nor the farewell to all of Star Trek that it was intended to be; rather, it is a superfluous episode of TNG that tries to condense an extra season's worth of story and character development into a ham-fisted hour of television that really didn't think things through. ENT ends on a note so sour that I can't suspend my disbelief enough to regard it as canon. This, coming from the guy who is totally cool with "Spock's Brain."
Ultimately, after a rocky journey, ENT proves itself to be a worthy addition to the Star Trek family. It's easy to harp on the continuity problems, but all Star Trek series have continuity problems; it just depends which series you consider to be most authoritative, and how far you're willing to stretch to explain away inconsistencies. It's easy to dismiss characters and episodes as knockoffs of things we've already seen in Star Trek, but if a good story is told well, is novelty really the most important thing? Besides, ENT continually does things that no other Star Trek does—no other series develops the Vulcans, Andorians, or Tellarites this much; pits the crew against a sentient species that operates with no audible or visible form of communication; has the crew hole up in the nacelles during a storm; or devotes not one but two episodes to a story that takes place entirely in an alternate universe with all alternate characters. ENT is not without its flaws, but it's a good show with good characters, which was just stepping out from the shadow of its predecessors when it went off the air.
[Last updated Oct 10, 2018]
In many ways, ENT is successful in this monumental task. We get to see the aftermath of First Contact and the groundwork for some of the organizations and interplanetary relationships seen in TOS and beyond. Transporters are untested and for emergency situations only; shields, holodecks, and tractor beams are decades away. The NX-01's interior looks like an evolution of a modern submarine, and its exterior mixes the design principles of future Starfleet ships (most notably the Akira class) with surface elements of Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix—perhaps not a direct precursor to Kirk's Enterprise, but still a plausible ancestor.
In many other ways, ENT is sloppy about being a prequel. Naming the ship Enterprise and having its missions be so historic makes it difficult to explain why the NX-01 would be completely absent in any of the later Trek series' visual and spoken references to ships named Enterprise. There is no shortage of transporter malfunctions in every other Trek series, yet during the entire four-year run of ENT, the brand-new and barely tested transporter does not malfunction even once. Hull plating is functionally identical to shields; why bother differentiating between the two? The universal translator is unreliable and a linguistic specialist is needed on the bridge, yet the communication barrier is a "whenever it's convenient" plot device instead of a fact of life.
Many episodes deal with races, technologies, and phenomena that are clearly very new to Starfleet when they're first introduced in TOS, TNG, DS9, or VOY, which take place a century or two later. The Temporal Cold War plot could have been a way of excusing any continuity errors ("People are meddling with the past! Now anything could happen!"), but it's never really clear whether anything specific is really altering the history we know from the other series, and the whole premise of getting caught up in a conflict between time-travelers suggests a lack of confidence in the prequel setting to be interesting on its own.
Moreover, ENT demonstrates a lack of confidence in Star Trek being able to hold the attention of an audience anymore. There's still some measure of using sci-fi as a vehicle to explore the human condition, but the show doesn't even identify itself as Star Trek until the third season—it's just Enterprise. The opening credits include singing, as though a show with an instrumental opening can't appeal to the masses—nevermind the likes of The Simpsons, The X-Files, The West Wing, Twin Peaks, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy, ER, Doctor Who, or any other Star Trek. Star Trek has never been shy about sneaking in a bit of sex appeal, from Seven of Nine's curvaceous catsuits all the way back to the skimpy outfits and oft-shirtless captain of TOS, but ENT's use of sex appeal gets in the way of the storytelling—the first episode advertises the decontamination chamber as the place where your favorite characters get naked, and there's really no story-related reason for the main cast to appear in their skivvies (if they're even wearing that much) as often as they do. At the same time, the show borrows heavily from its predecessors, often painting a thin line between homage and remake. ENT is simultaneously too much and not enough like the other Trek series, and it's not until the final season that the show commits to being what it could have been all along. Individual episodes live up to the potential of the show, but the bigger picture is somewhat disappointing.
To be clear, I like ENT, but I want more from it. The main cast roster is a perfect example of what I mean. Every other Trek has a uniquely diverse cast, with characters who are meaningfully different from everyone who came before them. ENT rehashes the characteristics of the TOS crew with minimal variation. Archer is a cowboy diplomat like Kirk. T'Pol fills in for Spock, but is female and fully Vulcan rather than male and half Vulcan. Tucker is a Southern boy; so's McCoy. On TOS, these three characters have a strong dynamic that holds the show together; on ENT, the characters have a different chemistry that doesn't lend itself to the kind of triumvirate the show is trying to recreate. Hoshi is Japanese; so is Sulu. Reed and Scotty are both from Great Britain. Uhura is the one black person in the main cast; so is Mayweather, except he was born and raised in space (which, admittedly, injects some much-needed variety into the cast). Phlox is the one genuinely novel character, but even he shares some of Chekov's cheeriness. Once again, ENT is simultaneously too much and not enough like the other Trek series.
Putting aside their similarities to the heroes of TOS, the main characters of ENT have the potential to be just as interesting as any of Star Trek's other protagonists. The trouble is that they're not always given opportunities to become as fantastic and cohesive as they could be. Archer strikes me as the blandest of the captains; there's a strong enough foundation in place for him to grow from a completely inexperienced leader into a great one, and to see him struggle more with serving humanity's best interests while preserving his own humanity, but the show never quite commits to developing his character in one way or another. If anything, he changes from an imitation of Kirk to an imitation of Picard, but there are moments where Archer's potential shines through—he works best when he's a brother figure, or when his competitive nature comes out, which is why Shran is so vital to Archer's development. Archer and Tucker are supposed to be old friends, but you have to be told that; it's rarely apparent from their interactions; I think that missing camaraderie is a huge component of why this show's triumvirate doesn't completely click, and why Archer sometimes comes across as a little flat.
As for the rest of the crew: I like T'Pol, and I like that she's a different type of Vulcan than Spock or Tuvok—perhaps a little less mature in her self-control, especially late in the series when her emotions are closer to the surface than ever. Tucker ended up being one of my favorite characters on ENT, despite it taking some time to warm up to him; he's the O'Brien of the bunch, with plenty of good and bad points that make for interesting interactions with those around him. Hoshi is another of my favorites, the reluctant scholar who really isn't suited to this kind of mission, but proves herself invaluable and gradually overcomes her fears. Reed could have been another favorite, but so much of his character development either degrades his character (did we really need to nickname him "Stinky"?) or takes away his potential for further development—for instance, the first season seems to set him up as Star Trek's first homosexual main character, up until "Shuttlepod One" and "Two Days and Two Nights" clearly make him just another one of the guys. Mayweather brings an interesting perspective with his spacefaring background, and his upbeat personality is a nice patch of sunshine amid a generally dour cast (I hadn't realized just how serious everyone is until Soong points it out in the final season); I just wish he had more screen time. Phlox is one of my favorite characters from any Trek; the fresh perspective and positivity I like about Mayweather are tremendously amplified in Phlox, and he's responsible for some of the funniest and most thought-provoking moments in the show.
ENT needs as much funny and thought-provoking as it can get, too. Star Trek has always had some sort of underlying message or moral question with its stories, but ENT often skirts the borders of flat-out action and horror, and without same quantity of smiles and laughter that keep practically any other Trek from becoming too grim for too long. It doesn't help that the show's two most prevalent ongoing themes, racism and annihilation, are heavy stuff to begin with. DS9 might be gritty, but ENT is downright dark, at least for a large portion of its run. It's a definite tone shift for Star Trek, but unlike the Abramsverse or Discovery, it still feels like Star Trek. The costumes, set designs, music, sound effects—they all feel like Star Trek. Archer and his crew get into a lot of dangerous situations, but they're explorers at heart, not action heroes. They're supposed to be rough around the edges, not yet the paragons of TNG. They grapple with tough decisions, learn from their actions, and grow into more complex characters. Even the bits that feel nothing like Star Trek are there to entice people who wouldn't normally watch Star Trek, not to redefine the series entirely. ENT earnestly tries to be faithful to its forebears while catering to a modern audience, and it largely succeeds...but when it doesn't, it hurts.
Despite a number of solid episodes and some well-executed story arcs, the show as a whole is plagued by a host of issues, including a lack of focus, uneven writing, recycled plot ideas, continuity-bending storylines, and wasted potential. Between the Temporal Cold War, the seeds of the Romulan War, the unclear fate of several major species that are never heard from again (the Suliban, Denobulans, Xindi, and the mysterious Sphere Builders), the founding of the Federation, and the relationship between Tucker and T'Pol, the series leaves too many things unresolved or underdeveloped. Granted, the show was canceled before it had a chance to tie up some of its loose ends, but it might not have been canceled in the first place if it had committed to being the origin story it set out to be.
What I expected from the first season of ENT was a lot of first-contact scenarios with familiar races, a lot of struggles with brand-new technologies, the development of one or two major story arcs, and glimpses of Earth becoming a progressively larger part of the intergalactic community. What we got was a series of fluff episodes with races never seen before or again, and the beginning of several different story arcs that take at least another season to get off the ground, if they go anywhere at all. The first episode almost turned me off to the whole series when it first aired; "Broken Bow" smashes together so many elements that it's bewildering to try to figure out where the show intends to go, let alone how it fits into the greater Star Trek picture, especially when the first thing you see is a Klingon with forehead ridges (which they shouldn't have until The Motion Picture!) being shot by a farmer. The rest of the first season proceeds in the same manner, bombarding the viewer with stories that, collectively, fail to paint a clear picture of the direction of the show or how it's laying the groundwork for the adventures of later captains.
"Fortunate Son" is exactly the kind of episode I was hoping would be the standard for the first season—a little taste of Earth's other spacefaring endeavors, a first contact with a race the Federation had already met by the time we first saw them, and the kind of thought-provoking conflict you expect from Star Trek. "Silent Enemy" and "Fusion" and "Desert Crossing" as well—episodes that remember the NX-01 isn't a battle-ready warship, that draw from the vast pool of existing Star Trek lore, and that think about the consequences of Archer's actions in previous episodes. Although not perfect, perhaps my favorite episode of the first season is "Two Days and Two Nights", which uses good ol' pleasure planet Risa as an excuse for the show to have some fun and give every main character some quality air time, furthering one of its many nascent plotlines as well.
The plotline that gets the most attention this season is the Temporal Cold War, but the more it's developed, the more distant and unlikely a comprehensible and satisfying conclusion seems. There's also a whole lot of senseless destruction (Reed gleefully blowing up part of the monastery in "The Andorian Incident" when there were SO many other options); mindless shootouts ("Broken Bow", "The Andorian Incident", "Shadows of P'Jem"), people running around in their underwear ("Broken Bow", "Acquisition", "Two Days and Two Nights" "Shockwave"); mystery diseases ("Strange New World", "Civilization", "Dear Doctor", "Sleeping Dogs"); and people being captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc. ("Terra Nova", "The Andorian Incident", "Shadows of P'Jem", "Acquisition", "Detained", "Vox Sola"). We also get a few significant breaches of continuity—for instance, a huge plot point of Star Trek VI is that basic Klingon anatomy is completely unknown to McCoy, yet Earth's physicians had plenty of time to study Klaang in "Broken Bow", so it makes no sense that the knowledge wouldn't be passed on. The first season makes me wonder how much planning went into the series, and how much attention was being paid to the big picture.
The second season is a significant improvement over the first, but it still leaves much to be desired. On the plus side, there's a great variety of episodes—a visit to 1950s Earth in "Carbon Creek", man versus machine in "Minefield", a high-tech mystery in "Dead Stop", a Wild West showdown in "Marauders", an homage to TOS with "The Communicator", an apparent transporter accident (though not a real one) in "Vanishing Point", a combination disaster show and hostile takeover attempt in "The Catwalk", a thinky follow-up on T'Pol's first-season mind meld in "Stigma", noncorporeal aliens in "The Crossing", a visit to Mayweather's old home in "Horizon", a tie-in with First Contact in "Regeneration", and the start of the Xindi conflict in "The Expanse", to name...well, about half the episodes in the season. We get some Trek-worthy philosophical questions and moral choices with the likes of "Dawn", "Stigma", "The Breach", and "Cogenitor". The writing is generally stronger than before (it's at least up to VOY standards now), with fewer low points and more high points; there are more frequent and better connections with other Trek (and any continuity errors feel more like honest mistakes than blatant carelessness); and the series starts to resolve its identity crisis by committing to TNG-style episodic television with occasional callbacks to previous episodes. All this is good, but it's where the show should have started.
Unfortunately, the recycling of story ideas persists, despite the great diversity of episode premises. Haven't had your fill of people getting captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc.? Lucky for you, there's "The Communicator", "Precious Cargo", "Canamar", "Judgment", and "Bounty"—and that's to say nothing of the other episodes where people get trapped, possessed, or otherwise deprived of their autonomy. There are still plenty of lapses in common sense among the characters (and the writers)—the whole premise of "The Communicator" is flawed, for example: transporters typically lock onto communicator signals, so why not just beam the communicator back instead of wasting a whole episode on an ill-conceived recovery attempt? The mindless action persists as well—I like explosions and space battles as much as the next guy, but on Star Trek, there needs to be a purpose to combat aside from looking cool, and that's not always the case with ENT. Perhaps most importantly, there's very little that could only happen in a Star Trek prequel; "Regeneration" and "First Flight" are among the few episodes this season that embrace ENT's time and place in the greater Star Trek universe. Oh, and that whole Temporal Cold War plot that was shaping up to be the primary conflict of the show is almost reduced to a MacGuffin in this season, falling into the background instead of getting any serious development.
Every Trek takes at least one season (usually two or three) to hit its stride, but ENT barely knows how to walk until the start of the second season. If the first season is a misfired attempt to shoehorn the essence of TOS into the mold of modern Trek, and the second season is one big flirtation with being like TNG, then it makes sense that the third season is a collision of DS9 and VOY. Fortunately, there is a steady trend that each season of ENT is better than the last, but the third season especially is another example of how the show is simultaneously too much and not enough like the rest of Star Trek.
Enterprise is sent into an unstable region of space to stop a mysterious race known as the Xindi from constructing a superweapon intended to destroy Earth. If the militaristic storyline sounds a bit like the Dominion War, if Enterprise being cut off from Starfleet in unknown territory sounds a lot like VOY, and if the whole premise sounds all too close to that of Nemesis, then you and I are on the same wavelength here. Heck, the Sphere Builders even look like the Founders, and that's one too many androgynous and facially featureless races to have masterminded a war in the Star Trek universe for my taste.
It also bothers me that, of all the Trek series to send a lone ship behind enemy lines to wage war, it has to be the one with a fragile flagship that, realistically, shouldn't be able to survive repeated combat encounters and devastating spatial anomalies without more advanced technology (eg, shields, replicators) or a starbase at which to repair and resupply. Also, of all the Trek series to introduce a hugely important new race that resides in a noteworthy area of space within range of Earth, it has to be the prequel series that knows we're never going to hear about the Xindi or the Expanse again.
To its credit, the third season contains a few of the series' best episodes ("Twilight" "Similitude", and "Proving Ground", for my money), a gripping overarching narrative with terrific continuity, an intriguing new race, important character development, some great story-centric action sequences, and a few hints that the Temporal Cold War storyline may finally be going somewhere. I like the addition of MACOs to the ship (a proto–Hazard Team, anyone?), and Major Hayes is a welcome foil for Reed. Likewise, Shran becomes a superb foil for Archer, and he matures into a well-rounded secondary character (and one of my favorites in the series, alongside Soval and Hernandez). Memorable, Trek-worthy moral struggles are more prominent than ever before. It's a good season.
Still, it's not a great season. Archer's character development is all over the place, with a murderous streak that comes and goes without any rhyme or reason. T'Pol's addiction to Trellium-D comes out of nowhere, and it's incredibly contrived. If they wanted an emotionally unstable Vulcan and didn't think of the idea early enough to lay the proper groundwork for it, they could easily have made it a delayed repercussion of that first-season mind meld. For an entire season devoted to the Xindi, we learn very little about their history and culture, and we learn even less about the criminally underdeveloped Sphere Builders, who are less of a race and more of a plot device. No less than a third of the season still involves people getting captured, imprisoned, incapacitated, etc. At one point toward the end of the series, I announced to my wife that I was going to start breaking things if I heard anyone claim they had no choice or that something was out of their hands. Seriously, Star Trek is about grappling with choices, not watching destiny run its course. This season also contains what I consider to be three of the worst episodes of the series, "Extinction", "Impulse", and "Chosen Realm", which dwell on two themes I strongly dislike (mindless transformations and righteously irrational zealotry) and fail to deliver anything of substance. I'm also not fond of the season finale interrupting the denouement with Nazis (how many times does Star Trek have to revisit World War II?), but at least it's for a good cause.
The fourth season, picking up right where the third left off, rather unceremoniously brings an end to the Temporal Cold War plot. I might balk if it were any other story arc, but I firmly believe that the Temporal Cold War stifled ENT's development from the very beginning. Freed from the shackles of someone else's conflict, the fourth season boldly goes where a Star Trek prequel should have been going all along.
The Augments. The Vulcan revolution. Alliances with the Andorians and the Tellarites. The origin of TOS's ridgeless Klingons. The Mirror Universe. Terra Prime. These are the kinds of stories you tell with a Star Trek prequel, episodes that paint a vivid picture of the time period and develop the roots of stories yet to be told. There are still episodes that suffer from some of the problems that have plagued the series ("Cold Station 12", "Daedalus", and "Bound" being the biggest offenders of the ones I acknowledge as canon), but overall, the fourth season of ENT is as strong as any given season of any other Trek. The opening sequences of "The Forge" and "In a Mirror, Darkly - Part I" are unforgettable. Archer's moving speech at the end of "Terra Prime" perfectly encapsulates what Star Trek is all about. There are truly great moments this season, and every other episode is one of the best in the series. Any one of these story arcs would have been a perfect fit for the first or second season, and even cutting out the Xindi arc and telling these stories a season sooner might have helped the show to survive for another year or two.
An even greater tragedy than the show being canceled in its prime is how the final episode turned out. ENT ends as it begins, getting caught up in someone else's conflict. "These Are the Voyages" is neither an ENT episode nor the farewell to all of Star Trek that it was intended to be; rather, it is a superfluous episode of TNG that tries to condense an extra season's worth of story and character development into a ham-fisted hour of television that really didn't think things through. ENT ends on a note so sour that I can't suspend my disbelief enough to regard it as canon. This, coming from the guy who is totally cool with "Spock's Brain."
Ultimately, after a rocky journey, ENT proves itself to be a worthy addition to the Star Trek family. It's easy to harp on the continuity problems, but all Star Trek series have continuity problems; it just depends which series you consider to be most authoritative, and how far you're willing to stretch to explain away inconsistencies. It's easy to dismiss characters and episodes as knockoffs of things we've already seen in Star Trek, but if a good story is told well, is novelty really the most important thing? Besides, ENT continually does things that no other Star Trek does—no other series develops the Vulcans, Andorians, or Tellarites this much; pits the crew against a sentient species that operates with no audible or visible form of communication; has the crew hole up in the nacelles during a storm; or devotes not one but two episodes to a story that takes place entirely in an alternate universe with all alternate characters. ENT is not without its flaws, but it's a good show with good characters, which was just stepping out from the shadow of its predecessors when it went off the air.
[Last updated Oct 10, 2018]
