Episode 98: These are the Voyages

They couldn't have picked a better way to end Enterprise's four-season run: with a really crappy episode, which focuses on characters from another show, features a contrived plot and a involves an entirely needless death.

"These are the Voyages" is an embarrassment. It offers stiff competition to "The Turnabout Intruder" for the title of worst final episode ever for a Star Trek series and perhaps for worst episode ever in Star Trek history.

Not surprisingly, Berman and Braga returned seemingly from nowhere to write it. You get the feeling that the actors and crew on the show hated it as well because the performances are hackneyed and the production values poor.

The connection to the TNG episode "The Pegasus" is clever and surprisingly well considered but takes on way too important a role in the final episode of Enterprise. This is not the final episode of Enterprise; it is just another episode of TNG.

And I think it's an insult to everyone associated with the show, both the creative folks who brought it to the world and the viewers who watched it, that B&B would decide first that they had to kill off Tucker in this travesty of an episode and then, once they made that decision, that they would care so little about making his death meaningful or even believable.

I watched this episode grateful in the knowledge that this would be Enterprise's last show and even more grateful in the knowledge that this would be, if there is any justice in the world, Berman and Braga's last opportunity to cause damage to Star Trek and its canon.

I should point out, I did quite like the last sequence where the legendary "Space, the final frontier" opening is passed from Picard, to Kirk and finally to Archer, which I think is the first time we hear Scott Bakula voice those words in that style.

There were some good things in the four years of Enterprise and I have to wonder what Season Five would have looked like under the guidance of TOS fans Manny Coto, Mike Sussman and the others, free as much as possible from the influence and control of B&B, and building upon some of the interesting character developments that were planted in Season Three.