“These are the Voyages…”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 4, Episode 22
Production episode 098
Original air date: May 13, 2005
Date: Stardate 47457.1
Captain’s star log. We have jumped ahead six years to 2161. After ten years in service, Enterprise is going home to be decommissioned—and also to be present for the signing of the charter that will make the United Federation of Planets a thing. Archer is still struggling with his speech, while Mayweather and Sato are speculating about what they’ll do next.
Then we pan over to a side console, where William Riker is sitting in an NX-01 uniform. He orders the holodeck to freeze and save the program then end it. We revert to the Enterprise-D holodeck, and Riker’s holographic Enterprise uniform is replaced by his Starfleet uniform.
According to Riker’s personal log, Admiral Pressman has just come on board, and he’s agonizing over whether or not to confide in Picard about the real reasons for Pressman’s presence. Troi is the one who suggested re-creating the NX-01’s final mission on the holodeck to aid him in making the decision. Troi also, over dinner in Ten-Forward, suggests he skip ahead to when they’re contacted by the Andorian. She also suggests Riker take on the role of the ship’s chef, who was the closest they had to a ship’s counselor.
Back on the holodeck, Enterprise is hailed by Shran, which comes as something of a shock, as they believed that Shran died three years previous. Shran admits to having faked his death because, after he left the Imperial Guard, he got involved with some unsavory characters, who have kidnapped his daughter, Talla. He needs Archer’s help to get her back, and Archer owes him. T’Pol advises against acceding to Shran’s request, as they can’t risk being late for the charter signing (and Archer not being present to give his speech), but Archer does owe Shran…
They head to Rigel X. Chef was planning a final meal with everyone getting their favorite dish. Riker poses as Chef preparing those meals discussing life, the universe, and everything with the crew. Later Riker brings Troi on board the holodeck to show off the ship. They observe a conversation between Tucker and Reed, with the latter teasing the former about his continuing to perform routine maintenance on a ship that’s about to be mothballed. But Tucker unconvincingly claims that he practically built the engine singlehandedly, and will care for her to the end. Troi then indulges in some foreshadowing by saying how sad it is that Tucker won’t be coming home from this mission.
Troi goes off to have a session with Barclay, and Riker now cosplays as a MACO who goes on the mission to Rigel X. Archer comments on how appropriate it is that the last planet they’ll visit is also the first one they visited…
Shran and T’Pol meet with the bad guys, T’Pol having fabricated a fake of the jewel the kidnappers think Shran has stolen (he hasn’t, but they don’t believe him). Once they get Talla back, all hell breaks loose, as the fake jewel flashes some lights and the rest of the away team, who has been lying in ambush, fires on the bad guys.
Tucker almost falls to his death, but Archer saves him. They all get back to the ship and head off. Shran is happy to accept a lift to get them far away from the kidnappers, who can only go warp two.
Riker-as-Chef has more conversations with the crew, then Riker watches Archer and Tucker talk about the impending charter signing and what it means. Then T’Pol reports an intruder alert.
The aliens have caught up to Enterprise and boarded her, er, somehow, and demand Shran and Talla. Tucker throws himself into the notion of enabling them to signal Shran with an elaborate rewiring of things that is utterly unconvincing, but the aliens fall for it anyhow, and one big-ass explosion later, all the aliens and Tucker are all mortally wounded. Phlox tries to save Tucker’s life (no such effort is made to save the aliens), but he dies on the table.
Riker then breaks the chronological sequence by going back to before the intruder alert, when Tucker visited Chef to discuss the final meal.
T’Pol and Phlox are present backstage to wish Archer well on his speech (T’Pol having to adjust his neckline). Archer impulsively gives T’Pol a hug before going out and giving his speech.
Riker and Troi are seen in the back of the arena, talking about the historic speech and the charter signing that would lead to the Federation. Riker says he’s ready to talk to Picard about the Pegasus, and they exit the holodeck.
Thank you, Counselor Obvious. Troi is the one who suggests that Riker visit the holodeck to help him with the decision he’s agonizing over.
If I only had a brain… Data briefly speaks with Troi over the intercom about finishing a discussion they started, but Troi asks for a rain check, an idiom that Data struggles with.
The gazelle speech. Archer, typically, leaves writing his speech until the last minute and refuses to take credit for anything during it.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol admits to Tucker that she will miss him after they’re no longer assigned to the same ship.
Florida Man. Florida Man Dies Hilariously Unconvincing Death!
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is unable to save Tucker after he’s in the middle of an explosion, and later is one of the last people to wish Archer well before his speech.
Blue meanies. Shran has left the Imperial Guard and faked his own death over the prior six years. He has mated with Jhamel and had a daughter, and apparently Archer hasn’t repaid all the favors he owes Shran…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. T’Pol and Tucker’s relationship ended not long after it began, apparently, though they’re both mature enough adults to continue to serve on the same ship for the next six years.
I’ve got faith…
“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
–The final lines of the episode, spoken first by Picard, then by Kirk, and finally by Archer.
Welcome aboard. Recurring regular Jeffrey Combs is back as Shran, while Jonathan Schmook plays the alien kidnapper. While this is Combs’s last appearance as Shran, he will return on Lower Decks as AGIMUS in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie.”
And, of course, the big guests are Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and an uncredited Brent Spiner as, respectively, Riker, Troi, and Data. The former two will next be seen in Picard’s “Nepenthe,” while the latter will next be seen in Picard’s “Remembrance.”
Trivial matters: The episode takes place simultaneously with the TNG episode “The Pegasus.”
While Jhamel is not seen, she is mentioned, and its made clear that the relationship with Shran hinted at in her appearance in “The Aenar” came to fruition.
This is the third straight Trek series finale, following DS9’s “What You Leave Behind” and Voyager’s “Endgame,” that is directed by Allan Kroeker.
Having written the lion’s share of the episodes from the first three seasons, this is the first (and, obviously, last) writing credit for Rick Berman and Brannon Braga in the fourth season.
After having one or two Trek TV shows in production consistently since 1987, there will be a gap of twelve years before the next one, when Discovery debuts in 2017. It will be four years before there is any kind of Trek screen production, the 2009 movie.
The novels Last Full Measure and The Good that Men Do, both by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, establish that the holodeck program Riker was utilizing was not an accurate portrayal of history, with most of what was depicted therein actually taking place in 2155, not long after “Terra Prime.” This is uncovered by Nog and Jake Sisko after some Section 31 files are declassified in the early 25th century. In the novels, the characters point out several inconsistencies in the program that indicated that it was fake, all of which were complaints made by fans after the episode aired. They also established that Tucker’s death was a fake as well, a cover-up for him to engage in a long-term deep-cover mission.
Aside from Riker, Troi, and Data, this is the final appearance of everyone in it to date.
It’s been a long road… “I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.” I have often stated that the idea is far less important than the execution, and this is a prime example of that, because the idea here actually isn’t all that bad a one. It’s a nice idea, knowing that this was closing off the then-current era of Trek television, to tie it back to the show that started the era in question eighteen years earlier.
But holy crap, is the execution an unmitigated disaster.
I remember back in 2005 when they were talking about how Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis would be appearing in the Enterprise finale, my first thought was how cool it would be to have a framing sequence on the U.S.S. Titan with Captain Riker and his wife Commander Troi consulting the historical documents about Enterprise’s final mission.
So imagine my shock that they were instead appearing as Commander Riker and Counselor Troi on the U.S.S. Enterprise-D.
A lot of pixels have been lit on the subject of how terrible this is as the Enterprise finale (both Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have spent a lot of time at conventions and in interviews apologizing for it since 2005), and while I’m happy to add to it here, I do want to take a moment to say how this is also a complete and total failure as a parallel story to “The Pegasus,” which was one of the highlights of a very uneven final season of TNG. We’ll leave aside the fact that Frakes and Sirtis are very obviously ten years older than they were when they filmed “The Pegasus” (this is why I figured it would be a story of them on Titan), there is absolutely nowhere in the episode where any of this fits. There is simply no opportunity for Riker to go haring off to the holodeck for hours at a time to agonize over this decision. And then at the end, he resolutely decides to confide in Picard—which is something he does not do at any point. Well, at least not willingly—he only comes clean to Picard when he doesn’t have a choice at the episode’s climax.
And that’s only the start of what a dreadful finale this is. Just as Frakes and Sirtis very much look ten years older, the rest of the crew looks not at all to be six years older. No changes in hairstyle (well, okay, Jolene Blalock’s wig is a bit froofier, but that’s it), and neither Reed nor Mayweather nor Sato have been promoted after a decade of service, which is completely unconvincing.
After finally having Tucker and T’Pol come together as a couple bonding over their unexpected kid in “Demons” and “Terra Prime,” we’re told that their relationship apparently didn’t live out the year, as they’ve been broken up for six years. To call that disappointing is a major understatement, though it’s as nothing compared to the disappointment of Tucker’s “heroic” death, which is so clumsily constructed you can see the strings, and is one of the most ineptly written death scenes in television history. Connor Trinneer stops short of actually saying, “I have to have my death scene now!” but that’s the only saving grace of this ridiculous scene.
It is fitting that Enterprise has proven itself once again to be completely incapable of repelling boarders despite having Space Marines on board, as the aliens have free rein on the ship before Tucker blows them up.
Watching it again for the first time in nineteen years, the thing that annoyed me the most was, bizarrely, the scenes of Riker-as-Chef talking to the various crew. Not that the scenes themselves were bad—quite the opposite, they’re charming as hell, and easily the best parts of the episode—but this is something we should’ve been seeing all along. To find out now in the 97th and final episode that people talk to Chef about their troubles is leaving it way late. I’ve never been fond of the often-discussed-never-seen character trope in television, and the use of Chef in this episode is so much more interesting than the way he’d been used in the 96 previous episodes.
Berman and Braga spent their three years as show-runners making the early days of space exploration as bland and uninteresting as possible, and their final episode lives down to that standard in pretty much every way.
Warp factor rating: 1
A 1? That’s very generous of you!
I was expecting Full Impulse. Maybe Half.
I considered giving it a 0, but the actual concept was, as I said, a good one, and I have to admit to adoring the scenes with Riker cosplaying as Chef and chatting with the crew, which was enough to get it out of the cellar, as it were…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
1 should really be the lowest possible score anyway.
If you use a rating scale from 0-10 that is 11 possible choices.
This is the penultimate Trek rewatch entry after 12 years of doing it, so you’re leaving it a little late to be nitpicking the ratings system…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Nothing wrong with that. There are ratings scales with 0-3 stars, 0-4 stars, 0-5, etc. What matters is the comparative rank, how far up or down the overall scale something is. The scale itself doesn’t have to be a specific size, though a larger size allows finer tuning.
I think we were all not-so-secretly hoping you’d lay a goose egg on this one, ratings-wise.
Regardless, it’s almost universally considered the worst Trek finale ever.
I dunno, man, as I said elsewhere, Trek‘s track record for finales is dreadful, and I don’t think I can say that this is worse than “Turnabout Intruder” or “Endgame” with a straight face.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
IIRC, you gave “Endgame” a 1, while “Turnabout Intruder” gets a 2.
Back when you reviewed these episodes, did you consider giving either one a zero?
This is the part where I remind everyone that the warp factor rating is the least important part of any rewatch entry…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The main thought that I had when I was watching this episode 19 years ago was that Berman and Braga were finally confirming what I think that a lot of us had long suspected: that they’d spent all four seasons of Enterprise (and seven seasons of Voyager) desperately wishing that they could still be writing TNG.
I cannot, in good conscience, say that it’s the worst Star Trek series finale (“Turnabout Intruder” and “Endgame” both exist); I can no longer even say that it’s the finale that feels the most contemptuous of the series that it is, in theory, a finale of (hellooooo Picard season 3!); but by God, does it suck nonetheless.
Honestly, Trek‘s track record with finales suck. “All Good Things…” worked — though flawed, it brought the series full circle and was an entertaining time travel romp — but that was it. “Turnabout Intruder” was hot garbage, “The Counter-clock Incident” was ridiculous, “What You Leave Behind” mistook the end of the war for the end of the show and also resolved the Prophet/Pah-Wraith (and Sisko/Dukat) conflict in the most awful way possible, “Endgame” was even hotter garbage, and, as you say, “The Next Generation” was a self-indulgent piece of nonsense that ended a season that was almost entirely self-indulgent nonsense.
Let’s hope Discovery is able to double the total of good finales this summer…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m not that fond of “All Good Things…”. It’s a decent episode, but superficial, an exercise in nostalgia without any deeper message. Also, Q goes on about how he’s testing whether Picard can expand his mind enough to grasp the solution to this intractable mystery, but it’s actually ridiculously simple.
“What You Leave Behind” was probably the best overall, though I agree it was seriously flawed in a number of ways.
I usually exempt “Turnabout Intruder” from consideration, since it was the one Trek series finale that wasn’t planned as such (in live action, anyway).
…I suppose I’ll have to offer the same exemption to Discovery‘s finale this year.
You won’t have to discount Discovery– they did reshoots of the finale after they found out that it was now the series finale.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, we nearly made it to the end of this rewatch before they redecorated and I didn’t like it. Are we ever going to get the comments for the last 12 episodes back or have they disappeared into the ether forever? Because the longer it goes on, the more tempted I am to just say “To hell with it” and paste my comments back in there. Anyway, onto, believe it or not, more pleasant matters…
“Been a hell of a run, Malcolm. Never thought it would come to an end.”
There are some things that you know can’t be as bad as their reputation. Sometimes you’re wrong and they actually are that bad. But over the course of more years than I care to remember rewatching Voyager and Enterprise with you all, there have been several times that I’ve gone in with low expectations and been pleasantly surprised. So prepare to throw me out of the guild because…
I really really enjoyed this.
I found pretty much all the standard criticisms of it are not entirely deserved. Saying it’s a TNG episode is an exaggeration: Only two and a bit of the TNG cast turn up, and they’re very much secondary to the show’s stars. I’ve always felt that the idea of an episode being seen from the point of view of characters from another series is an interesting one but it should never have been the last episode. (I also feel like, with them now being 20 years older, it’s easier to accept Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis as their TNG-era selves than it was at the time.) It’s very awkward that the exterior shots are all of the Enterprise-D rather than the NX-01 (and seeing any 1701 in CGI always feels wrong to me, which is why I’ve never managed to watch the remastered versions without grimacing). It means that it’s easy to dismiss this episode as not featuring the real characters and that this isn’t really what happened. (Some people even prefer to believe it never happened, which is a debate I’m really hoping not to get sucked into.) Personally, I prefer to believe that we actually are seeing the last voyage of Enterprise NX-01, aside from a few bits when Riker’s presence has influenced the narrative.
But, yes, those are some of the weakest parts, especially since, as krad says, we know that’s not how ‘The Pegasus’ went and Riker didn’t come clean to Picard until the Enterprise got trapped inside an asteroid and they needed the phased cloak to escape. I know at least one person who thought this episode meant the entire series was just Riker’s holo-fantasy!
While it’s a bit disappointing that we get a time skip and find everyone in the same rank and positions (although they’re hardly the first hero crew to stay in the same jobs far longer than is plausible), the episode does a better job of showing the passage of time than I thought, with new hairstyles (at least I thought they were new?), changed set dressing and nametags on the uniforms. Every now and then though I was left thinking that the time skip was added to the script at a late stage because, ironically, Shran is the only one who’s allowed to have had his life move on. He’s left the Imperial Guard, faked his death for three years, implictly married Jhamel (he’s said to be happily married and she’s the mother of his daughter) and gained a rather cute little moppet. As I mentioned earlier, I wonder if him seeking Enterprise for help here was originally setting up him being a regular in Season Five. (Talla calling Archer “pinkskin” is a slightly awkward moment that’s not as cute as it was probably intended.)
Not all the regulars are well-served but we get to see all the tropes we need. Of course Archer risks his crew and himself to help Shran out again, it’s what he does, and there is a full circle element to them returning to Rigel X from ‘Broken Bow’. And it is great to see Shran one last time, even if he does get lost in the mix in the second half, disappearing from the episode after getting Talla back to Enterprise.
Tucker’s death is unfortunately just as bad as we all remember. It’s horribly shoehorned-in, as if the scenes were written overnight when the cancellation order came in and they needed to have something big happen in the finale. He just decides out of nowhere to sacrifice himself when confronted with a bunch of generic villains who don’t have names who threaten Archer a bit. I know Troi all but said that he doesn’t survive the mission earlier in the episode, but cutting from him being taken for treatment while Archer and Phlox share a grim look, to him having died between scenes is awfully bad television grammar: We should have seen him slipping away in Sickbay.
But…one scene. One scene where I realised “Ah, that’s what they were getting at when they called this a valentine to the fans.” Tucker and Riker finally come face to face across the centuries and Tucker talks about how he can count on one hand the number of people (Archer among them) who he trusts to never hurt him and always have his back. “You ever know anybody like that?”he asks. “Yeah, one or two,” Riker confirms. Maybe having watched Picard Season 3 recently it hit home harder. As with that final shot of Picard, Kirk and Archer intoning the famous opening narration over their own Enterprises, it’s telling us that successive generations of Enterprises have produced crews that became like a family to each other and were always there for the rest of their lives. I’d totally forgotten the scene near the end where Reed and Mayweather predict that Archer will have a new ship soon and they’ll sign up aboard it with him: They might have just lost one of the family, but these people will keep on being drawn together.
And I love how much of Archer and T’Pol there is here. They get another of those ready room scenes where Archer is unnecessarily harsh while similtaneously showing how their relationship has grown since ‘Broken Bow’. Her adjusting his collar leaves me convinced they’re off to get married (“You look very heroic”). I genuinely teared up at that final hug.
But…yeah, they really miss the landing. I can see what they were going for by having the last proper line of the show being Riker announcing “Computer, end program” and the characters fading away but it was too meta for me. I really wanted them to cut to the real Archer at the real ceremony. I guess cutting to the real NX-01 was their idea of that but it didn’t work as well.
There continues to be an odd reluctance, even with the jump to the magic year of 2161, to admit this is the Federation: Shran’s still calling it a coalition and Archer, Tucker and Phlox all refer to it as an alliance (as does Troi, oddly). T’Pol noting her “intimate relationship” with Tucker ended six years ago means either they resumed it after ‘Bound’ but it didn’t last long or it ended for good circa ‘Home’. Archer mentions Shran helping destroy the Xindi weapon in ‘Zero Hour’. T’Pol refers to her mother and her death in ‘Awakening’. Phlox’s anecdote of Tucker negotiating an order to sleep for six hours down to four happened in ’The Forgotten’. There’s a reference to Phlox’s three wives. An Admiral Douglas is mentioned, possibly Gardner’s replacement. Riker comments on the lack of chair for the first officer on the bridge: That’s because, in those days, the first officer actually had a job to do on the bridge… In production terms, we last saw Riker, Data and Troi in Star Trek:Nemesis.
I’m more shocked about tor.com being changed to something new than about how bad this episode was. :D
But as you said, this entire series is really terrible, only Picard can compete with it in terms of quality of stories from the whole franchise…Watching the series was mostly painful even if I skipped the worst episodes. :D
Definitely a dud on many levels. I think I read somewhere that this was originally planned to be just a season finale set in 2155, and they hastily rewrote it into a series finale set 6 years later so they could jump to the founding of the Federation, which is why it just doesn’t work as a 6-years-later story, with none of the characters (but Shran) having advanced in any way at all.
And then they go and have Troi say at the end that the 2161 signing was just what would eventually lead to the Federation, rather than the actual founding itself, which makes me think it was a line left over from a 2155 draft where it was just the signing of the Coalition Charter, and they missed the line in the hasty rewrites.
No doubt all of this is why the novels reworked it into a coverup of events that actually did happen in ’55, though that doesn’t make sense on many levels. Surely that would create countless discrepancies with known history recorded elsewhere. But I guess there’s no real way to make sense of this.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that even in the simulation, we never actually see Trip die. We see him rolled into the surgical scanner, then cut to a scene of Archer and T’Pol talking about his death afterward. Which suggests that Berman & Braga were leaving the door open to reveal that it was faked and Trip was still alive, just in case they got an opportunity to revisit the series later. Although I doubt they would’ve done it the same way the books did.
I confess, I do kind of like that the payoff to the running gag of the unseen Chef is that Chef finally gets an on-camera role and it’s not really him.
I’ve heard that Manny Coto wanted to get Shatner to play Chef if the series had been picked up for a fifth season. I’m a bit disappointed that this never happened.
I would have accepted this if Shatner went real big with a Cajun accent or something.
I, on the other hand, am massive grateful that that never happened…. *shudder*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Back in the day, I only watched a bare handful of first-run Enterprise episodes. They included, yes, “These Are the Voyages,” as well as “A Night in Sickbay.” I did eventually watch all the episodes on DVD, but in the meantime, I was understandably left with a poor impression of the series.
I agree that TATV is basically a complete failure on every level. It might have been cool to see Riker and Troi pop up, but this should have been some other story in the middle of the season. As things stand, the characters are upstaged in their own series finale. And the tie-in with “The Pegasus” is clumsy at best.
Trip’s death scene is definitely one of the low points in the entire Star Trek franchise. Just watching it makes me angry, but at least the story set-up gives us some wiggle room. I haven’t read the novels that supposedly retconed it, but I hope that a future episode does address the issue.
If only they had framed this with “Shades of Gray” instead of “The Pegasus”. It’s just slightly more acceptable as a Riker’s hallucinatory near-death fever dream.
All that being said, this story was at least the basis for the only episode of Very Short Treks that was actually funny, so I guess that gives it a small degree of redeeming value.
I didn’t like that VST episode much, since it was just the same single joke repeated and driven into the ground (although it was at least inoffensive, unlike most of the rest). But admittedly, it fixes a lot of the episode’s problems if you assume someone was watching an inaccurate simulation of Riker and Troi in “The Pegasus” watching an inaccurate simulation of NX-01’s final mission.
Another possible handwave is that these were the Riker and Troi from some “Parallels”-style alternate quantum reality version of “The Pegasus.”
I try to resist the urge to simply ignore the fact that certain awful episodes actually exist, but this one makes it so very tempting. They should have just let the previous episode be the finale, because it does a much better job of it than this disaster. The only thing I don’t mind that everyone else seems to complain about is the fact that Frakes and Sirtis look older. The fact that everyone else doesn’t is much more difficult for me to accept.
I often scoff at people who talk about head canon, and movies or episodes that in their minds do not exist. But as much as I defer to the decisions of the writers, this episode was a hard pill to swallow. It was just awful.
I’ll fully admit, first airing, I’d already given up on Enterprise by the end of season 3 (yeah, it was less bad, in some ways at least, then 1 and 2, but I just wasn’t here for it anymore, and the tendencies of Berman and Bragga as showrunners had broken any good will I had towards the series), so I didn’t feel that bitterness at the 80s/90s/00s Trek ending in such an ignominious fashion.
That said, I am sad to see these rewatches end on this absolute bottom of the barrel note (the episode, obviously, not the review). Thanks for the ride KRAD, it’s been fantastic, even if the Star Trek often wasn’t.
Well, there’s two more pieces coming: the fourth-season overview, and then I plan to do a wrap-up of the rewatches, as it were, looking back at the original series, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise Rewatches after a dozen years of it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is still struggling with the notion that 2011 was 12 years ago….
Well, I for one say 2020-23 don’t count.
For me the worst part of Trip’s “death” wasn’t that it was clumsily written… nor that it was broadcast (foreshadowing is giving too much credit for subtlety that did not exist exist) in advance. No, the worst point was that it was absolutely pointless and had no effect on the plot of the episode.
May as well have had Trip slip and fall during his maintenance routine and crack his head on the floor.
Yeah, it sucked, but the real friends are the ones we made along the way…
I don’t get the hatred with this one. Yes, its sloppily written and poorly directed. Yes, it was a dud to go out on, and a laughable “love letter.” But the scenes with Riker are charming, and the implication that is was watching the second officer of the first Enterprise struggle and learning advice from him that got him to move forward with what to do with the Pegasus was nice.
Of course it doesn’t work with the actual TNG episode, and that is sloppy too. But I appreciate the attempt. Still dreadful, however. But I don’t hate it – not like I hated Season 2!. But it was dreadful as was most of the series – although I warmed to the cast quite a bit. I’ll miss them – even water polo-obsessed Bakula!
But of course I’ll miss these rewatches, and I’ll keep coming back to them when I do another rewatch of a series … erm, not this series, at least not for a long, long time…
As I said last week, thanks again Krad. “These were the voyages…”
ENTERPRISE, you were never a classic in your own right, but you were solid STAR TREK and I’ll miss you more than most – special credit to the indispensable Jolene Blalock, the inimitable Doctor Phlox, the incorrigible Shran and Porthos.
GOOD BOY PORTHOS.
(Honourable mention to Jonathan Archer courting Death like a fine lady, Hoshi Sato being d*** good at her job despite some serious reservations about Space, Mr Reed struggling to be a consummate professional by repressing his tendency to be a b***** little man, Charles Tucker III for proving that you can’t keep Earth in space without Florida Man, that Xindi Reptilian for being a true blue villain of the Old School, the Vulcans for being Just Done with Time Travel, the simple joys of seeing Starfleet wrecking the Third Reich, Porthos for being such a good boy he gets mentioned twice and to NX-01 for being homely: well miss you, lady).
On a less melancholy note, if this episode gave us nothing else it gave us an excuse to make a running joke out of Chef being played by a different STAR TREK veteran whenever he needs to show up onscreen (Bonus points for humour if some of these actors are actually actresses and not a single line of dialogue is changed to reflect the fact).
Actually, I’d have been happy to see Mr Frakes added to the cast as a recurring Guest Star in the role of Chef – as mentioned, his scenes really add something to the NX-01 ensemble – though one would be wickedly tempted to have him made up as the member of some alien species, in order to avoid the ‘Riker in cosplay’ angle.
Wait a minute – it occurs to me that an episode of LOWER DECKS showing Our Heroes get curious about NX-01 after Captain Pike’s mention of Archer’s Enterprise, then accidentally pull a DA VINCI CODE on the Great Tucker Cover-Up might be hilarious (and having Mr Jonathan Frakes voice a version of Chef who looks nothing like Captain Riker might be a nice little in-joke).
What’s the deal with the spacing and (lack of) hyphenation on line breaks on the comments?
Tremendously bad JavaScript, in addition to everything else that’s gone wrong with redo of this site.
Congratulations Keith you made it thru to the end!
I remember during the Voyager Rewatch that you said you wouldn’t do Enterprise. I wish that the series ended on a mission where the Enterprise a Vulcan ship and an Andorian ship all worked together on some rescue mission.
I remember reading once that this episode was written during the development of Season 3 and that some of the oddness with Trip/T’pol, etc. was due to it simply not being aware of the events of Season 4 at all.
Is there any truth to that?
Enterprise had a lot of problems, starting with the depiction of the Vulcans. In the last season we finally see a lot being fixed. OUR Vulcans were a repressed group, who finally were given a chance to come to power. It was in the last season that the show finally felt like it was taking part in the real Trek universe. Sadly, it was too late to save the series. If they had done this from the start it would have had a better chance. Yes, the finale was a disappointment on many levels. I still feel sorry for the cast, who had to struggle with bad writing for 4 years only to have their finale turn them into holograms to feed into a Riker story (all due respects to Frakes, who became one of my favorite Trek actors). The cast deserved better for their send-off.
The depiction of the Vulcans was one of the best parts. It would’ve been ridiculous for their culture and politics to be exactly the same in the 22nd century as it was 100 or 200 years later — just think of how much America or Europe has transformed in 200 years. Cultures change over time, and the show was smart enough to acknowledge that with the Vulcans, though not so much with the Klingons — though at least “Judgment” established that their warrior-dominated culture was a historically recent development.
Man, the text on this new site is so bad you can’t even tell something in the article is bolded.
I can vaguely tell, but mainly because I know it’s supposed to be bolded. It’s only very slightly heavier in that font.
My theory is that all the pixels for bolding text were reserved for the comments….
The whole episode is just one big slap in the face to the cast. It’s why I hate it with a passion. Basically, the whole cast becomes side characters in someone else story. For the life of me I can’t pretend that it was supposed to be taking place during “The Pegasus”. The actors who played Riker or Troi were a decade older. Maybe if it was set on the Titian. Then maybe it worked a little better. But I think Berman and Braga wanted to link Archer’ Enterprise to Picard’s Enterprise,
The only part of this review I disagree with is your not being fond of the often-discussed-never-seen character trope in television. I mean, this finale would’ve been far better if Chef was revealed to be… Maris Crane?!
There were 100 ways to make an episode that featured Riker and Troi and felt like a “valentine to the fans.” And apparently, the producers went with plan 101. From killing arguably the most popular character on the show to ending what was its most interesting relationship with no real explanation and reducing everyone on the show to extras in a TNG story, there’s nothing redeemable here. This is the only episode of the show I’ve never rewatched – and never plan to.
I’ve been waiting since this rewatch started to see what you would say about this FU to the fans final episode and it didn’t disappoint.
Seriously, berman and braga couldn’t have take 45 minutes out of their day to watch Pegasus to see how badly the Riker/troi scenes couldn’t fit anywhere, and that riker and troi should’ve been on the Titan yammering away about the early days of the federation?
Bad episode, bad series finale
Every few years when some hot property starts to “cool off” and Hollywood pundits start talking about property “fatigue” (Marvel fatigue, Star Trek fatigue, Star Wars fatigue), I inevitably circle back to thinking about this episode. I, as an audience member, didn’t feel any kind of Star Trek fatigue at the time.
(Granted I wasn’t an avid watcher of Enterprise, because it went in the opposite direction of time, in terms of what I wanted next for stories in Star Trek…but that’s a different gripe.)
But this finale left such a terrible impression of the property, it was hard not to just walk away and consider it “good riddance”.
I’m so glad you pointed out that even as a framing story, the events of Pegasus make no sense here, because there’s literally no place in the episode where Riker could take a few hours to chill in the holodeck and mull over this decision. That’s bothered me for so many years.
Even outside of those serious continuity concerns, it felt ugly to turn what should have been a farewell episode for the Enterprise cast into a “hey, remember these guys” episode for TNG. Having Riker and Troi feature in an holodeck-episode like this at some point earlier in the season would have been fine (assuming the execution was WAY better than this one), but here I always felt like it diverted a LOT of attention away from the cast who are actually the regulars on the show.
In retrospect, “These are the Voyages….” is still better than VOY’s “Endgame”. That one pretty much ran away and prevented viewers from seeing the repercussions and consequences of that journey. At least we get something here, even if it is mostly pretty lousy. The little details are nice enough. The fact that Trip and T’Pol didn’t work out as couple (sometimes they don’t), and that Shran’s been through a lot – and I would have loved to have seen future seasons with him as a regular, which is something Manny Coto had been hinting on possibly happening.
I had never thought of the idea of using Captain Riker on the Titan as the framing story launch point. That’s…. interesting, to say the least. And more plausible, given the evident ages of Frakes and Sirtis. Ultimately, the end result runs into the same problems when using Denise Crosby and Colm Meaney in “All Good Things….”.
Using a Titan-era Riker could have worked, depending on the motivation. But I think I get why Rick Berman and Brannon Braga ended up choosing the height of the TNG era as the framing story. In Berman’s viewpoint, TNG was the bread and butter of what made his career as Trek’s main producer/showrunner throughout those 18 years. DS9, VOY and obviously ENT all happened because of that show. And given the hit-and-miss track record of the TNG movies, I get why they would prefer to use the visuals (uniforms included, Marvin Rush brightly lit cinematography, the works) of the era that built the audience and goodwill. A sweet way to tie it all back to where it all began.
But it doesn’t work using the events of “The Pegasus” at all. The way they distort the events of that episode just isn’t worth it. They could have instead used season 6’s “Frame of Mind”. Have Riker go through some intense counseling sessions after the traumatic events of that episode (and written by Brannon Braga, I might add). A situation where he might be considering quitting starfleet, and where revisiting the early days of Archer and company would rekindle his passion for exploration and serving a greater cause. That could have worked much better.
Also, if the show had been renewed for season 5, the episode would have to be very different. For one, they would have had to cut Trip’s death, in order to avoid potential series ending spoilers. Then again, I doubt they had his death in mind for a potential series ender – it was just a way to raise the stakes in a rushed, poorly thought out season ender that had to be hastily rewritten as a series ender.
Wasn’t the fan theory at the time that the never-seen Chef would turn out to be played (In ‘real life’) by a legacy cast member, perhaps Shatner himself? If that was the actual plan, it would explain why they held off showing him until they could lock someone in, and would further make sense if they decided at the end that Frakes-in-a-virtual-setting would have to do.
I’m a few weeks behind, but it should come as no surprise that I also thought this was disappointing as a finale.
It doesn’t simply not fit anywhere in the course of *Pegasus*, but it also takes the teeth out of it. In the actual episode, Riker coming clean is a spur of the moment thing after these feelings have been bubbling, and it’s very emotionally charged. Here, we have him apparently very calmly resolving with Troi to talk to Picard, after having worked through all his angst on the holodeck. It just completely takes the emotional weight out of the TNG episode.
It’s also a disservice to the NX crew! It takes the focus off of them to put it on Riker. This is supposed to be THEIR finale, but instead they take a back seat to be characters in a movie someone from another show is watching.
The time skip and Tucker and T’Pol breaking up right after the last episode was also a slap in the face of the development of these characters. And any emotional weight Tucker’s death might have had is taken away by Troi casually calling it out ahead of time.
Overall, this was just an outright insult to the fans.
What’s ridiculous to me is that the writers apparently described this one as a “love letter to the fans.” Presumably they figured that all of the “fans” were fans of TNG who had just been suffering through all of these seasons of Enterprise (and Voyager, and Deep Space Nine) in lieu of what they really wanted to see. The idea that there might be fans of the actual series that this was a finale of seems never to have occurred to them.
This, of course, is exactly what just happened again toStar Trek: Picardlast yearYou know, jaime, the similarities between Terry Matalas’s approach to Picard season 3 and Berman & Braga’s approach to “These are the Voyages….” did not occur to me until you posted this comment. It’s a good point….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido