Star Trek: Enterprise Fourth Season
Original air dates: October 2004 – May 2005
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Manny Coto
Captain’s log. Having saved Earth and stopped the Sphere-Builders from taking over the galaxy, Enterprise is diverted to 1944 Earth to do one last Temporal Cold War favor for Daniels, which apparently ends the entire thing, to the relief of both the crew and the viewership.
The scars of the mission to the Delphic Expanse take a while to heal, particularly for Archer and T’Pol, with the former reuniting with an old girlfriend (who’s also captain of the NX-02, Columbia), the latter by going home to Vulcan, where she winds up married to her long-affianced Koss in order to save her mother from political reprisal.
Some Augments that were taken out of stasis and raised by Arik Soong attack a Klngon ship, and Enterprise gets caught up in their and Soong’s attempts to create an empire for their genetically engineered selves, though it all goes to crap pretty quickly.
Forrest is killed when the Earth embassy on Vulcan is bombed, allegedly by Syrranites—radicals who are Surakian fundamentalists, as it were—but truly by a faction within High Command that is secretly in bed with the Romulans. The Syrranites have unearthed Surak’s katra and his writings. The former is put into Archer’s head by Syrran on his deathbed, and he’s then able to find the latter, causing a revolution on Vulcan and restoring mind-melds in the bargain.
After encounters with both the inventor of the transporter and some Organian scientists, Enterprise is asked to mediate the long-standing rivalry between Andoria and Tellar Prime—but the Romulans don’t like all this peace crap, and try to sabotage the talks with a remote-controlled ship with a holographic skin. This almost works, and Archer has to fight Shran to the almost-death in order to help move past it, then they work together to contact the Aenar the Romulans are using.
Klingons retrieve the Augment wreckage and are able to genetically engineer Klingons who are physically superior, but look human—but who also have a nasty disease. Phlox is kidnapped by the Klingons to try to fix it, and he does, but at the expense of giving millions of Klingons smooth foreheads, thus explaining a makeup change from 1979 for whatever reason.
Finally, Enterprise is caught up in the Terra Prime movement, which wants to remove all alien influence from Earth, and is doing it at the barrel of a gun. Archer and the gang stop their terrorist attack just in time for a Coalition of Planets to be formed.
Highest-rated episode: a tie between “Home” and “Babel One,” which both received 10s.
Lowest-rated episode: the absolute twaddle of “Bound” with a well-earned 0.
Most comments (as of this writing): “These are the Voyages…” a finale that still has people talking nineteen years later, with 44.
Fewest comments (as of this writing): At the moment, of the entries that have comments available, it’s “Terra Prime,” with a surprisingly low 11.
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Affliction”: If the flow regulators are locked open, the warp core will breach if you drop out of warp, but if you go faster, the pressure is lessened. This is actually rather a spiffy bit of sabotage, akin to that which we saw in the movie Speed…
Favorite The gazelle speech: From “Observer Effect”: Archer sacrifices himself to try to save Tucker and Sato. He is also surprisingly unaffected by the corpse of his best friend sitting up and talking to him…
Favorite I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations: From “The Forge”: T’Pol has to remind Archer at one point that she is part of a species that evolved on Vulcan, so she’s way more suited to wander across the Forge than his human ass. One of the things she mentions is the nictitating membrane, or “inner eyelid,” something Spock needed the better part of a day to even remember he had…
Favorite Florida Man: From “Demons”: Florida Man Has Miracle Baby With Alien Lover!
Favorite Optimism, Captain! From “Divergence”: Phlox absolutely owns this episode, taking charge of the entire situation once he’s on the road to a cure, manipulating K’Vagh and Krell both with verve and aplomb.
Favorite Good boy, Porthos! From “The Forge”: When Archer expresses disbelief that Vulcan children have sehlats as pets, T’Pol reminds Archer about Porthos. Archer’s riposte is that Porthos won’t eat him if he’s late with dinner, to which T’Pol replies that Vulcan children are never late with their sehlat’s dinner. (Well, at least not twice, anyhow…)
Favorite Better Get MACO: From “Borderland”: Even though the Xindi crisis is over, there are still MACOs assigned to Enterprise. They guard Soong while he’s on the ship and Malik when he boards as well, and they prove as useless as ever in repelling a hostile boarding party, as the Augments take them down in seconds flat.
Favorite Ambassador Pointy: From “The Forge”: Soval is very obviously humbled by Forrest’s selfless gesture, and he rebels against the High Command from the minute they start accusing Andorians and Syrrannites of the bombing.
He also admits to being able to do mind-melds.
Favorite The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… From “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II”: Like Spock before him and Sarek after him, the MU version of Soval has a goatée. Tradition!
Favorite Blue meanies: From “Kir’Shara”: At one point, Kumari takes a hit intended for Enterprise, at which point Shran proclaims to Tucker that now Archer owes him two favors (the first for helping during “Zero Hour”).
Favorite Qapla’!: From “The Augments”: We meet two Klingon captains in this episode. One is incredibly gullible, the other incredibly incompetent. Not a banner day for the Empire, this…
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Bound”: I mean, where to start? The three Orion women turn all the human men (except for Tucker) into drooling idiots or posturing morons, or both. Plus T’Pol and Tucker finally decide to become a real couple after dancing around it for several years, and making us endure simply endless “Vulcan neuro-pressure” softcore porn scenes in season three…
Favorite More on this later… From “The Augments”: At the end of the episode, Soong thinks that he should abandon genetic engineering in favor of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, and muses that it may take a few generations to get it right, a hilariously clumsy bit of foreshadowing of the work of his descendent Noonien Soong in creating Data, Lore, and B-4.
In addition, Soong dismisses the story of Khan and his followers escaping Earth on Botany Bay as a myth, but it will be proven correct in the original series’ “Space Seed” (and again, after a fashion, in Star Trek Into Darkness) when Khan and his gaggle around found by Starfleet.
Favorite Welcome aboard: Several past recurring regulars make their obviously last appearances this season: Vaughn Armstrong as Forrest, Molly Brink as Talas, Jeffrey Combs as Shran, Jim Fitzpatrick as Williams, Gary Graham as Soval, John Fleck as Sillik, and Matt Winston as Daniels. This season also gives us a few new recurring regulars for the final go-round: Michael Reilly Burke as Koss, Joanna Cassidy as T’Les, Derek Magyar as Kelby, Ada Maris as Hernandez, and Eric Pierpoint as Harris.
Some folks who have made regular guest appearances in this era of Trek spinoffs also come back for one last hurrah: Lee Arenberg (“Babel One,” “United”), Cyia Batten (“Bound”), Kristin Bauer (“Divergence”), J. Paul Boehmer (“Storm Front”), J. Michael Flynn (“Babel One,” “United,” “The Aenar”), Robert Foxworth (“The Forge,” “Awakening,” “Kir’Shara”), Wayne Grace (“Divergence”), Brad Greenquist (“Affliction”), Harry Groener (“Demons,” “Terra Prime”), J.G. Hertzler (“Borderland”), Gregory Itzin (“In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II”), William Lucking (“Bound”), Christopher Neame (the “Storm Front” two-parter), Richard Riehle (“Cold Station 12,” “The Augments”), Mark Rolston (“The Augments”), John Rubinstein (“Awakening,” “Kir’Shara”), John Schuck (“Affliction,” “Divergence”), Joel Swetow (“Terra Prime”), Brian Thompson (“Babel One,” “United,” “The Aenar”), Marc Worden (“Affliction”), and Tom Wright (“Storm Front”).
Three actors get to play roles established on the original series: Kara Zediker as T’Pau (first seen and played by Celia Lovsky in “Amok Time,” appearing in “Awakening” and “Kir’Shara”), Bruce Gray as Surak (first seen and played by Barry Atwater in “The Savage Curtain,” appearing in “Awakening”), and Steve Rankin as Colonel Green (first seen and played by Phillip Pine in “The Savage Curtain,” appearing in “Demons”).
The “Storm Front” two-parter gave us some folks famous from other contemporary shows: Golden Brooks (Girlfriends), Steven R. Schirippa, and Joe Maruzzo (both from The Sopranos).
Other nifty guest stars include the great James Avery (“Affliction,” “Divergence”), WWE wrestler Big Show (“Borderland”), Adam Clark (“Demons,” “Terra Prime”), Bill Cobbs (“Daedalus”), Abby Brammell (“Borderland,” “Cold Station 12,” “The Augments”), Peter Mensah (“Demons,” “Terra Prime”), Michael Nouri (“The Forge”), Leslie Silva (“Daedalus”), and Peter Weller (“Demons,” “Terra Prime”).
And we have some folks better known for their roles on other Trek shows, starting with the amusing two-episode appearance of Jakc Donner (Tal from the original series’ “The Enterprise Incident”) as a Vulcan priest in “Home” and “Kir’Shara,” moving on to Brent Spiner (Data on TNG and Picard) playing his second of four members of the Soong clan, Arik, in “Borderland,” “Cold Station 12,” and “The Augments” (and also doing a vocal cameo as Data in “These are the Voyages…”), and concluding with Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprising their roles as Riker and Troi from TNG (and later Picard) in “These are the Voyages…”
But the best guest is the very very young Todd Stashwick, who will later go on to play Shaw in Picard season three, as a Vulcan-who’s-really-a-Romulan in “Kir’Shara.”
Favorite I’ve got faith… From “The Forge”:
“You keep saying ‘supposedly.’ You don’t believe Surak did the things they said he did?”
“He brought logic to Vulcan, in an age we call the Time of Awakening. But his writings from that period no longer exist.”
“There must be some record of it.”
“Over the centuries, his followers made copies of his teachings.”
“Let me guess—with the originals lost, whatever’s left is open to interpretation.”
“You find this amusing?”
“I find it familiar.”–Archer and T’Pol discussing Surak.
Favorite Trivial matter: Probably the one for “Divergence,” with all its Klingon-y goodness…
It’s been a long road… “I’ve been told that people are calling us heroes.” On the one hand, this is the show Enterprise really should’ve been all along. After two years of giving us the most lackluster exploration of outer space imaginable and one year of a 9/11-inspired season-long arc that didn’t really work, they finally decided to embrace being a prequel and show the roots of what would come later.
What was most successful about the season was that they didn’t allow themselves to be constrained by the one-hour format. The season was a delightful mix of single episodes, and two- and three-parters, giving some stories the space they needed.
Unfortunately, the execution left a lot to be desired. They all started promising, with the Augment three-parter giving us Brent Spiner snark; the Vulcan three-parter giving us the attack on the embassy that killed Forrest, a devastating loss; the Andorian three-parter opened with Shran’s ship being destroyed and Archer trying to negotiate a fragile peace, ending the first episode with a brilliant cliffhanger; the Terra Prime two-parter, the Klingon two-parter, and the Mirror Universe two-parter all had excellent first episodes, as well.
And every single multipart storyline blew the ending. The Augment trilogy turned into nonsense with the Augment kids looking more like they should be arguing over what mousse product to use in their hair than being the vanguard of the next step in human evolution. Both the Vulcan trilogy and the Klingon two-parter expended a great deal of story energy fixing things that weren’t broken, giving unnecessary fan service at the expense of an engaging story. The MU diversion was just that, a diversion, and not as fun a one as it could have been, as Trek has dipped into the MU well way too often. And the fascinating political commentary of Terra Prime devolved into an action hour with a big ray gun pointed at Earth.
Probably the most successful story was the Andorian one, which would’ve made a fantastic two-parter. Alas, they tacked a third part on, and “The Aenar” adds almost nothing to the story that wasn’t already accomplished by the first two parts.
The standalone episodes run the gamut from brilliant (“Home,” a fantastic coda to the third season’s trauma) to dreadful (“Bound,” a throwback to the worst excesses of the original series).
And the season was bookended by two abject failures. First was pathetically ending the Temporal Cold War with SPACE NAZIS! and then ending the season and the series with a misbegotten disaster of a TNG crossover holodeck episode that fails as an Enterprise finale, fails as a parallel storyline to a rather good TNG episode, and just generally fails.
While the fourth season is better than the previous three, it’s too little, way too late. By the time the fall of 2004 rolled around, Enterprise had hemorrhaged viewers to the point that no matter what they did in season four, it wasn’t going to be seen by enough viewers to justify the expense of producing the show. Three years of Mediocre White People Failing Upward had not proven to be a winning story strategy, and the final season did little to ameliorate that. Excellent work by various guest stars—the likes of Spiner, Gary Graham (whose Soval was at his best this season), Jeffrey Combs, John Schuck, James Avery, Bill Cobbs, Harry Groener, Peter Weller, Joanna Cassidy, Michael Nouri, and Vaughn Armstrong all served to show up how incredibly lackluster the main cast was. No one more embodied this than Ada Maris, whose Captain Hernandez proved in three episodes to be far more charismatic and interesting a shipmaster than Scott Bakula was able to scrape together over four seasons.
Warp factor rating for the season: 5
This ends, not just the Enterprise Rewatch, but all the classic Trek rewatches that I’ve been doing for this site on and off since 2011. Later this month, I’m going to do a wrapup of the five rewatches of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. And keep an eye on Reactor for news of my next big project…
So glad you’re done! I like your books, but my word you can’t watch a series in the spirit it was intended without applying a current lens to it. You seem to feel guilty for who you are, apologetic for things that don’t require apologies, and expect that a show that occurred in the past will somehow measure up to what you deem the minimum standard of the 2020s.
Great rewatch, and thank you for it. But please get off your high horse.
You’re welcome for it, but I have to say that 1) I don’t feel guilty about who I am in the least, 2) “applying a current lens to it” is the entire point of the exercise.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Really appreciate the reply, and I honestly wasn’t trying to offend/attack. Our perspectives differ, and that’s a good thing.
Wishing you Peace and Long Life KRAD
“After a failure of this magnitude, I could be dead.”
Sadly, the end of this rewatch has been a far bigger letdown than the end of the show it’s been covering. It took nearly four days of begging for my comment on the finale to be approved, at which point it was buried in the middle of a sea of comments and there’s a good chance no-one ever saw it. The 11 comments on ‘Terra Prime’ isn’t remotely representative, because last I checked the first three or four days worth of comments were still attached to the wrong article. And I’m not even convinced this will get posted but I’m trying. With this rewatch coming to its natural end, I’m forced to conclude that Tor’s gone and I have little interest in this new Reactor site.
As for Enterprise Season 4, well, unnecessary fan service pretty much sums it up, for all the talk of embracing being a prequel. That said, I did enjoy it and even found some of the multi-part stories improved as they went on, although there were just as many stinkers as well. Once again, I found the season book-ends more enjoyable than the majority, and for possibly the first time I could actually see what they were doing with ‘These are the Voyages’, however misguided the attempt to produce a finale for Paramount-era Trek as well as a finale for Enterprise was.
There’s surprisingly little discussion of the characters here: Some were engaging, some were mediocre, but all together they formed a decent crew and the last few episodes served to emphasise the bonds that have formed between them.
I may drop back to look for the overview of the whole rewatch series but if not, thanks for the ride!
Because the characters were barely even there, apart from T’Pol and Tucker. The main characters were almost incidental to what was going on……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Archer had his guilt from the stuff he did in the Expanse in the early episodes and then got to be the face of races uniting for the common good. Reed got to have his shady secret agent past dragged up and trying to reconcile it with his new role with Archer. Phlox got to invent smooth-foreheaded Klingons. Mayweather got to… fly the ship and meet an old girlfriend, Sato got made into a martial arts expert for a couple of episodes out of nowhere…yeah, okay, I’m reaching now.
I may have said this at the start of the season, but I’m not sure I agree that this season is what the show should’ve been all along. For all its strengths, the season was far too devoted to continuity porn and setting up future stories and ideas. That should’ve been a part of the series, but not to the extent that it dominated the whole thing, as it did in season 4. I actually liked the way season 1 did it, focusing mostly on its present while laying subtle hints about things mentioned in TOS, like the Axanar, the Malurians, and Coridan. Something in between that approach and season 4’s approach would’ve been a good balance. (Or something like Strange New Worlds season 1, though SNW season 2 shifted a bit too far toward continuity-driven stories.)
I’m sure I said that I loved the variable-length format, the most successful innovation of the season, and that I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more widely.
Anyway, for all its weaknesses, I guess I should be thankful to ENT for being the foundation for my longest ongoing novel series to date, the 5-book Rise of the Federation.
Agreed, plus the season tended too much towards Small Universe Syndrome. Not only did we get an unnecessary explanation of ridgeless Klingons, but it’s tied to the Eugenics War and Data’s grand-pappy. That’s on the level of Luke and C3PO being brothers.
The series found the perfect template for what it should be in the first season with the P’Jem episodes — the formation of the Federation is an area where there’s not a lot of established continuity, so the writers had room to build things in a way that would be understandable to newcomers yet still surprise veteran fans.
Congratulations, Keith, on making it through the entire series! Time for a ‘Picard’ rewatch? (Just kidding)
I’ve been saying that this season was “too little, too late” since it came out; but with what I’ve since learnt about the woes of UPN, it occurs to me that, even if it had been the best season of Trek ever made, it probably wouldn’t have saved Enterprise from cancellation (I suspect I may be saying something similar about the Paramount+ shows in a couple of years, unfortunately). That said, I found on the rewatch that I didn’t like it nearly as much as I remember. I suppose that, when it came out, the constant continuity references were an exciting novelty (and a welcome change for a series that had, in earlier seasons, often felt like it was ignoring its role as a prequel). Now, continuity references are everywhere, and the novelty has really worn off.
What I will say for this season, though, is that it marked the first time in many years (I’m inclined to say “since the end of Deep Space Nine”) that Star Trek actually felt energized. So much of the later Berman era had felt so formulaic, as if the writing rooms were sleepwalking through the script breaking process: meet an anomaly; spout some technobabble; press some buttons; rinse and repeat 26 times and you have a season. Even the Xindi Arc had felt like a network mandate with no enthusiasm behind it. Here, though, it’s obvious that Manny Coto and the Reeves-Stevenses are just pumped as hell to get to play in this sandbox, and their enthusiasm bleeds through into the script. Even terrible episodes like “Storm Front” have cool flourishes like that alternate history propaganda reel. It feels *fun* in a way that Star Trek simply hadn’t for a long time, and makes a good case for why they should have had a changing of the guard in the writers’ room years earlier.
The CBS/Paramount series have all been better received and are ending on their own terms. Enterprise was canceled by the network due to its unpopularity.
Yes, but the network was dying in any case and a single good season on Enterprise was never going to be enough to save it.
In any case, I think that I would consider every single one of the CBS/Paramount series to be better than Enterprise, and yet I’d still be surprised if Paramount+ was still around in two years. *shrugs*
As I said back during the “Broken Bow” re-watch, I wasn’t especially enthused about ENT back in 2001.
I grew up with TNG and was emotionally connected to the 24th Century era.
But with that era having passed at the time with VOY’s ending (and Nemesis a year later), I resolved to give it a chance to get my Trek fix (this was several years before, heh, defecting to Stargate).
But little has changed in over 20 years. While there are still some elements I like, ultimately ENT my least favorite of the Berman-era shows.
If anything, I liked the post-series novels more than the show (esp. Mr. Bennett’s Rise of the Federation).
Yes. While I did have to revise my overall opinion of Enterprise upward during the rewatch, I still think that it’s the weakest series overall.
I didn’t like it much in first run, but I found more to appreciate when I rewatched as research after being picked to do the followup novels. Still, it had a lot of wasted potential.
I long to live in a world where Season 1 of Enterprise actually had been on Earth, and about getting the ship off the ground – not just the continuing mission of the Starship Enterprise, but with slightly worse technology.
What makes it more unfortunate is that so many things did work – the set and costume designs are fantastic, the score is often excellent, all of the actors not named Scott Bakula are perfect in their roles (even if most of them are utterly wasted)… But the show just didn’t work. The first couple seasons, it was a lack of vision, largely brought about by the studio having no faith in trying anything but the generic formula that TNG and Voyager stuck to. Season 3 had some interesting ideas, but was about 14 episodes too long, and couldn’t commit enough to anything to stick out. And season 4 wasn’t just too little, too late (though it was that) – it was also wildly uneven, and though it may have been a step up in comparison, that bar had been set pretty low.
Then there’s the Scott Bakula of it all. I legitimately still don’t understand how this happened. He’s normally a pretty good actor, but he’s *so* bad in the role, and he’s such a focus of the show that there’s no recovering from it. Was there myopathy inside the studio about stunt casting the “Quantum Leap” guy? Did they just not do any screen tests? He veers wildly from so understated as to be boring, to hamming it up in the worst ways, and absolutely none of it lands. It doesn’t help that he’s got virtually nothing to work with for large swathes of the series, where he’s just written as Nepo Baby Ship Captain, a man wildly unqualified for his position.
I really, really wish this series had hit for me. I love Star Trek. I like old Star Trek, I like 90s Trek, I’m really digging all the new Trek that isn’t Picard S2/3 (god, don’t get me started). I even like chunks of Voyager (though I find that show’s failure to live up to it’s potential deeply, deeply frustrating). And yet, I just can’t get into Enterprise. I can’t even find the deep well of disappointment for Enterprise that bad Trek normally invokes in me. It doesn’t make me *angry* the way “Into Darkness” did. It’s just dull, occasionally stupid, and fails to summon much of any emotional response from me, other than “yeah, I guess that’s bad enough to kill Trek for a while. Meh”.
Did you mean myopia? Myopathy means muscle disease.
But yeah, Bakula was a weak point for me too. People still joke to this day about Shatner’s supposed penchant for dramatic pauses (literally to this day — I saw one on Facebook within the past hour), but he had nothing on Bakula’s glacial delivery.
Sure did. Don’t post at way too late o’clock after working 12 hour film shifts is the moral of the story today.
Is it possible that somewhere down the line, you’ll do rewatches of Picard and Discovery?
It’s certainly possible, but it’ll be very far down the line. Hell, I stand by the reviews of the episodes that I’ve written that are still right here on the site…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Do you think there’s any merit to revising your reviews with a rewatch, especially given that (most of) modern Trek leans incredibly heavily into a mystery a season for their plot? Having a full view before going into it does colour the season, as it were.
I rewatched some of Discovery during the pandemic, and one thing that surprised me was that I actually liked the first season a great deal better knowing how it ended, even though I didn’t think that the ending was particularly strong.
While Enterprise could have been better, I enjoyed the show. Perhaps if they had done a show from Commander Shran’s viewpoint, it would have been a winner, as every episode he appeared in stood out from the rest.
End of an era! Both Enterprise ending and the rewatches ending. I’ve only been reading them for about a year now, but it’s hard to believe something that ran for 13 years is over… damn.
ENT S4 probably has more watchable episodes in it than the remaining three seasons combined (and I say that as a huge ENT fan), and maybe if they’d done that all along, they wouldn’t have been cancelled. And maybe if they’d been showrun by people who cared about the franchise they were prequelling for. Alas…
The temporal cold war got exactly the send-off it deserved, though: a pathetic mess that made no sense.
Just wanted to say thanks for all the work you’ve done on this series, Keith. It’s been a monumental effort, provided tons of enjoyment for a lot of people, and I really appreciate it.
One thing should be said about Enterprise, and specifically this season: it has the best music of any Berman-era Trek (Ron Jones writing the only really great other music for TNG…). Props to Dennis McCarthy, Jay Chattaway, and everyone else for some excellent work – from the dissonant piano strands in Season 1 to the excellent, excellent score to “In a Mirror, Darkly.” I recently picked up the La-La Land discs of music for the series and was pleasantly surprised with how strong so much of it is. The use of percussion was one thing, but there was a really clear mastery of their craft compared with how grey DS9’s score felt.
Hello Keith,
regarding the comments count, I think you have to allow for technical hiccups on the way from Tor to Reactor. I believe that Terra Prime used to have at least one more. Doing migrations like this is never easy, especially without a downtime …
I’m not as critical as you are of the entire series, but I probaly agree with your assessment that this was the best season. I liked the first season, too, but that could be nostalgia speaking. (Trek again, any Trek is better than none …)
I still have a soft spot for the Mirror episodes, and not just in Enterprise. They allow characters to break the series format and do things like actually die unexpectedly.
What do you think about the development of Ensign Sato, compared to Ensign Mayweather? Both had very low rank compared to their billing in the show, and neither got a promotion during the run of the series (compare TNG, at least for the junior officers). Yet Sato showed impressive command ability by the end of the Series, and that was foreshadowed by her self-promotion to Empress.
According to the extra material on my DVDs, “These are the Voyages…” had many people from different parts of the Trek franchise as non-speaking extras. Do they count?
Hello! Long time reader, first time commenter. Thank you for all these years of fun recaps and commentary! I’m looking forward to finding out what you have planned next.
I generally agree with your assessment of this season, and of the series overall. I do wonder if some of the over-the-top continuity references in this season might have been so prevalent because they knew they weren’t getting a fifth, so they just decided to go whole-hog with it; maybe they would have spread it out a bit more if they knew they’d have more room to breathe.
But yeah, overall it’s just such a disappointment because I absolutely love the concept of the series. I was so bummed when it started off as mostly just more warmed-over TNG, like most of VOY before it. (And that’s not even getting into the show’s cringeworthy, juvenile attempts at sex appeal. The idea of a decon chamber makes sense–but not one where everyone strips down and rubs gel all over each other! Sheesh.
They said part of the reason behind ENT’s failure was because of fatigue, and they were right–but it wasn’t on the part of the fans. Twelve million people tuned in for “Broken Bow.” The interest was there, and they squandered it almost immediately. And yes, some of the show’s failures were because of obnoxious mandates brought down by UPN (I really like B&B’s initial idea of The Right Stuff in space, but not for a whole 20+ episode season–maybe a four- to six-episode arc) but it’s pretty clear that it was the writing team that needed a refresh, particularly at the head of the table. I agree with jaimebabb; while season 4 had its fault, there was a palpable difference in sheer energy. You could feel the writers’ enthusiasm coming off the page (sometimes) whereas most of the first three seasons just had a sort of blasé sense of ennui to it all. Shame.
They didn’t know they weren’t getting a fifth season until the fourth season was almost over. In fact, a lot of stuff in the Vulcan and Andorian trilogies in particular was setup for doing the Romulan War in season 5.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hey, Krad, do you know where the other Star Trek Rewatches went? When I do a search all I get are the Enterprise ones.
Maybe, but I’d be surprised if they weren’t aware of the possibility that the fourth season might be the last. I mean, to me as a viewer, it was obvious that the show was struggling in the ratings, and that the action-packed Xindi arc in season 3 and the heavy embrace of continuity and TOS setup in season 4 were desperate attempts to attract new viewers and avoid cancellation. So I doubt they assumed a fifth season would happen. They were trying to earn one by raising their game in season 4.
Indeed, I saw the Romulan stuff in season 4 less as a setup for an expected Romulan War arc later on, and more as a substitute for the Romulan War stories they knew the show might not last long enough to tell. I suspected that was why they moved up the start of the conflict to an earlier point than the ST Chronology had suggested. I figure they knew the ratings were poor enough that they couldn’t assume they’d get to cover the war, so they did something that could at least touch on the Romulans while they had the chance, while also working as setup for future stories if they were lucky enough to get renewed. Maybe they were hoping to improve their chances of renewal by setting up a cliffhanger of sorts, as many shows have done.
It’s tempting to imagine that if they had ended on a cliffhanger, they might have at least gotten a “Peacekeeper Wars”-style TV movie/miniseries to wrap everything up. Of course, given that UPN was on its last legs at this point, and Paramount and Viacom would split only about half a year later, I think that it’s entirely possible that it could have just been left hanging forever.
I’ve felt for decades that TV movies would be a good format for Trek, a way to fill in various bits of the timeline like the Romulan War. Particularly back in the ’90s when TV movies were still a commonplace format. It’s a pity we had to wait until the 2020s to get one — and that it had to be about Section rassafrassin’ 31.
It’s strange to me that Star Trek has traditionally avoided them, given how many other SF franchises did them during the 90s and 2000s.
And not just SF — there were the revivals of Perry Mason and Columbo in TV-movie format (with Columbo initially being part of a revival of the mystery movie wheel format, but they abandoned the rest of the shows in the wheel after two short seasons and just kept doing Columbo). And other revival movies for shows like The Man from UNCLE and McCloud. But yeah, there were the Incredible Hulk and Alien Nation revival movies (the latter of which I’ve just been reviewing on my Patreon), there were the three bionic-series revival movies (the second of which featured a pre-fame Sandra Bullock as the new bionic woman), there were the Babylon 5 pilot and sequel movies, and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and TekWar started out as parts of a syndicated movie-wheel series, the Universal Action Pack. And of course there were plenty of miniseries, though that term ended up being applied to a lot of things that were just 2-3 movie-length installments.
Thanks for all the rewatches Krad. You got me through some long and dark days :)
Testing.
I was never of the opinion that season 4 was either the show’s best, or what Enterprise should have been. In fact, I’ve always felt that it was less consistent than season 3.
Nevertheless, it was obviously a necessary part of the shakeup process going on to keep the franchise going. It goes without saying that these last two seasons were a serious improvement over not only the first two seasons of ENT, but also the last two seasons of VOY. I wouldn’t necessarily call it fatigue, but Trek was definitely feeling the effects of not trying anything new, fresh of interesting. The same storytelling format that began under Michael Piller back in 1989 was still the defining tone and driving force for new stories (DS9 being the obvious outlier).
But in itself, season 4 is definitely both flawed and inconsistent a lot of the time. I feel S3 achieved what it set out to do with the Xindi storyline, while 4 inherited the old Berman-era Trek problem of poor resolutions to its two parters.
And the focus on mythology and federation was a bit excessive to me. By devoting so much screentime to these plotlines, there was no room left to develop more classic episodic Trekkian stories, let alone the secondary characters. If your name isn’t Archer, Trip or T’Pol, you’re out of luck. Which is one of the reasons both “Home” and “Divergence” worked so beautifully – since it put him under the gun and forced him to react under extreme conditions. (cont…)
I feel season 4 would have worked better if it had more of a mixture of episodic and the occasional mythology building two parter, rather than populate it with trilogies back and forth. Leave some of these developments to a potential fifth season and beyond. As it is, it feels like a conscious attempt at doing everything they can before the inevitable cancellation (they might not have known of the cancellation until late in the process, but I’ve read Coto and Braga interviews where they mention the new regime that took over UPN in 2004 had no appreciation or love for Trek, and that the writing was pretty much on the wall – the ship was going down, regardless of what they did).
We had some excellent efforts, like the Vulcan and Andorian trilogies, and then the mostly awful Augments trilogy. And by focusing so much on plot, we lost the small character bits such as Reed’s birthday preferences, or Mayweather’s freighter family revisits.
And I guess Trek at that point had no other choice but to die down and lie dormant for a while. ENT’s last two seasons were worth the ride it took to get to them, but I truly feel we needed a break from the Rick Berman era. Enterprise being cancelled wasn’t just an end to that show. It was an end to 18 continuous years of Trek (or 26, if you want to count the TOS movies). The goodwill from the TNG era had died down (which is why I wasn’t surprised “These are the Voyages” took that route).
Like many, I assumed it was going to be a full decade or more without Trek on the air. I was genuinely surprised it only took 4 years for it to come back with the ’09 film, eventually leading us to the Secret Hideout/Paramount+ era. But it was just enough time for Trek to take a breather and come back fresh. By the time we get to Discovery, Trek has gotten the creative freedom to embrace its more gender progressive aspects in a way that was never allowed under Berman.
One last thing, site upgrade related. There should be some way to know when you’ve hit the word limit per comment.
I must say that for all five classic Trek series going through this rewatch, it’s been a long road indeed. I’m certainly sad to see it end. But you know…All Good Things…
Congratulations Keith it’s been a wonderful ride. Thanks for the insights, the research, the snark. It’s been a pleasure.
No way “Bound” is a worse episode than “These are the Voyages…” though.
I blame Les Moonves
I wanted to read your opinion on the awful theme song from this show. I remember hearing it for the first time in 2001 and I immediately changed the channel. It sounds like an overly sentimental ballad from a 1980s sitcom, not a sci-fi adventure series.
I still don’t know what the writers/producers were thinking when they chose that song.
Star Trek has never been about faith through all of the series since the 1960s. It has been about fact-finding and problem-solving.
But the song is not about religous faith, it’s about faith in ourselves. “I’ve got faith to believe I can do anything…. I can reach any star.” That’s very much the message of Star Trek, that human potential is limitless, that we can achieve any goal if we believe in our own capacity to do better.
It’s also a song of defiance — “They’re not gonna hold me down no more, no, they’re not gonna change my mind” — which is a perfect fit for Jonathan Archer’s attitude at the start of the series, that he won’t let Vulcans hold humans back anymore and it’s our time to prove ourselves and “touch the sky.” The lyrics are such a perfect fit for the show’s premise that I initially thought the song was written for the show.
I know this season is generally regarded as the best of the four, but if I’m honest I slightly prefer Season One. The best thing about it was how it wrapped up the previous season (I’m talking about Home, not the space Nazis). Everything after that was at least a little disappointing on some level. Of its multi part stories, I only really enjoyed the last one all the way through, and even that one was far from perfect. And of its four stand alone episodes after Home, I only really liked Observer Effect, and then only if I ignore the fact that these are supposed to be Organians. However, it’s the finale that really sinks it for me. After spending a whole season at least trying to be a good prequel show, it wastes all the good(ish) will it’s built up on the most ill-conceived finale the franchise has ever put in screen, made even worse by the fact that the previous episode would have made for a fine finale on its own. They’d have been better off ending with a clip show.