Enterprise, the conclusion
I've finished the fourth season of Enterprise.
...and I can see why not just Jolene Blaylock but pretty much every ENT fan on the planet was upset about the finale. It didn't have the same effect on me (i.e. I don't feel angry, it's more of a "boys, that was well-meant and ill-advised and badly executed" reaction), but then I am a TNG fan of old and had some fuzzy nostalgic feelings going on there. The thing is, if this had been any other episode but the finale, it would have felt like an okay crossover. Not the best of the inter-Trek crossovers, not the worst. The best being Trials and Tribble-ations and the worst being Q's later appearances on Voyager. Oddly enough, Voyager did some good TNG crossovers later on, using Reg Barclay and, wait for it, Deanna Troi and a holodeck. The difference to "These are the voyages...", aside from the entire finale problem, being that Barclay becoming fascinated by the Voyager crew did not only make sense given his backstory but resulted in him finding a way to enable them to keep permanent contact witht the Alpha Quadrant. I.e. his appearance had a point for the show in question, there was genuine give and take. These are the Voyages..., otoh, again leaving aside its status as a finale which I'll get to shorty, did not manage to establish a credible connection between ENT and TNG characters. It's hard to see why the events Riker has acted out for him would help him make up his mind on the Pegasus matter; there was no parallel. And Riker in turn did not do anything for the Enterprise characters, because he only interacted with holographic representations, not the genuine article, and playing the the Chef as a version of Guinan didn't fit either him nor the ENT crew. So, taken purely as a crossover episode, this failed. The only genuinenly poignant inter Star Trek history moment was the mixture of the credits speech in Picard's, Kirk's and Archer's voice which makes you realize this is actually Archer's speech from the ceremony.
As a series finale episode... oh dear. Where to begin? Firstly, it was a finale in which none of the characters of the show actually appear. Just holographic presentations of same. Bad idea. Secondly, the Enterprise section supposedly show us a future, ten years after the original launch... and nothing has changed. Poor Sato breaks Harry Kim's record as longest serving Ensign. Trip and T'Pol are still at an impasse. (Which feels wrong given where we left them an episode earlier.) Everyone else is where we left them off in season 4 as well, save for T'Pol, who all of a sudden declares her distrust of Andorians (a decade later?) and can't understand why Archer would help a father to get back his kidnapped child (this isn't the same woman I saw this season). She's more the caricature of a Vulcan, safe in her final two scenes with Archer.
You know, TNG gets regularly accused these days of being the embodiment of inconsequential, unchanging and bland Star Trek. (Unfairly and ignoring the production time, imo, but that's another rant.) But look at the TNG finale for comparison, which also has a section set in the future. But in this future, things have definitely changed for the crew, who isn't together anymore - Picard is back in France and ill to boot, he and Crusher got married and divorced, Data is in Oxford teaching, Troi is dead, Riker and Worf are at odds, and so on. Said TNG finale which plays with three time levels is very much about change; the section set in the past, at the point where the series started, showcases how the characters progressed in the course of seven years. Given that the TNG finale, All Good Things..., was co-written by Brannon Braga and Ron Moore, one would think Braga remembered what made it poignant. So okay, if you want to show us the future of our crew, do so, by all means, but let it be about change. Not necessarily change for the better, but change. Show us they've had lives.
Secondly, there are, roughly speaking, two ways you can wrap up your show if you know it's going to end ahead of time. (Meaning the Farscape writers, for example, couldn't do that, hence PK Wars, thankfully.) You can go for the characters saving the universe, or at least a world - the big epic thing. Which both TNG and DS9 did. Or you can go for the absolute contrast, the quiet character episode, which is what Babylon 5 did. Sleeping in Light doesn't offer Sheridan or the other regulars the chance to save the day one last time, it has nearly no outward action at all; twenty years into the future, the surviving regulards meet, have some quiet conversations, then one of them goes off to die, and finally the rest of them watches their space station "die" as well. No fighting, no action, and yet it's a perfect finale, because each of the characters, living and dead, and the station itself is present in their individuality and in their relationships with each other. And oh yes - it's set in the future, and things have changed.
Unfortunately, the ENT series finale went neither way. It's not epic - "Will Archer make it back to give his speech" is hardly a goal worth rooting for, and while "will Shran's daughter be saved" is more touching because we like Shran, it's still not something monumentous. And These Are the Voyages... isn't a quiet character drama, either. It tries to be, in the scenes where Riker-as-Chef talks with everyone about Tucker, but because Riker has no connection to these people (or the viewers unfamiliar with TNG), there is no resonance, as opposed to, say, Vir talking about Londo while sitting at dinner with Sheridan & Co. Or, to remain on the Trek side of things, Garak's bittler little speech to Bashir about Cardassia in the DS9 finale.
And lastly, there is the death. Basically not a bad idea as such for a finale. Killing of a beloved character, I mean. One of the reasons why B7 retains its cult status is that it killed off all of them, after all. As noted before, Sheridan dies in the B5 finale. (Now I'm not Sheridan's biggest fan as we all know, but I did find it poignant.) And wile I'm sure plenty of fans will disagree, I was okay with Damar dying in "What You Leave Behind". (No Jossverse examples here because I don't want to get into old wars.) But if you kill off a character, it's best to do that in a way that doesn't make said death look as the result of overwhelming stupidity. (Though Blake and Avon... okay, let's modify that to "extreme stress and constant paranoia make some none too bright actions understandable, plus two obsessives together make for an combustible mix anyway") Because really, we saw Trip deal with far more dangerous threats without choosing to commit suicide while going so. This has to be the most ill-executed Star Trek death since Kirk's.
(Sidenote: I was fine with killing Kirk. Drive stake into his heart and keep him in the ground while you're at it. But three middle-aged men indulging in fisticuffs as a grand movie finale was just ridiculous.)
In conclusion: it's one failed finale, and the show deserved better.
Now, about the other two episodes, Demons and Terra Prime: Not perfect, either. I mean, we all know xenophobia is bad anyway, and the baby was really contrived - our villain du jour was supposed to be intelligent as well as bigoted, and any intelligent person would know that showing a cute baby to millions of viewers as the symbol of a perceived thread does not good propaganda make. (I went to a seminar about propaganda movies once, with Nazi propaganda an obvious central example. Believe me, they were careful never to show any Jewish babies when they wanted their films to incense the audience.) However, there was still plenty to enjoy: the second Harry Groener appeared, the BTVS fangirl in me yelled THE MAYOR, and I appreciated that the show didn't go for the obvious and made him the villain. Instead, he was an interesting guest character, a politician neither villainous nor saintly. I also liked the reuse of the proto Section 31 which made its earlier appearance less of a one time thing, and sue me, but I liked all the scenes involving T'Pol and Trip, no matter how contrived the baby and the sudden parental feelings for same were. Their very last scene, with the two of them mourning together and her silently taking his hand while he cries, touched me deeply.
So, Enterprise, of which I now know one entire season and three episodes of another. Previously, I was inclined to think they should have given the franchise a rest after Voyager already. Now, I don't regret they made another any more; I did like most of what I saw. But I still see the problems, especially in comparison to the Sci-Fi shows with which Enterprise shared the screeen those four years. Firefly, BSG and Farscape all had an ensemble of roughly similar size, but the characters were very distinctive from the start. On Enterprise, I have no idea about what Merryweather (spelling?) is like, I know more about Mirrorverse Sato than I know about the real thing (though I liked her - she just didn't get much to do), and other than the proto-Section 31 membership, I don't know much about Reed, his likes and dislikes and personality, either. Which leaves Phlox, Archer, Trip and T'Pol, and out of these, the lead, Archer, feels the most generic. The fact that he's the leading man and thus doomed to certain general leading man characteristics is no excuse. Mal Reynolds, John Crichton and William Adama are the leading men of their respective shows as well, and are very different from each other, despite the general hero characteristics.
Meaning: I can see why it got cancelled. It galls that this happened after a season where the writing was mostly good and so were the performances, a season which could have lead to those weaknesses getting improved upon subsequently. But I still can't morn the premature demise of Enterprise as intensely as the cancellation of Firefly or Farscape, because the affection it was able to evoke just wasn't as thorough, for the above named reasons.
I'll look for fanfic, though. And will now go back to writing my Multiverse assignments.
...and I can see why not just Jolene Blaylock but pretty much every ENT fan on the planet was upset about the finale. It didn't have the same effect on me (i.e. I don't feel angry, it's more of a "boys, that was well-meant and ill-advised and badly executed" reaction), but then I am a TNG fan of old and had some fuzzy nostalgic feelings going on there. The thing is, if this had been any other episode but the finale, it would have felt like an okay crossover. Not the best of the inter-Trek crossovers, not the worst. The best being Trials and Tribble-ations and the worst being Q's later appearances on Voyager. Oddly enough, Voyager did some good TNG crossovers later on, using Reg Barclay and, wait for it, Deanna Troi and a holodeck. The difference to "These are the voyages...", aside from the entire finale problem, being that Barclay becoming fascinated by the Voyager crew did not only make sense given his backstory but resulted in him finding a way to enable them to keep permanent contact witht the Alpha Quadrant. I.e. his appearance had a point for the show in question, there was genuine give and take. These are the Voyages..., otoh, again leaving aside its status as a finale which I'll get to shorty, did not manage to establish a credible connection between ENT and TNG characters. It's hard to see why the events Riker has acted out for him would help him make up his mind on the Pegasus matter; there was no parallel. And Riker in turn did not do anything for the Enterprise characters, because he only interacted with holographic representations, not the genuine article, and playing the the Chef as a version of Guinan didn't fit either him nor the ENT crew. So, taken purely as a crossover episode, this failed. The only genuinenly poignant inter Star Trek history moment was the mixture of the credits speech in Picard's, Kirk's and Archer's voice which makes you realize this is actually Archer's speech from the ceremony.
As a series finale episode... oh dear. Where to begin? Firstly, it was a finale in which none of the characters of the show actually appear. Just holographic presentations of same. Bad idea. Secondly, the Enterprise section supposedly show us a future, ten years after the original launch... and nothing has changed. Poor Sato breaks Harry Kim's record as longest serving Ensign. Trip and T'Pol are still at an impasse. (Which feels wrong given where we left them an episode earlier.) Everyone else is where we left them off in season 4 as well, save for T'Pol, who all of a sudden declares her distrust of Andorians (a decade later?) and can't understand why Archer would help a father to get back his kidnapped child (this isn't the same woman I saw this season). She's more the caricature of a Vulcan, safe in her final two scenes with Archer.
You know, TNG gets regularly accused these days of being the embodiment of inconsequential, unchanging and bland Star Trek. (Unfairly and ignoring the production time, imo, but that's another rant.) But look at the TNG finale for comparison, which also has a section set in the future. But in this future, things have definitely changed for the crew, who isn't together anymore - Picard is back in France and ill to boot, he and Crusher got married and divorced, Data is in Oxford teaching, Troi is dead, Riker and Worf are at odds, and so on. Said TNG finale which plays with three time levels is very much about change; the section set in the past, at the point where the series started, showcases how the characters progressed in the course of seven years. Given that the TNG finale, All Good Things..., was co-written by Brannon Braga and Ron Moore, one would think Braga remembered what made it poignant. So okay, if you want to show us the future of our crew, do so, by all means, but let it be about change. Not necessarily change for the better, but change. Show us they've had lives.
Secondly, there are, roughly speaking, two ways you can wrap up your show if you know it's going to end ahead of time. (Meaning the Farscape writers, for example, couldn't do that, hence PK Wars, thankfully.) You can go for the characters saving the universe, or at least a world - the big epic thing. Which both TNG and DS9 did. Or you can go for the absolute contrast, the quiet character episode, which is what Babylon 5 did. Sleeping in Light doesn't offer Sheridan or the other regulars the chance to save the day one last time, it has nearly no outward action at all; twenty years into the future, the surviving regulards meet, have some quiet conversations, then one of them goes off to die, and finally the rest of them watches their space station "die" as well. No fighting, no action, and yet it's a perfect finale, because each of the characters, living and dead, and the station itself is present in their individuality and in their relationships with each other. And oh yes - it's set in the future, and things have changed.
Unfortunately, the ENT series finale went neither way. It's not epic - "Will Archer make it back to give his speech" is hardly a goal worth rooting for, and while "will Shran's daughter be saved" is more touching because we like Shran, it's still not something monumentous. And These Are the Voyages... isn't a quiet character drama, either. It tries to be, in the scenes where Riker-as-Chef talks with everyone about Tucker, but because Riker has no connection to these people (or the viewers unfamiliar with TNG), there is no resonance, as opposed to, say, Vir talking about Londo while sitting at dinner with Sheridan & Co. Or, to remain on the Trek side of things, Garak's bittler little speech to Bashir about Cardassia in the DS9 finale.
And lastly, there is the death. Basically not a bad idea as such for a finale. Killing of a beloved character, I mean. One of the reasons why B7 retains its cult status is that it killed off all of them, after all. As noted before, Sheridan dies in the B5 finale. (Now I'm not Sheridan's biggest fan as we all know, but I did find it poignant.) And wile I'm sure plenty of fans will disagree, I was okay with Damar dying in "What You Leave Behind". (No Jossverse examples here because I don't want to get into old wars.) But if you kill off a character, it's best to do that in a way that doesn't make said death look as the result of overwhelming stupidity. (Though Blake and Avon... okay, let's modify that to "extreme stress and constant paranoia make some none too bright actions understandable, plus two obsessives together make for an combustible mix anyway") Because really, we saw Trip deal with far more dangerous threats without choosing to commit suicide while going so. This has to be the most ill-executed Star Trek death since Kirk's.
(Sidenote: I was fine with killing Kirk. Drive stake into his heart and keep him in the ground while you're at it. But three middle-aged men indulging in fisticuffs as a grand movie finale was just ridiculous.)
In conclusion: it's one failed finale, and the show deserved better.
Now, about the other two episodes, Demons and Terra Prime: Not perfect, either. I mean, we all know xenophobia is bad anyway, and the baby was really contrived - our villain du jour was supposed to be intelligent as well as bigoted, and any intelligent person would know that showing a cute baby to millions of viewers as the symbol of a perceived thread does not good propaganda make. (I went to a seminar about propaganda movies once, with Nazi propaganda an obvious central example. Believe me, they were careful never to show any Jewish babies when they wanted their films to incense the audience.) However, there was still plenty to enjoy: the second Harry Groener appeared, the BTVS fangirl in me yelled THE MAYOR, and I appreciated that the show didn't go for the obvious and made him the villain. Instead, he was an interesting guest character, a politician neither villainous nor saintly. I also liked the reuse of the proto Section 31 which made its earlier appearance less of a one time thing, and sue me, but I liked all the scenes involving T'Pol and Trip, no matter how contrived the baby and the sudden parental feelings for same were. Their very last scene, with the two of them mourning together and her silently taking his hand while he cries, touched me deeply.
So, Enterprise, of which I now know one entire season and three episodes of another. Previously, I was inclined to think they should have given the franchise a rest after Voyager already. Now, I don't regret they made another any more; I did like most of what I saw. But I still see the problems, especially in comparison to the Sci-Fi shows with which Enterprise shared the screeen those four years. Firefly, BSG and Farscape all had an ensemble of roughly similar size, but the characters were very distinctive from the start. On Enterprise, I have no idea about what Merryweather (spelling?) is like, I know more about Mirrorverse Sato than I know about the real thing (though I liked her - she just didn't get much to do), and other than the proto-Section 31 membership, I don't know much about Reed, his likes and dislikes and personality, either. Which leaves Phlox, Archer, Trip and T'Pol, and out of these, the lead, Archer, feels the most generic. The fact that he's the leading man and thus doomed to certain general leading man characteristics is no excuse. Mal Reynolds, John Crichton and William Adama are the leading men of their respective shows as well, and are very different from each other, despite the general hero characteristics.
Meaning: I can see why it got cancelled. It galls that this happened after a season where the writing was mostly good and so were the performances, a season which could have lead to those weaknesses getting improved upon subsequently. But I still can't morn the premature demise of Enterprise as intensely as the cancellation of Firefly or Farscape, because the affection it was able to evoke just wasn't as thorough, for the above named reasons.
I'll look for fanfic, though. And will now go back to writing my Multiverse assignments.