Thirty Days of TV: Day Twenty-Six

[selenak]

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4: These are the voyages... comes immediately to mind.

Some background first: I had watched the first few Enterprise episodes when they were broadcast and then decided the show wasn't really for me. Not that it was staggeringly incompetent or something like that, but it came at the

Comments

[4thofeleven]

Amusingly, I’ve heard the official Enterprise novels have completely ret-conned the ending away, using the excuse that Riker’s holodeck program is no more historically accurate than the average film made today would be about events from two hundred years before…

The decision to tie into The Pegasus was the most baffling part of the whole thing for me - I mean, sure, it’s a good episode, but not really one of the ‘major’ episodes of TNG, and, as you say, there’s no parallel between it and the Enterprise incident, so what’s the point?

(Not to mention Riker here decides to confess to Picard about the Pegasus, but in the TNG episode he doesn’t come clean until after the cloaking device is recovered - presumably Riker and Troi aren’t meant to be having fun on the holodeck while the Enterprise-D is already trapped in an asteroid… but if not, then Riker wasn’t actually inspired by the program to confess after all…)

Assuming I was stuck with the bulk of the episode, I’d have dropped the Pegasus relationship entirely, and had the framing story be Riker and Troi post-Nemesis on the Titan. Maybe Riker’s a bit overwhelmed by being a captain, so he’s revisiting Archer to remind himself of how much harder it was in the ‘old days’ or something… I don’t know, I just think the episode would have felt a lot stronger if it had at least been the chronologically latest Star Trek episode, rather than basking in misplaced nostalgia for a TNG episode from ten years before.

[selenak]

I don't know why Pegasus, either. Nothing about the episode makes sense. But I do love the comparison to the accuracy of historical movies. :)

I should say that I did love the ENT reference in the Star Trek reboot, but that's one funny line from Scotty which even works if you haven't watched the show.