The “Star Trek” franchise spans seven different live-action series, an animated series, a short film anthology and thirteen feature films, over eight hundred hours or so of content set within the same universe. When you cover so much ground though, some of it is bound to be bad.
Every series has a handful of truly terrible episodes – “And the Children Shall Lead,” “Sub Rosa,” “Let He Who Is Without Sin” and “Threshold” to name a few. “Star Trek: Enterprise,” the last and arguably weakest of the four spin-offs that dominated television from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, famously capped its fourth (and otherwise best) season by saving the entire show’s worst hour for last with the series finale “These Are the Voyages”.
The episode, which frames the events of the finale as a holodeck program in a lost episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” aired 15 years ago this month. It was the worst received sendoff in a franchise otherwise famous for sticking the landing with celebrated send-offs like “All Good Things,” “What You Leave Behind” and (to a lesser extent) “Endgame”.
In fact it’s one of the worst received hours of Trek ever made and effectively put Trek on ice on TV for twelve years. Due to the anniversary, the episode has come up in discussion again – including being featured on the front page of Wikipedia earlier this month. THR has done a solid piece reflecting on what went wrong on an episode which even showrunner Brannon Braga said in retrospect “was a kind of a slap in the face to the Enterprise actors” and one which he regrets now.
Recently the show’s fan favorite regular Connor Trinneer, who played Charles ‘Trip’ Tucker, spoke to TrekMovie about the anniversary and didn’t mince words: “One’s feelings about the finale were not just bittersweet, they were just bitter. We had the plug pulled out from us, and we felt it was far too soon.” He does add he did welcome being able to end Trip’s journey with an “untimely demise”.
Of course a lot has changed since then. Streaming has brought new found popularity to various “Star Trek” series, most notably the heavily serialised “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” with fans still clamoring for it to get a HD remaster akin to that given to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” which remains the gold standard for TV HD restoration done right. The “What You Leave Behind” doco released earlier this year showed off glimpses of DS9 restored in 4K and the results are often jaw-droppingly good.
“Star Trek” itself came and went from the big screen while CBS All Access has become a central hub for everything ‘Trek’ – the ‘Berman-era’ having now made way for the ‘Kurtzman-era’ shows like ‘Discovery,’ ‘Picard’ and the upcoming ‘Strange New Worlds’.
