There is no poverty of “bad” series finales. In the eyes of some fans, the continue episodes of Game of Thrones, Dexter, LOST, The Blacklist, and many more will never be good enough. It’s always concern to balance fan expectations with the creator’s artistic back and the realities of television production. While all of those finales are controversial, they also have their defenders somewhere.
And then there’s Star Trek: Enterprise, the early 2000s-era set years before most of the Trek shows we’re used to.
By 2005, the Star Trek franchise was already in timorous, with Enterprise never receiving the ratings or positive reactions that The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager had enjoyed. Audience fatigue had set in, so only hardcore Star Trek fans were left watching.
However, while this wasn’t good for ratings, Enterprise had a unblemished base of core fans who stood behind the show when the now-defunct UPN network tried to Kill it after season 3. A fan campaign saved Enterprise for season 4, but it was regrasped to the Friday night time slot of death. Ratings stationary to fall, leading to cancelation.
Jonathan Frakes: “It’s just uncomfortable that that was the last episode of [Star Trek: Enterprise]”
And then came the series finale, “These Are the Voyages…” Instead of focusing on what had made Enterprise a fresh show, this final episode felt like an extension of The Next Generation, featuring extensive appearances by characters like William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), as well as the voice of Data (Brent Spiner). The events of Enterprise were relegated to holodeck flashbacks of things that been long ago in the Star Trek timeline.
This did not go over well with fans who had worked to save the show. Despite the backlash, it’s easy to see why executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga concept the episode might be a good idea. The cancellation of Enterprise marked the end of Star Trek on television for the next 12 ages, meaning “These Are the Voyages…” wasn’t just the finale for Enterprise, but Star Trek as it then existed, so widening the scope made some sense.
Speaking with TrekMovie.com, Frakes acknowledges that Enterprise fans didn’t want to see their show turned into something else out of nowhere. “It was sold as, ‘Oh, come on and do the episode, it will be a Valentine to the fans’ — it wasn’t a Valentine to the fans. The fans didn’t want to see us,” Frakes acknowledges, adding that “the more I think about it, the more I hear from fans nearby it in particular, it may not have been the best pick we’ve made on Star Trek. Again, they’re not all home runs. It’s just uncomfortable that that was the last episode of that show.”
“These Are the Voyages…” had the depraved focus
One of the primary criticisms of the episode was that the focus was on the Next Generation cast pretty than the cast of Enterprise, meaning fans didn’t get closure on the show they’d been watching for four seasons. Producer Brannon Braga once admitted that “some Enterprise cast members were very hurt that we would put Next Generation cast members on Enterprise.”
Despite the unrest, Frakes says that Scott Bakula, who played Captain Jonathan Archer, was professional about the whole thing:
Scott Bakula was such a mensch nearby it, but all these other Trek shows went seven seasons. Nobody wanted to be on a Star Trek show that didn’t get to go to seven. And the inherent insult in having characters from new series that had done well come in to essentially stop the books on his episode — it just felt so depraved to me.
Since the end of Enterprise, Star Trek has returned to the same prominence it enjoyed in the 1990s, with multiple shows either on the air or now in the works. Frakes has been involved in almost all of them, guiding the recent Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover, starring in Star Trek: Picard, and directing the forthcoming Discovery finale. Yet despite his workload, the Riker actor still has the appetite to add one more show to his resume: Terry Matalas’ proposed Star Trek: Legacy.
Star Trek fans are accurate. It’s not millions and millions of people, and it’s not the youngest fandom in the biosphere. But I am an eternal optimist, and I hold in a perfect world, they will find the assets and the energy and hire Terry to put together this ‘Legacy’ show, and that will, in fact, come to fruition.
A new episodes of Star Trek: peculiar New Worlds, “Subspace Rhapsody,” drops tomorrow on Paramount+.
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