Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) Review
4-8/10
Ninety-eight episodes across four seasons, set roughly a century before the original series, about the first Earth ship capable of going anywhere worth going. The only Star Trek since 1969 to be canceled before it finished.
The split rating is the real one. The first two seasons drag badly and have no idea where they’re going. The third and fourth are good, and the fourth is the show the concept was always for.
Enterprise frustrates me more than any other Star Trek, because the good version was sitting right there the whole time. I find the first two seasons a chore, and I’d happily hand the last two to anyone who thinks the franchise ran out of ideas. T’Pol and a handful of season four stories are enough to make me forgive a lot, though never the finale.
The best thing in it is T’Pol, the Vulcan who comes aboard at the beginning and doesn’t want to be there, and the thing that damaged it most was deciding to put her in a romance.
The captain and the crew are the weakest ensemble in the franchise. That’s a real problem for a show whose entire premise is that these are the people who built the Federation.
It Had a Literal Identity Crisis
The first two seasons are identity crisis television and there’s documentary proof of that instead of just a critical impression.
For seasons one and two the show was titled simply Enterprise. The franchise name was dropped from its own series, reportedly to avoid the baggage, and the production only restored the Star Trek prefix in season three once it had worked out what it was making. A show that removes the name of the thing it is and then takes it back two years later has told you exactly what its first two seasons were. Nobody involved knew whether they were making a prequel, a frontier show, an ensemble piece or a franchise entry. The plotting reflects it. Episodes are largely standalone, most of them are premises the earlier series had already done better, and the recurring arc they did commit to went nowhere for two years. That arc is the Temporal Cold War, in which factions from the future interfere with the past for reasons the show never adequately explained and largely abandoned. A prequel whose ongoing mystery is time travelers from after everything is a prequel that doesn’t trust its own period.
The theme song is the other thing everybody names. A pop ballad with lyrics, sung, over the credits of a Star Trek series. That’s a small decision that told the audience the production was aiming somewhere other than where they were.
That song drives me up the wall. Opening a Star Trek series with a sung pop ballad tells me the production wanted something softer than Star Trek, and I think it’s the most revealing choice in those first two seasons.
None of this is Scott Bakula’s fault and some of it isn’t the writers’ either. UPN wanted a broader audience, the network was struggling, and the notes that produce a show with its own name removed aren’t notes anybody in the writers’ room generated.
When a production changes what it calls itself, that’s the clearest available signal about its own confidence. This one removed the franchise name and then restored it. That’s two years of indecision recorded on the title card.
Watch for the equivalent in your own work. A project that keeps being retitled is usually a project without a thesis.
A prequel has to trust its period. An ongoing mystery about people from the future is an admission that the era you chose isn’t interesting enough to sustain you. Standalone episodes that repeat what earlier work did better is the default failure of a franchise entry. The question to answer first is what this setting can do that the others couldn’t.
T’Pol Is the Best Thing In It
She arrives as a Vulcan officer assigned to a human ship against her preference, by a government that considers the humans reckless and unready, and that’s the most interesting position anybody on this show occupies.
What makes it work is that the Vulcans are right. Earth isn’t ready, Archer is reckless, the ship makes serious mistakes in its first year, and T’Pol is the person in every room who can see it and has to serve anyway. That’s a fresh angle on the franchise. The Vulcans in earlier Trek were wise elders or comic straight men, and here they’re a condescending regional power managing a client species they don’t respect.
Jolene Blalock plays the restraint properly. That’s harder than it looks. The performance has to convey disagreement without expression, and the good episodes give her a position to hold instead of an emotion to suppress. Nothing on this show pleases me more than watching T’Pol be right in a room full of people who don’t want to hear it. Blalock is the best actor the show had, and those scenes are what make the first two seasons bearable for me.
She was also an outspoken critic of the show while making it, publicly faulting the third season’s direction and saying the producers were out of touch. That’s an unusual thing for a series regular to do and suggests she had a clearer view of the material than most of the people writing it.
The Vulcan material in season four is where the character finally pays off. The Kir’Shara three-parter reforms Vulcan society, explains the difference between these Vulcans and Spock’s, and gives T’Pol a political stake instead of a personal one. Her mother, the arranged marriage, and the Vulcan High Command are all better material than anything the show gave the human characters, and the series took three years to notice.
The Romance Broke It
Pairing T’Pol with Trip is the decision that damaged the show, and the reason is structural instead of prudish. Her entire value was the friction. An officer who disagrees with the mission, reports to a government that disapproves of it, and can’t express either, is a permanent source of tension in every scene she’s in. A romance dissolves all of it. Once she’s emotionally attached to a member of the crew, she’s no longer the outsider, the Vulcan position becomes a personal matter instead of a political one, and the show has converted its most interesting character into a participant. It’s the same mistake Voyager made with Seven of Nine, which I cover separately on this site, and it’s the most common way a series destroys its own best creation. The character who doesn’t fit gets made to fit. The surrounding treatment didn’t help. The series leaned on Blalock’s appearance from the first season, including a recurring decontamination sequence that exists for no narrative reason, and the romance arrived on top of two years of that.
What the pairing did produce is one good thing. That’s the loss of their child in season four and the Terra Prime two-parter around it. That material is well handled and it doesn’t repay what setting it up cost.
The correct version is available and obvious. Keep her apart, keep her reporting to a hostile authority, and let the Kir’Shara material give her a stake without giving her a boyfriend.
The character who doesn’t fit is only valuable while they don’t fit, and a romance is the fastest available way to dissolve that. This franchise has now made the identical mistake twice in consecutive series. The reason it keeps happening is that a relationship is easy to write and friction isn’t. Ask what a pairing costs before asking what it gives. Here it gave some good third-act material and cost the show its only source of structural tension. If you lean on an actor’s appearance for two seasons, you’ve already told the audience how you think about the character, and a romance afterward reads as the payoff to that and not as a development.
The Xindi Arc
Season three is the core, one continuous story across twenty-four episodes, and it’s the point at which the show became legitimate. The premise is that a species called the Xindi attacks Earth with a prototype weapon, kills seven million people including Trip’s sister, and Enterprise is sent into an uncharted region called the Delphic Expanse to stop the full version. It’s a post-2001 story and makes no attempt to hide that. A civilian population attacked without warning, a ship sent out with a military detachment aboard, and a captain who begins authorizing things he would have refused in season one.
The serialization is what fixed the show. Once every episode had to advance a single question, the writers couldn’t fall back on a planet of the week, and the standalone filler that dominated two seasons became structurally impossible. Archer is also finally given something. He tortures a prisoner, strands a ship’s crew to steal its warp coil, and makes a series of decisions the franchise would previously have had somebody talk him out of, and Bakula is considerably better with that material than with exploration.
Twilight and Similitude are the two standout hours. The first is a future in which Earth has been destroyed and Archer can’t form new memories, and the second is a clone grown to save Trip’s life who has roughly fifteen days to live and knows it.
Similitude is the one that wrecks me. A clone grown to live about fifteen days knows exactly what he’s for, and the show refuses to let anybody off the hook. It’s as good as anything The Next Generation made.
The one criticism that holds is length. Twenty-four episodes is too many for the question being asked, and the middle third has a stretch of episodes that are visibly filling time inside an arc instead of advancing it.
Season Four Is the Show the Premise Deserved
Manny Coto took over as showrunner and made the best season the series had, and it’s the one that justifies the whole enterprise.
The structural change was to drop both the standalone format and the single-season arc in favor of two and three-part stories. That gives each idea enough room to be developed and stops any of them outstaying their premise.
What Coto also did was decide the show was a prequel and act on it. Season four is about how the Federation got built. That’s the only reason to set a series in this period and the thing the first three seasons largely avoided. The Vulcan trilogy reforms Vulcan. The Andorian and Romulan three-parter has the Romulans trying to break an alliance before it forms, and the founding charter is signed by the end of the series. The Augment trilogy connects Khan’s people to Soong’s genetic work, and In a Mirror Darkly is the best single thing the series made. Two episodes entirely inside the Mirror Universe, with a Terran Empire crew, no regular characters as themselves, and a reconstructed original series starship interior. That mirror two-parter also has the nerve to replace the title sequence with a militaristic alternate history of the same period, and to end with a character in charge who has murdered her way there. It’s a Star Trek episode with no Starfleet in it at all. In a Mirror Darkly is pure fun, and the show was right to get this reckless in its final season. The rewritten title sequence alone puts a grin on my face. Coto was also reportedly prepared for a fifth season that would have run toward the Romulan War, and the cancellation arrived with the show finally pointed at the thing it existed to depict.
Two and three-part stories are the format most series should use and almost none do. Enough room for an idea to develop, not enough for it to sag, and a natural stopping point before the premise is exhausted.
A single-season arc has the opposite problem. That’s twenty-four hours of runway for a question that needs twelve. Decide what your setting is for and then write that. Season four is about the founding of an institution. That’s the only reason to be in this period, and it took three years and a change of showrunner to reach it.
An episode that removes your own format is worth one swing. In a Mirror Darkly drops the regular characters, the organization and the title sequence, and it’s the best thing the series produced.
Archer and the Crew
The ensemble is the weakest in the franchise and that’s a significant problem for a show about the people who founded everything. Archer is an underwritten character. He’s decent, enthusiastic, out of his depth in season one and properly hardened by season three, and there’s very little underneath any of that.
The comparison that hurts is the premise. This man is supposed to be a foundational figure, the Zefram Cochrane of exploration, and the series never establishes what he believed strongly enough for anybody to have built an institution around it.
Bakula is a capable actor in the wrong tone. He’s warm, likeable and best at ordinary decency, and the show needed either a frontier pragmatist or a man with a conviction, and he was given neither to play.
Trip is the most likeable of them and Connor Trinneer is doing good work, and Phlox is the other real success. John Billingsley plays a doctor from a species with entirely different ethics about medicine and family, and every scene where that comes up is interesting.
Reed, Hoshi and Mayweather are barely written. Hoshi is a linguist, which in a franchise with universal translators is a job the format can’t use, and Mayweather is the helmsman with four notable scenes across four years. That’s the cost of not knowing what your show is for two seasons. By the time the writing improved, three of the seven regulars had been established as functions instead of people, and season four had no time left to fix it.
The Finale Is the Worst in the Franchise
These Are the Voyages is the single most disliked hour of Star Trek and the objection isn’t a matter of taste.
It’s not an Enterprise episode. It’s framed as a Next Generation holodeck sequence, set during that show’s seventh season, in which Riker uses a simulation of Enterprise’s final mission to resolve a problem of his own.
So the last episode of a four-year series is about two characters from a different show, watching the cast of this one as a historical exercise, with the actual crew reduced to figures in somebody else’s training program.
Trip is then killed off in it, pointlessly, in a way that resolves nothing and was invented for the episode. The crew get no closure and the Federation founding, which the season had been building toward, happens in a speech nobody hears.
Trip’s death was a bad decision, plain and simple. Connor Trinneer spent four years making him the easiest person on that ship to like, and the show threw him away to give a holodeck story some stakes. It’s a crappy way to treat a character and a worse way to treat the actor who built him.
Jolene Blalock called it appalling in an interview at the time and didn’t retract the substance. Connor Trinneer and Anthony Montgomery both said publicly they were disappointed. Jonathan Frakes, who’s in it, called it an unpleasant experience and a disservice, and later said plainly that it stinks.
Berman and Braga described the intention as a valentine to the fans after eighteen consecutive years of Star Trek on television. That’s a defensible thing to want and was the wrong episode to want it in. It was also the last Star Trek on television for twelve years, until Discovery in 2017. That means the franchise went off the air on a holodeck episode about a show that had ended eleven years earlier.
A finale belongs to the work it’s ending. Using it to service a different project, an anniversary or an author’s affection for something else is the clearest way to tell an audience their four years didn’t matter.
The intention here was real and the execution told the cast and the viewers that they were a supporting element in somebody else’s story. Don’t kill somebody in a finale unless the death is the point. Trip dies to give the framing story a stake. That’s using a character as a device in his own last appearance. When the cast says publicly that an ending was a disservice, that’s data instead of temperament. Four of them said it and one of them was in the framing story.
The Essential Episodes
Start in season three, and if you only have an evening, start with the mirror two-parter in season four.
In a Mirror Darkly, both parts, is the best thing the series made and requires almost no context. A Terran Empire crew, an original series starship rebuilt, and no Starfleet anywhere in it.
Twilight is the season three standout. Archer can’t form long-term memories, Earth has been destroyed, and the episode is built around a man being told the same catastrophe repeatedly.
Similitude is the other one. A clone is grown to harvest tissue that will save Trip, is fully conscious, has about fifteen days of life, and knows all of it, and the episode doesn’t resolve the ethics in anybody’s favor.
The Kir’Shara trilogy, the Babel One and United and Aenar three-parter, and the Augment trilogy are the season four spine. Then Home. It’s the quiet one where the crew return to Earth after the Xindi mission and nobody is the same.
Dead Stop, Shuttlepod One and Cogenitor are the three worth keeping from the first two seasons. Cogenitor in particular is the one time early Enterprise found a real Prime Directive problem, and Archer’s position at the end of it is the correct and unsatisfying one.
The floor is mostly dull instead of notorious. That’s its own kind of failure. A Night in Sickbay and Precious Cargo are the two people name, and the Temporal Cold War episodes are worse than either because they’re essential and go nowhere.
Should you watch Star Trek: Enterprise?
Watch seasons three and four and skip most of what comes before. I’d give the first two seasons a grudging pass at best, and season four holds its own with any Star Trek of its era. My rating for the whole show sinks because it took so long to find itself and treated T’Pol and Trip so badly on the way out. Even so, I’d tell any Trek fan to watch the Xindi arc and everything Coto made after it.
