Those were the voyages...
Over on his blog, Mark Gibson briefly shared some comments on this weekend's final episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, in a piece cleverly titled Enterprise: Trip's End.
I left a comment block over there - a mixed response and general commentary - which I may as well reshuffle into a blog entry here. (As is Haloscan's way frequently, though, at last check it was still showing 0 comment, though clicking on it shows the text to be there.)
I understand the generally valid criticisms Mark made, but perhaps I went in expecting something worse, and so didn't take it as badly. This was thick in a last block of workweek-defying escape time, so perhaps I wasn't inclined to inspect the horse's mouth so closely. I missed these last two episodes on Friday, btw, and so its Sunday night rebroadcast was part of an unusually long block of tv watching for me. Starting with The Simpsons - a show I've become distanced from in recent years, but which I was in the mood for last night - and ending with the West coast rebroadcast of this week's Deadwood at midnight.
Berman & Braga have, I agree, become more like disease-bearing tics living off the Trek franchise in recent years. Still, I can recall when they were part of a welcome breath of fresh air when, back somewhere during Next Generation, they were finally enabled by Roddenberry's death to get away from Gene's sometimes oppressive directives. Gene's insistance that the ship must be in danger every episode, for instance, proved too rigid a formula for such long-running, episodic fiction.
The Terra Prime two-parter, with a nice turn by Peter Weller as the leader of the xenophobic movement, was definitely better written than the series-ending "These Are The Voyages." As Mark noted, Trip's demise in the finale was contrived. Still, and perhaps I missed something, I ultimately couldn't find a reason for why a xenophobic group would create a "clone hybrid" from human & Vulcan DNA. Who is one going to win over to the cause by showing them a cute infant with pointed ears and decrying it as evil? It, instead, came across solely as a plot device to play off against Trip and T'Pol. It was ridiculously elaborate as a ploy if it was solely intended to lure those two to the lunar mining colony. Maybe I was refilling my drink at a critical juncture and missed the explanation..?
Treating the final episode as a look back - elevating it to an important place in Trek history - seemed... a reasonable way of compressing the sense of proud history for that first, spacefaring, Enterprise and its crew. It was marginally inventive, too, that they folded it in as an unseen subplot for a NextGen episode that actually existed. (I'll leave it to a true devotee to provide the episode title. I remember the plot, but not the title.)
One last note about the closing - and, again, I'll leave it to a true Trekker to let me know if this is substantiated anywhere: My impression was that at least part of the "go boldly where no man has gone before" riff they repeated was part of Archer's speech at the Federation treaty signing. I may be making too much of Troi's mentioning he she had to memorize it in school, just before they left the holodeck and Archer was set to speak, but that was the impression I was left with.
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