TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 3

TV #29 of 2023:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 3

Credit where credit’s due: this season is a solid step up in quality for what’s previously been the weakest iteration of Star Trek to date. It’s still not a total success story, but this run makes a lot of smart choices to shake up its formerly lackluster status quo. Let’s go through them, one at a time.

First: a proper sense of mission for the crew and a true ongoing serialized plot. The surprise attack against earth in the previous finale already carried significant 9/11 vibes, and this year finds the program doubling down on the parallel as the Enterprise hunts for answers and takes the fight to the new enemy, who’s building an even bigger weapon to destroy the planet completely. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable allegory, but a welcome change from the days of Archer puttering aimlessly around the galaxy, and in the last string of episodes I would say that the show even approaches Deep Space Nine levels of dramatic serialization. Well done!

There’s also both a new romance among the main cast and the addition of a military presence of soldiers on-board, each of which alters the usual dynamics and gives rise to different possibilities for episodic subplots. Similarly, the Enterprise’s quest brings it into a region of space riddled with strange alien artifacts and ‘spatial anomalies’ that cause widespread damage to the ship, which likewise allows for some distinct new challenges as the larger story unfolds.

As for the weaknesses, well, none of the above is necessarily all that engaging, and the eventual revelation linking the Xindi to the transdimensional sphere-builders seems far too pat. We also don’t get a great sense of personality from any of the recurring adversaries outside of Degra and the returning Andorian played by Jeffrey Combs, and the worldbuilding behind the various Xindi factions is too surface-level to register as particularly meaningful. Scott Bakula and the others do their best with all the dry exposition about needing to sway three of five council votes or whatever, but it’s hard to get worked up about any of it absent a more emotional character-based connection to the drama.

I’ll also mention that the seriousness is severely compromised by the start of every hour cutting from a moment of high tension to that awful theme song, an effect that’s been made even worse now via the introduction of a jaunty riff to the affair. Whose idea was that?? It’s a minor issue, but it does launch each episode with the exact wrong energy for the steadily-deepening plot.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, and torture.]

★★★☆☆

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