TV #47 of 2023:
Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4
I gather conventional wisdom holds that the latter two seasons of this TOS prequel series are better than the first, and sure, I’ll mildly agree to that. The writers understand their characters and the other strengths (and limitations) of the program a little more clearly now, and there are some serialized plot arcs that allow for interesting and meaningful stakes. Personally, though, I still found the penultimate run to be among the weaker Trek efforts overall, and this last one is yet more uneven in comparison to that. Eschewing one big continuous storyline like the Xindi threat, it instead presents a sequence of two- or three-part episode strings, which tend to be both fairly discrete from one another and rather variable in quality across the year.
The two hours spent in the parallel universe, for instance, work well on their own and as a follow-up to the classic outings “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Tholian Web,” but they’re utterly disconnected from anything else in their own show. No actual Enterprise characters appear — only their Terran Empire equivalents — and the events never cross over to impact the main continuity in the slightest. It’s a good microcosm of the season as a whole, really, yet still better by itself than certain other stories this year, like the hasty wrap-up of the temporal cold war or the attempt to finally and laboriously explain on-screen why Klingons didn’t have their now-standard forehead ridges in their earliest appearances in canon. It’s a new anthology approach to the narrative, and a bit of a mixed bag by result.
There’s not much of a grand conclusion or send-off to the enterprise (sorry), either. The literal finale is almost hilariously inept in that regard, jumping forward by six years for the starship crew and then representing not even a proper last adventure for them but only an inspirational holodeck reconstruction accessed by TNG figures in the distant future, during the events of their own episode “The Pegasus.” Unlike the earlier stunt casting of Brent Spiner as the ancestor of Data’s creator, which is otherwise in service to a solid piece of Enterprise storytelling, this nostalgia bait reads as a simple effort to remind fans of a show and cast that they probably liked much better and robs a few would-be important developments of the space they’d need for full effect. Even given my many critiques of this title as I’ve watched through the thing, it’s an unnecessary and insulting disservice in its final hour — and perhaps speaks to why this would wind up being the last new televised Star Trek for a hiatus of a dozen years.
[Content warning for racism, gun violence, suicide, torture, and gore.]
This season: ★★★☆☆
Overall series: ★★★☆☆
Seasons ranked: 3 > 4 > 2 > 1
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