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Eulogy for Star Trek by Billie Doux [Originally published on N:Zone in May 2005] "All good things..." May 13, 2005. The finale of Star Trek: Enterprise has just aired. I feel awful. A cultural phenomenon like Star Trek deserved so much better than this furtive, hastily constructed holodeck coda to usher it into history. Did they actually plan to pull the plug on Friday the 13th? Probably not, but that doesn't surprise me. In my opinion, the Star Trek Powers That Be haven't been on top of things for a long, long time. Season four of Enterprise was certainly its best. Enterprise finally hit its stride this season by delving into original series aliens and storylines, by expanding stories to two and three episode arcs in order to give them more depth. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late; this was what season one should have been, and wasn't. Enterprise lost its audience before it found its voice, and that's just so sad. It certainly wasn't Scott Bakula's fault, or the fault of any member of the cast. I place the blame squarely on the Star Trek Powers That Be: Paramount, Rick Berman, and so on. Star Trek has been on life support since the final seasons of Deep Space Nine and the unfulfilled potential that was Voyager. What should they have done? What could have made yet another Star Trek series work? Well, it always comes down to the writing. Recycle old plots and fail to innovate, and there's no framework to support the series. They needed to find a new direction right from the start. They needed to take risks with the format, to boldly go, so to speak. Maybe instead of Enterprise, they should have tried young recruits at Star Fleet Academy, or the adventures of Captain Sulu and the Excelsior. Instead, they were so terrified of killing their cash cow that they kept it reined in. It's ironic that this was what finally did kill Trek: their own lack of courage and vision, which is what Star Trek was always all about. Maybe Enterprise never had a chance. Voyager was the series that should have been about human conflict and personal drama... and it wasn't. That ball got dropped but good before Enterprise even hit the drawing board. Yes, Next Generation was the high point, the pinacle of Trek. I can understand why the Powers That Be thought it was appropriate to return to Next Generation, to the glory days, for the finale. But to me, it felt disrespectful of Enterprise, which was its own unique self. It was like they were saying to the audience, "Hey, forget Enterprise, here's Next Generation again. Remember how good Star Trek used to be? And by the way, let's kill off the best character on Enterprise just to make it seem like we're giving you a finale. Are you fooled?" No, I wasn't. In fact, I think I'm pretty angry. The initial rejected pilot for the original classic Trek series, "The Cage," was filmed in 1965, which was forty years ago. Star Trek has been with us for forty years, and now it's done, over, kaput. The only good thing about the finale was the last minute, when we heard Picard, Kirk, and Archer all talking about the continuing voyages, about boldly going where no man has gone before. It just feels so wrong that it ended this way. Not with a bang, but a whimper. |
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