I’m not an ENT fan. I gave up on it shortly after the pilot. But I have to chime in on the ENT program finale. It’s neither awful nor brilliant. It’s just pathetic.
It’s the perfect capstone to the Berman & Braga era, a testament to their dramaturgical tone deafness. The vast array of missed opportunities and self-congratulatory gestures is just typical of their work these days.
Days? More like the last few decades. And that’s what gets me. They’ve been working in one capacity or another on the Trek planation for almost a generation.  And they still don’t know what they’re doing.
Study the 20-year mission of the USS B&B: to constantly explore the same old, same old…to seek out weak plots and mental shortcuts…to blandly go to the same ol’ place we keep going to. Going where no one has gone before? No way. It’s hard work.
In the creative decisions that were the foundations of this finale, they demonstrate a fundamental lack of skill or interest in making noteworthy Star Trek. With B&B, it’s all about killing time. Fill the time slot. They insist on a certain kind of Trek story, calling it quality control, to avoid creativity or thought. Berman himself said, “Star Trek is a formula.”
So, Trek fans, how do you like your formula?
B&B’s attitude comes through loud and clear in the ENT finale. Check me on this.  “These Are The Voyages….” is the final episode of Enterprise. But it’s about Commander Riker.
No, really. Riker is busy noodling a moral crisis, so naturally he’s on the flippin’ holodeck. He, Commander Troi, and the rest of TNG crew are the only “real” people in the episode.  Basically he’s playing with a holonovel about the holographic crew of the holographic original Enterprise’s final holographic mission.
(“Oh sure, I always fire up a video game whenever I have an existential quandry on my hands. And if I’m being attacked by alien invaders, I’ll drop everything and make the time.” C’mon! Is everyone in the 24th Century that morally abstracted from reality? Sometimes the holodeck idea feels like a mistake, in many ways like another well-intentioned trope of the Trek universe, namely the Prime Directive. Cute, clever, problematic, mishandled, and eventually ruined.)
The NX-01 crew, who should be the dramatic focus of the show, are treated as little more than props for Riker’s benefit. They get the most screen time, but Riker’s moral crisis define the plot structure.  He zips through the events of Archer’s last mission, interacting with the crew, hoping all this will help him solve his problem.
Archer and company are handled with indifference. Oh sure, Riker and Troi make semi-reverent about these historical figures (from their perspective). But it all comes off as smug, self-indulgent, and self-absorbed. Riker’s plight is the only one with any dramatic weight. Riker and Troi show little, if any, emotional involvement in the fate of Archer’s crew. Troi mentions in passing, with dull displeasure, it’s a shame Trip dies on this mission. You can hear the halfhearted shrug in her voice.
Yeah, the show’s most popular character dies. And it happens in such a pointless, half-assed way. Not because he was cornered, not because it was necessary to the plot or continuity—he died because B&B ran out of ideas. They couldn’t find a better way to build some drama, so they laid the foundation for Trip’s death in a casual mention and kept the audience waiting to see how long it’d take them to drop the other shoe. That’s all it was. They can’t make the distinction between that and a noble, tragic, inspiring sacrifice like Sydney Carton, Ranger Marcus Cole, or that guy with the ears. That’s the best they can do.
Even when Archer is about to make history, the big payoff of the entire ENT series, Riker stops the holoprogram—and the story—dead. Why? He got what he needed.
His needs. Screw ours. That’s the message. B&B claimed their message was something else, a Valentine card, a tribute to the Trek universe. They can make that case. But it doesn’t stack up against the preponderance of evidence. One series, one cast, became props for another, diminishing one to prop up another. Their colleagues and their audience are left to fend for themselves. The finale’s overall subtext is that of a hard plink on the nose:
“Screw you, I got mine.”
The previous storyline of “Demons” and “Terra Prime” was a better coda. It gave Archer a chance to be heroic, a chance for characters to grow a little, and a glimpse at the birth of the Federation. They could have gone with that. Then again, ENT “isn’t the Manny Coto Show.” They couldn’t let that stand. They had to stomp that sand castle flat.
They attribute the end of ENT to the overexposure of the entire Trek franchise. (God, I hate that expression. They make it sound like a fast food joint.) Ironically they’d spent years denying such a thing was taking place. Apparently they changed their minds when the only other alternative was taking responsibility for its poor quality. And yet everyone knows they killed the goose that laid so many golden eggs.
The only question that remains in my mind is whether they’re that devoted to the crocodile god, as my wife Jamie would say…or are they really that stupid?