This Week in Retro: Star Trek's Finale [2005] (Patreon)

May 13, 2005: Star Trek's 39-Year Mission Ends

by Diamond Feit

I don't know how I discovered Star Trek; that memory is too old to be retrieved. It might very well have been a network television airing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—now one of my favorite movies—that led me to revisit the then-nearly-20-year-old series. When I did, I was hooked, and that craving for Star Trek's unique blend of science-fiction, moral dilemmas, and straight-up optimism became a bedrock of my young personality. My passion for Star Trek blossomed at just the right time, as a brand-new series would debut when I was in middle school, and its success would lead to more shows in the 1990s: All distinct flavors of Star Trek that still shared the same fundamental worldview. This meant that from adolescence straight through young adulthood, I always had access to brand-new episodes of Star Trek…right up until everything came to a crashing halt 15 years ago.

On February 2, 2005, the United Paramount Network announced that Star Trek: Enterprise had been cancelled and that the final episode would air on May 13. Enterprise was the fourth and final "new" Star Trek series; while it was only in its fourth season, its cancellation was a de facto cancellation for all of Star Trek after 18 years of continuous renewed production. Without getting too deep into it (let's save that talk for the 20th anniversary...next September, yikes), Star Trek: Enterprise was the least-loved of the "new" Star Trek incarnations, so the cancellation was surprising to no one, but its departure was painful to fans regardless because this was the first time in 36 years that a Star Trek series was cancelled with no known replacement (31 years if you count the cartoon).

Given the long legacy behind it, along with its notoriously passionate fan base, how Enterprise would end became an immediate mystery. In its brief run, Enterprise had already featured extended story arcs about time travel, including a recurring mysterious shadow figure who was meddling with the ship's mission from the future. Might the finale reveal his identity? Or might it, as other Star Trek finales had, show viewers what would become of the crew after their voyage was complete? Rick Berman, producer of all things Star Trek since The Next Generation, was quoted in multiple publications as describing the Enterprise finale as a "valentine" to the fans.

It was not received as such.

On May 13th, when "These Are The Voyages…" aired, social media was not the force it was today: Facebook only existed on college campuses, and Twitter did not exist anywhere. If they did, the acronym "WTF" would have surely trended nationwide less than a minute in as Jonathan Frakes as Commander William Riker from The Next Generation made a surprise appearance, revealing the entire episode to be a holodeck simulation. Yes, "These Are The Voyages…" is a holodeck episode. It's not even a holodeck episode about the Enterprise crew but instead it is presented as an insert into an episode of The Next Generation called "The Pegasus" which had aired 11 years earlier. Commander Riker was facing a dilemma in that story, so he...took time out of his schedule to...visit the holodeck and...observe an entirely different cast of characters to help him decide what to do??? I'm sorry, I'm unsure of how to end that sentence with anything less than three consecutive question marks.

(I should clarify: no, the entirety of Enterprise was not a holodeck simulation—not even Star Trek would be willing to Tommy Westphall four years of television. Enterprise was set in the 22nd century, while Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all took place in the 24th century. So Riker was doing an extremely normal thing and watching a 200-year-old simulation of people he never met for advice, just how I like to read detailed accounts of the War of 1812 whenever I feel unsure about myself.)

What happens in the finale doesn't really matter, obviously, given the stakes as defined in the first minute, but when one longtime Enterprise character dies abruptly (which supposedly teaches Riker a lesson), fans were upset that a character they liked was killed off to make a character on another television show feel bad. If any of this has any redeeming value, it's that the episode ends with a then-fancy CG rendering of the original Enterprise, the Enterprise-D, and the Enterprise-Enterprise flying through space. You can watch it on YouTube in HD in German if you like.

"These Are The Voyages…" was met with immediate rancor from the fans, of course; but more significantly, the cast and crew were vocal in their displeasure with how their own series ended as well. Before the episode even aired, Jolene Blalock (who played T'Pol) was quoted as saying "I assumed that the ending would be about our show and not a wrapup of the conglomerate...it was just insulting." Executive producer Brannon Braga later said of the finale "It was the only time [Enterprise star] Scott Bakula got pissed off at me." Even special guest star Jonathan Frakes was uncomfortable stealing the spotlight from another cast, telling StarTrek.com in 2010 "It didn’t work on so many levels...I don’t think it was our finest hour."

For me, the real disappointment with "These Are The Voyages…" is not the quality of the episode itself. After all, the original Star Trek didn't even get a proper finale to speak of, and its last episode is a truly awful yarn about Captain Kirk switching bodies with a madwoman. But with "These Are The Voyages…", it was the end of Star Trek as we know it. Not only was the only surviving Star Trek series leaving the airwaves, but three years earlier, Star Trek: Nemesis had flopped at the box office (to say nothing of the critical and fan reception), ending The Next Generation's motion picture run at four films. Even a long-time fan such as myself had to question if Star Trek was worth carrying a torch for any longer.

In the 15 years since "These Are The Voyages…", Star Trek has not remained dead. In 2009, the franchise got an alternate-timeline reboot on the big screen, which fared well enough to earn two sequels (with another being discussed). As of this writing, Star Trek: Discovery has a third season in the can, and Star Trek: Picard has recently completed its first season with a second season already announced. There's even talk of an expanded "Star Trek Universe" of assorted new programs, both live-action and animated, coming in the near future; the newly announced “Strange New Worlds”, which will focus on the adventures of Captain Kirk’s predecessor Christopher Pike on the original Enterprise, will the first venture. With this much Star Trek being produced on both the small and big screens, surely the title of this column is invalid?

I wish I saw things that way.

It turns out that the last 15 years haven't weakened my love of Star Trek but calcified it. I'm fortunate to have lived long enough to have every single episode of Star Trek—even the cartoon!—available to watch at any time at the push of a button. At this point, even episodes I didn't care much for (e.g. most of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager) bring me comfort. And as much as I love Star Trek, it is hard to view the Star Trek we are receiving in 2020 as a faithful expansion of the Star Trek that came before it.

I know The Onion called me out on this 11 years ago, but the modern conventional wisdom of Star Trek seems to be "shoot first, ask questions never." Star Trek can do action, but Star Trek was never an action show. It's hardly infallible but from its inception, Star Trek was designed to show viewers that the human race would overcome the biases that were omnipresent at the time it was produced. With Discovery and Picard airing on streaming services rather than broadcast television, there is clearly a push for more violence and "edgy" material which I feel comes at the expense of that fundamental optimism that made Star Trek important in the first place. I'm also of the opinion that killing off characters as gleefully as Discovery/Picard has done trivializes those deaths.

In hindsight, perhaps "These Are The Voyages…" was more prescient than fans give it credit for. I don't agree with the decision to make the Star Trek: Enterprise finale a holodeck episode about the end of Star Trek, but so far, there haven't been any signs of pre-2005 Star Trek lately. Maybe that "valentine" was more of an obituary. Too bad. I could really use a fun show about going where no one has gone before right about now.