Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 4

Earth has survived an attack by the alien Xindi. The crew of the NX-01 Enterprise have been hailed as heroes, but Earth is also in the grip of anti-alien xenophobia, fanned by a terrorist organisation known as Terra Prime. There's also growing tensions between the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites, with Earth caught in the middle...and an unseen enemy manipulating events from behind the scenes.

The fourth and concluding season of Star Trek: Enterprise is the moment when the show finally starts fulfilling its premise. For its first two years the show seemed to too often disregard the potential of its setting in favour of doing too-traditional Star Trek stories, just with less advanced technology. In the third season the show adopted more long-form storytelling that made it more dynamic and interesting, but still had problems with pacing, not to mention telling a story that had nothing to do with the show's reason for existing. This final season finally lines everything up just right to deliver the most consistently excellent season of Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine.

The season is divided up into several multi-episode arcs. The first quickly disposes of the Temporal Cold War, an ill-thought-out plot device that hamstrung the first two seasons of the show. Very quickly the show moves into stories tying together the augments (the genetically-engineered descendants of Khan) into the humanoid-looking Klingons of the original series (a story that really didn't need to be told, but isn't awful) with other stories bringing in the Romulans as masterminds of a plot to thwart the growing relations between the eventual founders of the Federation. Other episodes involve a social revolution on Vulcan (including an appearance by a young T'Pau, a fan-favourite character from the original Star Trek) and, most effectively, a two-parter entirely set in the Mirror Universe. Another multi-part story revolves around the last gasp of fascism on Earth and its final defeat, setting the scene for Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision to come to pass.

The result is a relentlessly enjoyable season of television. It's still not the sharpest-written season of Star Trek, let alone SF in general, and the fact this season aired alongside vastly superior first season of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica probably did it no favours, but removed from that context it stands up pretty well. This Enterprise as it should have been from the start, deftly mixing together original stories with the established history of the Star Trek canon and having fun in the process. The writers and cast are clearly having more fun than they have in previous seasons and that joy finds its way onto the screen.

Of course, there is a big "but" in all of this. There are a few weak episodes this season, and the few stand-alone episodes peppered between the two and three-parters are mostly forgettable. There's also some problems within the longer arcs. The augment story is too long and mostly unnecessary: it tries to explain what happened to genetically engineered humans after Khan, a story already adequately explained on Deep Space Nine, and it laboriously tries to explain why Klingons looked different in the original series, a story, er, already adequately explained on Deep Space Nine. There's also a bafflingly pointless story which tries to mine drama from Trip's decision to leave Enterprise permanently (hint: he doesn't), which is undercut by the fact that no-one cares.

Worse, and most famously, is the season and series finale, These Are the Voyages. This episode is framed as a flashback from Star Trek: The Next Generation with Riker weirdly consulting a holo-programme about Enterprise's final mission to justify some personal decisions. This is an insult to the cast and crew of Enterprise, putting too much focus on TNG characters rather than the show that is actually ending, and feels forced. The episode is ill-conceived, badly-written and lacking in tension and drama, making it easily the weakest Star Trek series finale since Turnabout Intruder (and at least the writers of that episode had the excuse they didn't know it was the finale).

Still, at least it's a single really awful episode in a season featuring some stand-out and, in the form of the In a Mirror, Darkly episodes, a genuine classic two-parter. Overall, the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise (****) is thoroughly enjoyable and shows the potential of this show that went unrealised for so long. The season is available on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and many other parts of the world.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 3

Earth has been attacked by an alien superweapon. Florida and the Caribbean have been left in flames and over seven million people are dead. The alien attackers are traced to a mysterious region of space known as the Delphic Expanse and an alien race known as the Xindi, so Starfleet sends the NX-01 Enterprise to the region to investigate further and stop the Xindi before they can launch a second attack.

According to conventional wisdom, Star Trek: Enterprise gets a lot better with its third season. The show's best writer, Manny Coto, was promoted to producer and given more creative freedom. The entire season also has a strong, ongoing story arc. It's still not full-on serialisation - many episodes are still stand-alone, just with more frequent mentions of the ongoing storyline - but it's closer than Trek has gotten before across a whole year. There's also more attention paid to character growth, such as T'Pol developing an addiction to a chemical and then going through withdrawal, leaving her permanently emotionally damaged, whilst the human crewmembers initially hunger for revenge against the Xindi before learning more about them and how they've been manipulated by another alien race.

It is certainly true that Enterprise's third season is more interesting than the first two. There is more of a sense of tension and drama and the show feels more experimental. Long-term Trek producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, criticised by many fans for presiding over the long-term decline of the franchise, seem to have backed off and given Coto more freedom to innovate. The producers cleverly realised that their storyline, although it had legs, was still insufficient to fill 25 episodes, so were still able to bring in side-stories to expand the texture of the new setting of the Expanse. Although some of these episodes are undeniably filler (Extinction and Rajin are groan-inducingly boring), there seems to be a far higher hit rate than in previous seasons.

The season also gives us Enterprise's first truly classic episode. Twilight riffs on previous episode ideas but also takes a strong influence from the movie Memento, with Archer affected by a neurological problem which prevents him from forming long-term memories. The episode unfolds as an alternate view of what happens if the Enterprise's mission fails and, although we know it won't, the episode is well-written and directed enough that it doesn't matter too much.

Other strong episodes include Proving Ground (even if the arrival of Andorian occasional semi-ally Shran is a little implausible), Strategem and Doctor's Orders (an excellent showcase for John Billingsley's acting). The season also ends with a strong arc starting with Azati Prime, where Enterprise takes incredibly heavy damage and is left crippled for the rest of the season. The crew have to find a way of destroying the Xindi weapon without having their normal resources to call upon, so have to resort to a diplomatic solution. In a post-9/11 world and with the far darker Battlestar Galactica reboot hitting screens at the same time, Enterprise takes a very different approach is still very true to the ethos of Star Trek, and does so reasonably well. The season-ending cliffhanger is less than compelling, however.

The third season of Star Trek: Enterprise (****) is indeed better than the first two and the finest season of Star Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine. It's not perfect and occasionally resorts to tiresome Star Trek standbys, but it entertains and successfully finds a solution to the season-long arc that channels Star Trek at its finest. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 2

The NX-01 Enterprise, Earth's first deep-space exploration vessel, continues to visit new worlds and make first contact with new species. However, Captain Archer's mission is complicated by rising tensions between the Vulcans and Andorians, the ongoing threat of the Suliban and internal dissent within the Klingon Empire which results in a price being placed on his head.

The first season of Star Trek: Enterprise was promising and intermittently fun, but it was also highly variable in quality, pulled its punches a lot and didn't have the courage of its convictions. A Star Trek prequel series featuring life at the rough end of space, humans establishing relations with races like the Tellarites, Vulcans and Andorians and featuring lots of low-tech solutions that Geordi or O'Brien would have fixed in five seconds in later series could be quite exciting. Enterprise doesn't do that, however. It's really just another Star Trek show, slightly bland and playing it safe whilst leaning a lot on Star Trek tropes that were exhausted long before The Next Generation ended, let alone by the time Enterprise was on air a full decade later.

The season actually starts off in an entertaining enough fashion, with T'Pol relating the story of a Vulcan science team stuck on Earth in the 1950s which does some typical but amusing culture clash stuff quite well. A Magnificent Seven-riffing episode has the crew help a team of miners defend themselves from Klingons and a war episode focusing on Andorians and Vulcans fighting over a contested moon is clever for how it shows that human flexibility can be an asset in resolving a situation that the Vulcans can't deal with through logic alone. There's also a solid Klingon trial episode starring J.G. Hertzler as a Klingon attorney and a very good first contact culture clash episode starring the late, great Andreas Katsulas as an alien captain who forms a bromance with Captain Archer over their mutual love of exploration. A late-season episode featuring a flashback to Archer's days as a warp test pilot (riffing on things like The Right Stuff) is also decent. There's a solid sense of character progression throughout the season as well, with T'Pol developing into a more interesting character and Phlox getting some interesting episodes as well.

The weaknesses from Season 1 remain intact, however. Trip gets far too many episodes dedicated to him when he is simply far too bland and uninteresting a character to merit it, Travis gets exactly one episode to do anything of interest in (and doesn't do too great a job) and Hoshi doesn't even get that. To be fair they do drop some of the more frustrating elements from Season 1 - the Temporal Cold War is pretty much forgotten about, apart from two episodes - and they also work on making the Klingons more formidable bad guys at the end of the season, but Enterprise remains firing on half-thrusters for most of the season. For every good episode there is a dull-as-dishwater one, and a couple that are flat-out terrible.

That said, the season finale is surprisingly good. The Suliban reluctantly form an alliance with Enterprise to combat a greater threat in a region of space known as the Delphic Expanse, setting the scene for the much more heavily-serialised third season.

The second season of Star Trek: Enterprise (***½) remains watchable and at times it lives up to the promise of the premise. But all too often it waters down gripping ideas into dull, Star-Trek-by-the-numbers morality plays and sells short its own potential. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 1

AD 2151. Earth has spent a century recovering from a devastating global war and developing new technologies, such as the ability to travel faster than light through Zephram Cochrane's warp drive. The alien Vulcans have taken taken humanity under their wing, seeing in them great potential but also great dangers linked to their rashness. Now Starfleet's first Warp 5-capable starship, the NX-01 Enterprise, is ready for launch under the command of Jonathan Archer. But the Vulcans are still uncertain about their allies and place one of their own on board to monitor events.

Back in 2001 Star Trek was suffering from a bad case of "franchise fatigue". Rick Berman had produced 21 seasons of television, none shorter than 20 episodes, spanning three different series in fourteen years. His feeling was that the franchise needed to be rested to come back stronger, but Paramount were adamant that they wanted to keep the Star Trek gravy train afloat. Wearily, Berman and Voyager producer Brannon Braga agreed to create a new show but only on the condition that they could be more experimental and bold with it.

The result was Enterprise, a prequel series set 115 years before Captain James T. Kirk's original five-year mission, and about 90 years after the time travel events of the movie Star Trek: First Contact. The idea was to strip away all of Star Trek's convenient and "easy" technology - the transporter, photon torpedoes, shields, the universal translator, replicators - and make something much grittier and more "real", with less pure and ideologically-motivated humans and the making of space into a much darker and more threatening place.

It's a nice idea which, intermittently, works. Enterprise's main problem in this first season is that it kind of pulls its punches. Not as much as Voyager did, but still a lot more than it should. Enterprise doesn't have shields, but instead it can "polarise the hull plating". It doesn't have torpedoes but it does have missiles which are almost as good. It does have a transporter, but it's "risky" to use (albeit it works perfectly when the script needs it to and not when it doesn't). The universal translator is an advanced version of Google Translate and about as reliable, but they have a linguistics genius on board who can straighten it out, so that's fine. All of the less-than-scientific facets of the Star Trek universe - artificial gravity and sound in space most notably - remain intact.

Still, Enterprise remains a big improvement over Voyager. The show deliberately hearkens back to the original series's sense of adventure, with Archer as a bold, curious scientific explorer (who's not afraid to get his hands dirty when needed) in Captain Kirk's mould. It's also fun to see what mischief the crew can get up to without the Prime Directive holding them back (even though by the end of the season the need for it becomes clear). Unlike Voyager's crew of dysfunctional, depressed bores, this crew is a bit livelier and funnier, with a generally much higher standard of acting ability (Dominic Keating being the weakest link, and he improves significantly as the season progresses). Scott Bakula, possibly the most likable person on Earth, makes for a great captain, Jolene Blalock overcomes some dubious costuming choices to deliver a smart and nuanced performance (her deadpan sense of humour comes more to the fore in later episodes) and Linda Park is great - if not given enough to do - as linguistics expert Hoshi. Connor Trinneer's engineer (who seems to be a mash-up of Scotty's engineering genius and McCoy's Southern charm) Trip is less interesting but kind of harmless. Anthony Montgomery's Travis probably gets the rawest deal in terms of having anything to do. The strongest performance on the show is given by John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox. Early fears that he might be Neelix Mk. 2 never materialise and he goes on to give a nuanced performance throughout the season (apart from a comedy plotline in which he is woken up early from his annual hibernation, which is irritating).

Enterprise may be better than Voyager at this early showing, but that certainly doesn't make it perfect. Individual episodes vary immensely in quality, with some very strong and entertaining episodes like Dear Doctor and The Andorian Incident having to make up for a lot of typical, semi-Star Trek filler pap. For a first season, Enterprise tests its viewers' patience a lot. Maybe not as much as the first seasons of TNG and Voyager, but there's a still an fair bit of tedium to get through to get to the good moments.

More questionable is the insertion of a storyline in which time-travelling operatives from the far future are engaged in a "temporal cold war" with one another. Having a Star Trek prequel series building naturally to the universe we know is a good idea. Having one in which some guy from the 31st Century shows up and tells Archer that he's special and his actions will lead to the founding of the Federation is a lazy shortcut. The main alien race in this storyline, the Suliban, is also not one of Star Trek's more interesting antagonist races, it has to be said.

But, ultimately, Enterprise ends up being diverting and entertaining. It's also interesting as a historical artifact: shortly after this season began, 9/11 took place and American SF took a turn for the darker and more cynical. That gave us some great TV like the new Battlestar Galactica, but it also may have taken things down too dark a path. Enterprise's overwhelming feeling of optimism, adventure and exploration is, when done well, a refreshing tonic to the grimness that would come after it.

The first season of Star Trek: Enterprise (***½) is watchable, harmless and occasionally very cheesy fun. It's not the franchise at its best, but it's a long way from it at its worst. It does have a lot of potential, but it needs to up its game in future seasons. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.