Lower Decks

I can’t even begin to imagine what viewers who’d never watched the franchise must have thought of ‘Star Trek: Enterprise.’ Well, beyond very little. I do know, however, that Paramount’s decision to greenlight a fifth live action series was the straw that broke the camel’s back. New fans whatever; the old ones had had enough. In 2005, after four seasons, the series ended, not even afforded the dignity of any final allowances to its creative decisions, and with it, the franchise died. Well, we all know, like Spock himself, Star Trek didn’t stay dead for long, and at $240 or so million (to date), it’s going to be at least the second best success story of the summer box office (Pixar’s ‘Up’ will pass it shortly) pre-‘Transformers 2.’ Adjustments for inflation or not, that’s the biggest audience for any single Star Trek event. Still, for some, this kind of success remains bittersweet. Some of us old fans hold a friendly grudge over Scotty’s failure to rematerialize “Admiral Archer’s prized beagle.”

Star Trek has been around for more than forty years, and its history is about as complicated as they come, but it’s got to hold some kind of record for being a cult phenomenon that utterly imploded at the moment of its greatest exposure. The audience, its own audience, ultimately came to reject it, actually openly call for its end (or “hiatus,” as they termed it), a stark contrast to the two campaigns during the original series that saw it limp to three seasons and eventually a growing fan community that ultimately saw six films reunite the cast now made doubly famous and a new generation of characters and stories that ran for roughly twenty years (the same amount of time it took for the Kirk films to run their course, if you count ‘The Voyage Home’ as the peak and therefore basically the run of them, with the successful ‘Undiscovered Country’ a nostalgic coda). In the 1990s, three different shows ran, with the middle one ‘Deep Space Nine’ suffering the fate of a middle child, and ‘Voyager’ the spoiled younger sibling that could ultimately get no respect. With ‘The Next Generation’ films still chugging along (‘Insurrection’ in 1998 had been a failure but the studio still held out hope for success), ‘Enterprise’ launched the season after the end of ‘Voyager,’ but ‘Star Trek Nemesis’ tanked horribly at the box office in 2002 (in the middle of the epic frenzy over Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, which symbolized how far beyond the franchise was from even the center of geek cool at the time). No matter what ‘Enterprise’ did, the trend that had begun with DS9 finally reached it culmination: the fans were simply burned out, no longer interested.

Now, the story goes that Star Trek died because it ended up running on creative fumes, but anyone with an objective view and the shrewdness to follow the plot through will tell you that even the stuff that story says was definitely worth watching couldn’t capture the extended interest of the audience. ‘Babylon Five’ had neutered the appeal of DS9 when rampant speculation led everyone who wasn’t a fan of the latter to assume Star Trek just stole the concept of a space station from under J. Michael Straczynski, and yet, inarguably, anyone who watched B5 was just a splinter of a splinter of popular culture. The remaining Star Trek fans got a completely different kind of series, and they weren’t much keen to carry over to what was essentially backtracking to what had come before. And everyone who got sick of ‘Voyager’ was even less interesting in giving yet another Star Trek a chance. I’ve made this argument so many times in the past, I know how quickly and easily it will be ignored. Hence the title of the column, folks.

The fact remains, I consider ‘Enterprise’ to have been anything but a failure. I was a fan of every other Star Trek, and DS9 was easily my favorite. ‘Enterprise’ still rivals it. Whatever, I don’t care if everyone else hated it. I don’t care if the success of ‘Star Trek’ (2009) doesn’t cause hundreds of thousands of new fans to check out the old material (as I clearly tried to instigate in past columns, listing essential episodes and characters from throughout the franchise as a friendly service) and end up liking that, too.

I’d actually like to talk about an even less popular element of an unpopular series (it actually did get a little respect in its final season), its final episode. Ah, yes. “These Are the Voyages…” Only “A Night in Sickbay” sends a comparable shot of hackles in the air from those who watched the series and pretty much hated themselves for it (though they would never admit it). I keep watching it. It’s a favorite, I can’t help it, and it’s endlessly fascinating for me. I love that the writers ended up realizing that Conner Trinneer’s Trip Tucker was basically the center of the series, even if he wasn’t the captain. And I love that those same writers were brilliant enough to dare interrupt this moment with characters from an earlier Trek. Repeatedly. Like ‘Enterprise’ had to share its own finale. Which I’ll never understand how it wasn’t understood how appropriate and necessary that move was. When the tenth film flopped (a goodbye of its own, to the TNG cast, at one point the most popular in the franchise) and the studio called for the first cancellation of a Star Trek in forty years, the writers (I won’t mention names, because it would only dignify the animosity they would drudge up; besides, I’ve got more plans for them yet) had to know they were closing out a chapter, and there was only one thing to do. ‘Star Trek: Generations’ had already gotten this kind of reaction (which basically caused the implosion) ten years earlier, so it’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing. Rather much the opposite. In the most polite way possible, they were thumbing their nose at their critics, and ending as things as they’d begun, as something for the fans.

Well, what fans remained. It didn’t matter. It worked beautifully. Set a hundred years before any other cast of characters, Captain Archer and crew had never really had the opportunity to indulge in what every incarnation of Star Trek since TNG had enjoyed, appearances from familiar faces, in familiar roles. Sarek and Spock (and McCoy) in TNG. Q, Kor, Picard in DS9. Barclay, Troi, Riker in ‘Voyager.’ Well, in the form of a holodeck program, the latter two returned again to toast ‘Enterprise.’

Set in the midst of a story from the final season of TNG itself, “These Are the Voyages…” caught Riker in a moment of terrible inner turmoil, to which Troi suggested a program that dramatized the events of the final ‘Enterprise’ episode, set six years later than the rest of the last season, when Archer is about to reap the reward of his crew’s pioneering journey. The more times you watch it, the better you realize how cleverly it’s sculpted. Recurring character Shran appears, causing turmoil of his own, an unwanted bump in the road that Archer doesn’t need, but is willing to put up with because of the bonds that have at time reluctantly united the Andorian and the Starfleet captain (with just a little stretch, it’s a metaphor for the frustration that the writers must feel about their own situation, the end of their little Star Trek), which reverberates over the occasion that serves as the birth of the Federation, a future organization of unbelievable cooperation between diverse alien cultures.

But that’s not what Riker’s there to study. Rather, it’s the sacrifice he knows Trip is going to make when Shran’s plan turns sour. Some of the complaints over the episode are reserved for the perceived simplistic nature of what amounts to the final message of the series, about how well-voiced the nature of trust and its significance turns out to be. I’ve always found that the best part, but I haven’t been able to voice it properly until now.

The bond between Trip and Archer is unlike any other in Star Trek lore. As chief engineer and captain leading a series, they don’t hold particularly original roles in the franchise, but their backstory takes them to another level. They were old friends before they were ever shipmates. One episode from the second season (“First Flight”) dramatizes the circumstances of their initial acquaintance, but that was long after the first season spent so much time establishing their unique qualifications for taking control of the most important starship of their time. It was this kind of perspective that helped me bond with the series, the sheer charisma of the engineer, and the depth beyond all the criticisms that dogged the show.

What Riker realizes through the program is that he’s got that kind of relationship himself, after seven years, with his own captain, Picard, rather than with the petty commanding officer who’s reappeared recently and has asked him to continue making the wrong decision, rather than what’s right, no matter the cost. The death of Trip is a dramatic example, and something a series finale can almost be excused for doing so apparently lightly (but the structure of the story brings him back for one more scene that piles on the implications and tugs still further at the viewer). In turn, what the episode is really saying (again with the metaphors for the remaining fans), this last voyage was worth it, this last visit with family. Because above all else, Star Trek is about the human experience, and at the heart of that experience is the home, the sense of community, that humanity at its best continually fosters.

I watched ‘Enterprise’ as eagerly as DS9 for the intricate arcs, and as passionately as TNG and ‘Voyager’ for the continuing chance to explore an expanding world of genre television with heart, and a soul that continually shone through, greater than I would find in any of the competitors that might ape Star Trek in appearance or storytelling structure, but never matched in impact. It would take ‘Lost’ to truly match the franchise, and possibly exceed, but the sheer amount of material means that the franchise will never be overlooked for long, much less forgotten. It’s still the most recent series, but that’s not why I continually find ‘Enterprise’ to be the show I most want to revisit. I want to enjoy it all over again, for its warmth, its ingenuity, but mostly to hang out with old friends.

This, ah, won’t be the last time I write about it here. There’s plenty left to write about. How about the way T’Pol was the perfect balance on which to center the two characters I’ve already mentioned? Or how Dominic Keating, Lt. Reed, is currently starring with a chimp in movie pre-shows…?