I’m generally as devoted a Star Trek fan as the next guy, but all I can say about the cancellation of Enterprise after five years is… good riddance.
 
I liked the show.  I liked the cast.  The setting was fine, although the premise (of a Temporal Cold War) left something to be desired.  I mean, Star Trek’s occasional dalliances with time-travel has surpassed flirtation and gone into the realms of obsession.  There’s all of space out there, the whole galaxy and the universe beyond it.  Do we really need to be jetting around the timeline in shows which are meant to revolve around space exploration?
 
But the thing which really bugged me was Paramount’s saturation bombing of us, the audience, with Trek-Trek-Trek.  Worse, the creative teams behind the various shows had been at it so long that they’d lost touch with the most important element of episodic television: story.  Instead, we often got a lot of contrivance, technobabble which put most of us to sleep, and convenience.
 
Let’s recap, to see how Trek evolution went awry.
 
Gene Roddenberry helmed the reinvention of his vision in the 80s with The Next Generation.  This is Trek as it was probably always meant to be, and as he epitomized it in The Motion Picture.  I liked The Original Series with its fistfights and more action-oriented pace and the focus centred around the triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, but The Next Generation was far more cerebral, based around an ensemble cast, and really showcased harmony and unity amongst the crew.
 
As all the Treks would end up doing, TNG took a while to find its footing – at least three seasons.  But it had a relatively virginal audience, a fantastic lead in Patrick Stewart who virtually hit the ground running with his portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and developed a strong triumvirate of characters in Picard, Riker and Data, who formed the backbone of the show and from which stories could evolve. 
 
Next came Deep Space Nine, which wasn’t Trek as far as trekking around the galaxy went,  but its strength was that it was something different.  We already had the Enterprise in TNG exploring the galaxy, so now an innovative vision was required, one which could take the franchise in a new direction.
 
In fact, I really liked DS9 because it fired on so many levels.  We had another strong lead in Ben Sisko, his young son Jake who was likeable instead of being one of those irritating, precocious brats you love to hate (and want to see die every episode), two strong female co-leads in Jadzia Dax and Kira Nerys, the best engineer since Scotty in Miles O’Brien, an affable doctor in Julian Bashir, a gruff head of security in Odo, and the redefinition of the Ferengi through Quark and, later, Rom and Nog.
 
Then there were the relationship (Sisko-Dax, Jake-Nog, O’Brien-Bashir, Odo-Quark), the recurring villains (Kai Wynn, Gul Dukat, Weyoun, the Founder, Gowron), and storylines which exploded into life once the show found its footing through the discovery of the Dominion.  That’s not to say the series didn’t have its share of dud episodes, but at least it had meaning.
 
In my opinion, DS9 is very much the underrated Trek.  Maybe it was pushed toward excellence because it was in competition with Babylon 5.  Or maybe it was because its predecessor, TNG, had space exploration covered, which forced DS9 to tell its story in a different way.  Or maybe it was just a fluke.  I don’t know.  But I do know that it worked.
 
This is when Paramount should have rested the franchise, and should have retired it from this time period.  It’s like Jerry Lewis says: Leave them wanting more.  After all, what more do you have to tell about this era which isn’t going to be repetitive after the fourteen years TNG and DS9 had collectively given us?  The creators seemed to think similarly, so they took a starship and flung it seventy thousand light years across the galaxy.
 

This was Voyager which… sucked.  Actually, that’s unfair.  It didn’t suck immediately.  Like its predecessors, it begun shakily and really searched to find its footing.  But every time it threatened to become interesting, it took the easy option out with its solutions, and plummeted into a decline involving clichéd answers, hackneyed premises and tired storylines.

The crew dynamic never really worked.  The creators tried to create friction by combining a Starfleet crew with a Maquis one, but they could have accomplished the same ends by killing the majority of the senior crew in the pilot and promoting officers not ready for the responsibility into their positions.
 
Take Janeway.  Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if she was the First Officer aboard the Voyager and forced to take command of the ship after the death of the Captain?  She might feel unprepared for command, and certainly ill-equipped to deal with the situation which had her in charge of a ship on the wrong side of the galaxy.  These doubts could have made her interesting.
 
Instead, she evolved into a tyrant.  It’s difficult to write female leads without making them bitchy and dictatorial, the sort of women you’d expect to be the villain on a soap like Melrose Place.  But that’s what we got with Janeway.  Actress Kate Mulgrew had the presence to play the leader, but got writing which turned Janeway into a despot.
 
This eclipsed the one really interesting character on the ship, Chakotay - the only Maquis actually semi-qualified for his position.  The character had a quiet strength and nobility which was never really explored, and later in the series, whenever he objected to any commands Janeway would ignore and/or overrule him, making him look weak and ineffectual.
 
As for the rest?  Well, Vulcans can’t be leading characters in Trek because they’ll be compared to Spock.  And it’s not like they have much scope as characters to be different.  So that’s all we got with Tuvok.  Tom Paris was a shallow rogue, Harry Kim was as irritating as those precocious brats I’ve already mentioned, Neelix was redundant after the pilot episode, and B’Elanna Torres was the sort of cliché you’d expect from a half-Klingon character.  She also happened to be a Starfleet flunky who dropped out of the Academy after a year.  This is the person you put in charge of Engineering?
 
The doctor was awesome, but I’ve really had enough of Trek’s exploration of the rights of artificial life-forms.  They did it with Data – fine, he’s an android who’d lived 30 years up until the trial which recognized him as sentient.  But then it also regularly became an issue with the doctor.  So many times I felt like telling them to get over it.  What was next? Acknowledging the sentience of the doors for realizing when they had to slide open?
 
Lastly (and the short-lived Kes aside), we had Seven.  Jeri Ryan had blown us away in the short-lived Dark Skies and had been written into a bodysuit into Voyager as an ex-Borg.  Of course, in doing this, the writers contradicted everything we knew about the Borg.  It was established in TNG that the Enterprise encountered the Borg when Q flung them across the galaxy.  Now we were being told that Seven’s human family had studied them for years and at a time which would have been years before Q forced the 1701-D to confront them.
 
Whatever the case, Seven’s status gave her a vast repository of Borg knowledge which allowed her to provide any answer the crew of Voyager required, making them redundant.  The ship only needed Janeway and Seven, the rest could have been put into hibernation – or might as well have been.  Between Janeway and Seven, the Voyager overcame pretty much every problem thrown their way.
 
The show lost all its dramatic tension.  You had no sense of apprehension, of fear for the characters’ well-being, because Janeway and Seven were always there to come up with the answer.  Encounter the Borg?  Fine, just waltz onto their cube, take what you need.  Time-travel?  Fine, send Janeway or Seven.
 
And the finale, a future-Janeway going back in time to help the present-day Janeway and Voyager get back to Earth, oh please!  How convenient is this?  Voyager really screwed around with time-travel, wreaking havoc wherever they went, but this was, fortunately, the final straw of convenience.
 
To spin onto a tangent briefly, Janeway appeared in a cameo as an Admiral in Nemesis, which made me wonder about Starfleet’s policy on promotions.  Do they regularly give out admiralties to officers who lose their ships on the other side of the galaxy and take seven years to get back?  With no sexism meant in this comment, I tend to think that Kirk or Picard would’ve done it in an hour or two.
 
Anyway, lastly, we have Enterprise, which offered mixed signs of promise.  On one hand, we had a pretty good crew.  Sure, it was derivative of The Original Series, but the majority of them were written well and interestingly.  The only two which flopped from the onset and never got any better were T’Pol and Dr Phlox.
 
I could see absolutely no point making Phlox an alien, his character would have been far better served being human.  Also, actor John Billingsley has that wonderful everyday confidence which would have made him an excellent human confidante for the likes of Archer, Trip, Lt. Malcolm Reed,  etc.  As an alien, he seemed superfluous, as if the writers realized they had only one aboard and they should write in another for “balance”.
 
The other character who failed to work was T’Pol.  Okay, let’s forget what I’ve written about Vulcan characters being repetitive, let’s forget that Spock was meant to be the first Vulcan to enlist in Starfleet (and I realize the distinction with T’Pol not actually serving in Starfleet, but it amounts to the same thing), and let’s look at the actress: the creators must have realized the impact Jeri Ryan in a figure-hugging bodysuit had for Voyager, and that more of the same was required by casting Jolene Blalock in similar attire.  It really seemed a cheap sexist ploy.
 
In terms of storylines, the writers continued to rewrite history. Take the ship, for example – why did it have to be an Enterprise?  We’ve been watching Trek since the 60s, and we’d never heard that the original 1701 had a predecessor, other its forbears in the form of a space shuttle and air craft carrier.  And why did a little model of it never appeared in Picard’s ready-room? 
 
Then there’s Archer’s meeting with the Klingons, when it’d already been established in TOS’s Day of the Dove that first contact between Starfleet and the Klingon Empire led to almost a century of conflict.  I know you can fudge history as it has been established in Trek (i.e. the dates of the Eugenics and Third World War seem to be move around a bit), but this seemed to be a complete snub of it.
 
The only reason I can imagine for this cavalier attitude regarding what’s already been established is that everything’s changed (or changed back) by the prettily named Temporal Cold War, the premise at the heart of Enterprise.  However, that would make the show itself meaningless – one of those tacky scenarios where the climax leaves the characters ignorant that history’s been rewritten.
 
Come on!  It’s a huge galaxy, infinite in possibilities, and this is what we get? Couldn’t Enterprise have offered the story of the Federation developing against the backdrop of the Klingon-Human war?  Wouldn’t that have been interesting?  Did we really need to be flitting across time, inventing desolate expanses, wars and casualties which surely would have been mentioned in one of the other Treks (unless later episodes erase them from the timeline), and guest-cameos from the Ferengi?
 
Enterprise could have been great, it really could have been.  It got so much right.  But instead of being a gritty account of the way Starfleet and Federation evolved, instead of showing us the development of the technologies we’ve grown to love (and even the transporter is almost used as a deus ex machina), we got contrivance and convenience.
 
It’s like the writers and people in charge have been doing Trek for so long they’ve forgotten how to be original.  Instead of giving us character-driven, story-based television, we get problems solved by meaningless technobabble or somebody with a privileged insight of information (in Voyager: Seven with her Borg knowledge, in Enterprise: Daniels, the Starfleet officer from the future).
 
Worse, but we’re expected to swallow it and like it.
 
Before Enterprise even began, I read an interview with John Billingsley where he said that one of the producers asked him what he was doing for the next seven years (the intended life of Enterprise, as Voyager, DS9, and TNG all went seven seasons).  Like we’d swallow whatever we were given, regardless of quality, or lack thereof.
 
So, again, to Enterprise and the current Trek franchise I say, Good riddance.
 
Hopefully, when you return it’ll be after a lengthy hiatus and with something completely original.