4x22 These Are the Voyages...

[5.0/10] I can see how an episode like “These Are the Voyages...” could work in a vacuum. The public did not exactly receive Enterprise with fondness and reverence and so there’s a certain logic of trying to channel the fondness and reverence for The Next Generation to give this humble little show a benediction on its way out the door. And truth be told, it is a minor thrill to see Captain Riker in an NX-01 uniform, or to see Counselor Troi walking the ship’s bulkheads.

But the fundamental error that this disappointing series finale commits in execution is that it makes the episode much more about Riker and his choice from TNG’s “The Pegasus” than anything about the crew of this era’s Enterprise. To put in true Star Trek terms, this episode reverses the polarity, turning our farewell to Archer and company into an excuse for our old friends from Picard’s crew to pop in and remind us of the good times rather than a way to borrow some of TNG’s goodwill and sprinkle it on Enterprise before the swan song.

What’s worse is that, as much fondness as I have for Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, they both feel rusty and robotic here. It had been a few years since they played these roles, and even longer since they’d played them regularly on television. Beyond the fact that each looks noticeably different than how they appeared in “The Pegasus” a decade earlier, which already starts things on the wrong foot, their line-reads feel detached and stagey. The frame device of a holodeck program already puts them at a remove, and their time away from this sort of material leaves both feeling out of place in their performances.

The excuse for Riker’s presence here is that he’s trying to decide whether or not to disobey his orders from his old commander on The Pegasus and tell Picard about its secret cloaking experiments, or to stay mum. The conceit is that Troi advised him to revisit the NX-01’s last mission to study Trip’s choices, in the hopes that it will give him some clarity.

With that, Enterprise tries to draw a line between Riker and Trip, as senior but subordinate officers who admire and trust their captains, to the point that they’re willing to break rank and protocol to do what’s right. If you squint, you can kind of see it, but the characters don’t have that much in common beyond a very general level, to where the equivalence feels strained. That puts the whole episode on a weak foundation from the get-go.

(For what it’s worth, I always saw Archer and Trip’s relationship as being more akin to Kirk and Bones’s, but I suppose it wasn’t exactly feasible to have DeForest Kelley in there admiring Commander Tucker.)

The other big problem is that the episode is anchored around a choice by Trip -- to sacrifice himself to save Archer -- that doesn't really make sense or feel like the Trip we know. It’s entirely believable that Trip would give his life to save the life of his captain and friend. But it comes down to a group of thugs with some phase pistols who’ve boarded the ship which...feels like Tuesday on the Enterprise, not the sort of dramatic threat that would prompt Trip to go kamikaze. We’ve seen both Archer and Trip fight and scheme their way out of tougher scrapes, so to have him sacrifice his life to save Archer from...a pack of random pirates, feels out of step both with the import of the moment and the type of storytelling the show’s engaged in for four seasons now.

Connor Trineer sells it like a champ and almost makes it work. His wry, sardonic farewell on the biobed in sickbay, as he coughs through his last moments, feel perfect for the character’s personality. And what the script lacks in momentousness, the makeup team does a stellar job to convey how serious Trip’s injuries are. But at the end of the day, this is still Trip going out with more of a whimper than a bang, and for somewhat puzzling reasons to boot. That’s a major flaw when your episode is built around another character using this decision as the inspiration he needs to make a big choice of his own, already a suspect premise to begin with.

That’s worsened still by the fact that there’s barely any story in “These Are the Voyages...”. The episode at least manages to sneak in Shran for one last appearance. It leads to one more favor exchanged and solid enough confrontation with the aforementioned marauders. (Though why the Enterprise team doesn't’ just give the marauders the fake crystal and get the hell out, I don’t know.) But even that comes off like a pretty perfunctory excuse to build to Trip’s death.

Instead, most of the episode is centered around Riker either having conversations with the crew of the Enterprise in which they deliver expositional monologues about Trip and their adventures generally (via the conceit that he’s playing Chef, which is cute, at least), or literally just watching them have painfully contrived conversations with one another about the topic du jour. The writing here is especially weak in these scenes, because it’s the peak of Berman & Braga’s “tell, don’t show” philosophy at play.

Beyond Trip’s choice to sacrifice himself (which is effectively analyzed to death by other characters), nobody’s thoughts or character or beliefs are really conveyed through their choices or actions in this episode. Instead, Enterprise uses Riker’s holodeck guise to just have the characters announce what they’re thinking and feeling, or has them continue on that tack without even the benefit of Riker’s faux-interview setting.

It’s a strange, talk-y episode where, despite the import of a finale and the drama of a major character dying, everything feels very staid and wonky in the context of the show’s usual rhythms. “Talk-y” doesn't have to mean “bad”, but when every other line feels like a thinly-veiled meta reference to some aspect of the show itself, or a character just telling the audience what they’re supposed to understand from the scene, it all quickly becomes trying.

That doesn't even take into account all the smaller, but weird choices that don’t really sink the episode, but which at least make you scratch your head. Riker kissing T’Pol on the cheek, or even Troi talking about how cute Trip is, just feels kind of strange in the moment. For that matter, while I can understand why Berman & Braga wanted to do a six-year jump to show what this was all building to, it puts the audience at a remove from the characters whose lives and adventures we haven’t seen in that intervening time.

There’s also the choice to break Trip and T’Pol up over that time for, from what I can tell, no reason at all? You can tell there’s multiple cooks in the kitchen here, when Manny Cotto’s finale in the last episode seems to firmly and finally pull the trigger on T’Pol/Trip, only for Berman & Braga to have them be broken up for the ensuing six years, get one grace note before Trip kicks the bucket, and then vaguely hint at there being some god-forsaken romantic tension between T’Pol and Archer yet again.

It speaks to a larger problem with this episode. Berman & Braga stepped back from running Enterprise and the show changed and evolved in their absence. I think it changed for the better (even if it still had plenty of problems), but good or bad, it was different. “These Are the Voyages...” comes off like an ending to the show disconnected from the important developments that have occurred over the past season and a half. I’d be lying if I said I was enthused to see Berman & Braga’s names on the ledger for this one, and the finale contains some of their telltale flaws as storytellers. But beyond their nuts and bolts abilities as writers, this episode simply feels out of step with where the show went after their departure.

One of those telltale problems (which, in fairness, carried over to Cotto’s reign), is the need to make Archer the greatest, specialest, most important captain in the whole galaxy. Here, not only is Archer the only member of the Enterprise crew that anyone cares about, but the episode bends over backwards to remind you how gosh darn modest he is. People are constantly talking about his refusal to take credit in this one, and while that doesn't exactly ring false, it does ring of Berman & Braga continuing to shower a character they created with unrivaled hero worship in a way that, frankly, just feels sad after a while.

That’s honestly where I landed on “These Are the Voyages...” As an episode, it is meh in conception, albeit watchable, but as a finale it’s just sad. It doesn't really represent the characters or their journeys in the way that “Terra Prime” did. It doesn't really take good advantage of the fact that you no longer have to hold the status quo for next week’s episode given how hollow Trip’s death feels and how little else of consequence happens. And it even as a dialogue-heavy victory lap, it doesn't feel like it makes any sort of meaningful statement about what the show is or was.

Sure, it’s stirring when the episode builds to a recitation of the franchise’s famed opening lines from Picard to Kirk to Archer, but it’s a meager balm for an otherwise miscalibrated final episode. Berman & Braga reportedly hyped up this finale as “a love letter to the fans” and it is....to fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Enterprise is surely the inferior show when measured up to that hallowed forebear. But it was also a show that slowly but surely earned its place in the Star Trek pantheon. It rested too much on Jonathan Archer/Scott Bakula; it often bit off way more than it could chew in terms of stories and arcs, and its approach to the broader Star Trek universe vacillated between “screw continuity” and “this is elevated fan fiction.” But it also told a compelling story about the assembly of the Federation from a group of mutually mistrusting civilizations, tackled some of those franchise trademark thought experiments with aplomb, and introduced characters who deserve to be remembered and considered among the great and loved personalities of Star Trek.

It was a far from perfect series, but one that aspired to do something unique and worthwhile, and which deserved much more, and much better, than to have its grand exit turned into a footnote for another show.

EDIT 02/07/2022: So I tried revisiting this episode after watching “The Pegasus from TNG again, with the thought that having Riker’s dilemma more fresh in my mind might improve the Enterprise finale. Welp. I was wrong.

If anything, it makes this episode even worse. On a practical level, it makes the discontinuity of Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis playing the ten-years-younger versions of themselves even more conspicuous. More than that, going from TNG (even in season 7) to Berman & Braga’s version of ENT is like sipping champagne and then switching to a can of Mountain Dew that’s been sitting behind the dryer for four years, and does the latter show no favors.

My god, I laughed out loud to hear the bossa nova version of “Faith of the Heart” again. For some reason, this Star Trek episode from 2005 looks worse and chintzier than one from 1994 in terms of its visuals and production design. (Maybe it’s just native HD versus upscaling? Who knows!) The writing of Berman and Braga seems that much clunkier in comparison to the rhythms of the older show. The strange focus on characters finding each other cute stands out as even more bizarre. And it’s ultimately a reminder that, god bless him, Scott Baukla’s Archer has nothing on Patrick Stewart’s Picard when it comes to performance or character. Situating these two shows together only puts Enterprise in a worse light.

Even the in-universe reason to tie these two episodes together fails. Riker’s “I need to see how they did things on the first Enterprise to gain guidance on what to do in this situation” is already a pretty flimsy premise to begin with. Riker pretty much gets his answer from T’Pol in the first ten minutes of the episode, who basically says that Trip trusts Archer, and that’s the foundation of the relationship, something Trip himself eventually affirms in a weird out-of-sequence scene. That’s the core of it for Riker, he trusts Picard and doesn’t trust Pressman, despite their differences in rank. The end. Could have been finished in fifteen minutes.

Except we have to have Trip pointlessly die to save his captain. I’ve already talked about why that story choice is bad, but what’s especially frustrating returning to it post-”Pegasus” is that it’s not even remotely like the decision Riker’s faced with! Trip ostensibly has to disobey his captain’s orders because he trusts him and wants to save him. Riker has to disobey his superior’s orders because he mistrusts him, and if anything wants to listen to his actual captain rather than ignore him. The decision points don’t line up in a way that’s instructive or meaningful.

At best, you can say that Trip trusted and cared for Archer so much that he was willing to give his life in order to protect him, and so given Riker’s trust in Picard, Will should be willing to risk his career in order to protect Jean-Luc from Admiral Pressman’s risky plan. But that’s at such a high level of generality and abstraction as to be effectively irrelevant, and doesn’t align well with Riker’s practical or psychological dilemma in the episode. Hell, at the end of this, he resolves to tell Picard about what happened with the U.S.S. Pegasus regardless, which doesn’t seem to align with him only doing so when the Enterprise is in a tight spot.

Berman & Braga seem to want to say, “Trip likes Archer, and Riker likes Picard, and that parallel is enough. Goodbye!” When I first watched this episode, I thought it was merely a bad finale for Enterprise, given where the series had gone since it had changed showrunners and how it shortchanged the show it was ostensibly a swan song for in favor of one the audience probably liked better.

I genuinely thought revisiting it this way might improve my opinion of it. I figured putting some distance between it and “Terra Nova” might make it feel more like a fun reunion special in the middle of TNG rather than a disappointing final statement for 1990s Trek. But putting it closer to the throwback context the writers intended reveals it as a bad episode and crossover on its own terms, one that fails to connect the two shows it’s drawing a line between and makes each seem more dreadful for the connection.

I will say that this time around, I appreciate the subtle implication that Archer’s big speech, the one we don’t get to see, turns out to be the famous mantra that began so many Star Trek episodes. I didn’t pick up on that in my initial viewing, and it’s a nice touch. So there’s that as a positive!

Still, on first watch, this one got a little benefit of the doubt from my not remembering “The Pegasus” particularly well. It had been a long time, and the attendant cloudiness made the potential connection between Trip and Riker more plausible. But seeing them back to back only exposes how discordant and creatively bankrupt this finale is, a dreadful capstone on Enterprise and this era of Star Trek, both of which deserved a better farewell.