Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Wasted An Incredible Premise

We've previously called These Are the Voyages… 'weird,' and now we're going with 'wasted.' It's not looking great for the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise! (Tumbleweed) To agree with Brannon Braga when he said that "it was a cool concept, but it was languid," the core premise of the episode was actually quite a good one. It was 'only' the application and execution that let it down.

We all love a crossover, and that was the basic idea. A future Starfleet gazing upon its past self, or vice-versa, was not a new concept, nor one that has gone out of fashion. It was done most recently with panache, and just a little bit of time-travel, in Those Old Scientists, and previously with the transporter in Relics, and mind-meld in Flashback. Through the temporal cold war, a good deal of Enterprise was explicitly linked to the future from day one.

The show within a show on the holodeck could have worked, therefore, just not to end the series. It did provide for a different perspective on the characters from both eras, reminding us that the events of Enterprise we were watching were also a piece of history. Writer Aaron Waltke took the idea and ran with it to create the brilliantly clever mise en abyme that was the Very Short Trek Holograms All the Way Down.