10 Best Star Trek: Enterprise Episodes Not About The Main Cast
Although it ran shorter than others, Enterprise still had excellent stand-alone episodes.
Star Trek: Enterprise may not have enjoyed the seven seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager, but it did manage to cram an awful lot of action into its four-season run. Some of the guest stars stood out so much that they may as well have been stars themselves, which is to say that Jeffrey Combs absolutely deserved to be in the opening credits.
As the show began to experiment with serialization, it becomes slightly more difficult to pick individual episodes about guest stars, but there are still absolute gems that manage to stand out. Whether it's baseball bat-wielding reptilians or former Androids-turned mad scientists, Enterprise had a knack for creating interesting and compelling characters of the week, even when some of its main crew suffered as a direct result.
There are those episodes that test the criteria for a list like this, though they still absolutely deserve their spots, the show does have many examples where in the middle of an arc, a single episode based on a new character rises above the rest. Perhaps if there had been more like this, the show would have survived to its fifth season but for now, the four seasons of Enterprise will have to do us all.
10. Carpenter Street
This third-season episode is near-infamous for reasons that have nothing to do with its plot. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, best known as Negan from The Walking Dead, and The Comedian from Watchmen, guest stars as a Xindi Reptilian here. The experience with the make-up effects was enough to torment him to the point that he wanted to quit acting. Not a great place to start.
In a way, the episode is an odd one for the fact that, in truth, it's really not a very good episode overall. There are some tired time-travel plot points that amount to nothing, with Archer and T'Pol struggling with 21st-century technology. If it were not for one element of the show, it quite easily would be a forgettable affair all around.
However, Leland Orser is the reason it is on this list. He is odious as Loomis, the blood bank employee who has been selling bodies to the Xindi. Delivering his line with a skin-crawling drawl, it's enough to make the audience cheer when T'Pol administers the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, and later shoots him with a phaser. There is no reset button here either. When the agents of the future return home, Loomis is left to deal with the police, shouting about aliens and laser pistols. It's a thoroughly enjoyable coda to this piece of human rubbish.