9 TV Shows That Wrapped Up In Ridiculously Bizarre Ways

5. Star Trek: Enterprise

Like Life On Mars, it's pretty easy to see some of the ideas that were behind Enterprise's finale, These Are The Voyages. Everyone figured out this would be the end of 18 straight years of Star Trek on TV and someone clearly thought it would be nice to bring that era to a close with some The Next Generation character cameos. Unfortunately, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga insisted on doing it all themselves, instead of coming up with the idea and working with the existing writing staff to give Trek a proper sendoff. These Are The Voyages manages to do two impressively ridiculous things: trample all over the cast's character development over the past two seasons and steal the focus from those characters to place it on William Riker. The first is accomplished by writing the characters and plot like a season 1 script (aka when the show sucked and Archer was pretty racist against Vulcans) and the second is done by making the entire episode take place in a holodeck during TNG season 7. Ultimately, the bizarre decision to mash these two periods led to a story that seemed more like bad fan fiction than a celebration of the franchise. Riker played fry cook while trying to sort out whether to tell Picard about a black ops project he was on, Archer was racist against Vulcans again (after helping saved their civilization from a civil war), Andorian general Shran faked his death to avoid some thugs instead of getting everyone he knew to blow them to subatomic particles, and Tucker died inhaling superheated gas. It pretty much solidified fan opinion that Berman and Braga were idiots and hacks that killed the franchise up until the last three or four years, when more behind the scenes info about Enterprise's production troubles came to light. These days, Trekkies give Berman and Braga (mostly Braga, as he had interesting ideas) a bit more slack for putting up with UPN execs that wanted bands on the show, but few think this bizarre finale deserves anything more than being the worst Trek series finale to date.