Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Are UNWATCHABLE Now
1. These Are The Voyages
Star Trek: Enterprise was sadly cancelled during its fourth season, leading to a rushed finale that couldn’t possibly sum up the promise of Star Trek’s prequel series. While Demons and Terra Prime offer a powerful, yet bittersweet ending to the ongoing story of the show, These Are The Voyages has gone down in history as not only one of the worst episodes of Enterprise, but also retroactively damages one of the stronger episodes of The Next Generation as well.
Envisioned as a tribute to Star Trek, the episode sees Riker viewing the final days before the foundation of the Federation on the holodeck. All regular characters from Enterprise appear in holographic form, Trip is killed, Archer’s speech is cut off before the credits roll, and no one is given any sort of resolution beyond surface level. Was it truly necessary to kill Trip for shock value? Was it truly necessary to cut away from one of the most famous speeches in Federation history just so Riker and Troi can leave the holodeck?
There were some nice cameos in the crowd at the end, including the show runner Manny Coto, but nothing about the episode feels earned or enjoyable. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have since claimed that the episode had always been planned, which is why is was set ten years ahead of the events of the penultimate episode, but one has to wonder whether that is actually true.
Dominic Keating, who played Malcolm Reed on Enterprise, has said that he enjoys the episode, though others have claimed it was the only time that Scott Bakula was ever visibly upset on set. These Are The Voyages can best exist in a ‘what If?’ Scenario, unrelated to the overall plot of the show, as opposed to the actual finale of this bold step backwards into Star Trek’s history.