Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Are UNWATCHABLE Now
5. Extinction
If the episode is so bad that LeVar Burton regrets directing it, then you know it’s got to be a real dud. Indeed, such is the case with Extinction, the third season episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. In a year that began with the fallout from Trek’s own 9/11, in the form of the Xindi attack on earth, having an episode where two of your lead actors spend forty minutes grunting and running around on all fours was a choice.
Not even Jolene Blalock, bravely trying her hardest to make something of this script alongside a non-verbal Scott Bakula and Linda Park, can save it. The episode was meant to highlight a species facing, well, Extinction, but instead veers too far into the pantomime, killing the message along with the pacing of the season.
This was Enterprise’s darkest year, told in the early days of the Second Iraq War. Whatever one’s feelings on that conflict, stopping that story for a toddle around a forest set with a face covered in plasticine did no one any favours. The setting is dull, the action is sparse, the grunting and hissing is hard to hear. This is a story that should have never escaped the writers’ room, let alone made it through all of the stages to actually airing.
Thankfully, Enterprise had some far better offerings along the way - this simply wasn’t one of them.