Full Disclosure: for reasons I cannot explain, I genuinely like Star Trek Enterprise. Maybe it's nostalgia for the early '00s form of edgy slickness; maybe it was the possibility of a truly 'cool' Trek, but most of all I think it was the fact that Enterprise was a genuinely frustrating show. The plotting was always a little left of ideal, the characterization too muddy, and the design a little too conservative. It was simultaneously generic and truly weird, and ended Star Trek on the small screen in the worst way possible. It was never as "Ed Wood bad" as Voyager occasionally was, and a lot of the characters were genuinely likeable, but in many ways, that made it worse; it hurts to be let down by something you like. It was redeemable in a way that Voyager never was - it could break our hearts week after week. Maybe it was good that we haven't had Star Trek on television for almost 7 years. It had its highs, it had its lows, but here are the 10 reasons why Enterprise did, ultimately, totally suck...
10. The Weirdly Rampant Sexism
Star Trek doesn't have the best track record when it comes to dealing with women's issues. Race relations? sure, but women have been woefully under-utilized and at worst relegated to window dressing (even the series with the strongest women characters, Deep Space Nine, regularly failed the
Bechdel Test) so when our brave Captain Archer threatens to knock a female character "on her ass" in the first ten minutes of the pilot episode, I was more than taken aback. The rest of the episode doesn't fare much better. T'Pol, our token Vulcan and, in this series, the first to serve on a Human ship, is consistently noted by her gender as well as her species, which seems a little unfair. and don't get me started on how much leering the male characters on the show do about the female characters; I mean, I live
here and I consider it worth noting. The worst part is that the female characters are regularly underwritten or weakened by the sort of quivering-chin romance and flippant sexualizing we should all be past by now, and while the cast got better about all this by the end of the series, it never got to a point where it was bearable. However, some characters suffered more than others.