Well, that's finally over...

We didn't get around to watching the second-last episode of Enterprise, but we did watch the very last episode, and it wasn't good.

Why bring in The Next Generation? Why set this in the middle of a Next Generation episode when the actors are so obviously a decade older? Why make a point of drawing comparisons between Riker's dilemma and Archer's, when they really don't resemble each other a hell of a lot? For that matter, why tell us that Riker (who made the order to open fire on his Borgified captain and friend years earlier) needs to watch a holodeck story about someone else to figure out how to deal with a difficult situation? Why set the Enterprise portion of the episode six years after the previous episode without making anything more than cosmetic changes to the ship and the uniforms? Why kill a major character off in circumstances less challenging than plenty of other dangerous circumstances Trip has found himself in? For that matter, why kill off a character at all, other than a feeble effort to recapture the emotion that Spock's death in Star Trek II had, and that Data's in Nemesis pretty much lacked? Why build up to the birth of the Federation, a pivotal event in the series, and then fail to deliver on it, in damn near the same way Voyager's homecoming failed to deliver?

Okay, it was kind of nice to see the old Enterprise-D again, but that's not where Star Trek started. It may be where a lot of today's viewers started, and it may be where Berman and Braga started, but it's not the first Star Trek series, nor would I call it the best, though it was certainly the most popular. And the little montage at the end was kind of nice, but surely a farewell to Star Trek should have been able to find a way to tip the hat to Deep Space Nine and Voyager as well.

I've been a Star Trek fan for so long. The end of the show's remarkable run on TV (even if only a brief pause of a few years, as it's likely to be) deserves some kind of thoughtful commentary. Some kind of putting into context of what it all means, where it should go from here, but you know what? Fuck it.

(Now playing: The Ruts, "Society," Peel Sessions.)