Following our ranking pieces on both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, we cast our minds back to the last TV series before the advent of the recent Star Trek: Discovery – prequel show Star Trek: Enterprise, which went back to the very beginning and charted the early days of Starfleet, the first Enterprise starship, and the road toward founding the United Federation of Planets.
Here’s a (subjective) ranking of five of the best Enterprise episodes, part of a series which still divides opinion to this day…
Broken Bow (S1, E1/E2)
Oddly enough, Star Trek pilots historically have paled in comparison to the series that followed – you’re not likely to find ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ or ‘Caretaker’ on any top five lists. ‘Broken Bow’ bucks that trend and remains, even with Discovery now out there, the strongest Trek pilot (with DS9‘s ‘Emissary’ trailing a little behind). Over two episodes, the framework for certainly the first two seasons of Enterprise is really well established, introducing all the key players and getting the NX-01 on its mission of exploration via a strong, interesting story.
One of the reasons ‘Broken Bow’ works is because it feels a little like Trek ‘greatest hits’ – we have Starfleet Admirals, officious Vulcans, gruff Klingons, space battles, planetary gunfights, even a cameo from James Cromwell reprising his role as Zefram Cochrane from Star Trek: First Contact. There is also a level of familiarity which in the end causes the show problems but here, as a mission statement, is very well packaged together. Had the series weekly been at this quality level, it could have lasted much longer.
Twilight (S3, E8)
To some extent, ‘Twilight’ is Enterprise‘s version of episodes such as TNG‘s ‘The Inner Light’ or DS9‘s ‘Hard Time’, which place characters in a science-fiction gambit allowing them to live a life separate from the one they do week to week. It’s the turn of Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) here who, after being inspected by ‘subspace parasites’ (we’ve all been there), ends up relieved of command and the Enterprise’s third season mission–to destroy the Xindi super-weapon (more on that in a minute)–fails. Earth is destroyed and the Trek future we know never happens.
Becoming essentially an alternate-timeline story with an inevitable silly reboot button pushed at the end, ‘Twilight’ nonetheless inventively imagines a future where an ageing Archer is cared for by his former first officer T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) and becomes something of a character piece, despite the big science-fiction ideas and timeline elements. In a neat little call back to The Wrath of Khan, Archer and the survivors also end up living on Ceti Alpha V. Hope they watched out for eels!
The Expanse (S2, E26)
If ‘Broken Bow’ was one of the best pilot episodes of the Trek shows, then ‘The Expanse’ is easily one of the strongest season finales. Rarely has a show managed to pack so much into one hour and make it work, both tying off half a dozen plot threads that had rippled across the first two seasons, while also teeing up a massive directional change for the series in its third season; indeed its practically a prequel for S3 as much as a finale, designed to breathe life into a show many believed was already ailing, straining under the weight of feeling like a watered-down TNG amidst an evolving television landscape.
‘The Expanse’ begins with a massive attack on Earth by a probe from the Xindi, an unknown alien race who Archer later finds out (via the mysterious Future Guy who had menaced the Enterprise in the bizarre Temporal Cold War since the pilot) believe the Federation will destroy their race in the 26th century and are pre-emptively planning to destroy Earth with a super-weapon they’re building. Problem is, they can only be found in the ‘Delphic Expanse’, basically the Bermuda Triangle in space, so the Enterprise not only has to undertake a desperate mission to find & stop the Xindi but also traverse an area of space where all manner of weirdness goes down.
Before the Enterprise can set off, mind, you not only have Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer) mourning the death of his sister in the attack, the creepy Suliban lurking about, T’Pol questioning whether she should stay on the ship and even disgraced Klingon commander Duras seeking vengeance on Archer. Just a blistering hour which kicks off a strong, serialised third year which did just enough to keep the show going…
In a Mirror, Darkly (S4, E18/E19)
One of the treats in the Star Trek universe, right from the 1960’s indeed, was when the writers popped across to the so-called ‘Mirror Universe’, a pulpy, overwrought, intentionally theatrical version of the Trek world, where the Federation is the Terran Empire and humanity are far more sadistic and evil than the alien species who are more foe than friend in ‘our’ universe. Following Spock with an evil beard in TOS‘s ‘Mirror, Mirror’, DS9 brought the Mirror Universe back with a collection of hugely entertaining stories which expanded the mythos. If anything, Enterprise, which dabbled once during its fourth season in this alternate universe, delivers one of the most entertaining adventures with ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’.
A two-part episode, replete with its own darker, alternate title sequence, this sees incumbent show-runner Manny Coto (brought in to, unsuccessfully, save the series from cancellation by tapping into much more fan-friendly corners of Trek mythology), have enormous fun allowing the actors to flip over their traditional roles and ham it up. Linda Park in particular takes a cue from DS9‘s Nana Visitor’s Intendant Kira by vamping it up gloriously as Empress Hoshi Sato, who is after the USS Defiant we saw in 1960’s episode ‘The Tholian Web’, allowing for a neat call-back and tie-in to that fan favourite episode.
One of the biggest joys of ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’ though? The inclusion of an original version of the USS Enterprise bridge (even if its not *quite* that ship), exactly as it looked in The Original Series. The two-parter not only provides an extra chapter to the Mirror Universe, it ties into classic Trek wonderfully. If only they’d done an entire season in the MU, as the writers had toyed with the idea of.
Regeneration (S2, E23)
You’ve read above plenty of instances of fan-service in Enterprise, but none was executed quite so deftly as ‘Regeneration’, which cannily finds a way to bring the Borg–easily Star Trek‘s most terrifying adversaries–into the prequel show, despite the fact Starfleet had no idea they even existed before The Next Generation episode ‘Q-Who?’ over two hundred years into the franchise’s future. How did they do it? By tapping into an ingenious loose end from the movie First Contact, namely the wreckage of a Borg Sphere the USS Enterprise-E destroyed in orbit, which crashed in the Arctic of the 2060’s and now, a century later, causes a formative version of the Borg to surface on Earth.
None of the Enterprise crew know this, of course. The word ‘Borg’ is never mentioned, nor is there any clue as to the time-travelling events of First Contact, but we as the audience are in the delightful position of understanding the contextual backstory as Archer and his crew face a terrifying drone threat in what becomes something of a Trek-take on The Thing, before wonderfully queuing up a temporal paradox which leads beautifully well into ‘Q-Who?’, answering a question we never even thought to ask.
For me, ‘Regeneration’ was Enterprise firing on all cylinders, telling exciting stories while tapping into Star Trek mythology in cool, interesting ways. It’s just sad that by the time the series understood that’s what it probably could do best, the writing of its demise was on the wall…
Star Trek: Discovery is now airing on Netflix UK every Monday. What is your favourite Enterprise top 5? Would your list be different? Let us know!