Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.

As I sat down to watch the sixth and final Star Trek series from the filmic-pre-reboot era, I fully expected the show to end up at the bottom of the list and after the mediocre first two seasons, my opinion became fairly certain. Then something changed in the third season. It wasn’t the studio’s forced push to bring more action to the show that finally made it get good, it’s that it shifted writing wise as well. At first, going from the entirely episodic first two seasons to the season-long storyline of the third made for a jolting experience and I was initially hesitant to accept it.

While I ended the third season frustrated with a lot of the showrunners’ decisions, I ultimately felt the show had turned a corner, but the finale of the third season and the first two episodes of the fourth, and final, season gave me pause. It tackled Nazism in more straight-forward terms than any of the prior series. Yet, the episodes felt entirely derivative, which wasn’t a good sign for the show. The first two episodes ended well enough, but again they weren’t as good as I would have wanted. Yet, after that, the series took a much grander, bolder, and more compelling turn, one that helped point towards the ultimate founding of the United Federation of Planets and with numerous multi-part episodes to cap off the series, the end result was decidedly more enticing.

When I first started working on this project, I decided to rate all of the episodes on a four-star scale. No series started off so poorly on an average of these ratings than Enterprise, which didn’t have its first four-star episode until the final episode of season 1. After that, the number of exceptional episodes continued meagerly until Season 4, where just under 50% of the series’ four-star episodes were released. Ultimately, the averages of all of the episodes puts Voyager at the bottom with Enterprise just barely past it in fourth place. That said, in my gut, Voyager was more consistently good than Enterprise was and I would probably swap those places were it based on overall impressions rather than ratings.

In the end, because the final season was shorter than its predecessors and was more jam-packed with well written and compelling narratives, the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise averaged out to be the second best season in Trek history, just behind the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That might seem surprising, but as we learned with Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, the fourth season is always the season in which the shows finally hit their stride. That Enterprise ended on its fourth season is disappointing, but expected. It was never going to reach the heights that the prior series did, even with the far more well known Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap) in the lead.

Bakula played Capt. Jonathan Archer, the son of a noted ship designer, who is taking the prototype Warp 5 NX-01, named Enterprise, on its maiden voyage. Having been cautiously watched by the Vulcans who let the Humans make all their own mistakes, they assigned a Vulcan science officer, T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) to the ship, who acts as second-in-command to Archer. Other crew members include Archer’s best friend Charles “Trip” Tucker III (Connor Trinneer) as chief engineer, Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating) as tactical officer, Hoshi Sato (Linda Park) as linguist and communications officer, Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery) as helmsman, and Dr. Phlox (John Billingsley) as the Denobulan chief medical officer who, alongside T’Pol, was the only other non-human onboard.

The series initially focused on the Temporal Cold War, an attempt by time traveling aliens to derail history, specifically by trying to ensure the United Federation of Planets is never founded. This led into the third season story arc that began with the annihilation of a swath of Florida, killing millions of humans, and leading the Enterprise into the Expanse, a strange span of space where large planet-sized structures were adapting that area of space into an inhospitable wasteland for Enterprise and many other species. The Temporal Cold War was poorly handled and was a weak part of the first three seasons. Beyond that, the fourth season involves several events that ultimately lead towards a treaty between two factions the Vulcans and the Andorians, who were perpetually on the brink of war.

With all that out of the way, let’s get into my list. I have once again combined multi-part episodes into one whole. There were a total of nine of these types of episodes across the series’ four seasons, with three of them being three-part episodes and the rest two-part. Strangely, there were no multi-part episodes in the whole of season 3 even though most of the story was continued from one episode to the next. Out of 98 episodes, only 12 earned four stars from me. When combined, there were only nine episodes that would have even qualified for this list. Rather than shoe-horning a tenth episode into this list from the very large number of three-and-a-half-star episodes, I will leave the list as it stands with only nine entries, which will continue after the break.

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