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A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Enterprise

Back in September, I did a ranking of every episode of every Star Trek series .

But what if you haven’s seen all of the Star Trek series? And what if you’re all ready to binge-watch another series this year?

If you haven’t seen Enterprise , the Trek franchise’s first prequel series, you’re probably not alone. While I have found several people who consider it their favorite, anecdotally, it appears to be the least watched series outside of the original animated one.

And I understand. The first two seasons are tough going a lot of the time. The theme song never gets better (except for briefly in season 4). However, as with all Trek, Enterprise –by and large– ages pretty darn well and scratches some itches you didn’t know you have about Andorians, Vulcans, and the founding of the United Federation of Planets.

The following list cuts 44 of the 98 episodes out of the mix, giving you enough grounding with the characters in the first two seasons to better enjoy the increased continuity and worldbuilding of the final two seasons.

If you find you really are enjoying the series, you can always catch up on those missing episodes in the inevitable rewatch for completeness (I’m cutting some episodes I really like, but –if I’m being honest– aren’t necessary for a first watch).

Also, after hearing the opening theme song, feel free to turn down the volume or skip the intro entirely except for “In a Mirror, Darkly” in the fourth season (I love the visuals, I’ve tried and the song doesn’t work for me).

Skip most of it except:

“Broken Bow” (Eps 1 & 2)
“The Andorian Incident” (Ep 7)
“Silent Enemy” (Ep 12)
“Dear Doctor” (Ep 13)
“Vox Sola” (Ep 22)
“Shockwave, Pt. 1” (Ep 26)
“Shockwave, Pt. 2” (Ep 1)
“Carbon Creek” (Ep 2)
“Minefield” (Ep 3)
“Vanishing Point” (Ep 10)
“The Breach” (Ep 21)
“Cogenitor” (Ep 22)
“The Expanse” (Ep 26)

Season Three

Watch most of it, except:

“Extinction” (Ep 3)
“Exile” (Ep 6)
“Similitude” (Ep 10)
“Doctor’s Orders” (Ep 16)

Season Four

“Daedalus” (Ep 10)
“These Are the Voyages…” (Ep 22)

As per the showrunner, the true series finale is “Terra Prime,” episode 21.

There you go! A Star Trek binge-fest that can easily fit into the rest of the year.

(Note: I did this one as a favor to someone who had meant to watch the series, but couldn’t get into it and have since been told by several people that they were in the same boat (or NX-class starship?). If people think I should do viewing guides for other series, let me know!)

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You need to watch the most controversial sci-fi show on Netflix before it leaves next week

Here’s the only five episodes you really need to see.

The boldest and most controversial Star Trek series of all time debuted 20 years ago on September 26, 2001. Since 2011, all four seasons of the show have been streaming on Netflix, but, along with The Original Series and Voyager , the earliest voyages of Starfleet will leave Netflix on September 30, 2021. Maybe forever.

Before Discovery and before the J.J. Abrams reboot, there was Star Trek: Enterprise , the rough and tumble adventures of the 22nd-century ship. If you’ve never watched Enterprise , here’s why you should, and the best five episodes to binge while you still can. (Extremely mild spoilers for Star Trek: Enterprise ahead. You’ve been warned.)

What is Star Trek: Enterprise ?

A good amount of Trekkie dogma will tell you that Enterprise — a retroactive prequel set before The Original Series — is the worst of all the post- Next Generation shows. While there’s a certain amount of been-there-done-that to many of Enterprise’s plots, its overall quality right out of the gate was, arguably, higher than TNG and Voyager .

In an attempt to tell the story of what Starfleet was like 100 years before The Original Series , the show not only ran into a lot of canon problems, but long-term, created a huge amount of foundational continuity that the rest of the franchise still relies upon.

Enterprise is kind of like The Phantom Menace of the Trek canon.

The plot of Star Trek Beyond is a direct outgrowth of everything that happened on Enterprise , and, tonally and aesthetically, Discovery’s first season is as much a direct sequel to Enterprise as it is a prequel to TOS. In short, Enterprise is kind of like The Phantom Menace of the Trek canon. It caught a lot of flack at the time it was released, but over time, you have to just accept that it exists.

But, in addition to the canon connections and world-building , Enterprise also contains a few stand-out, utterly thrilling episodes. After Enterprise leaves Netflix, the series will, of course, still be streaming on Paramount+, along with the rest of the Trek shows. But if you’re looking for a minimalist approach to the show, the following five episodes are your best bet.

5. “Broken Bow” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Broke: Klingons in space. Woke: Klingons on the farm!

A farmer shoots an alien running through his field — and it’s a Klingon! The first episode of Enterprise starts things off by trying to ground the world of Earth we know today with a projection of only 100 years in the future. The plot is a bit wonky, and the shape-shifting enemies, the Suliban, won’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense later, but the vibe of this episode is great. If you can’t handle Captain Archer’s (Scott Bakula) “NX-01” baseball cap and the syrupy theme song, you’re not gonna like the rest of the show. Strap in! It’s gonna be a long (short?) road.

4. “Dear Doctor” (Season 1, Episode 12)

Hoshi and Cutler help Dr. Phlox investigate a mysterious virus.

A bizarrely prescient episode focused on ethical dilemmas amid a planet-wide disease outbreak, this episode is one of the best examples of how Star Trek’s famous “Prime Directive” of non-interference doesn’t always have easy answers. And at this point in the timeline, Starfleet doesn’t even have the Prime Directive yet, making some of the ethical problems faced by Archer and Dr. Pholox (John Billingsley) messier than anything Picard or Kirk ever faced.

“Dear Doctor” also begins an interesting Enterprise tradition: leaving the audience unsure if the crew even did the right thing. Enterprise might not look gritty, but its ethics are much messier than TNG and Voyager . For most fans, this was the first episode of the show that proved it was real Star Trek, unafraid to ask hard questions.

3. “Impulse” (Season 3, Episode 5)

Vulcan zombies don’t raise their eyebrows...or drag their feet.

Vulcan zombies! In Enterprise Season 3, the crew spends most of their time trying to deal with a hostile multi-species alien culture called the Xindi in an area of space called “the expanse.” (No connection to the contemporary sci-fi series of the same name.) But, in the expanse, the wild final frontier of this early Trek prequel gets a little wilder.

In this episode, Enterprise encounters a Vulcan ship in distress, only to learn that a specific substance, called "trellium-D" has turned all the Vulcans into insane murderers. This episode is one of the best examples of Trek doing a horror story well, and the events have far-ranging impacts on the rest of the show.

But, perhaps most important, “Impulse” is one of the episodes of Enterprise that sports a writing credit from Terry Matalas, the new showrunner for the forthcoming second season of Star Trek: Picard . (Matalas also has a story credit on the Enterprise episode “Stratagem,” which is worth watching as well.)

2. “Damage” (Season 3, Episode 19)

T’Pol has a secret.

This is a great follow-up to “Impulse” and an episode that doubles down on the fractured Starfleet ethics that pervades much of the series. While T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) grapples with addiction issues, Archer has to figure out how to fix the warp drive of Enterprise without extra parts.

Will Starfleet resort to piracy just to keep its mission going? This episode does not care if you think Starfleet officers can’t act like this. It’s a hardcore, compelling story, and one of the most underrated episodes of the Enterprise, and Star Trek in general.

1. “Demons” and “Terra Prime” (Season 4, Episodes 20 and 21)

These folks will phase you if you cross them.

The crowning achievement of Enterprise , this two-part story is technically two episodes, but you have to watch both. Many hardcore fans consider this to be the true series finale, and not the actual last episode, “These Are the Voyages...”

The plot focuses on an extremist xenophobic group that takes hold on Earth. This group wants Earth for humans only and is going to great lengths to make it happen. The only thing standing between this conspiracy and total chaos is the crew of the Starship Enterprise .

Had Enterprise continued for a fifth season, the events of this epic two-parter would have certainly created several new plot points. But, as it stands, it's easily the finest hour of this underrated Trek series.

Enterprise is on Netflix until September 30 and on Paramount+ for the foreseeable future.

Check out two great streaming recs you should also add to your queue:

The Best Cult Documentary on Amazon Prime
The Best Sci-fi Sports Movie on Netflix
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I'm glad star trek is showing more love to scott bakula’s enterprise.

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Star Trek: Discovery’s Incredible Scott Bakula Enterprise Twist Explained

After 5 years, the boys' very first story is officially finished, the rookie season 7 bts images reveal first look at returning cast as filming officially begins.

Star Trek: Enterprise is finally getting the recognition it deserves in modern Star Trek, especially in Star Trek: Discovery season 5.
Enterprise was unfairly dismissed as "the show that killed the franchise", but viewers now see it as a really good show worth watching.
The integration of Enterprise into Star Trek: Discovery shows the lasting impact of Captain Archer's crew in the far future of the final frontier.

I'm glad to see Star Trek: Enterprise getting deserved love and recognition from modern Star Trek , especially in Star Trek: Discovery season 5. When Enterprise premiered on UPN in 2001, I was an early adopter. While I agreed with the overall then-sentiment that Enterprise felt like watered down retreads of Star Trek: The Next Generation 's stories, I still enjoyed the Enterprise NX-01 crew led by Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer. Enterprise was bristling with potential and was at its best in season 4 when UPN canceled the show.

Since then, I appreciated every unexpected shoutout to Star Trek: Enterprise , like J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009) referencing "Admiral Archer's beagle" , and how the NX Class USS Franklin and Enterprise -era MACO space marines were pivotal to Star Trek Beyond . Star Trek: Lower Decks ' name-drops like "a Kirk sundae with Trip Tucker sprinkles" and Lt. Brad Boimler's (Jack Quaid) mini statue of Mirror Universe Archer were a delight. Star Trek: Discovery season 5 brought back the Archer Space Dock, made a Denobulan one of the all-important Progenitors scientists, and, best of all, revealed that Doctor Kovich (David Cronenberg) is really temporal Agent Daniels (Matt Winston) from Star Trek: Enterprise. It's gratifying how Scott Bakula's Enterprise is getting its just due.

Star Trek: Discovery's series finale dropped a bombshell about Doctor Kovich tying back to Star Trek: Enterprise and the Temporal Cold War.

Scott Bakula's Enterprise Has Long Deserved Greater Recognition From Star Trek

Enterprise did not "kill the franchise," and star trek knows it.

For too long, Star Trek: Enterprise was unfairly dismissed as "the show that killed the franchise" . Yes, Enterprise was the only Rick Berman-produced Star Trek series that was canceled at season 4 instead of running 7 seasons like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek: Enterprise 's hated series finale was also like a scarlet letter the show still bears. Enterprise had poor ratings on UPN, and a sizeable segment of Star Trek fans didn't give the prequel a chance. However, this started to turn in the 2010s when Enterprise arrived on streaming. Viewers who binged Star Trek: Enterprise a decade or more after it ended found what I knew watching it first run: Enterprise is actually a really good show.

Modern Star Trek is regularly finding creative ways to homage Scott Bakula's Captain Archer and his crew.

Recently, Scott Bakula joined his fellow luminaries of Star Trek at the 84th annual Peabody Awards . Bakula has moved on from Star Trek and continued his successful acting career, but it was meaningful to see Scott representing Enterprise with huge names from past and present Star Trek like executive producer Alex Kurtzman, Patrick Stewart, Jeri Ryan, LeVar Burton, Doug Jones, Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck. The makers of Star Trek on Paramount+'s series recognize the important role Enterprise plays as, essentially, the beginning of Star Trek. While an Enterprise reunion of some sort doesn't appear to be on the table, modern Star Trek is regularly finding creative ways to homage Scott Bakula's Captain Archer and his crew, and it's genuinely appreciated.

It's Fitting Star Trek: Discovery Gave So Much Love To Scott Bakula's Enterprise

Star trek: discovery picked up where enterprise left off.

Star Trek: Discovery has given Star Trek: Enterprise the most recognition, and it feels right. After all, Discovery picked up where Enterprise left off as the next Star Trek series 12 years after the NX-01 crew left the airwaves. Discovery proved that Enterprise did not kill the Star Trek TV franchise. Rather, Discovery launched a new golden era for Star Trek, and it always contained genuflection to Enterprise - Discovery' s original blue Starfleet uniforms were an update of the blue jumpsuits Captain Archer and the NX-01 Enterprise crew wore. Further, when the USS Discovery arrived in the 32nd century, Earth had reverted to United Earth , which was the Terran homeworld's designation before the founding of the United Federation of Planets.

Enterprise has been fused into Star Trek: Discovery all along.

The shocking bombshell that Doctor Kovich is the aged Agent Daniels essentially means a character from Star Trek: Enterprise has been part of Star Trek: Discovery since season 3 . Enterprise has been fused into Star Trek: Discovery all along, and this is also brilliant as the two series bookend the thousand-year Star Trek saga from Enterprise 's 22nd century to Discovery 's 32nd/33rd century (and beyond). In Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 's future, I love that the Archer Space Dock continues to build and upgrade Starfleet's armada so that the pioneering spirit of Captain Archer and Star Trek: Enterprise is ever-present in the far future of the final frontier.

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WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Star Trek: Enterprise

After more than a decade of television supremacy, Star Trek: Enterprise would prove to be the final frontier for Gene Roddenberry's space opera, at least where television was concerned, accidentally killing the franchise until J.J. Abrams hit the movie reboot button in 2009. Because of that, it's gained a reputation for being a pretty crappy Star Trek all things considered, and while it's certainly not up there with the highlights of Trek 's 49-year history, it's also not as bad as many people think.

A prequel to the original Star Trek , Enterprise let producers reset the franchise from the increasingly safe era of The Next Generation and Voyager , where technology could be relied upon to save the day and humanity had evolved past petty hatred and things that could provide easy drama. By showing the origins of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, the logic went, the series could delight long-time fans while also drawing in new viewers... except that the reality proved to be almost entirely the opposite.

A decade since the show's cancelation, it's time to revisit Enterprise , and see how it stands up to the test of time (and space).

Number of Seasons: 4 (98 episodes)

Time Requirements: If you push it, you could manage to get through the entire series in just under two months. (Two episodes a night during the week, three per day on the weekends.) There are times when it'll seem difficult to push through, but we have faith in you.

Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, CBS.com

Best Character to Follow: Although there are certainly more likable characters in the show—step forward, Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery) and Hoshi Sato (Linda Park)—the best characters to follow are probably Scott Bakula's Captain Jonathan Archer and Connor Trineer's engineer, the resident fake McCoy, Trip Tucker. They are, after all, characters who get something resembling development throughout the entire series, as opposed to just an episode of spotlight every now and again. (Jolene Blalock's T'Pol also falls into that category, but also unfortunately alternated between "generic Vulcan" and "hot lady" in terms of her treatment across the show's run, making her a frustrating character to focus on at times.)

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

There's no real way of avoiding it: The first two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise —officially titled just Enterprise , the Star Trek didn't show up in the title until the third season—are uneven at best, and the third is... well, it depends how you feel about what was intended to be a new direction for the show, shall we say. This leaves the series feeling pretty skippable in large part until the show's fourth and final year, where things got a lot better very quickly. But if you're looking for specific episodes to avoid, here are some you can definitely do without.

Season 1: Episode 18, "Rogue Planet" What if Captain Archer fell in love with a mysterious woman on an alien planet, only to discover that she's actually a giant snail? Oh, sorry: We've spoiled the twist in the tale of this suitably sluggish, slow episode that might just make you want to climb into a shell and never come out.

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Season 1: Episode 23, "Two Days and Two Nights" Every single time any Star Trek series broached the idea of their crews grabbing some rest and relaxation, things threatened to get unwatchable, and never more so than this episode, which sees the Enterprise crew hit pleasure planet Risa only to be seduced by "exotic" aliens in such a manner that makes you wonder if the cast were as embarrassed speaking the dialogue as we are listening to it.

Season 2: Episode 26, "The Expanse" A controversial suggestion for some fans, "The Expanse" was obviously the Enterprise writers' response to the political fallout of 9/11 (the episode aired May 2003), and temporarily retooled the series as something more aggressive, with the Enterprise given bigger weapons and a new group of soldiers as they respond to a massive alien attack that killed millions by setting out to stop war at any cost possible. There are some interesting ideas in the season that follows—not least of which is the idea of a cold war between time travelers, which involves different factions playing with history for their own ends—but in many important ways, it doesn't feel true to the ideals of Star Trek . Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Season 4: Episode 22, "These Are the Voyages..." In general, Star Trek series nail their final episodes, but *Enterprise'*s final hour is so off-base that it's gained a reputation amongst fans for being one of the franchise's worst episodes overall, with later spin-off novels not only undoing one of the more dramatic plot twists of the story, but also making fun of the nonsensical nature of the episode overall. An embarrassing, ignoble end for a show that, while not perfect, deserved better.

Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:

The shorthand version of what Enterprise to watch if you're pressed for time is, "Season 4." Sure, it starts with a surreal resolution of the previous season's storyline (hello, space Nazis!), but everything that follows all the way up until the terrible final episode is golden. If you're looking to take a more leisurely stroll through the series, however, watch out for these episodes.

Season 1: Episodes 1 and 2, "Broken Bow" The pilot for the show is as messy as the series' first couple of years, but there remains something charming about the uncertainty with which the crew of the first Enterprise reacts to their looming mission, before events—and the episode's plot—overwhelm them. Plus, finally we get translation problems with aliens. It'd only taken us 30-something years!

Season 1: Episode 7, "The Andorian Incident" Talking about showing things that fans had long wanted to see: This is the episode that finally put subtext into text—yes, Vulcans really are dicks. In fact, they're hateful, xenophobic dicks, although their hatred for the Andorians isn't entirely off-base, as the audience quickly learns. But nonetheless, "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" Vulcans, these are not, and they're all the more fun for it.

Season 2: Episode 2, "Carbon Creek" The idea of taking a regular cast member and placing them in more-or-less contemporary Earth had become a Star Trek tradition by the time this episode rolled around, but Jolene Blalock acquits herself admirably, playing an ancestor of T'Pol in 1950s America. Sure, there's a plot explaining why they're there, but that's not what anyone is watching for. We just want the culture clash hijinks.

Season 3: Episode 10, "Similitude" The ethics of cloning are explored in a surprisingly subtle way in this episode in which a second Trip is "grown" to act as, essentially, an organ farm for the original version. Sounds a little creepy? Well, you're not alone in thinking so, which is where the episode's heart comes from. OK, that and the fact that the clone has all of Trip's memories and emotions, but not necessarily the social knowledge in how to deal with them.

Season 3: Episode 21, "E2" Thanks to the "temporal cold war," the crew encounters a version of the ship that had been sent back in time more than a century, and is now populated by their own descendants. Can this other Enterprise help prevent the time traveling that created them in the first place? If Back to the Future made your head hurt, this episode could be fatal, and we mean that as a compliment.

Season 4: Episode 3, "Home" What happens after Earth, humanity, the universe, and the timeline as we know it has been saved? If you're the crew of the Enterprise , you get to go home and find out how everyone else has been doing in your absence. After the previous year's high drama, this episode of downtime and after-effects is wonderfully fulfilling, humanistic, and feels very much like a course correction from where the show had been heading up to this point. Just great stuff.

Season 4: Episodes 4, 5, and 6, "Borderland," "Cold Station 12," and "The Augments" Tying together various threads in Star Trek mythology, including Khan (as in The Wrath of ) and *The Next Generation'*s Data, with Brent Spiner reappearing to play the ancestor of Data's creator, who also happens to be a fan of genetic experimentation and the closest thing Star Trek ever got to a mad scientist. You can tell that he's loving the role, and the result is something pulpy, fun, and filled with Trek Easter eggs for the fanbase.

Season 4: Episodes 18 and 19, "In A Mirror, Darkly" Parts 1 and 2 And here's another Easter egg for the faithful: a two-parter set in the "mirror universe" of the original series' "Mirror, Mirror," and relishing the campy drama that comes along with the setting. For the continuity-minded, there are excerpts from Star Trek: First Contact to explain where the mirror universe branched off from the regular Star Trek timeline, while the rest of us can enjoy the 1960s costumes and the suitably different opening titles.

Season 4: Episodes 20 and 21, "Demons" and "Terra Prime" Forget about the horrible final episode of the series (no, really, forget about it): This two-parter that immediately preceded it offers a far better conclusion to everything that came before, as discussions about the formation of what will eventually become the United Federation of Planets are disrupted by a xenophobic faction that wants to rid Earth of all aliens. What's that, you say, unsubtle political commentary? You betcha, and it's wonderful.

Why You Should Binge:

Because, thanks to the 2009 movie, Star Trek: Enterprise is now the only television series that is still canon. (No, really; Archer even gets referenced in the dialogue of the first one, as does his dog. Watch the Scotty scenes again.) Also, as rough as the series can be at times, there is something occasionally thrilling about seeing everyone involved try and retro-engineer the Star Trek that the audience knows and loves—and watching Enterprise in binge-mode is probably the best way to do it, as you see the show work its way backwards in terms of influence; it starts off in the mode of Star Trek: Voyager , but by the final (and best) season, there's a lot more of the original series in there. A forgotten classic? That might be going a little too far, but Enterprise is certainly not as bad as common wisdom remembers it to be.

Best Scene—"Let's Go" There are many fine moments throughout the 98 episodes of Enterprise , but nothing quite manages the moment in the pilot where the ship leaves the security of space dock for the first time. It's a moment filled with anticipation for what's to follow, which only feels fitting.

And, hey, it could be worse:

Much, much worse.

The Takeaway: In a way, Enterprise mirrors the earliest years of Earth's interplanetary exercise: an awkward start, some false moves in there, but things get closer to plain sailing as time goes on. Admittedly, the cancellation of the show four years in kind of ruins that metaphor a little bit, but work with us here. (And the less said about the coda in the finale, the better.)

If You Liked Star Trek: Enterprise You'll Love: If nothing else, most of the Trek canon. Probably some Battlestar Galactica , too.

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Star Trek: Enterprise will always be the first Star Trek spin-off to be cancelled rather than retired, the first live-action spin-off to run less than seven seasons. That is what pop culture will remember of the fifth Star Trek series, when it chooses to remember anything at all. That is what large vocal segments of fandom will remember whenever they are asked their opinion on the show. There is no escaping that simple truth. Even Star Trek: Voyager was spared the indignity of killing an entire iteration of the franchise.

Star Trek had been on the air for fourteen continuous seasons by the time that UPN convinced producer Rick Berman to work on what would turn out to be his final season. Fourteen seasons is a long time in television, and it is rare for any property to continuously succeed over so extended a period. The franchise had been on the air continuously since the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation . The franchise had been a massive success for both the studio Paramount and for the network UPN.

The cancellation of Enterprise perhaps explains why the series has been subject to so much speculation and discussion. There is a desire to rewrite history and to tailor narratives with benifit of hindsight. Nevertheless, the production team have suggested that the version of Enterprise that launched in late September 2001 was not the show they originally wanted to produce. The television show broadcast on UPN to fill the slot vacated by Voyager was not what its creators had wanted it to be.

Rick Berman has talked about the concept of franchise fatigue, and his own deep-seated concern that the Star Trek franchise needed to take a rest from television. After all, by the point that Enterprise launched, audiences had already enjoyed fourteen consecutive years of Star Trek . Not only that, there had been twenty-one seasons of Star Trek produced in those fourteen years. It was possible that the franchise had reached (if not surpassed) the point of saturation, and that the whole thing might collapse in on itself.

There is a certain logic to this argument. After all, even the most popular and successful of franchises seem to implode at some point or another. Over sixteen years, the CSI franchise ballooned to three shows running concurrently before those numbers gradually dwindled and the shows faded from the cultural consciousness. At its peak at the turn of the millennium, the Law & Order franchise had three shows broadcasting concurrently. In the years since, the original show was cancelled and the production team have failed to launch any new shows.

While Rick Berman was suggesting that it might be a good idea to rest the franchise, Brannon Braga had more ambitious notions. Enterprise would serve as a prequel series to the Star Trek franchise, any idea undoubtedly stoked by the commercial (if not critical) success of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace . Braga saw the possibility for a different approach to Star Trek . Writer Chris Black would recall that the idea was pitched to him as the franchise’s version of The Right Stuff .

Braga had several novel ideas for the show. He wanted to set the first season, or a segment of the first season, on Earth in the lead-up to the launch of the ship. In doing so, he wanted to flesh out the world and experiment with the sort of arc-based storytelling that had held his fascination since Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II during the fourth season of Voyager . This approach would have served to clearly distinguish Enterprise from its predecessors and help the show to carve out a new niche.

However, it was immediately clear that UPN was not willing to let either producer have their way. Rick Berman understood that the network would eagerly replace him if he proved unwilling to fill the slot in the schedule left by the retirement of Voyager . Brannon Braga learned that the studio wanted another neatly episodic Star Trek series with no arc-based storytelling and adhering to the traditional format. The Enterprise would not launch half-way through the first season, it would launch about twenty minutes into the first episode.

UPN was also quite anxious about breaking away from the twenty-fourth century setting that had defined so much of the franchise since the launch of The Next Generation . In order to placate the anxious network executives, Brannon Braga came up with the idea of the Temporal Cold War. The idea would be that there were various futuristic powers interferring in the day-to-day lives of Enterprise, with some mysterious and nefarious agendas. At the centre of all this was a mysterious shadowed figure nicknamed “Future Guy.”

In basic terms, the Temporal Cold War loosely resembled the kind of “mythology” that was so popular on contemporary shows. It was a mystery to be solved, not unlike the conspiracy at the heart of The X-Files . However, in practice the Temporal Cold War turned out to be something completely different. It was less a story than a status quo , less a plot to advance than a backdrop for interesting stories. Over the four-year run of the show, Archer never really gets any closer to understanding who is driving the Temporal Cold War or why.

Instead, the Temporal Cold War worked best as a metaphor for the external pressures bearing down on Enterprise . In episodes like Cold Front , it was a way for the series to touch upon its awkward relationship to the larger canon. What if the reason nobody had mentioned Archer over the course of The Next Generation or Voyager was because the ship didn’t exist in the original timeline? What if this whole series was an abherration in the show’s the continuity, a distortion of the master narrative?

Alternatively, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga would also treat the Temporal Cold War as a metaphor for the pressures facing the production, the intrusion of outside forces into the narrative. In Shockwave, Part I , Archer discovers that the only place he can be safe from those meddling forces is before the events of Broken Bow ; literally outside the show’s narrative and in a setting not unlike Brannon Braga’s original pitch for the show. The Temporal Cold War found Archer operating at the whim of vastly powerful forces beyond his control.

Of course, the idea of building an arc around the Temporal Cold War was stillborn. When Enterprise first debuted, it was a stunningly conservative show, from both a narrative and political standpoint. Television was undergoing a massive evolutionary leap at the turn of the millennium, shifting away from a rigid episodic format and towards more ambitious storytelling approaches. Serialisation had already worked very well on cable networks like HBO, but it was creeping into the mainstream. Enterprise premiered in the same season as 24

However, the first two seasons of Enterprise were distinctly uninterested in embracing serialised storytelling. Instead, they hewed rather close to the rigid “done-in-one” episodic format that had defined so much of Voyager . There was very rarely a sense of continuity from episode-to-episode in those early years, with an extended journey towards Risa between Fallen Hero and Two Days and Two Nights and the damage to the ship carrying between Minefield and Dead Stop proving the exception rather than the rule.

This caused some very clear problems in the first two seasons, as Enterprise tackled a number of plot threads that were probably best suited to long-form storytelling. The Temporal Cold War was one such thread, only appearing in the season premieres and finales of the show’s first two seasons along with a single standalone episode in the middle of each season. The foundation of the Federation was another such thread, with the Andorians only appearing three times in the first two years and with little sense of improving relations between Earth and Vulcan.

Part of the appeal of doing a prequel series is the fact that the ending is already known, that the journey has a destination. Watching the first two seasons of Enterprise , it seemed like the show was wandering around in circles rather than advancing towards its goal. There was a sense that the Star Trek franchise was still stuck in 1994. This fear would find its ultimate expression in These Are the Voyages… , the final episode of the show that made a point to jump back to a seventh season of The Next Generation .

The show’s style and sensibility was very much rooted in The Next Generation . While advertised as a prequel to a classic Star Trek , the series was aesthetically and stylistically a sequel to Star Trek: First Contact , to the point that it was James Cromwell as Zephram Cochrane who passed the torch to Jonathan Archer in Broken Bow and that the production team would return to Cochrane in the teaser to In a Mirror, Darkly Part I . The ship looked a felt a lot more like the ships of the Berman era than those from the original sixties television show.

To be fair, the show’s aesthetic would soften over the course of the run. Despite the reintroduction of the Andorians to the franchise with The Andorian Incident , the first two seasons featured rather muted colour tones and an emphasis on industrial design. There was also a relatively grounded approach to issues like make-up and costuming, with Enterprise reluctant to venture too far outside the template established by The Next Generation and carried on through Voyager .

However, with the third season, the show embraced a decidedly pulpier sci-fi aesthetic and a bright colour scheme. The third season featured a literal “planet of the (cowboy) hats” story in North Star , the kind of honest to goodness “genre world” story that the franchise had shied away from during the Berman era. The crew found themselves facing evil aliens that looked like reptiles and CGI insect monsters, with the third season finale featuring Archer wrestling a reptile in regal purple costume on top of a giant bomb. Kirk would be proud.

Of course, there was a downside to all of this. It could be argued that some of the more unfortunate retrograde sexism of the final two seasons – particularly in episodes like Rajiin and Bound – was rooted in this nostalgia aesthetic. There was a sense that the show could occasionally be a little too indulgent of pulp science-fiction tropes, instead of challenging them. In some ways, this contributed to the broad conservative feel of the show, with the series’ embracing pulpy genre tropes at face value rather than interrogating them.

The show’s colour palette grew a little bolder in those final two seasons, with the deep reds of Vulcan in The Forge and the rings of Andor in The Aenar adding a pulpy paperback charm to the show’s production design. Even the strong purples design the eponymous research laboratory in Cold Station 12 evoked the kind of brightly lit (and coloured) set upon which William Shatner might have strode. In those final two years, it felt like Enterprise was reconnecting with the goofy science-fiction b-movies of the fifties and sixties, which felt appropriate for a prequel to Star Trek .

However, in its first season, Enterprise never quite captured the feel of a prequel. The technology felt held over from The Next Generation and Voyager , with the protein resequencer seeming closer to the replicator than the food slots. Following Broken Bow , the transporter becomes a fairly regular part of the show’s technology. Unexpected even has the crew encounter a proto-holodeck, while Minefield gives the Romulans cloaking technology. There is very little about Enterprise that seems appreciably less advanced than the shows it followed.

Indeed, the first three seasons arguably squander some of the most exciting aspects of the prequel setting. Early in Broken Bow , Trip boasts that mankind has conquered war, famine and poverty. It is a single line that immediately erases a whole world of storytelling possibilities. One of the most fascinating possibilities of a prequel to Star Trek is in watching mankind conquer their demons and work together to build a utopian future. Optimism has always been a key attribute of the Star Trek franchise, and it would be intriguing to see that optimism play out.

Even outside of the missed storytelling opportunities, Enterprise was hobbled by a sense of familiarity. The first two seasons wasted too much time treading over familiar ground. T’Pol began as little more than a transparent copy of Seven of Nine. Phlox was very much a generic eccentric alien, because every Star Trek show is obligated to have one. The Klingons regularly appeared in episodes like Broken Bow , Unexpected and Sleeping Dogs . The Nausicaans appeared in Fortunate Son . The Ferengi got a comedy episode in Acquisition .

This was to say nothing of the fact that so many episodes felt like retreads and stock stories. Oasis was just Shadowplay . Dawn was Darmok stripped of its optimism. The Communicator was A Piece of the Action . Vanishing Point was Remember Me meets Realm of Fear . The Breach was Jetrel by way of Duet . Despite the fact that the production team had made a conscious choice to step away from the familiar tropes, even stripping Star Trek from the name of the series in its first two seasons, Enterprise felt like “Star Trek by the numbers.”

In fact, even many of the episodes that weren’t explicitly rip-offs of earlier Star Trek episodes had a very generic feel to them, particularly during the final stretch of the first season. Vox Sola was the standard “creepy space life-form” story. Rogue Planet was a stock “message episode about a social issue” story. Fallen Hero was very much a “ferrying a diplomat” story. The first season of Enterprise seemed torn between the novelty of the premise and the safety of the franchise standards. The second season opted for security over originality.

Of course, UPN had changed slightly in the years since Caretaker had launched the network. The channel was skewing younger and towards ethnic demographics. From the start, there was a conscious sense that Enterprise was going to be a version of Star Trek designed to appeal to a young adult demographic. In particular, the network advocated for heightened sexual content, for more skin and for more physical content. Perhaps the show’s most infamous sequence is the incredibly gratuitous rub-down scene in Broken Bow .

With the exception of the original Star Trek , the franchise had never been particularly good at doing “sexy.” When the franchise attempted to do sex comedies, it ended up with disasters like Up the Long Ladder or Let He Who Is Without Sin… The writers and directors working on Star Trek tended to adopt a rather juvenile approach to sexuality, as demonstrated during the mirror universe episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Trying to mandate a “sexy” Star Trek show seemed like a spectacular error in judgment.

Indeed, Enterprise never really moved past that creepy voyeuristic approach to sex, combining stilted expository dialogue with scenes of characters touching one another against highly stylised light effects. Broken Bow set the tone for the rest of the series, but the show was consistent in its very childish approach to the human body. Bounty and Bound are perhaps the worst offenders of the four-season run, but even episodes like The Augments and Babel One feature sequences of the show trying (and failing) to be sexy.

That said, not all the errors with the series can be blamed on the network. Enterprise suffered from issues with its scripts from the outset. One of Brannon Braga’s bolder ideas had been to recruit writers from outside the Star Trek gene pool to work on the show. Instead of retaining the strongest writers on the Voyager staff, like Bryan Fuller or Michael Taylor, Braga opted to draft in writers with experience beyond the franchise. It was a good idea in principle, particularly given that Braga wanted to write a new type of Star Trek .

The only issue was that it takes a great deal of skill and experience to write a Star Trek script. The franchise has its own sensibility and aesthetic, and experience in the medium does not always translate to experience within the franchise. The writers’ room featured some pretty heavy attrition over the course of the first season, with many of the show’s new writers turning in offensive nonsense like Terra Nova . Over the course of its four-season run, Enterprise would feature a staggeringly high turnover of writers, leading the show to struggle to find a voice.

To be fair, there were occasional glimmers of a new type of Star Trek to be found in that first season. The first season wold occasionally attempt to tell a unique or distinct sort of Star Trek story. This was particularly apparent in stories like Breaking the Ice , Cold Front , Dear Doctor or Shuttlepod One . At its best, the first season of Enterprise slowed down its storytelling to appreciate the majesty of space flight, to get excited about the possibilities of exploration, to revel in the potentialities of first contact. These episodes had a slower, more deliberate pace.

Unfortunately, these episodes were very much the exception rather than the rule. As a result of the massive attrition from the writers’ room, Brannon Braga found himself radically re-writing most of the first season scripts under incredibly tight deadlines. No matter how much Braga might have wanted to write a new type of Star Trek , that sort of pressure and that sort of workload inevitably forces a writer to fall back into familiar routines and familiar clichés. Enterprise often felt quite bland and samey in its first season.

More than that, the failed experiment of hiring writers from outside the franchise led the production team to become a lot more conservative in its recruitment policies. When it came to hiring writers to replace those who had failed to last the season, Brannon Braga opted for safer choices more familiar with genre work. The result was a conscious move away from the more experimental style that had marked the strongest and strangest episodes of the first season towards an approach perhaps best summarised as generic Star Trek .

Enterprise was also somewhat burdened with a more conservative aesthetic than any of the other spin-offs. The Star Trek franchise had long been regarded as progressive and open-minded, a safe haven for representative diversity. The Next Generation had featured an English actor playing a Frenchman. Deep Space Nine had featured the franchise’s first African-American lead. Voyager had featured a female lead and a cast that was almost fifty percent female.

In particular, the ensembles on Deep Space Nine and Voyager had been incredibly diverse. The franchise had yet to feature an overtly homosexual or bisexual lead, but those shows featured characters and cast members of all colours and creeds. There was not a single white American character in the primary cast of Deep Space Nine , which is quite remarkable in the context of American television. As such, the primary cast of Enterprise represented a clear step backwards for the franchise, with a particular emphasis on white American men.

Archer was very much conceived as a white all-American hero for the Bush era, right down to the daddy issues that drive him to action in Broken Bow . His best friend is Charles Tucker III, a white American Southerner. Both Archer and Trip spend an extended portion of the first season making (at best borderline) racist remarks about T’Pol. There are only two women in the primary cast, and only two people of colour. Indeed, it could legitimately be argued that the cast of Enterprise is less diverse than the original Star Trek .

This would cause all manner of problems in terms of how the show presented itself. The episode Twilight , for example, suffered from the show’s lack of female characters. While Trip and Reed were allowed to be captains of their own vessels, the show’s only African American character was casually killed off and the show’s only female leads were reduced to caregivers and background characters. This is not to suggest Twilight is racist or sexist, but to demonstrate how the show’s questionable casting and concept choices impacted even its strongest episode.

From the outset, Enterprise struggled to define its cast of characters. In the show’s early seasons, Archer was highly volatile and variable, recalling the characterisation of Kathryn Janeway. It seemed the production team never had a read on the character, and it occasionally seemed like the writers didn’t understand the appeal of Scott Bakula’s folksy naturalistic charm. Bakula is perfectly cast as a square-jawed all-American hero, but flounders when asked to deliver a Picard monologue like the one in Shockwave, Part II or to embrace his inner Sisko in Anomaly .

The rest of the cast never quite gelled in the same way that the cast on The Next Generation had come to embody their characters, and were never developed to the extent that the cast on Deep Space Nine were fleshed out. Mayweather barely had any lines, let alone any development. Hoshi seemed to get stuck repeating the same character beats in stories like Fight or Flight , Sleeping Dogs and Vox Sola . The biggest developments for Malcolm Reed in the first season were that he liked pineapple in Silent Enemy and T’Pol’s derriere in Shuttlepod One .

As such, the cast on Enterprise frequently seemed generic and one-dimensional, recalling the way that Voyager had treated its own diverse ensemble. The show’s breakout character was Charles “Trip” Tucker, the speedboat mechanic turned warp specialist played by Connor Trinneer. Trinneer brought a delightful charm to Trip, earning the audience’s respect for (relatively) gracefully navigating storytelling disasters like Unexpected or Acquisition . It is no wonder that Brannon Braga decided to (somewhat spitefully) kill Trip off in These Are the Voyages…

While the first season had teased the idea of recurring crewmembers like Rostov or Cutler, Enterprise never felt like a community in the same way that Deep Space Nine had eventually. That said, Enterprise did manage to cultivate something of a small recurring cast in its final year. Kelby appeared in a few episodes, his humiliations serving as something of a cruel recurring punchline. Characters like Soval and Shran helped to flash out the show’s universe and to create a sense of a world beyond the hull of the ship.

The first half of the first season was written and produced over the summer of 2001. Even then, the show was very much Star Trek for the Bush administration. There was a strong conservative and nationalist element to the plot, with Archer adamant about “going it alone” and fulfilling his father’s dreams. However, everything would change right before Broken Bow premiered. Enterprise would become the first post-9/11 Star Trek show. Almost as much as its eventual cancellation, this aspect would come to define it.

Broken Bow had obviously been produced long before those terrorist attacks took place. In fact, Civilisation was actually in front of the cameras when new began to filter in of what had happened. Because of the nature of television production, the actual impact of 9/11 would only truly ripple through the second half of the first season. Nevertheless, Enterprise launched in the wake of a devastating terrorist attack that completely changed the way that Americans saw the world. The show (and the franchise) would be unavoidably changed by that fact.

9/11 had a massive impact on Enterprise . Indeed, it could be argued that the thematic arc of the show’s four-season run is one about coming to terms with the attacks and their impact on the popular consciousness. The first season is largely about denial, the production team trying to pretend that nothing has changed. The impact of the attacks can be felt on episodes like Shadows of P’Jem , Desert Crossing or Detained , but there is a clear sense that the production team want everything to be business as usual.

The second season finds the show quietly stewing in the anger and confusion of the War on Terror. In the second season of Enterprise , the universe becomes a lot more hostile and alien. Episodes like Minefield and Dawn suggest that perhaps the best that anybody can hope for is that other cultures and people will keep to themselves. Apocalyptic landscapes populate episodes like Shockwave, Part II and Cease Fire . Paranoia and fear of the alien is justified in episodes like The Seventh and The Crossing .

In its second season, Enterprise is at its strongest when it challenges (rather than embraces) this latent xenophobia and anxiety. Judgment confronts the audience with the possibility that the United States has transformed into the Klingon Empire. Regeneration fused all of the show’s fears about its relationship to the rest of the franchise to a post-9/11 zombie horror story. Cogenitor weighed the consequences of unilateral intervention while asking the audience to make up their own minds. However, these episodes were the exception rather than the rule.

At the end of the second season, everything changed. Towards the end of the first season, the management of UPN had changed dramatically. The executives who had insisted upon a Star Trek show to fill their schedule were gone, replaced by individuals with a very different perspective. While Star Trek had traditionally been left alone by the studio and the network, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga frequently found themselves attending meetings and taking notes from people who had no idea of how the franchise actually worked.

Over the course of the second season, it became increasingly clear that UPN was disinterested in Enterprise . The show’s ratings had dwindled, but the network had also shifted its focus away from the show’s target market. For the first time in a very long time, it looked like the Star Trek franchise was not a priority. With ratings down and the network disinterested, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga were instructed to go for broke and to reinvent the show. The second season finale, The Expanse , reconfigured the show for the War on Terror.

Of course, these themes had been bubbling through the first two years of the show. With The Expanse , Berman and Braga brought them to the fore. The episode featured a horrific attack upon Earth, and dispatched Archer on a mission to find those responsible and hold them accountable. Trip was cast in the role of bereaved sibling, his sister brutally murdered by this alien threat. This was a premise that essentially challenged the franchise. What does Star Trek look like in the twenty-first century? How can the franchise’s idealism be reconciled with all that?

The third season was messy and raw. It was also ambitious and exciting. The production team were afforded the opportunity to confront and address issues that had been bubbling away in the background, allowing the season to serve as something of an exorcism for all the worst tendencies that had taken root over the first two seasons of the show. All the xenophobia and hatred, all the paranoia and mistrust, all the anger and bloodlust. The third season could draw them out.

This was not always comfortable viewing. The show seems to embrace militarism in episodes like The Xindi , with Archer taking a full compliment of trained marines on board his ship. Archer also brutally tortures an enemy captive in Anomaly , arguably getting his own hands far dirtier than Sisko did over the course of In the Pale Moonlight or Tacking Into the Wind . At points, it feeled like the show was genuinely confused about all this, about how much it endorsed Archer’s actions and about how much it bought into the “ends justify the means” rhetoric.

Still, the third season journeyed back to traditional Star Trek ideals. Archer had been dispatched on a search-and-destroy mission, but the third season finds Archer making peace with the Xindi. The narrative arc of Star Trek has always been about how our enemies become our friends, and about the triumph of innocence and optimism over brutality and cynicism. The third season reached its thematic and emotional conclusion with the brokering of peace with the Xindi in The Council , even if the action plot continued for two more episodes.

The third season seemed introspective. Cycles of violence became a recurring theme across the year. The Xindi were only motivated by the fear that humanity would destroy them. The torture that Archer inflicted in Anomaly haunted the character, and was visited back upon himself in Azati Prime and upon Hoshi in Countdown . Although the script itself was terrible, Hatchery represented a clear and unambiguous rejection of an overly militaristic approach to Star Trek . Even in standalones like North Star , communities were trapped in repeating patterns of violence.

In contrast to the adventure-of-the-week format of the show’s first two years, the third season of Enterprise opted to construct a single year-long story that found the crew engaged in a mission to save Earth. The transition from rigid episodic storytelling to a more serialised format was awkward, not helped by the fact that the production team failed to use the gap between the second and third seasons to map out the year ahead. As a result, the first stretch of the third season tended to wander a bit, lacking focus.

Still, the production team eventually got to grips with the format, and the home stretch of the show’s third year marks one of the most consistent runs in the show’s history. More than that, the shift in storytelling style allowed the production team to experiment with novel ways of telling their stories. The Forgotten , for example, allowing the series to focus on grief and trauma in a manner that would not have been possible earlier in the run. Similarly, Harbinger was an episode mainly driven by character beats that had simmered through the season to that point.

Perhaps reflecting the show’s declining ratings and the uncertainty of the future, the third season also touched upon anxieties concerning the larger Star Trek franchise. North Star essentially deconstructed the idea of Star Trek as a space western, demonstrating that the western itself is a problematic genre that glosses over its own uncomfortable historical roots. Episodes like Twilight and E² wondered about the sustainable future of Star Trek , daring to ask whether that future even existed in a recognisable form.

There was a conscious shift in Enterprise during its third season, as if the franchise itself became aware of its own mortality. The third season order was cut from twenty-six episodes to twenty-four in the middle of the run, suggesting that the network was not as eager for more Star Trek as it once had been. The cast and crew found themselves addressing rumours of cancellation in interviews. While many of that same cast and crew had talked about the job security of doing a Star Trek show upon the premiere of Broken Bow , they seemed a lot cagier.

The franchise received its first cancellation scare in a long at the end of the third season, with the network taking its time to renew the show. Although Zero Hour ended on a cliffhanger featuring evil!alien!space! Nazis, there was every possibility that UPN would not pick up the show for a fourth season. The fourth season was largely the result of a series of complex behind-the-scenes compromises and negotiations which shifted a lot of the onus of producing Enterprise away from the network and which cut the show’s budget significantly.

These budget cuts took an immediate toll on Enterprise . The special effects in the fourth season looked a lot less polished than they had in the prior three seasons, while the production made the transition from shooting on film to shooting on digital. Although members of the production team were positive about the changes in contemporaneous interviews, Brannon Braga acknowledges that he was not fond of the compromise, believing that it made Enterprise look cheap. It is not an unfair observation.

The budget cuts at the start of the fourth season also forced a change in storytelling style for the show. The fourth season eschewed the idea of a single season-long arc, instead opting for a series of smaller multi-episode arcs running two or three episodes. It was a novel approach for Star Trek , a franchise that had always treated two-parters as big “event” episodes. The reason for the decision were partially pragmatic; building sets for multiple episodes allowed the team to effectively amortise the construction of sets and props.

The fourth season also found Rick Berman and Brannon Braga stepping back from the day-to-day running of the series, handing over the running of the writers’ room to Manny Coto. Coto had arrived around midway through the third season, and had made a strong impression with his scripts for Similitude and Azati Prime . Coto also had experience running the show Odyssey 5 . A massive Star Trek fan, Coto made it his priority to tie Enterprise back into its franchise roots and to embrace the prequel format.

The fourth season of Enterprise was effectively a continuity bonanza. Affliction and Divergence solved the long-standing riddle of Klingon foreheads, while In a Mirror, Darkly, Part I and In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II managed to serve as both a prequel to Mirror, Mirror and a sequel to The Tholian Web . There were other hints of continuity fetishism, with Coto essentially building the season’s first big three-parter ( Borderland , Cold Station 12 , The Augments ) as an extended homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan .

Although the fourth season was widely beloved by fans who saw it as Enterprise finally embracing its place as a prequel to the sprawling Star Trek canon, there was occasionally a sense that the show’s obsession with continuity led to bad storytelling choices. This was most obvious in the season’s standalone episodes. Daedalus was a somewhat pointless story built around the idea that it might be worth exploring the roots of the transporter. Observer Effect featured Organians for the sake of featuring Organians. The less said about Bound , the better.

In many ways, for better and for worse, the fourth season of Enterprise paved the way for the JJ Abrams reboot. It serves as something of a bridge between two iterations of Star Trek , and not just because they both feature Peter Weller as a xenophobic bad guy or because Star Trek wiped everything but Enterprise from the official canon. The connections run deeper than that, with both the fourth season and the Abrams movies treating Star Trek continuity as a fetish object of itself.

This is most obvious in the way that both the Borderland trilogy and Star Trek Into Darkness both focus on retreading The Wrath of Khan , but it also bubbles through on their shared fixation on Spock as an ambassador for the franchise. Star Trek cast Spock as the one character carried over from one iteration of the franchise to the next, while the fourth season hints repeatedly at the idea of a Vulcan-human hybrid as a sort of messianic figure that serves to summon the Star Trek universe into being.

The most interesting narrative threads of the fourth season focused on the foundation of the Federation and emergence of the franchise’s utopian vision of the future. Although less overt in its social and political commentary than the third season had been, the fourth season was still shaped and informed by the War on Terror. This is most obvious in the recurring theme of xenophobia building through episodes like Home to Demons and Terra Prime . There was a sense that hope for a better future was more essential than it ever had been before.

The fourth season of Enterprise set about reconciling Earth and Vulcan in The Forge , Awakening and Kir’Shara . It brought together the founding members of the Federation against a Romulan threat in Babel One , United and The Aenar . It even featured meetings that would lead to the foundation of the Federation in Demons , Terra Prime and These Are the Voyages… Even more than serving continuity, these episodes embraced the core ideals of Star Trek , the idea that different people can work together for the greater good.

One of the smarter decisions of the fourth season is to present this idealism as subversive in its own way. Repeatedly over the course of the fourth season, it is stressed that mutually beneficial cooperation is not a given. The fourth season returns to the classic Star Trek trope of space-faring Roman-themed civilisations, presenting both the Romulan Empire and the Terran Empire as alternatives to the nascent Federation. Indeed, Paxton’s Terra Prime is specifically coded as a movement that would lead to the Terran Empire rather than the Federation.

Bridging the gap between the first and second terms of President George W. Bush, at a point in time where it seemed like the United States was committed to “going it alone” , it was good to see Enterprise embrace the optimism at the heart of the franchise once again. In many ways, the Star Trek franchise has always been an idealised extrapolation of an American future, and it is good to see the fourth and final season reclaim that following the grim cynicism of the first two seasons.

Indeed, Demons and Terra Prime serve as something of a finale to the series by bringing Enterprise full circle. The ship and crew return home to fight the demons that have been lurking there all along. In particular, Paxton is presented as a counterpoint to Archer, with Coto even casting another eighties science-fiction icon in the role. Paxton is xenophobic and paranoid, mired in daddy issues, just like the version of Archer introduced in Broken Bow . Having Archer come home and vanquish that part of himself feels like an important thematic beat.

The final two seasons of Enterprise are fantastic examples of the franchise innovating and experimenting, despite their flaws. It is a shame that the quality of those two seasons tends to get drowned out by the bland mediocrity of the first two seasons and the long shadow cast be the cancellation. Enterprise will always be the show that marked the end of the Berman era and began the franchise’s decade-long absence from television. However, at its best it was a proud heir to the Star Trek name.

Enterprise was a show that frequently struggled with the question of what a twenty-first century Star Trek show should like, in terms of both theme and narrative. It is debatable whether it ever settled on a convincing answer, but its final two seasons suggest some interesting possibilities. In many ways, those final two seasons have the perfect narrative for a Star Trek prequel. Amid the confusion and chaos of the War on Terror, Enterprise helped the franchise find a way back to itself.

That is no small accomplishment.

September 26, 2001 – May 22, 2002

Fight or Flight
Strange New World
The Andorian Incident
Breaking the Ice
Civilisation
Fortunate Son
Silent Enemy
Dear Doctor
Sleeping Dogs
Shadows of P’Jem
Shuttlepod One
Rogue Planet
Acquisition
Fallen Hero
Desert Crossing
Two Days and Two Nights
Shockwave, Part I

September 18, 2002 – May 21, 2003

Shockwave, Part II
Carbon Creek
A Night in Sickbay
The Seventh
The Communicator
Singularity
Vanishing Point
Precious Cargo
The Catwalk
Future Tense
The Crossing
Regeneration
First Flight
The Expanse

September 10, 2003 – May 26, 2004

The Shipment
Carpenter Street
Chosen Realm
Proving Ground
Doctor’s Orders
Azati Prime
The Forgotten
The Council

October 8, 2004 – May 13, 2005

Storm Front, Part I
Storm Front, Part II
Cold Station 12
The Augments
Kir’Shara
Observer Effect
In a Mirror, Darkly, Part I
In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II
Terra Prime
These Are the Voyages…

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Sci-Fi Movies

Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked: Which Ones Are Worth Watching?

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Star Trek is the sci-fi franchise that went where no other sci-fi franchise had gone before. Indeed, no other media franchise—in and beyond the realm of science fiction—has had the same kind of complex storytelling and world-building that Star Trek brought forth.

Ever since 1979, the Star Trek movies achieved varying levels of success, both good and bad. For every bad movie ( The Final Frontier ), there would be also a good one ( The Undiscovered Country ), and Trekkies love them all in their own unique ways.

Despite dips in quality, all of the Star Trek movies are worth watching for their different journeys and arcs. Here's our take on how the different Star Trek movies rank against each other.

13. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

The Final Frontier is universally slammed as the least impressive Star Trek movie ever made. The crew of the Enterprise is called to action when rebel Vulcan Sybok, Spock's half-brother, stages a hostage crisis.

They then discover his plans to venture to the center of the galaxy and physically locate God. Does that premise sound ludicrous? Wait 'til you see the movie itself. The uninspired action and cheesy dialogue make it look like a spoof.

William Shatner's vision is all over the place, but you can still see the passion from the entire crew. Incompetence aside, this has some decent ideas. For skeptics, treat it like a decent passion project.

12. Star Trek VII: Generations (1994)

Star Trek: Generations is the first movie crossover in the franchise and the first entry for the Next Generation timeline.

For this seventh movie, Jean-Luc Picard teams up with the now-retired Captain James T. Kirk to stop the devious El-Aurian Tolian Soran (played by Malcolm McDowell) from causing destruction throughout the galaxy.

For the average Trekkie, it's amazing to see the two generations team up. Sadly, the resulting crossover ended up sour when Picard got more screen time than Kirk, and when the story ended up feeling more like a stretched TV episode.

Overall, Star Trek: Generations is a passable time-burner for the least-expecting fanatic, and McDowell's Soran makes for a great threat.

11. Star Trek IX: Insurrection (1998)

Another from the Next Generation, Star Trek: Insurrection follows the Enterprise-E crew at odds with Starfleet when they learn of a heinous plot to conquer the planet Ba'ku for its resources. This results in Picard leading a rebellion to stop the Son'a from causing destruction to the planet.

Picard leading an insurrection is an idea filled with potential. Even if it seems thin on execution, it works as the ideal Star Trek escapist flick. Jonathan Frakes continues to deliver the goods of a fun Trek voyage: the Son'a are a credible threat and Patrick Stewart remains awesome.

10. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

In the second movie of the Kelvin timeline, the Enterprise is assigned to travel to Klingon territory and track down the terrorist John Harrison (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) who's behind the attacks on Earth.

But when Harrison surrenders, his hidden intentions compromise the mission and the crew themselves.

Star Trek Into Darkness continues the streak of the J. J. Abrams series of movies, even if this one has a mediocre outcome. Most Trekkies point to the characterizations as its main problem, the worst being Harrison's twist revelation and Carol Marcus herself.

Regardless, it has all the set pieces for an explosive Star Trek blockbuster, making it the highest-grossing Star Trek movie.

9. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture came on the heels of the show's abrupt cancellation. This time, the original crew of the USS Enterprise is brought back to their assignments, along with now Admiral James T. Kirk, to stop an alien cloud called V'Ger.

For all its hype, Trekkies were delighted to see the crew back on deck for more missions, even if it wasn't the brightest of starts. Despite all that, there are moments to enjoy, like the cloud's destruction scenes, Ilia's presence, and Leonard Nimoy as Spock.

8. Star Trek X: Nemesis (2002)

Star Trek: Nemesis was unfortunately the endcap to the Next Generation timeline. In this last hurrah, the Enterprise-E crew is assigned a hazardous mission: to stop a clone of Jean-Luc Picard named Shinzon (played by Tom Hardy) from taking over the Romulan Star Empire.

Both fans and audiences deride this film for ending the Next Generation timeline on a sour note. Yet, Nemesis is filled with intriguing ideas beneath its mess and action. For one thing, Picard's brawl against Shinzon is both a physical and philosophical combat for Picard.

7. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

For the third Star Trek movie, the crew of the USS Enterprise seizes their starship to return Spock's body to his homeworld after his spirit is confined inside Dr. Bones McCoy's mind.

Meanwhile, their mission is interrupted when a group of ruthless Klingons, led by Kruge (played by Christopher Lloyd), want to use the Enterprise for terraforming purposes.

The Search for Spock continues the three-movie arc started by Wrath of Khan about Spock's significance. And while it feels like the middle child, it successfully balances the crew's enjoyable dynamic with the overall spectacle. Plus, Christopher Lloyd's Kruge is watchable as ever.

6. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Star Trek Beyond continues the voyage of the Kelvin timeline reboot series. During one passage, their starship is ambushed and the crew ends up isolated on a nearby planet.

There, they learn of a Starfleet captain named Krall (played by Idris Elba), who was horribly transformed and developed a hatred of the Federation.

Trekkies and audiences might know this entry as the one with Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" playing in its trailer. While that was an unfortunate red herring, the resulting movie is more than rewarding.

Star Trek Beyond keeps the ball rolling with its splendid cast and immersive world-building, and Justin Lin's knack for action makes it more alive. Sadly, this is the last we see of Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin.

5. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country is the last movie to feature the original cast. This time, the Klingons are brought to their knees and attempt to make peace with the Federation.

However, Captain Kirk and McCoy are held accountable for the murder of a Chancellor, leading Spock on a mission to clear their names.

When The Final Frontier proved to be the end for Star Trek , The Undiscovered Country proved that there were more worlds to conquer. Trekkies were treated to many callbacks to the series, while newbies were welcomed with its stunning visuals and the whodunnit plot.

4. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

The fourth chapter in the Star Trek movie saga, The Voyage Home finds the Enterprise crew succumbing to the fallout from The Search for Spock .

Upon their travel, they learn that the planet is under threat from an alien probe attempting to contact humpback whales. As a result, the crew travels back in time to before the whales' extinction.

For his second directorial effort, Leonard Nimoy proved that he knew how to blend the absurdity of Star Trek with its seriousness into a fantastic popcorn flick. The result is a fun adventure that's half "fish out of water" fantasy and half cautionary tale.

3. Star Trek VIII: First Contact (1996)

Star Trek: First Contact features the directorial debut of Jonathan Frakes. The mission this time is for the crew to travel back in time to the mid-21st century to thwart the plans of an alien race called the Borg, who want to change the past and make the Earth vulnerable to invasion.

Storylines within the Star Trek pantheon have been endlessly compared to literature by scholars. This one has a clear parallel to Moby Dick , with Picard being compared to Captain Ahab. That proved a strong point for the crew's intense conflict against the Borg—the perfect foil.

Combined with the cool Borg Queen and its exciting action, First Contact made resistance to expanding the franchise futile.

2. Star Trek (2009)

The 2009 Star Trek movie starts the series fresh with a reboot, and the result is gratifying. The newly-rebooted crew of the USS Enterprise is sent on a mission to stop the nefarious Romulan Nero (played by Eric Bana) from laying ruin to an alternate timeline (separate from the original show).

Back then, no other filmmaker had the sheer ability to re-energize a franchise like J. J. Abrams. While he brings a ton of flashiness to the screen, Abrams also bridges the gap for old and new fans by honoring the show's legacy while starting afresh with a fine cast led by Chris Pine.

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

No other Star Trek movie sticks the landing as greatly as The Wrath of Khan did. The second entry finds the Enterprise facing off against their fiercest rival yet, the tyrannical Khan Noonien Singh (played by Ricardo Montalbán), who wants to acquire the terraforming device Genesis.

This is the perfect film for newbies to Star Trek since it references the 1967 episode "Space Seed," which set up Khan. It provides the right balance between immersive sci-fi flick and radical Star Trek voyage. And thanks to Montalbán's charm, Khan is the best Star Trek villain to date.

Let’s Watch Star Trek

Enterprise Episode Guide

Broken Bow Rating: 3 – Watch Fight or Flight Rating: 3 – Watch Strange New World Rating: 1 – Skip Unexpected Rating: 3 – Watch Terra Nova Rating: 2 – Skippable The Andorian Incident Rating: 4 – Watch Breaking the Ice Rating: 2 – Skip Civilization Rating: 2 – Skippable Fortunate Son Rating: 2 – Skippable Cold Front Rating: 3 – Watch Silent Enemy Rating: 4 – Watch Dear Doctor Rating: 1 – Skip Sleeping Dogs Rating: 3 – Watch Shadows of P’Jem Rating: 3 – Watch Shuttlepod One Rating: 0 – Skip Fusion Rating: 2 – Watch for Continuity Rogue Planet Rating: 1 – Skip Acquisition Rating: 2 – Skippable Oasis Rating: 2 – Skippable Detained Rating: 2 – Skippable Vox Sola Rating: 2 – Skippable Fallen Hero Rating: 2 – Skippable Desert Crossing Rating: 2 – Skippable Two Days and Two Nights Rating: 3 – Watch Shockwave, Part 1 Rating: 4 – Watch

Shockwave, Part 2 Rating: 3 – Watch Carbon Creek Rating: 3 – Watch Minefield Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Dead Stop Rating: 4 – Watch A Night in Sickbay Rating: 1 – Skip Marauders Rating: 3 – Watch The Seventh Rating: 2 – Skippable The Communicator Rating: 3 – Watch Singularity Rating: 1 – Skip Vanishing Point Rating: 1 – Skip Precious Cargo Rating: 1 – Skip The Catwalk Rating: 2 – Skippable Dawn Rating: 2 – Skippable Stigma Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Cease Fire Rating: 3 – Watch Future Tense Rating: 4 – Watch Canamar Rating: 3 – Watch The Crossing Rating: 2 – Skippable Judgment Rating: 4 – Watch Horizon Rating: 3 – Watch The Breach Rating: 3 – Watch Cogenitor Rating: 4 – Watch Regeneration Rating: 3 – Watch First Flight Rating: 3 – Watch Bounty Rating: 2 – Skippable The Expanse Rating: 4 – Watch

Season Three

The Xindi Rating: 3 – Watch Anomaly Rating: 3 – Watch Extinction Rating: 1 – Skip Rajiin Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Impulse Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Exile Rating: 3 – Watch The Shipment Rating: 3 – Watch Twilight Rating: 3 – Watch North Star Rating: 3 – Watch Similitude Rating: 2 – Skippable Carpenter Street Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Chosen Realm Rating: 3 – Watch Proving Ground Rating: 3 – Watch Stratagem Rating: 3 – Watch Harbinger Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Doctor’s Orders Rating: 2 – Skippable Hatchery Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Azati Prime Rating: 3 – Watch Damage Rating: 4 – Watch The Forgotten Rating: 3 – Watch E2 Rating: 3 – Watch The Council Rating: 3 – Watch Countdown Rating: 3 – Watch Zero Hour Rating: 3 – Watch

Season Four

Storm Front Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Storm Front, Part II Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Home Rating: 2 – Watch for continuity Borderland Rating: 3 – Watch Cold Station 12 Rating: 3 – Watch The Augments Rating: 3 – Watch The Forge Rating: 3 – Watch Awakening Rating: 3 – Watch Kir’Shara Rating: 3 – Watch Daedalus Rating: 2 – Skippable Observer Effect Rating: 3 – Watch Babel One Rating: 3 – Watch United Rating: 3 – Watch The Aenar Rating: 3 – Watch Affliction Rating: 3 – Watch Divergence Rating: 3 – Watch Bound Rating: 3 – Watch In a Mirror, Darkly Rating: 3 – Watch In A Mirror, Darkly Part 2 Rating: 3 – Watch Demons Rating: 3 – Watch Terra Prime Rating: 3 – Watch These Are The Voyages… Rating: 0 – Do Not Watch.

Pike standing with M’Benga on a snowy planet with the Enterprise looming in the background in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

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Star Trek has truly reinvented itself

The sci-fi franchise is all TV these days, and there’s something for (almost) everyone

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Here’s a wild statistic: There are nearly as many currently running Star Trek television series as there are completed Star Trek television series. The first 40 years of the franchise’s history include five live-action series and one animated spinoff, totaling 725 episodes. In the past five years, five new series have launched (six if you count Short Treks as its own entity), airing a cumulative 130 episodes as of today. Star Trek as a brand is busier than it’s been since the mid-1990s, when Deep Space Nine , Voyager , and the Next Generation TV series were all running concurrently and shops around the world dedicated entire displays to Star Trek toys, novels, and video games.

Of course, television is an entirely different beast today than it was when Star Trek died its second death with the cancellation of the prequel series Enterprise in 2005. Like practically everything worth watching in the year 2022, Star Trek is now a product for paid subscribers, and it’s in the interests of intellectual property owner Paramount to have something new for Trekkies 12 months out of the year. Like the Star Wars and Marvel lines on Disney Plus, Paramount Plus maintains its grip on Star Trek fans via a constant flow of new seasons of different series. All five current Star Trek series have debuted episodes this year, their seasons usually overlapping for a week or two in order to discourage subscribers from lapsing. Since August 2021, there have been only nine weeks without any new Star Trek.

Most importantly, this prismatic approach to expanding the Star Trek universe has allowed franchise custodian Alex Kurtzman and his team of producers to experiment with a variety of formats and tones, enabling them to triangulate what it is that fans are looking for. This past year — its fifth since the relaunch began in September 2017 with Star Trek: Discovery — has seen that experimentation pay off in the form of the franchise’s best-received new series in decades, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds .

The modern Star Trek family now includes an ongoing series for every taste: Discovery for those who enjoy the high stakes and high drama of the modern feature films, Strange New Worlds for those who prefer the classic format and a lighter touch, Lower Decks for die-hard, trivia-loving Trekkies, Prodigy for young newcomers looking for an introduction to the universe, and Picard for… someone, theoretically. It’s been a long road getting from there to here, but the Star Trek franchise seems healthier than it’s been in ages, with each stumble along the way offering guidance so that the next season, the next series can better capture the feeling of hope, wonder, and family that has enraptured fans since 1966. The first five years of modern Trek have been a crucible, a shakedown cruise that has proven that Kurtzman’s blueprint is, on the whole, spaceworthy and poised to accelerate into further frontiers.

Boldly blazing the trail

Four members of the Discovery standing in a hallway holding up flashlights and gizmos, looking at bodies and sparks on the ground in front of them

It’s expected for any new Star Trek series to face heavy scrutiny from fans who are itching for a reason to disqualify it from the canon. Every single television installment has been initially rejected by the old guard of fans, even the now-sacrosanct Next Generation . (How can you have Star Trek without Kirk and Spock? Who’s this bald guy?) However, it’s fair to say that no new Trek series has endured as much loud and sustained vitriol as Discovery . One should immediately dismiss the outrage of anyone decrying that Star Trek has “gone woke,” as if progressive politics and racial and gender inclusion are not essential to the very essence of creator Gene Roddenberry’s stated objectives for the original series. ( Even original star William Shatner refuses to see this. ) These complaints about Discovery , which stars Black actress Sonequa Martin-Green in the lead role, became the bedrock for a loud and loathsome new subsection of Trekkies whose YouTube channels insist that no one watches “NuTrek” and that all these shows are going to be canceled any day now. (Of the five new series, only Picard has wrapped production, and that likely has something to do with its leading man turning 82 years old this summer.)

It can’t be ignored, however, that Discovery is a significant departure from previous Star Trek series in ways that could still put off a seasoned fan who engages with it in good faith. Discovery imported the visual language and aesthetic of the J.J. Abrams-produced reboot film trilogy (also hated by some Trekkies) into the “prime” Star Trek universe. With the glossier look also came a faster pace, heightened emotions, and a TV-MA rating as the producers attempted to bring the family-friendly franchise into the Game of Thrones era of prestige television. Discovery dove headlong into serialized storytelling, into which previous Treks had only dabbled. It was also the first Star Trek series that fans had to pay to watch, itself a source of frustration and controversy. Star Trek has always incrementally evolved, but Discovery was more different from its immediate predecessors than any of its older siblings were.

United Earth President and President Rillak standing and facing each other with a line of Starfleet officers standing behind Rillak. Behind them you can see the starry sky of space

It’s also the show that’s evolved the most since its launch, in many ways in a direction closer to its ancestors, becoming more optimistic and colorful and leaping ahead in time to avoid conflicts with established continuity. After years of dramatic retooling, Discovery has finally settled into a rhythm under co-showrunner Michelle Paradise, who took over managing the series in season 3. Where its first season was built around seeing how much shock and punishment its protagonist (and its audience) could endure, Discovery has since committed hard to the exploration of empathy and the celebration of love. It has become Trek’s most earnest incarnation, as occupied with big feelings as it is with big ideas. It may not be all the way great television, but it feels much more like the old familiar Star Trek than it did at the beginning without losing too much of its modern feel.

Arguably, Discovery has played defense for every Star Trek show that has followed. Without Discovery , not only would the acclaimed Strange New Worlds not exist as we know it, but it would likely have been subject to a slew of criticisms to which it now seems to be a response. Had Discovery not relaunched Star Trek as a modern serialized drama, would we be as happy to see Strange New Worlds return as an old-school procedural? If Discovery hadn’t thrown out the visual style guide and introduced new, “anachronistic” uniforms and technology, wouldn’t Strange New Worlds have taken more heat for its own design revisions? As lovable as we may find Anson Mount, could Trek’s legacy as a diversity-forward institution have survived if the face of its long-awaited return to television had been yet another straight, square-jawed white man? As the vanguard of modern Star Trek, Discovery has taken nearly all of the punishment, broken almost all of the new ground, and made it possible for the franchise to thrive in its wake.

Creating new legends

Picard flying a ship with a pop up interface in front o f him

Where Star Trek: Discovery was initially a prequel to The Original Series featuring a totally new set of characters and only a tenuous connection to the classic cast, Star Trek: Picard was the first modern Star Trek series to carry the continuity of the universe forward in the traditional way, with a mix of new and familiar faces. The first season of Picard , run behind the scenes by author Michael Chabon, catches up with a retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) after 20 years of failure in both his personal and professional lives, finding a new purpose amongst a young motley crew.

Picard follows the now-familiar path of the “legacy sequel,” in which the star of a long-dormant series returns to pass the torch to a new generation. With one important exception: It never actually passes the torch. Over the course of its first two seasons, Picard fails its own characters time and again, unable to commit to a steady characterization or cogent story arc for anyone except for Alison Pill’s Dr. Agnes Jurati — who, like most of the new breed, has now been written off the show so that the entire Next Generation cast can reunite in season 3. The tragedy of this isn’t just that a troupe of actors have just lost their jobs to an ensemble who’s been dragged out of retirement, but that these discarded characters will not be missed. No one will be too choked up that Elnor and Worf won’t be charging into a fight together, or that we’ll never see Cristóbal Rios at the poker table across from Will Riker, because the gang from La Sirena has never felt equal to Picard’s Enterprise family. The second season simply made it clear that passing the torch was not a priority, and that the show’s younger cast was merely the backup band for Patrick Stewart and perpetual Special Guest Star Brent Spiner.

Happily, other branches of the franchise have found a much healthier balance of nostalgia and newness. The decision to make Discovery ’s Michael Burnham the adopted sister of Spock seemed a bizarre one at first, but their relationship has turned into a boon for both characters, adding texture without becoming a distraction. The animated sitcom Star Trek: Lower Decks is absolutely littered with callbacks, cameos, and references to Treks past, but its lead characters, Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), have nevertheless emerged as true stars, and the series sports modern Trek’s most robust and memorable secondary cast. The kid-targeted animated adventure Star Trek: Prodigy features a returning Kate Mulgrew as a holographic Janeway, but her role as a mentor rather than a lead has allowed the show’s new characters to thrive in a way that Picard ’s never did. Even Strange New Worlds , which features multiple “legacy characters” (Pike, Spock, and Uhura) in its ensemble, shows the same amount of love and care to those that it’s broadly reinvented (Una, Chapel, and M’Benga) or created whole-cloth (La’an, Ortegas, and Hemmer).

Superficially, shows like Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds may appear to be more pandering and nostalgia-driven, but creatively, Picard is the far more cynical endeavor. Of the five modern series, it’s the only one that seems uninterested in being anyone’s first Star Trek, and is now doubling down on the novelty of the current “reunion series” trend. This isn’t to say that a final farewell to the Next Generation cast couldn’t be entertaining, only that it’s the least interesting idea that the Kurtzman era of Trek has yet offered. As the franchise branches out into multiple directions, exploring different eras, tones, and media, Picard is the only road that appears to be a dead end. However, with a new showrunner and a new (old) cast on board for its final season, there remains hope that the franchise’s weakest modern entry may come to a satisfying conclusion.

Approaching infinite velocity

Picard sitting in a chair in an empty, overgrown sunroom, with Q standing in front of him and holding his face in his hands

Picard may be coming to an end next year, but Alex Kurtzman and company have no intention of letting the franchise lose steam. Kurtzman has spoken publicly about two live-action series that are currently in development, and has hinted that there are more that have yet to be announced. A Discovery spinoff starring Michelle Yeoh as the reformed interstellar tyrant Philippa Georgiou was intended to start production in 2020, but has been delayed by the pandemic and by Yeoh’s film career renaissance. Yeoh recently described her series , tentatively titled Star Trek: Section 31 , as “Mission: Impossible meets Guardians of the Galaxy,” but there’s been no word on when she might have time to make it. There’s the long-gestating Starfleet Academy series , which is currently being developed by Absentia co-creator Gaia Violo after a version from Gossip Girl ’s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage failed to ossify. A long-rumored narrative podcast miniseries about the legendary villain Khan from Star Trek II director Nicholas Meyer has just been officially announced . Kurtzman and company clearly intend to keep Trek running year-round on Paramount Plus until the wheels fall off, and if it continues with its current pace and variety, this may well be sustainable for another five years. (We’re looking forward to seeing Section 31 premiere on Paradiscovery Prime in 2026.)

The potential hyperspanner in the works is Paramount’s plans to supplement this with further Star Trek feature films. The conglomerate has promised stockholders a fourth film starring Chris Pine and the rest of the crew from the reboot trilogy, committed to a 2023 release date despite scheduling conflicts with the cast and a currently vacant director’s chair . New head of Paramount Pictures Brian Robbins has expressed interest in multiple new Star Trek films , both live-action and animated, on top of the nonstop rotation of new shows streaming on Paramount Plus. This suggests that Paramount intends to try yet again to build Star Trek into a franchise on the scale of Star Wars, something that no one but its stockholders is asking for. It’s miraculous that Star Trek has managed to expand in the directions that it has over the past five years, with five very distinct television shows appealing to different but overlapping audiences, but the thought of frequent theatrical films on top of this is, frankly, exhausting. There’s the ever-present danger of Trek’s value as a corporate property interfering with its capacity to tell interesting, even radical, stories. The more money there is in the Star Trek business, the closer scrutiny it’s sure to receive from on high and the less likely it is to challenge the status quo. Trek should always be about lessons first and lore second. Thankfully the current leadership seems to understand this, but leadership changes fast, particularly during the streaming era.

Nevertheless, it is an incredibly exciting time to be a Star Trek fan. There’s a new episode on TV every week, a movie in the works, and a genuinely exciting new comics series on the way, as well as the first new console video game in half a decade . 2023 will see the first legitimate crossover of the modern Trek era, between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks , a pairing that makes a surprising amount of sense as both series have warmly embraced the campy and absurd facets of their universe. We have reached Peak Star Trek, and like Peak Anything, it cannot be sustained indefinitely. Like the golden era of the mid-1990s, this is a time that Trekkies should cherish. Either the quality or the quantity of new Star Trek is bound to decline soon, and the former is certain to precede the latter.

Star Trek: Discovery tore itself apart for the good of Star Trek’s future

Star trek: discovery boldly goes where no trek has gone before by saying religion is... ok, actually, star trek: discovery is cracking open a box next gen closed on purpose.

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The beginner's guide to Star Trek: What to watch first

The Star Trek television world consists of eleven full and distinct television series released across the decades, going all the way back to the mid-1960s. While some of the older sets and effects are certainly dated, some of the issues the shows grappled with back in the day are as relevant now as they were almost 60 years ago.

When Star Trek debuted on September 6, 1966, it was a relatively low-budget TV series with only lukewarm network support. It took two pilot episodes before the series was picked up by NBC, only to be unceremoniously cancelled three years later. Nobody back then knew that Star Trek would create cultural touchstones and iconic characters, or that it would go on to spawn ten more TV series (so far) and thirteen movies (also, so far).

Today, Star Trek is deeply entrenched in modern mythology, with characters like James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard as familiar to us as Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo.

But not everyone is fully up to speed on all things Trek . Perhaps you're seeing promotions for the new shows coming out this year and wonder what all the fuss is about. Perhaps you want to introduce Star Trek to a younger generation or catch up after a long hiatus.

No matter what, we're here to help. In this guide, I'm going to take you through the TV series and help you understand what each is about, give you some hints about watching order, and share with you my subjective perspective on the shows.

Also: 14 unofficial Star Trek series and films

Star Trek has inspired a tremendous amount of media. Beyond the TV shows, there are movies, video games, books, comics, fan fiction and productions, collectables, and more. Because the commercial world of Star Trek fandom is so huge, I'm going to limit our discussion to just the TV shows -- although there will be a few mentions of one or two movies that are requisite viewing for later series' continuity.

How to get started

There are four Star Trek series currently in production right now. More are rumored to be on the way. And there's even a Seth McFarland-helmed homage to Star Trek called The Orville that carries on the Trek spirit (new episodes will be broadcast on Hulu in June).

So, you could get started watching a current show, especially since the visuals and production quality are top-notch. If you feel strongly about starting with new material, I'd recommend kicking off your watching with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on the Paramount+ streaming service. I'll talk more about SNW (most Trek series get abbreviations) in a bit. Another choice would be the gorgeous animated series Star Trek: Prodigy . It's intended to bring kids into the Star Trek universe, but it fires on all cylinders for adults just as well.

But I recommend you start where it all started: Star Trek , the original series ( TOS ) produced in the 1960s. It's here you'll meet Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty the engineer. This is where it all began, and everything builds upon this fundamental mythology.

And with that, let's get started!

1. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS)

The series that began it all.

Production Years: 1966-1969
Trek Timeline Years: 2266-2269
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 79
Stream on: Paramount+
Buy: Amazon

This is it. The series that began it all. I recently rewatched the entire run of TOS after not having seen it in years, and the thing that made the biggest impression on me was how much they got right in those early years. Roddenberry was building a mythos out of thin air, and yet many of the foundational elements that Star Trek folks know and love today were written into those early shows.

Of course, Roddenberry didn't get it perfect right out of the gate. He did two pilots which introduced Captain Christopher Pike instead of Captain Kirk and a female "Number One" as second in command. This pilot, called " The Cage " never made it on the air but was repurposed into a two-parter late in the first season. You'll want to remember Pike and Number One because they're prominent in the new modern-day Trek series currently being released.

Some episodes of this very early series age well, while others are deeply cringeworthy. Because it's 1960s entertainment (and relatively low-budget entertainment at that), it can be a bit tedious at times. And yet, it touched on some really important themes. Martin Luther King Jr. actually reached out to Nichelle Nichols , who played Lt. Uhura , when she was considering leaving the show. He urged her to stay on because he saw her role as a very important inspiration.

If you want to understand all the Trek lore that comes after, this is the place to start.

Must watch episodes: The City on the Edge of Forever, Space Seed, The Trouble with Tribbles

Movies: There were six movies made with the TOS cast. Of them, the best two are The Wrath of Khan (which sets up a lot of subsequent mythos) and The Voyage Home , which is probably the most fun of them all.

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)

The story forward 100 years.

Production Years: 1987-1994
Trek Timeline Years: 2364-2370
Seasons: 7
Episodes: 178

Star Trek's continuing popularity during the eighteen years after NBC cancelled the original series was unexpected. Star Trek , that weird space show with the pointy-eared alien, turned out to have legs. It took ten years of fan pressure and conventions, but in 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released. It was... not so good. But three more movies came out over the next eight years, and they were great. So the momentum was in place for a Star Trek reboot.

Rather than recasting the original characters, Roddenberry decided to move the story forward almost 100 years, create a version of the Enterprise starship whose interior decor most resembled a Marriott hotel in outer space, and give it warp nacelles and photon torpedos. This was The Next Generation , with Captain Picard, first officer William Riker, the android Data, the boy wonder Wesley Crusher, his mom, the Klingon Worf, and unlucky-in-love engineer Geordi La Forge. Roddenberry even created the role of a mental health counsellor (Deanna Troy) as a key member of its bridge crew.

While Patrick Stewart's Picard was much more Captain Stubing than Shatner's Captain Kirk, there's no doubting this Shakespearean actor's talents. Brent Spiner, as the android-who-wants-to-be-human, was another standout performer. The first two seasons were a little rocky. Remember: back then, nobody knew whether this show would last, and the actors and showrunners were still trying to come to terms with how to move beyond TOS . But subsequent years are among the best science (and societal) fiction you'll ever see on TV.

Must watch episodes: The Measure of a Man, Yesterday's Enterprise, The Best Of Both Worlds I and II

Movies: There were four movies made with the TNG cast. The first one, Generations , also included key members of the TOS cast. I recommend you watch First Contact because it's a really good movie. And you might want to watch Nemesis because it sets up some details you'll need in later series (but it's definitely not the best movie made).

Also: Best video streaming service

To boldly go...

Once you've watched TOS and TNG , you're pretty much ready to travel wherever you want throughout the Star Trek franchise. You'll have a good foundational understanding of the Federation, the various alien species, the rules and regulations of Starfleet, and most of the iconic characters.

My recommendation is to wrap up the early Trek productions by taking in the two seasons of the first animated series. Then, move on to the middle period of Star Trek production, with Voyager, Deep Space 9 , and Enterprise , and then jump forward to the current productions. That's how I'm going to present the remaining series to you, but you can pretty much choose any order you want once you've made it this far.

3. Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS)

Worthwhile animation with tos voices.

Production Years: 1973-1975
Trek Timeline Years: 2269-2270
Seasons: 2
Episodes: 22
Buy: Amazon

A few years after NBC canceled TOS , Roddenberry managed to convince studio heads to let him produce an animated version of the show. While it was considerably less expensive to produce than the live-action Star Trek , the animated series was the most expensive animated show airing at the time, but that was mostly because nearly all the original series actors (Walter Koenig as Chekov was missing) lent their voices to the show.

While the series was intended as a kid's show, it hews pretty closely to classic Star Trek themes and can be considered a proper sequel to TOS . Watching it in 2022 is a bit weird because cartoons from the 1970s definitely seem a bit weird to our 2022 mindset, but TAS is a worthwhile romp, especially since it features the voice work from the core actors who first made Star Trek .

Must watch episodes: Yesteryear, The Slaver Weapon, More Tribbles, More Troubles (because...Tribbles)

4. Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9)

Thought-provoking, must-watch tv.

Production Years: 1993-1999
Trek Timeline Years: 2369-2275
Seasons: 7
Episodes: 176
Stream on: Paramount+ , Netflix
Buy: Amazon

By many measures, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is as good as Star Trek (or science fiction overall, for that matter) gets. Rather than exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations, Deep Space 9 takes place mostly on the eponymous space station, Deep Space 9.

The station sits at the junction of a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant (a far off part of space) and the planet Bajor, a planet previously occupied by Cardassians' warlike race (not to be confused with the Kardashians). DS9's leader is played by actor Avery Brooks, who starts off with the Starfleet rank of Commander and later gets promoted to Captain. DS9 starts off slow but ends with a massive war and some of the best space battles ever put on film.

While there are a few silly episodes, most plotlines are tight, deep, and thought-provoking. Characters develop complex and compelling personalities. And the show takes some powerful swings at issues of the day, with Far Beyond the Stars an absolute standout showing issues of racism in 1950s America and yet fitting totally in with the rest of DS9 . If anything can be considered must-watch TV, chock full of religious and political intrigue, it's Star Trek: Deep Space 9 .

Must watch episodes: Far Beyond the Stars, The Visitor, Trials And Tribble-Ations (because...Tribbles)

5. Star Trek: Voyager (VOY)

A female badass captain who guides her crew on the uss voyager.

Production Years: 1995-2001
Trek Timeline Years: 2371-2378
Episodes: 172

The series starts with the crew of the Voyager chasing after a Maquis raider ship in a rough part of space. Suddenly, both ships get pulled into a spatial distortion, only to wind up far, far away from home. A super-powerful being called the Caretaker brought both ships to the Delta quadrant as part of its quest to help a species it cared for.

The plot of the pilot is a bit convoluted, but the Captain Kathryn Janeway makes a decision that strands Voyager and the crew of the Maquis ship in the Delta quadrant. The voyage home will take 75 years. Kate Mulgrew was not the franchise's first choice for a Janeway captain. Instead, Geneviève Bujold was originally cast in the role, but she apparently crashed and burned in a day and a half . That's fortunate because Mulgrew absolutely owns the part, turning the Janeway character into a tough, sensitive, compassionate, and absolutely kick-ass leader.

The Voyager crew becomes a blended crew with both Starfleet and Maquis. Early episodes playoff that dynamic, but the early crew conflicts tend to slip away as the series progresses and the crew coalesces. Throughout it all, the series is about how this crew survives all on its own, trying to find a way home and the adventures along the way.

Must watch episodes: Tinker, Tailor, Doctor, Spy, Year of Hell (two-parter), Timeless Worst episode in any science fiction, ever: Threshold

6. Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT)

The start of the prime universe.

Production Years: 2001-2005
Trek Timeline Years: 2151-2161
Seasons: 4
Episodes: 98
Stream on: Paramount+

With Enterprise (the series debuted without the " Star Trek: " prefix), we're starting to move around the "Prime Universe" timeline. So, okay, some definitions are in order. In 2009, J. J. Abrams did a reboot of the original Star Trek crew in a three-movie set. That reboot changed some of the Star Trek canon (its established mythology) and became known as the "Kelvin Universe". All the Star Trek that exists in the unaltered (or mostly unaltered) mythology is called the "Prime Universe." All of the TV shows so far (but not all the movies) are considered Prime Universe.

In the Prime Universe, series timelines span centuries . The majority of established canon takes place in the TNG era, which is 2364-2379. TOS , Discovery , and Strange New Worlds take place 100 or so years earlier than TNG , while Discovery eventually jumps to about a thousand years later. But Enterprise is a prequel to all of that, showcasing a ship just beginning to travel between the stars. It takes place starting in 2151, a century before the days of Kirk and Spock.

There are some nods to the idea that technology wasn't as advanced in 2151 as it was in later centuries, but since Enterprise itself was made 35 years after TOS , the production value and effects made it seem somewhat more advanced. That will prove to be an ongoing problem with Trek prequels: what do you do when the real tech to produce the prequel is half a century more advanced? What do you do when the actual tech we have in our pockets seems far more advanced than the "future" tech shown in the early shows? Artistic license is used.

The NX-01 Enterprise is led by Captain Jonathan Archer (played by Quantum Leap's Scott Bakula) and his Number One is a Vulcan named T'Pol (played by Jolene Blalock). In Enterprise's time frame, trust between Earth and the Vulcans is tenuous, and that tension plays out over the series. Unfortunately, Enterprise only lasted four seasons. It, like most other Trek , was a bit rocky in the first seasons, but by Season 4, it was producing excellent television.

My biggest question about Enterprise is about Porthos, Archer's adorable beagle. Porthos spent most of his time in Archer's cabin, but I've always been curious about how Porthos took care of business. Did they just walk him around the decks and some crewmember cleaned it up? Was there a spot of grass somewhere in an unused cabin? It keeps me up at night.

In any case, I consider Enterprise criminally underrated. It was a great show.

Must watch episodes: In a Mirror, Darkly (two-parter), Carbon Creek, Similitude, Twilight, The Breach (because...Tribbles)

7. Star Trek: Discovery (DIS)

Discover the fun in star trek.

Production Years: 2017-current
Trek Timeline Years: 2255-2259, 3188-3190 (so far)
Seasons: 4 (so far)
Episodes: 55 (so far)

Star Trek production effectively went into shutdown for about a decade after Enterprise . After the success of the reboot movies in the late 2000s, Star Trek TV experienced a resurgence in Discovery . Discovery is a hard beast to pin down, and this had the effect of turning off some of the entrenched Star Trek fanbase. That said, it's still great TV. Discovery was the first of the modern-day Star Trek series to be available solely on streaming, via what was then CBS All Access and is now Paramount+.

Somehow (spoiler alert), Micheal Burham goes from the Federation's first mutineer with a life sentence to a beloved starship captain. Burnham is Spock's human sister (yeah, that was a surprise to everyone). Played by Sonequa Martin-Green, the standout feature of Discovery is some of its great performances and characterizations.

My favorites are the gangly alien Saru (played with absolute perfection by Doug Jones), the mirror universe emperor Georgiou (played with scenery-eating intensity by Michelle Yeoh), cranky under-utilized engineer Jett Reno (played by the wonderful-in-anything Tigg Notaro), and Captain Christopher Pike, reimagined from the pilot for TOS (who was played to such perfection by Anson Mount that the minute he hit the screen, everyone knew a series had to be made around him -- which became Strange New Worlds ).

The first season takes place ten years before the original series. Klingons don't really look like Klingons, Burnham starts a war, Discovery travels to the mirror universe where everything is Bizarro World , and chaos ensues. The second season is back in the home universe where the crew tries to stop an AI bent on destroying all life in the universe. To avoid that fate, the crew travels 930 years into the future and...okay, let's take a breather for a second.

Do. Not. Try. To. Make. Sense. Of. All. This. Discovery is weird enough to be pretty much the Twin Peaks of Star Trek . Just enjoy the fact that the visuals are impressive, the characters (at least most of them) are great, and the stories hold together long enough to make it through each episode as long as you don't think about it too much. Discovery can be annoying and sappy, to be sure. But it's also a heck of a lot of fun.

Must watch episodes (so far): An Obol for Charon, The Sound of Thunder, Short Trek: The Trouble with Edward (because...Tribbles)

8. Star Trek: Lower Decks (LD)

Focus on life onboard for low-ranking members of starfleet.

Production Years: 2020-current
Trek Timeline Years: 2380- (so far)
Seasons: 2 (so far)
Episodes: 20 (so far)

Back in 1994, there was an episode of TNG called Lower Decks . It focused on lower-ranking crew members and looked at what life onboard a starship was like for the non-hero characters of Starfleet. In 2020, Mike McMahan, previously known for his work on the animated comedy Rick and Morty , took the lower decks concept into an entire animated Star Trek series.

And it works. McMahan also addressed a lot of fan complaints about Discovery by including an almost overwhelming array of Star Trek Easter eggs as fan service in the series. If you've ever wondered about Cetacean Ops , for example, McMahan has an entire episode devoted to Starfleet's underwater crew.

Overall, Lower Decks delivers fully Star Trek plots, along with a lot of genuinely funny moments. But it doesn't sacrifice good storytelling either for laughs or nostalgia.

Must watch episodes (so far): No Small Parts, First First Contact, An Embarrassment of Dooplers

9. Star Trek: Prodigy (PRO)

Animated and visually stunning.

Production Years: 2021-current
Trek Timeline Years: 2383- (so far)
Seasons: 1 (so far)
Episodes: 9 (so far)

Prodigy is the second animated series currently in production. It has a completely different theme and art style from Lower Decks and is most definitely its own thing.

The premise is that a bunch of enslaved tweenagers of varying non-human species in the Delta Quadrant find a dormant Federation starship. While exploring, they activate the "emergency training hologram," which turns out to be an animated Captain Janeway (voiced by Kate Mulgrew herself). Hologram Janeway thinks the interlopers are cadets and helps them start the ship up so they can make their escape.

The series is Nickelodeon-branded and is supposed to be for kids, but the episodes are well-written and even suspenseful. The first season ended on a cliffhanger that both newbies to Star Trek and long-time fans will find compelling. And can we talk about the visuals? This series is just absolutely gorgeous. Watch it on the largest, brightest TV you can. It's that good.

Must watch episodes (so far): Time Amok, First Con-tact, Kobayashi

10. Star Trek: Picard (PIC)

New adventures of an older captain picard.

Trek Timeline Years: 2399- (so far)
Seasons: 2 (so far)
Episodes: 20 (so far)

The premise behind Star Trek: Picard is simple. Thirty years after TNG , Admiral Picard goes back out into space for new adventures. Picard (and Patrick Stewart) are much older, and the series addresses the challenges of ageing and how someone who was once the galaxy's hero deals with becoming irrelevant -- just as events reach out to bring the retired admiral back onto center stage once again.

Have you noticed how most of the Star Trek series have three-letter abbreviations? Star Trek: Picard's should be WTF. There are moments in Picard that are wonderful. But a lot of Picard is just plain terrible. If you even try to think about all the plot holes and paradoxes in just the final episode of Season 2, you'll find your brain sucked into a wormhole. As much as it's an absolute pleasure to see Patrick Stewart in anything, Star Trek: Picard is undeniably the worst television Star Trek has yet produced.

Like all of the current-era Star Trek , it's gorgeous. There's fan service everywhere, and we do get to meet some of the TNG characters again. More are promised for Season 3. But something went horribly wrong in the writers' room for the storylines in most of the episodes to be this convoluted, self-referential, internally inconsistent, and rather unbelievable (trust me, suspending disbelief often just doesn't work here). If anything, Season 2 is even more disastrous than Season 1, and that's saying something.

All that said, should you watch Star Trek: Picard ? Of course. It's a hoot. Plus, the episode Nepenthe (where we get to meet a gray-haired Captain Riker and his wife, Deanna Troy, along with their daughter Kestra) makes the whole series worthwhile.

Must watch episodes: Nepenthe, Stardust City Rag

11. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW)

Referential to established canon for entrenched trek fans.

Production Years: 2022-current
Trek Timeline Years: 2259- (so far)
Seasons: 1 (so far)
Episodes: 4 (so far)

Strange New Worlds has been jokingly called the longest order from the pilot to series in television history, but there's some truth to that. The very first TOS pilot back in the 1960s spotlighted the main characters of Strange New Worlds . As the legend goes, NBC didn't like those characters, so Roddenberry retooled and the result was Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

Today, however, Anson Mount is center stage, along with Ethan Peck as the third actor to play Spock, and Rebecca Romijn playing Number One. We haven't seen too many episodes yet, but so far it's good. Really, really good. Sure, this U.S.S. Enterprise is supposed to be from a time ten years before Kirk's in TOS , and it's far fancier. But that's what you get with 2022 budgets and CGI compared to the hand-me-downs that went into the original Star Trek .

You can follow the story well enough without having seen any other Star Trek , so it makes for a good first series. But it also is so reverently referential to established canon (while blazing its own way as well) that deeply entrenched Trek fans will undoubtedly enjoy it as well.

Must watch episodes (so far): Strange New Worlds, Children of the Comet, Ghosts of Illyria, Memento Mori

Also: The 7 best free video streaming services: Watch movies for free

What are the worst to best Star Trek series?

This is a highly subjective list, but I know you're going to want to know. So here it is. My call for worst series to best. You'll be surprised.

10. Picard : I had high hopes, I love the reunions, but the plots don't hold together if you think about it for just one minute.

9. The Original Series : Yes, it started everything. And yes, they got a lot right. But some of it is just downright hard to watch.

8. The Animated Series : Like TOS , it's a rough ride to watch. Pacing is very late sixties.

7. Lower Decks : I'm not a huge animation fan, and the silliness is a bit annoying.

6. Prodigy : Prodigy is gorgeous, and the plots hold together well. But I'm not as into it as I could be. Perhaps with more seasons.

5. The Next Generation : TNG defines Star Trek , and while there are some great shows there, it's getting old. I'm just not that invested anymore.

4. Discovery : I really like some of the characters and the modern visuals are spectacular. The focus on one character as a Mary Sue gets tiresome, as do the somewhat lazy resolutions for season-long mysteries.

3. Voyager : Some of the premise broke down in early years, but the overall crew survival dynamic makes for worthwhile TV. I've become attached to some of the characters after watching them grow into their responsibilities.

2. Enterprise : Yes, I consider Enterprise among the best Star Trek ever, even though it died an early death. From Archer's relationship with the Andorian commander Shran (played by the wonderful Jeffrey Combs) to some really excellent standalone episodes, I miss Enterprise more than any other series.

1. Deep Space 9 : Yeah, this is just about the best science fiction you're going to find anywhere.

* Strange New Worlds : I'm not rating Strange New Worlds yet. I've only seen a few episodes. But from what I've seen, it has the potential to be among the favorites.

What about you? What's your favorite Star Trek series? Are you Trek-curious and just getting started? Are you coming back after a long hiatus? Share with us in the comments below. Live long and prosper.

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz , on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz , on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz , and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV .

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5 Great Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 episodes worth watching

By marc kick | jan 11, 2024.

15th Annual Official Star Trek Convention

S1:E25: Two Days and Two Nights: It's shore leave time as humanity makes it's first trip to the paradise planet of Risa.

After planning a stop at Risa for a few weeks, finally, the Enterprise crew gets to sample paradise on another planet, however, just about everyone's shore leave doesn't exactly go as planned. Since they only have a couple of days, the Enterprise crew essentially draws straws to see who would be able to get away this time. The results: Captain Archer, Commander Tucker, Lieutenant Reed & Ensigns Sato and Mayweather are the winners from the bridge crew, while Doctor Phlox decides to use the time to hibernate.

Calamity ensues as one by one, the Enterprise crew faces various setbacks. The Captain meets a fellow vacationer who is more interested in obtaining information on the Suliban and turns out to be a Tandaran operative, Travis Mayweather breaks his leg while rock climbing, and while he's treated at a Risan medical facility, due to an allergy, he's now having trouble breathing & needs to return to the ship, where Dr. Phlox needs to be woken up to treat him. When Trip & Malcolm decide that a trip to Risa is high time to be eligible bachelors, they're ultimately swindled by a couple of shapeshifters and return to Enterprise in just their underwear. The one member of the senior staff who actually has a good time on this trip is Hoshi, who works on her interpretation skills and spends the night with a guy she meets.

Certainly, there are other worthwhile episodes in the first season to watch, these five are by far my favorites! I'll be back with a few more for Season 2 worth watching before Enterprise gets into the Xindi arc. While the Xindi arc is well told, it's not my favorite storyline. However, the series does finish strong with a few episodes near its end that quickly put a cap on the series.

Next. 5 reasons fans never fully embraced Star Trek: Discovery. 5 reasons fans never fully embraced Star Trek: Discovery. dark

COMMENTS

Star Trek: Enterprise. Worth watching it? : r/startrek
17 votes, 54 comments. Thank you all for your opinions. I'm into episode 4 now and kinda like it. Tbh, it feels more natural for this time of era…
Star Trek: Enterprise
Nobody likes the opening theme song, but Enterprise is definitely worth watching. I found Season 1 fairly subdued as the series tried to find it's footing--more entertaining that DS9 's first season and not as bad as TNG 's first. I liked Season 2 and 3 the most and could barely tolerate Season 4.
Is Star Trek Enterprise worth watching? : r/startrek
Prepare for the huge shift in the series tone between the 2nd and 3rd seasons. It is worth watching but DS9 blows it and voyager out of the water so watch that if you haven't already. By the way, the speed up of the tempo of the theme song in season 3 was a big improvement.
Is it worth watching Star Trek Enterprise? : r/startrek
Personally it's my favourite Star Trek and I don't think it was given a fair chance. First two seasons are ok but seasons 3&4 were both excellent. What I enjoyed about it was the humanity, people acting like people with actual flaws and everything and not the ideal versions of humans that exist in the 24th century.
Is Star Trek: Enterprise worth watching? : r/startrek
If it's Star Trek, it's worth watching. Yes. Push through to Season 3 because the Xindi arc is Enterprise 's best. You also have to watch it through the lens of post-9/11 America because the arc kicks off with the Season 2 finale The Expanse, which aired in May 2003. It's a good series that came at the wrong time.
Is Enterprise worth watching? : r/startrek
Enterprise is awesome!! It got badly panned when it first came out because trek fans hated the style and the theme tune. it was just far too much of a style change from the established series. In addition, No non-Trek fans bothered to watch it because they didnt like trek anyway and didnt want to give it a chance.
How bad is The Motion Picture (1979)? : r/startrek
As a piece of Star Trek, it's marvelous. This is peak Roddenberry, and the most 2001-scifi-ish Star Trek has ever attempted to be. It's also a very rare peak at what Earth is like at the height of Star Trek's vision for the future. And the music is spectacular, and has set the tone for every Star Trek soundtrack ever since.
Is Star Trek: Enterprise worth watching? : r/DeepSpaceNine
I say worth watching. Season 4 is really good, season 3 is weird but watchable. Personaly I felt in love with T'Pol, she's really good vulcan character and captain Archer is probably the most realistic of all captains. Then you have Phlox who is the most funny and adorable alien doctor ever.
A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Enterprise
The theme song never gets better (except for briefly in season 4). However, as with all Trek, Enterprise -by and large- ages pretty darn well and scratches some itches you didn't know you have about Andorians, Vulcans, and the founding of the United Federation of Planets. The following list cuts 44 of the 98 episodes out of the mix ...
Time gap between the Enterprise C and D : r/startrek
So I was watching the TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" and Captain Picard mentions that the Enterprise C has come 22 years into the future. ... What I am wondering is why is there such a gap between the Enterprise C and D? We saw in Star Trek Generations Captain Kirk being on the bridge of the Enterprise B which is just a few years after ...
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Sep. 25, 2021. The boldest and most controversial Star Trek series of all time debuted 20 years ago on September 26, 2001. Since 2011, all four seasons of the show have been streaming on Netflix ...
10 Positives You Only Notice Rewatching Star Trek: Enterprise
8 Enterprise Broke The Star Trek Mold Star Trek: Enterprise proved that the franchise could evolve. By its nature as a prequel, Star Trek: Enterprise had an immediately unique aspect to other franchise shows.Looking to previously unexplored gaps of the Star Trek multiverse timeline, Enterprise attempted to learn from the less successful elements of Star Trek: Voyager and incorporated notions ...
Seriously, is Enterprise worth watching?
Unfortunately rather then being given the time to find its pace like the others Enterprise got canned when it hit its stride. 1) most shows don't get the number of chances Treks do. 2) the ratings just got too low. 3) don't start a season of change and improvement with time travelling space Nazis.
I'm Glad Star Trek Is Showing More Love To Scott Bakula's Enterprise
I'm glad to see Star Trek: Enterprise getting deserved love and recognition from modern Star Trek, especially in Star Trek: Discovery season 5. When Enterprise premiered on UPN in 2001, I was an early adopter.While I agreed with the overall then-sentiment that Enterprise felt like watered down retreads of Star Trek: The Next Generation's stories, I still enjoyed the Enterprise NX-01 crew led ...
WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Star Trek: Enterprise
The Takeaway: In a way, Enterprise mirrors the earliest years of Earth's interplanetary exercise: an awkward start, some false moves in there, but things get closer to plain sailing as time goes ...
Is Star Trek Worth Watching? Here's What We Think for Each Show
Article Breakdown. The Star Trek franchise is definitely worth watching; however, some installments can be skipped because they offer minimal enjoyment or minimally contribute to the overall story. 'The Original Series,' 'The Next Generation,' 'Deep Space Nine,' 'Short Treks, and 'Pickard' are a definitive must-watch if you ...
Star Trek: Enterprise (Reviews)
Star Trek: Enterprise will always be the first Star Trek spin-off to be cancelled rather than retired, the first live-action spin-off to run less than seven seasons. That is what pop culture will remember of the fifth Star Trek series, when it chooses to remember anything at all. That is what large vocal segments of fandom will remember whenever they are asked their opinion on the show.
The 10 Best STAR TREK Seasons, Ranked
Here are our picks for the best seasons of Star Trek. They've earned the Starfleet Medal of Valor, and will be remembered into the 23rd century and beyond. Paramount Television. 10. Star Trek ...
Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked: Which Ones Are Worth Watching?
Despite dips in quality, all of the Star Trek movies are worth watching for their different journeys and arcs. Here's our take on how the different Star Trek movies rank against each other. 13. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) The Final Frontier is universally slammed as the least impressive Star Trek movie ever made. The crew of the ...
Enterprise Episode Guide
0 = Painfully bad! Never worth watching. 1 = Bad. Only for the most dedicated fans. 2 = A mediocre episode, possibly worth skipping if new to Star Trek. 3 = Good! Generally enjoyable, worth watching if new to Star Trek. 4 = Great! An example of why we love Star Trek. 5 = One of the best. A classic.
Star Trek has truly reinvented itself
Share this on Reddit; ... second death with the cancellation of the prequel series Enterprise in 2005. Like practically everything worth watching in the year 2022, Star Trek is now a product for ...
The beginner's guide to Star Trek: What to watch first
But I recommend you start where it all started: Star Trek, the original series ( TOS) produced in the 1960s. It's here you'll meet Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty the engineer. This ...
5 Great Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 episodes worth watching
I'll be back with a few more for Season 2 worth watching before Enterprise gets into the Xindi arc. While the Xindi arc is well told, it's not my favorite storyline. However, the series does finish strong with a few episodes near its end that quickly put a cap on the series.
5 Great Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 episodes worth watching
S1: E7: The Andorian Incident: In looking over the Vulcan star charts, Captain Archer comes across P'jem, a planet with a Vulcan monestary on it, decides to pay them a visit and gets more than he ...

A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Enterprise

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Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked: Which Ones Are Worth Watching?

13. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

12. Star Trek VII: Generations (1994)

11. Star Trek IX: Insurrection (1998)

10. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

9. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

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7. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

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Boldly blazing the trail

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Star Trek: Discovery tore itself apart for the good of Star Trek’s future

The beginner's guide to Star Trek: What to watch first

How to get started

1. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS)

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)

To boldly go...

3. Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS)

4. Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9)

5. Star Trek: Voyager (VOY)

6. Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT)

7. Star Trek: Discovery (DIS)

8. Star Trek: Lower Decks (LD)

9. Star Trek: Prodigy (PRO)

10. Star Trek: Picard (PIC)

11. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW)

What are the worst to best Star Trek series?

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5 Great Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 episodes worth watching

S1:E25: Two Days and Two Nights: It's shore leave time as humanity makes it's first trip to the paradise planet of Risa.

COMMENTS