6:40 PM

Very solid review from Michelle Erica Green of “These Are the Voyages…” on Trek Nation:

There are probably two reviews that could be written of this episode: the critical reactions of an Enterprise viewer and the overall impressions of a longtime Star Trek fan. Being both, I must admit from the outset that the latter overwhelms the former for me; it’s hard for me not to enjoy any episode that features Riker and Troi (their relationship is one of the few things I love unreservedly in Insurrection and Nemesis), and it’s hard for me not to get a little choked up being told that Kirk and Picard’s famous voiceover was originally their predecessor’s speech to the assembly that became the UFP.

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I don’t want to take anything away from Connor Trinneer, who really demonstrated in the final three episodes the extent to which he is the most valuable actor on Enterprise. He had me wiping my eyes in “Terra Prime” as he played Trip mourning for a daughter he hardly knew, even though I found the whole instant-paternity instinct rather contrived. His acting is the reason I believe Reed and Sato when they explain that there was so much more to Tucker than redneck hick and solid engineer, because there’s really not a lot in the scripts to suggest otherwise. But really I could say the same for Reed and Sato as well. I doubt that in these reviews I have ever given as much credit to this cast as it deserves. I really like all the characters on Enterprise in a way that I did not in the end like many characters on Voyager, and the credit for that must go to the actors, because if I sit down and try to make a list of things I learned about Sato or Reed as opposed to moments I think Linda Park and Dominic Keating really nailed, it’s pretty sparse.

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Archer’s Enterprise is returning home to be decommissioned after ten years; we saw far more upheaval on Picard’s Enterprise in only six years. We know that ultimately Riker and Troi do come back together, that he gets his own ship, that they get the happy ending Tucker and T’Pol never will. And maybe they were never meant to, but it would have been nice to see them try, you know, instead of to see them in denial and then be told after the fact that it just didn’t work out and very little changed otherwise on the NX-01.

I don’t think that “These Are the Voyages…” is the stink-bomb of an episode that some of the early reviews have claimed, nor do I think it’s the glorious send-off for the Star Trek franchise that some folk at Paramount would like us to believe. It’s more an orphan episode of an orphan series that never quite worked out its continuity issues, that never fully embraced its role as a prequel to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek…that provided several seasons of entertainment and likeable characters, but, had it not borne the Star Trek label (and who can forget that it didn’t for two full seasons), would never be classed as the sort of groundbreaking, gutsy science fiction that Next Gen and Deep Space Nine were and that I hope the next incarnation may be.