Well, that finale lives up to its poor reputation.

I recently watched the infamous Enterprise finale for the first time. Full disclosure, I've only seen a handful of Enterprise episodes; I've always been more of an Original Series kind of guy than a Berman/Braga guy, although I enjoy some Next Generation episodes. Anyway, my curiosity about the much-maligned Enterprise finale was renewed recently when I was reading the excellent "Fifty Year Mission" oral history books about Trek that were published last year.

My two cents, for whatever it's worth: the episode really was a total misfire. The critics are right. In theory I guess I can sort of see the rationale of using the Riker Holodeck stuff to make this episode an epilogue not only to Enterprise, but to the entire Berman-era Trek that started with Next Gen. In theory it might have been possible to make a good, respectful episode that used that holodeck contrivance -- an episode that told one more Enterprise story through that lens, while showing a Next Gen character (Riker) seeing and acknowledging the achievements of Archer and his crew. The idea itself isn't that bad.

It was the execution that was awful. The way it's staged, Riker seems like a weird stalker through most of the scenes. Also, it's too focused on Riker himself and his personal conflict in the "Pegasus" incident. It really would have been more appropriate to just have Riker watch and learn more passively, and maybe offer a few honorific comments to Troi at the end, instead of cutting away several times to full-blown Riker/Troi-centric scenes.

Also, at times the writers seem to be confusing the Holodeck with a time machine. They have Riker interacting with the Enterprise characters in the guise of a cook, and apparently influencing their behavior in the past. For example, there's a scene where Riker-the-Cook plants the seed in T'Pol's head that she's going to "miss" Trip when the mission ends. Then a few minutes later, moved by that encounter, T'Pol confesses to Trip that she's going to miss him. I don't get it. Did that conversation "really" happen in the past? If so, how could Riker have possibly influenced the real T'Pol hundreds of years ago through a Holodeck? And if it DIDN'T really happen in the past, why are they showing it to us? Who cares if a merely make-believe hologram of T'Pol tells a merely make-believe hologram of Trip that she'll miss him? Where's the heart in that? It's pretty stupid and not well thought out.

So, overall I have to say, the episode is a pretty scathing failure by Berman and Braga. They made a lot of mind-bogglingly bad choices in the series and the movies they made together, but this episode as much as anything else suggests to me that their creative instincts weren't very good. Okay, okay, I know that they're responsible for producing more Trek material than Roddenberry and the original guys ever did, but it's still a head smacker that these two guys with really questionable ability ever got hold of the thing.