Title: Star Trek: Enterprise
Year: 2001-05
Country: USA

Format: Blu-ray
Seasons: 4
Episodes: 98
Seen: 9 August 2025 – 16 January 2026
First viewing (mostly)

Captain’s Blog: Back in August of ’25, a few weeks before I started Project Glowing Rectangle, I also started a months-long telly-watching project. On days when I don’t have the time, energy or inclination to watch a film but I still need something to lure me away from doomscrolling, my main Thing To Watch has been Star Trek: Enterprise. It has seen me through some rough times and big changes these past five months. And yesterday I watched the final three episodes.

I had seen a handful of Enterprise eps when they originally aired—T’Pol made a big impression on my adolescent self! But this was my first time watching the entire series. Overall I enjoyed it… but it did play everything very safe. Maybe this is inevitable for a prequel series; it had to slot into the existing Star Trek continuity, so it could never take big swings. The riskiest aspect of the whole show was the theme tune, a godawful country power ballad that I ended up skipping for most of the run.

The cast is decent but mostly pretty bland. Being something of an outsider myself—let me count the ways!—naturally I’m most drawn to Star Trek’s outsider characters. I was spoilt for choice with Deep Space Nine, but there’s slim pickings on Enterprise. Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), a dog dad and water polo fan, is easily the least interesting of all the pre-streaming Star Trek captains. The standouts for me are the two alien crew members, science officer T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) and Dr Phlox (John Billingsley), but even they don’t get to shine as often as I would like. I also enjoyed the recurring character Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs), an Andorian who keeps trading favours with Archer. Jeffrey Combs’ many, many guest appearances were a highlight of DS9, so I was happy to see him again here.

Enterprise has none of the truly atrocious episodes that make me yell at the telly, ‘WTF was that?!’ (I’m looking at you, Sub Rosa…) Equally there are none of the stunning, profoundly moving stories that make me rejoice to be a fan of Star Trek. There’s nothing here that approaches the level of Darmok, The Inner Light, The Visitor, or Far Beyond the Stars. But maybe it’s unfair to ask lightning to strike twice. Or even once!

The high point for me was season 2, episode 2: Carbon Creek, in which a Vulcan crew—including T’Pol’s great-grandmother (also played by Jolene Blalock)—is stranded on 1950s Earth. It’s quite telling that the best episode was one that didn’t involve the regular crew at all, aside from the framing device of T’Pol relating the story over dinner. But if you watch only one episode of Enterprise, make it this one.

I also enjoyed the third season, a completely serialised story about the Xindi plot to destroy Earth. This was something unique for pre-streaming Trek, and I think they pulled it off. After that, the final season reverted to more episodic storytelling; not in itself a bad thing, but a lot of these two- or three-part stories felt like desperate fan service. There’s a two-parter devoted to explaining why Original Series Klingons had smooth foreheads. Give me a break!

The final episode, These Are the Voyages…, is notoriously detested by fans. The whole thing is a holodeck simulation run by Riker, taking place in the middle of a Next Generation episode. As a finale to Enterprise, it doesn’t really work. As a celebration of Star Trek in general, it… doesn’t really work either. I didn’t hate it like the fandom seems to, but I agree the preceding two-parter is a more fitting and emotionally resonant finale to Enterprise.

So yeah… all in all, a pretty middling iteration of Star Trek. Not much I hated, but not much I really loved. It felt like a show that could never fully decide what it wanted to be. But it was nice to see some new-to-me Trek with a substantial number of episodes per season. Enterprise has been a good companion to me these past five months, for which I’m grateful.

Up next, a rewatch of The Original Series.