Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise (known simply as Enterprise in its first two seasons) is an American sci-fi TV series created by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. It is the fifth live-action Star Trek series.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The show has three different types of storytelling style and corresponding tones, all of which work well in their own ways:
 * 2) * The first two seasons stick with the TNG and Voyager approach of being a light and episodic show, with occasional bits of inter-episode continuity.
 * 3) * Season 3 is built around a season-long story arc with the Enterprise crew entering an unexplored region of space in order to find a group called the Xindi, who wish to destroy Earth, and features a much darker tone akin to that of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, with the ethics and principles of the main characters frequently being tested.
 * 4) * Season 4 then switches it up again to being made up of multi-part stories that tend to be made up of two or three episodes, and typically act as prequels to TOS stories, with a tone somewhere in-between that of seasons 1 and 2, and season 3.
 * 5) It offers a look at the early days of the Federation, giving it a very different feel to any of the previous (and chronologically later) Star Trek shows.
 * 6) Despite starting out as a bit of a bunch of misfits, the Enterprise crew all evolve into competent and likeable characters over the show's run.
 * 7) This show's incarnation of Starfleet comes across as a more plausible military organization, even introducing the MACOs, a commando group on-board the Enterprise, at the end of Season 2. Even for fans who prefer Starfleet to be shown as an organization that focuses on exploration and science, it makes sense that this era's Starfleet has a more military focus given that the Federation isn't really established yet.
 * 8) Seasons 2 and onward have some very well-executed social commentary on America after 9/11, showing how it can bring out the worst in a society, but also the best. It certainly stands out as far better than the utterly failed (and years too late) attempts to do this commentary on Star Trek: Picard.
 * 9) The show finally ditches the "romance of the week" formula that most of the previous Star Trek shows had tended to build episodes around, with a believable relationship between T'Pol and Tucker developing over the course of the series, and most other episodes never going beyond the main characters having some light flirting with a guest character.
 * 10) Some good call-forwards to the chronologically later Star Trek shows, most notably season 4's "In a Mirror, Darkly" two-parter, which focuses around the Mirror Universe Enterprise crew discovering the USS Defiant from the TOS episode "The Tholian Web" and seizing control of it.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Between all of the 1966-2005 Star Trek shows, it's easily the weakest one. As with TNG, DS9 and Voyager, it took until season 3 to find its feet, but was then cancelled after season 4, instead of carrying on for seven seasons in total.
 * 2) While the first two seasons' sticking so closely to the formula of TNG and Voyager means those seasons are still very watchable, they might seem a little samey to viewers who've watched the combined total of 14 seasons of those shows.
 * 3) The show takes some time to get the main characters right, with most of the first season making Captain Archer seem excessively angry and prone to making bad decisions, T'Pol a smug and condescending know-it-all, and Tucker a bumbling idiot.
 * 4) Its continuity with the previous Star Trek shows is all over the place. It had been said in both TOS and TNG that first contact between Humans and Klingons took place early in the 23rd century and went disastrously, starting hostilities between the two races. Yet the pilot episode of this show retconned this implication, stating that the first contact between the two races were taking place in the mid-22nd century and going absolutely fine, with relations between the two races being relatively cordial for the rest of this show's run. Then, later in the first season, we get the Enterprise crew encountering the Ferengi two centuries before humanity was meant to have made contact with them. The second season also has the crew encountering the Borg two centuries before humanity was to have made contact with them as well, although this is passed off as a consequence of the events in First Contact, and the Enterprise crew ultimately don't figure out who the Borg are.
 * 5) The theme song, "Faith of the Heart" by Russell Watson, is notoriously cheesy and poorly suited for a sci-fi series. It was controversial enough that fans petitioned to have it changed and others avoided the show because of it, contributing to it's cancellation. However, it did get an improved remix for seasons 3 and 4.
 * 6) The series had an infamously terrible series finale, "These Are The Voyages...", which is still regarded by many as the single worst episode in the entire Star Trek franchise.
 * 7) Troubled Production: Rick Berman had been campaigning for a break in televised Star Trek as far back as Voyager, but Paramount was adamant on having a new series following the end of Voyager. Brannon Braga looked to get some fresh blood into the franchise by getting a new writing staff, but discovered they were not up to the task of handling an hour-long television show like Star Trek. Braga was forced to rewrite almost every episode of the first two seasons, a fact he is not proud of. Being a network show meant they had a lot more studio micromanagement, and efforts to make a newer, fresh series were forced back into the Star Trek cliche. Things got a little bit better near the end of the second season when Braga was given the go-ahead to shake things up, and the third season brought in another writing staff, including Manny Coto, who became the showrunner for the fourth season.