98 – These are the Voyages …

Grade: F

Summary

Almost 200 years after the events of “Terra Prime,” Commander William Riker of the Enterprise has to decide between obeying a direct order from his former Captain, or obeying one from his current Captain. To get some insight on what to do, he watches a historical hologram program which displays Captain Archer’s last adventure as Captain of the Enterprise.

Commentary

Here’s the biggest ho-hum episode of them all. It’s obvious that everyone knew this would be the last episode of the last Star Trek series to ever be on the air – at least for a long time. They don’t seem too motivated to make a great story here.

The storyline is cheap and uninteresting, and the insertion of Commander Riker and Counselor Troi is just ridiculous. The accidentally funny thing about this episode is that all of the Archer contemporaries are supposed to be 10 years older than the last time we saw them, and yet they don’t even look 10 minutes older than in “Terra Prime.” But on the other hand, Riker and Troi seem to look at least 10-15 years older than they should have looked in this episode. Riker looks much older and much fatter than he should have been.

One additional criticism I have of this show is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for Riker to watch this historical story on the holodeck. I mean, we already know what happened in that episode in TNG – why should we be interested in how Riker reached his decision? Wouldn’t it have been better to just watch the epidose unfold without all of the play-by-play commentary from Troi and Riker?

Something else I didn’t like is how Trip was killed off. It just seemed stupid, unnecessary and worthless. And why would they have needed to jump 10 years into the future? Weren’t there any other interesting storylines they could have pursued right after Terra Prime? And here’s another nit-pick – in only 10 years they’ve gone from warp 5 to warp 7 capability. That seems like an awfully big jump – especially considering Kirk’s ship didn’t even go that fast very often.

I was personally also extremely disappointed at how Trip and T’Pol’s relationship just fizzled out like that without much explanation or reasoning. It took 4 years for their relationship to really develop, and then to have it so casually dismissed is just unthinkable. All in all, I will just pretend this episode never happened. And that also goes for this entire series.

Of Note

This is the only time in any of the series when the regular cast only appear as holographic projections in the series finale.

You’ll probably notice that Troi’s hair in this episode does not match her hair from “The Pegasus”. That’s because when The Next Generation ended, Marina Sirtis kept her hair pieces from the series. When she went back to film “These Are the Voyages”, she forgot she had the hairpieces at her home.