[Thomas P]

The true finale was the second part of “Terra Prime.” Trip and T’Pol have had some genetic material stolen to create a cloned baby to warn Earth against the horrors of interspecies miscegenation – again, Trek confronts the issues of the day – and the kid doesn’t make it. The Day Is Saved, The Conference Goes Forward (it’s a curious nod to Roddenberry’s utopian delusions that the plot often hinges on the saving of a conference) and the Enterprise once more Does Her Duty. But the episode ended with Trip coming to T’Pol’s room to discuss funeral arrangements for the baby, and that one scene contained more emotional power than any scene since Scotty tootled Amazing Grace as Spock was buried in a torpedo casing and Kirk gargled the word “human.” Of course, it’s always the weeping that defines “great acting” in the groundling’s book, but this wasn’t a scene played for cheap emotion. It felt real in a way that reminded you how little else in Trek truly felt real. Everything was so frickin’ mythic. Not this. At the end, it was two people from two places holding hands over the death of a child and the possibility of another. That was the end of Star Trek, and it couldn’t have gotten there without Enterprise.

The finale was candy. Apparently the cast wasn’t happy, and when I heard that I was seized with the fear that the entire Trek story would be revealed as a dream Gene Roddenberry had while passed out in a plane wrec. But no. They were mad, it seems, because their finale contained a heapin’ helping of Jonathan Frakes, and was essentially a holodeck story. But please. What else could we have had? Enterprise defeats the Borg! Enterprise is thrown into the Gamma Quadrant! Enterprise saves the world at the last minute when Trip vents the plasma conduits and reroutes auxillary weapons through the EPS manifold! Enterprise goes forward in time to defeat a gigantic single-cell organism shaped like Shatner’s toupee! There’s almost nothing else left to do. And so we saw the entirety of the Enterprise story as something that had become Distant History, a story you read in second grade. The ship was Old Ironsides – interesting, inert, historical, a relic. That was a fun tour, let’s have lunch. It was a contrast between the tone of a standard episode (what happens now is incredibly important and the Federation hangs in the balance and any one of our heroes may be killed, despite the fact that they have signed a contract for the next season) and the cool regard of history, for whom these events are simply a matter of record. What Riker was worried about would be history in the same way, eventually. That’s the point. We think that Today is incredibly vital and pertinent; surely history will see it as we do, feel it as we do. Well, no. Not unless it’s a very bad day, and certainly not if it’s a nice one. Battles turn into paragraphs. Sunk ships are footnotes, if they’re lucky.

That’s what I think they were trying to do, anyway. To end it without ending it. Each character got to walk on stage and converse with the Chef, who’d been mentioned but never seen for four years. That was their last turn in the footlights. The story ended before Archer gave his speech, and of course the dolts on the message boards complained that we didn’t hear what he said. Of course we didn’t. That’s the point. Write the thing yourself in your head. Imagine it. Consider what had to be stated at that moment in human history. Dream, you morons.

It ended with the three ships. (Interesting how they didn’t show the 1701-E, perhaps because the design wasn’t really beloved; it owes too much to the Voyager-class shoehorn look, and the notch on the nacelles looks distinctly unFederation-like. And yes, I just crossed over into the land of unredeemable dorkheadedness, but I’m past caring.) I’ve always liked the design of the “Enterprise” Enterprise. The 1701-D looks computer generated. But the original ship, the Constitution class – that’s the one that still has a hook in your heart. Maybe because it was actually real. They built a model out of wood and painted it and stuck wires in it and filmed it, and those few frames brought the whole story to life. I bought the original model kit and flew it around my bedroom. (I considered buying another and burning it to look like the one in the Doomsday Machine, too.) That was the archetype; that was what Icarus had in mind. And that was what hung in the Smithsonian that day they opened the Star Trek exhibit. All the cast showed up, except for Bones. I met them all: press tour. On the way out I found myself standing next to James Doohan under the big model of the Enterprise, floating above in the hall. I walked up next to Scotty. We looked up.

“Ah, she’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?” he said.

That she was.