Good riddance. This past Tuesday, Enterprise, the bastard child of oft-villified Star Trek executive producer and once-great Trek writer Brannon Braga, went off the air. Enterprise left me with a sour taste in my mouth -- like rancid onions -- since the first episode. Here was my initial reaction when Enterprise debuted a few weeks into my freshman year in college:

Let's talk about Scott Bakula again. His character bothers me. He's very gung-ho in that "Fine, I'll be the only one who stands up for what's just!" attitude that all the other Star Trek captains had. The only problem is that the other captains showed a human side; we could see the difficulty it took to arrive at their decisions, and we could appreciate their humanity. Captain What's-His-Name has no humanity that we can see; he's just gung-ho and sometimes comes off as arrogant. When the Shapely Vulcan Female confronts him (go on, pick an occasion, any occasion), she accuses him of being arrogant, and he proceeds to act arrogantly! I can see why the humans of this time period don't like the Vulcans; they're always right! Scott Bakula and all his friends onboard are arrogant, especially that Texan engineer fellow. I don't like him much.

And that lady figured out the Klingon language pretty quickly. For a language that has no relationship whatsoever to any known Earth language, that's impressive. If she's not in the pantheon of Greek gods, then she should be: as the goddess of linguistics or something.

Yes, let's talk about the ship. Looks a lot like an Akira-class up on top, doesn't it? And what's up with all those touchscreens? I thought the producers said this would be mostly dials and switches (of course, I guess this is all part of the adjustment from the 1960s vision of the future with 1960s technology, so now we have to re-think everything). Still, for a ship they claimed was going to be like a submarine, it's pretty roomy and it has all the superfluous lighting of the other ships from past series. If Starfleet were a real entity, I don't think their primary concern would be backlighting the wall for dramatic effect.

And while I'm complaining, remember in Star Trek: Insurrection when Riker calls for the manual control joystick? Was that corny or what? I mean, talk about an attempt to please dumb non-Trekkers. There's a joystick on the navigational console, for crying out loud! And why does Riker have to use the manual control thing? There's a helmsman; I'm sure he's more qualified than Riker to drive the ship.

But back to Enterprise, now. Kids, cover your eyes; it's time for the "grease me up with the antidote scene." Yikes! I'll admit that I laughed and laughed through that entire scene. It really did look like second-rate softcore pornography, and on a Star Trek? I was okay with Rick Berman and the Dominion War, but this really crosses the line. The close-ups of Texan Engineer really weren't necessary, and we didn't need such a visual indication that the quarantine chamber was a little chilly. Yes, even chaos theory agrees with the notion that removing that scene would have absolutely no effect on the rest of the show. Fortunately, I was pleased to see in the third episode (the "psychotropic pollen" episode) there was none of that sort of thing, so I guess they decided that pleasing irate Trekkers was more important than garnering ignorant viewers on UPN.

The characters and plots were uninspired and the show suffered from the same "alien-of-the-week" phenomenon that plagued Voyager in its last years. Enterprise was a feeble attempt to continue an ailing empire, and for what? For the sake of money. Voyager was the flagship production of UPN, the ailing, chintzy United Paramount Network. Enterprise was the only thing keeping the network afloat, and it suffered from a lack of ratings. There were a few die-hard fans, and these fans tried to keep the show going by actually attempting to raise enough money themselves to produce another season, but Berman and Co. said, "No, thank you." Star Trek had been on the air continuously since 1987, when Star Trek: The Next Generation revived the brand. After eighteen years, the quality of the shows went down. Unlike Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or even Voyager, Enterprise did not go out on top. It was canceled. A fitting ending to a crappy show.

Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, writing in the Los Angeles Times, does not lament the death of Star Trek. "The original 'Star Trek,' created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad," he writes. "Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion." The other spin-off series, says Card, were limited in the same way as the original: "The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut." His hypothesis for its longevity? People had never read good science fiction before. Star Trek was their first taste of science fiction, and like the couple that has their first sexual experiences on their wedding night -- and terrible experiences, at that -- they don't know that science fiction can be better.

I've always liked Star Trek, and Deep Space Nine had writing that was unparalleled. Each week, they tackled some contemporary issue in a new and interesting way, making use of what Darko Suvin called "cognitive displacement" in order to make its audience see the same old issues -- evil being done for good ends, attitudes about homosexuality and racism -- in new lights. Star Trek, the original series, was full of interesting ideas that were executed poorly. Enterprise was full of bad ideas that were executed well. Perhaps, someday, Star Trek will come back, full of new ideas that are executed as well as was done on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and (occasionally) Voyager.