STAR TREK ENTERPRISE - THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON (2004)

Star Trek Enterprise - The Complete Fourth Season (2004)

Starring: Scott Bakula, Jolene Blalock, John Billingsley, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery
Directors: David Barrett, LeVar Burton
Format: Colour, Widescreen, Box set
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Number of discs: 6
Run Time: 939 minutes

DVD Features:

Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 2.0)
Over 3 hours of special features: Enterprise moments, Season 4; Inside the "Mirror"; episodes; Enterprise secrets; Visual effects magic; That's a wrap; Links to the legacy; Deleted scenes and outtakes; Photo gallery

Movie: * * *
Disc: * * *

The fourth – and final – season of this series, and perhaps the whole Star Trek franchise as well.

Unfortunately this show, which attempted to do something grittier and fresh with the Trek universe and went back to the pre-Kirk pre-Federation era, was dogged by controversy amongst fans from the very start. The Star Trek universe is traditionally more antiseptic than let’s say the ones in Star Wars and Blade Runner, so Trek fans railed against the idea of the less than perfect future depicted in Enterprise. My wife has it right when she remarked that Star Trek Enterprise simply doesn’t feel like Star Trek.

However, Enterprise wasn’t half bad and while the show had its share of mediocre episodes, it featured less annoying characters of the sort that Trek shows seem to specialise in. Season Three of the series also had some strong episodes which featured good writing and highlighted fascinating moral dilemmas as informed by America’s post-9/11 experience. That season – considered by many to be the best of the series (and I tend to concur) – featured a single story arc – the whole so-called “Xindi saga”.

Season Four wraps up a few plot strands from the previous season and then settles into the more familiar (to Trek at least) single episode plot structure. Perhaps realising that this is the last season of the show, Season Four tries to straighten out some continuity errors it introduced into the Trek universe. It tries for instance to answer the question as to why the Klingons have bulging foreheads in this series but not in the “later” 1960s TV series. (The answer: genetic mutation.)

THE DISCS: Packaging is virtually identical to previous seasons. So is the lack of episode descriptions. Sigh.

WORTH IT? Always an underrated and underappreciated series, this is the ideal way to give it another shot. Plus, on DVD you can skip that annoying theme song . . .

RECOMMENDATION: If you’re a Trek completist you’d want to buy this. Newbies to the show can safely skip Season One and go straight to Season Two and Three before putting down money for this box set.