After finishing Voyager, I started to watch the Top 100 Star Trek Episodes in Chronological Order. But after watching the top seven Enterprise episodes in the Top 100, I wanted to start over with the premiere and keep going.
I really enjoy the premise of the show: the first human deep space explorers using the first warp-five starship. It’s a fun era of Star Trek, and they handle many aspects of being a prequel right, even if they went against fan expectations (with the theme song, with the crew’s naivety and bumbling, and with the Vulcans as an antagonist). I get why people think it is one of the worst Treks and don’t want to watch all of it, but I wanted to curate a list of the best episodes, those worthy of watching from this underappreciated series.
Curating the right list was tough for two reasons. First, Season 3, with its season-long story arc, makes it difficult to excerpt episodes from. Second, Enterprise had more three-parters than any other Star Trek series, plus an abundant number of two-parters; again, hard to excerpt.
I ended up curating a few different lists.
Top 10 Episodes
Here are the top 10 Enterprise episodes, derived from IMDB’s top 12, rearranged into chronological order:
| Episode | IMDB Rating | Season | Episode |
| Carbon Creek | 8.5 | 2 | 2 |
| Regeneration | 8.5 | 2 | 23 |
| Twilight | 8.6 | 3 | 8 |
| Similitude | 8.4 | 3 | 10 |
| Proving Ground | 8.4 | 3 | 13 |
| The Council | 8.4 | 3 | 22 |
| Countdown | 8.5 | 3 | 23 |
| Zero Hour | 8.5 | 3 | 24 |
| Babel One | 8.4 | 4 | 12 |
| United | 8.4 | 4 | 13 |
While “Azati Prime” is the second highest-rated Enterprise episode, I omitted it because it ends on a cliffhanger, which is unsatisfactorily resolved in the next episode (“Damage,” 8.1), which begs for the episode after it to also be watched (“The Forgotten,” 7.9). (That’s why “Azati Prime” is not in my Top 100 list either.)
“Shockwave, Part I” (ranked #9, average rating of 8.4) would have required “Shockwave, Part II” (ranked #16, rating of 8.2). Dropping it let me add in another 8.4-rated episode, “United,” which I think is a great way to end this mini-viewing session, because it demonstrates what the crew achieve over the course of the show.
Shrantastic List
While that Top 10 is great, I don’t feel it captures the story arc of the entire series regarding the Vulcans. Shran, played by Jeffrey Combs, is a fan favorite, and his story encapsulates much of the whole series. So here are the Top 10 episodes (of 11, lol) with Shran.
| Episode | IMDB Rating | Season | Episode |
| The Andorian Incident | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| Shadows of P’Jem | 7.7 | 1 | 15 |
| Cease Fire | 7.9 | 2 | 15 |
| Twilight | 8.6 | 3 | 8 |
| Proving Ground | 8.4 | 3 | 13 |
| Zero Hour | 8.5 | 3 | 24 |
| Kir’Shara | 8.4 | 4 | 9 |
| Babel One | 8.4 | 4 | 12 |
| United | 8.4 | 4 | 13 |
| The Aenar | 8.2 | 4 | 14 |
If out of completeness you really want to watch #11, the series finale “These Are the Voyages,” try to find the fan edit, “No Next Generation: These Are the Voyages.”
So Good Soval
But to me that Top 10, Shrantastic as it is, still doesn’t capture the essence of Enterprise. So here are the fifteen episodes of the series-long story arc about the Vulcans.
| Episode | IMDB Rating | Season | Episode |
| Broken Bow, Part 1 | 7.6 | 1 | 1 |
| Broken Bow, Part 2 | 7.5 | 1 | 2 |
| Breaking the Ice | 7.1 | 1 | 8 |
| Shadows of P’Jem | 7.7 | 1 | 15 |
| Fusion | 7 | 1 | 17 |
| Shockwave, Part I | 8.4 | 1 | 26 |
| Shockwave, Part II | 8.2 | 2 | 1 |
| Cease Fire | 7.9 | 2 | 15 |
| The Expanse | 8.2 | 2 | 26 |
| Home | 7.8 | 4 | 3 |
| The Forge | 8.2 | 4 | 7 |
| Awakening | 8 | 4 | 8 |
| Kir’Shara | 8.4 | 4 | 9 |
| Demons | 7.6 | 4 | 20 |
| Terra Prime | 8.1 | 4 | 21 |
Temporal Cold War Arc
My least favorite aspect of the series is the “Temporal Cold War.” The showrunners wanted to raise the stakes, to make it clear that this prequel could derail the established timeline. I never found it narratively satisfying myself. It elevated Archer to historic importance while his initial story arc was of bumbling inexperience and parochialism.
| Episode | IMDB Rating | Season | Episode |
| Broken Bow, Part 1 | 7.6 | 1 | 1 |
| Broken Bow, Part 2 | 7.5 | 1 | 2 |
| Cold Front | 7.6 | 1 | 11 |
| Shockwave, Part I | 8.4 | 1 | 26 |
| Shockwave, Part II | 8.2 | 2 | 1 |
| Future Tense | 8.1 | 2 | 2 |
| Carpenter Street | 7.4 | 2 | 3 |
| Azati Prime | 8.5 | 2 | 4 |
| Zero Hour | 8.5 | 2 | 5 |
| Storm Front | 7.3 | 4 | 1 |
| Storm Front, Part II | 7.3 | 4 | 2 |
On Being a Good Prequel
When writing about prequelitis, I mentioned the following:
In [Strange New Worlds], the interiors make the Enterprise a much different ship. In TOS, the ship is cramped, with narrow corridors and small rooms. In SNW, in contrast, the bedrooms are luxury suites or apartments, Sickbay has two floors and its own transporter, and the cargo bay is huge. These changes are due to difference in budget and special effects, so I forgive them as differences in staging.
This was something that another prequel, Enterprise (the show), did right, with a ship that looked like a predecessor ship: grappling hooks instead of a tractor beam, a small supply transporter, smaller shuttles, a kitchen rather than food synthesizers, etc. (Even the uniforms looked like they were from an earlier era.)
I could go further on aspects I like about Enterprise as a prequel: the photon torpedoes are unreliable and often ineffective, the ship often has to run from a fight, an early use of the transporter leaves a crewman with skin abrasions, and the universal translator is slow to train and often doesn’t kick in until the middle or end of an episode.
Linguistic Treknobabble
Speaking of the universal translator, while as a conlanger and linguistics nerd, I was excited about having a linguist on board, the writers give Hoshi Sato the most nonsensical dialogue. (Now I’m starting to think their understanding of temporal mechanics and subspace theory might also be suspect…)
They often seem to saddle Hoshi with non sequitur comparisons.
PHLOX: Look at the synaptic activity. This organism possesses a very sophisticated nervous system. It could be capable of higher mental functions.
HOSHI: If it’s intelligent maybe we can communicate with it. The frequency distortions, they look a lot like the phonetic patterns in certain Andorian dialects.
No, no they don’t, Hoshi. That’s nonsense, and later in the same episode she finds the language is based on higher math, so this suspicion was wrong. (Why an alien being that fills an entire planet and is the only one of its kind needs a native language I’m not sure.)
REED: With all due respect, Hoshi, we’re not talking about nouns and verbs here. It could take you days to learn a language like that, even if it is one.
Ah, yes, learning a new language with no references in days. Something Hoshi often does.
The technobabble is so bad that in the past I’ve proposed a new meme for conlang enthusiasts, from the episode “Fight or Flight”: “The grammar is bimodal.” For those instances when something in a conlang makes no sense. (I’m not aware of any bimodal grammar, though there is bimodal bilingualism.)
2023 Review
From my 2023 overview of Star Trek in general, in passing mention of the series:
I enjoyed the low-stakes, episodic nature of early Enterprise, but I get why it doesn’t make great television. I regret that they didn’t fully commit to the bit: for instance, within the first episode they are using transporters. I would have happily had an entire Star Trek series without transporters, given that they are science fantasy. I was much happier to see the evolution of the universal translator, even if the science of linguistics was poorly handled.
The fundamental problem with the show is that it never really knows what it is. The first two seasons stumble along episodically, then the third season is a serialized disaster inspired by 9/11: the Xindi arc. According to IMDB, this is the second most popular season of Star Trek ever, though it’s my least favorite. The fourth season contains a bunch of three-episode arcs and ushers in the era of fan-service Trek, earning it the highest rating of any season.
“These are the Voyages” is the series finale, and it was even more awful than I remembered. This review says it better than I could.
Despite all this, the series is a guilty pleasure, and I enjoyed rewatching it. (October 2021-March 2022)
Oh, and of course I love the theme over the instrumental they considered. Especially for its montage.
Photo credits: StarTrek.com
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