Well, to give you an idea of how I liked it, I'm getting ready to start up, for TU's Fan Fiction section, the Official "TATV..." Decanonization Contest, offering a prize to the person who writes the coolest story that effectively wipes out TATV.
I'm not even going to discuss the utterly pointless, wandering, redundant, unnecessary, and repetitive first half-hour. Think that sentence was unneceessarily long? Not nearly as long as those 30 min. Shran? Child? Random walking? Poor writing?
I've got nothing against the Riker and Troi thing, but the tie-in was weak at best.
And what in the frelling DSOKPACH were those blatches thinking with Trip's pointless, unnecessary, ignonimous, redundant, even repetitive death?! We watched Major Hayes last year, B&B! We don't need the SAME BLOODY SCENE a SECOND TIME! Was there a dramatic point? Was the writing clever? No! Trip died basically just like Phlox came close to dying in "The Catwalk!" Ooo! Evil alien pirates the world will forget about in a week! Why does Bermaga insist on killing off characters for no reason? I mean, we've got the same thing going on here as with Data in Nemesis! The story would have been dramatically satisfied without the death, which added nothing to poignancy and simply made us all walk away with a bad taste in our mouths!
Too many exclamation points in this post. Oh, well. I'm ranting, I know it, and I'm proud of it.
Don't get me wrong. I condemned the Wooden Man and supported Bermaga for years. It wasn't until... oh... must have been "Precious Cargo..." no, it was the Trellium-D arc that I realized they really weren't giving us anything worth watching. And yet I did, because, somehow, the characters rose above the unadulterated crap for scripts they were getting. You know what? There is no one on the Enterprise cast who is more right about that show than Jolene Blalock. What makes her better than Voyager's Pinnochio is the fact that she kept acting--and acting well--after the producers destroyed her role. What I'm trying to say is that, when Bermaga tried to step in on Manny Coto's season (and I am utterly disbelieving Berman's recent, pathetic defense on TrekToday), they should have not only been denied, but possibly fired, and, if they refused to leave, shot through the lungs. Braga, anyhow. Berman has reigned during some of Trek's greatest times. Braga, so far as I can tell, was around for Trek's major turning point: First Contact. Since then he has led the franchise into the ratings doldrums and now cancellation.
But I digress.
The last five minutes of TATV were not bad. It were the only place in which Riker and Troi should have appeared. That spot, in fact, worked great with regards to them. Seeing Manny Coto behind Reed was nice. Reed, Hoshi, and Travis interacted... nicely. Mediocrely [sic]. The Ultimate A/T scene was weaker than it could have been, because Enterprise's Big Three (remember back at the beginning of the series when Bermaga promised a TOS-esque relationship?) was minus one of its number. Without Trip facilitating, A/T scenes haven't really worked for years.
And, of course, we didn't get to see the speech... unless, of course, you choose to believe that the "Space. The Final Frontier." monolouge was in fact the text from Archer's speech.
On that subject, the final montage was the one single moment of the episode that I truly loved, and it deserved to be the final moments of an 18 year era.
When Star Trek returns, I hope that we of Trekdom will lead a revolt against the Bermaga regime. Anybody but Braga or J. Michael Stravinski! Berman may live, but only if he submits to Our Will. For the motherland!
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