What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

Personally I always thought they should have ended the show with the opening salvos of the Romulan War. I thought Enterprise had gotten more on track in the last 2 seasons and thought it deserved a shot at another season. By the 4th season it finally felt more like a prequel.

I know Berman and Braga get trashed a lot but I do think they tried to make Enterprise a good show, and you could tell they tried different things with Enterprise. They brought in Manny Coto to shake things up a bit. And season long story arcs are pretty common on TV today. But Enterprise was the first Star Trek show to actually do a serious season long story arc in season 3, then their mini arcs in season 4.

I just think in the first 2 seasons they sometimes fell into TNG trap. At times it felt more like a TNG prequel than an original series prequel.

And let's be honest, I think all the spin offs took 2 or 3 seasons to really find their footing. The first 2 seasons of TNG and DS9 honestly were a bit uneven and those ended up being great shows in the long run. Voyager also got better as time went on (though I think of all the shows that had the most unexplored potential--I still liked it, but there were some missed opportunities there).

 

I loved the season 4 mini-arc format. I don't get why other shows don't emulate it. It's got great flexibility -- you can let each story be as long or as short as it needs to be, instead of being trapped into 1) fitting every story into just one episode or 2) dragging out every story to fill a full season.

I don't see that. It had more TOS elements than any series since TOS. It delved deeper into Vulcans and Andorians than any prior series, including TOS itself. It featured Tellarites on a recurring basis and gave us our first looks at species name-dropped in TOS, such as the Axanar, Coridanites, and Rigelians.

And ENT captured the sense of frontier exploration and pioneering better than any series since TOS -- even Voyager. Now, VGR was a show that was too much like TNG in its presumption of Federation power and dominance even in a ship alone on the frontier. ENT turned it around and made Starfleet the weaker power challenging more established, advanced powers like Vulcans, Andorians, and Klingons and striving to earn a seat at the table. It was very different from TNG.

 

Yeah, true. It allowed some more expansive shows but you still got several different stories in a season. And season 4 still had 2 or 3 standalones, while on the other hand there was occasional linkages between arcs (i.e. the Klingon augment virus and the augment episodes).

I guess it's a bit different with the current shows because they have a lot less episodes, 10 instead of 25+. And it seems many TV shows these days have season long, or even series long arcs. But I think I'd prefer something akin to season 4 of Enterprise, along with an occasional standalone. Even season 3 of Enterprise threw in the occasional standalone episodes that had a cursory link to the overall Xindi arc.

I see some of that. Perhaps I'm just a bit colored by specific episodes, like the one that brought in the Ferengi, or the Borg (though I admit I loved "Regeneration" and I also have to admit it does fit existing canon in the sense that they were careful never to actually name the Borg directly and it actually strengthened canon a bit by offering an in-universe explanation of how some in the Federation knew of the Borg before "Q, Who?" while at the same time forgotten to history). But you're right, in many ways this is a less perfect Earth, a less perfect Starfleet than even what we see in the original series.

And like I said, I could see they were trying, and all the spin offs seemed to need a season or two to get their footing. It'd be unfair to expect Enterprise to not need some time to find it's legs.

 

I think Ezri made captain way too fast.

 

I think it's the other way around, though. Season-arc plotting came first, and shorter seasons resulted from it, because a single arc works better with fewer episodes.

 

Didn’t she become a captain the same way Picard did on the Stargazer? My memory’s a bit fuzzy on this.

 

Yeah, IIRC she became captain when the original captain was killed.

Then I think it was The Soul Key, which came out later, but took place earlier in the timeline where Ezri first expressed serious interest in the command track.

 

Ezri transfers to the command track after taking command of the Defiant following Commander Jast’s death during the Jem’Hadar attack in Avatar, serving as Vaughn’s first officer during the Mission Gamma arc. She’s still a Lieutenant through most of this, takes Advanced Tactical training somewhere following The Soul Key, prior to the past section of Ascendance. Some point after that, prior to 2380, she transfers to the Aventine as its second officer. Then the Borg begin their invasion and the captain and first officer of the Aventine are killed, and, due to the crisis, she gets a field promotion to captain, a promotion she keeps after the invasion is concluded.

It's a quick promotion, sure, but it's also one that she received because of a crisis, and given the losses of ships, crews, and captains, I 100% believe Starfleet making that promotion permanent afterwards.

 

Captain Ezri Dax is a highlight of the litverse for me. Total badass.

 

If anything, I think Ezri’s reaction to the symbiote was a little too extreme. I did not love the “Ezri becomes the person (mostly Jadzia while sleeping with Bashir)” plot thread. It’s just not necessarily an ongoing condition we’ve ever seen any other Trill go through. I’m just about to read Destiny, so I’m curious if it continues.

 

Of course it wasn't. That was the whole point from the beginning -- that Ezri's experience was exceptional. Most Trill are joined to hosts who've been carefully selected for compatibility and have spent years training for the role, and most joined Trill we've seen are years past the initial process of adjustment. Ezri was a completely untrained candidate who was joined in an emergency and didn't even want to be a host. So of course her reaction wasn't like other Trill. That was the whole defining premise of her character from day one.

 

There are some shows, like The Flash, that has started doing a handful of shorter arcs per season, instead of full season arcs.

 

Yeah, that's close, and The Flash this season did have a trio of essentially standalone episodes between the main 8-part arc and the concluding 4-part arc. Still, it's not quite as flexible as ENT's season 4 format. Plus, it's been more than 15 years since then. What I'm saying is that it's strange nobody else emulated such a promising format in such a large span of time.

 

The Clone Wars animated series followed a similar format, especially in the later seasons.

 

More like in the early seasons. See, what I'm saying is that I like the variety of story lengths that ENT season 4 had, the flexibility of being able to make each story as short or as long as it needed to be, rather than forcing every story to fit the same running time. Early seasons of TCW had storylines of various lengths, but the last three seasons were all 4-parters. That's just as rigid as doing all 1-parters or all season-long arcs.

 

Variety is nice. Another reason it's sad Enterprise ended with Season 4. It seemed they found a formula that really worked for that show....then it was cancelled. DS9 experimented with that just a bit as well if you think about it, particularly at the beginning of the Dominion War where we had several linked episodes, and then the war's conclusion.

 

Season Six had two four-parters, a three part arc, and a two-parter.

 

There were two things happening there. One novelist's book (Dillard, I think) on the same subject (Riker-Troi-Worf) fell through. And selling PAD's novel as Imzadi II was a marketing decision.

 

I'm not following...

What does marketing have to do with this? Either it's Imzadi II or it isn't.