When you really look at it, you see the pure lack of effort regarding the supposed future of TATV. No one asked: "What will these characters look like in six years? What rank will they be? Will they be doing something else? Will they still need to haul MACO's?
And we know the answer.
Shran had a daughter with the Aenar Jhamel and then faked his death.
T’Pol wears more makeup than ever.
Archer is still bringing up the Xindi. And has regressed and comes off irritated at T’Pol again.
Hoshi and Mayweather at best peaked at junior lieutenant; Captain Hernandez calling her one pipped helmsman lieutenant in the Klingon forehead arc
does makes it canon that the one pip can be applied to lieutenants. And the ranks of Mayweather and Hoshi were never mentioned in the episode.
Oh, and the bridge and the uniforms get an update.
And that’s it.
It's like they wrote a 2155 story and then just moved it ahead 6y, for the same no-reason reason as why they chopped five years off Riker's age... and since Jonathan Frakes was in his 50's by then, he was not passing for 35.
Those that have written stories that suggest possible futures (TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT) or general foreshadowing - like how VOY episode “Before and After” foreshadowed the Krenim - weren’t the ones writing the finale.
If the finale was left in the hands of anyone else, they would have at least incorporated some of the future elements from the ENT episode “Twilight” (promotions, greying hair/different hair styles, T’Pol in a Starfleet uniform, changed personalities) into that episode.
Here is my biggest gripe with TATV, and this might be controversial or just my own weird quirk. The biggest emotional beat was Trip and T'Pol making peace with the loss of their daughter. That if Terra Prime hadn't done the process the way they did she would have been viable not died. That is a devastating loss. And then, next episode, "Eh, 6 years have gone by and that relationship is over." We're going to end the last episode with a big dramatic loss and then it never comes up again. No, fuck that. That's poor writing and ignoring character development for the sake of the status quo.
The daughter only died because the show got cancelled. She was supposed to have lived if the show continued
Interestingly, Michael Piller had written for the VOY two parter "Basics" that Seska's child was supposed to have died as a punishment for Seska, but was overruled by Berman because it was in "bad taste".
do we know the names of the rest of the NX class beyond Enterprise and Columbia?
It was intended to be NX-03 Challenger, NX-04 Discovery, NX-05 Atlantis, NX-06 Endeavour (T’Pol’s ship in the novels), and NX-07 Intrepid. While it was intended to be only seven NX class ships with only 3 of that class surviving, the novels suggest there’s more. So its entirely possible that an NX-09 Avenger was in the prime universe like in the mirror universe.
But when you look it up on Memory Beta you see some registries share certain names (NX-03 for both Challenger and Excalibur, NX-04 for was Discovery and Constellation, NX-05 for both Atlantis and Slayton, NX-06 for both Endeavor and Defiant, NX-07 for both Lexington and Intrepid)
The head canon I'm working with is that United Earth Starfleet intentionally produced ships with the same registries but different names to confuse the Romulans during the war.
It would also explain why no one on Voyager questioned the USS Dauntless having the registry NX-01A, as there was a Dauntless NX-01 operating alongside an Enterprise NX-01 at the time.
