As I’ve said before, I was never a fan of Enterprise, the fifth and most-likely final televised incarnation of the venerable Star Trek media franchise. I didn’t hate it. It just wasn’t my cup of “tea, earl grey, hot.” I watched three or four episodes when it premiered, saw that it looked like more of the tired old same, and decided to spend my valuable TV-viewing time on other things. A couple of friends who stuck with it say I really missed out on something good, that the show picked up in subsequent years and that, as an old-school Trekkie, I would’ve liked the homage-heavy final season. Maybe they’re right. But I’ll never know, because I couldn’t break through my indifference long enough to give the show a second chance.

Nevertheless, I was somewhat curious about the series finale that aired last Friday. Not curious enough to watch it, apparently, because I forgot it was on, but I have wanted to know how the Trek franchise was going to end after so many years. (Yes, I do believe it’s over, regardless of what the misguided optimists say about a new Star Trek series debuting after a “rest period.” It’s a beautiful dream, you crazy kids, god love ya. If it happens, I owe all of you a Coke.) Luckily, there’s plenty of commentary about the finale floating around the blogosphere today, so I’ve been able to get a pretty good sense of how it all went down, both pro and con.

On the less-than-impressed end of the spectrum, we’ve got Peter David, a writer who has dabbled in this particular universe on both a personal and professional level. (He’s written a number of ST tie-in novels and comics, but he also identifies himself as a fan.) David thinks the uninspired finale, which focused more on guest star Johnathan Frakes (Commander Riker from ST:TNG) than the series regulars, was a sort of meta-comment on the Trek fan scene:

Basically, the last episode of “Star Trek” consists of a guy in a Starfleet outfit sitting around watching a rerun of “Star Trek,” and even creating his own fanfic by writing himself into the story and making himself a wise, wonderfully intelligent individual who all the crewmembers unburden themselves to.

Meanwhile, James Lileks takes the contrary view — as usual — by defending what he thinks was a perfectly appropriate finale, despite the grumbling fans who feel betrayed by the producers’ decision to make the end of Enterprise an accessory to a ten-year-old episode of The Next Generation:

[The finale] was essentially a holodeck story. But please. What else could we have had? …There’s almost nothing else left to do. And so we saw the entirety of the Enterprise story as something that had become Distant History, a story you read in second grade. The ship was Old Ironsides — interesting, inert, historical, a relic. That was a fun tour, let’s have lunch. It was a contrast between the tone of a standard episode (what happens now is incredibly important and the Federation hangs in the balance and any one of our heroes may be killed, despite the fact that they have signed a contract for the next season) and the cool regard of history, for whom these events are simply a matter of record. What Riker was worried about [in the finale’s frame story] would be history in the same way, eventually. That’s the point. We think that Today is incredibly vital and pertinent; surely history will see it as we do, feel it as we do. Well, no. Not unless it’s a very bad day, and certainly not if it’s a nice one. Battles turn into paragraphs. Sunk ships are footnotes, if they’re lucky.

As for myself, I can’t comment on a show I didn’t see. I think if I had been a fan of Enterprise, I would be among those who are torqued off about the finale revolving around a character from another show. But I have to say that I found Lileks’ point about history and our perceptions of it very compelling. It actually mirrors something I’ve been thinking about the last couple of weeks, namely the sobering realization that the things that have always been so important to me — things like certain TV series, movies, music, even the evolving landscape around my home — are not eternal, no matter how much I wish them so, and will not be appreciated in the future the way I have appreciated them. The fact is, there’s a whole generation that has grown up with no memory of seeing Star Wars in a theater, or of watching the original Star Trek on TV, or, here locally, of playing in alfalfa fields and learning to drive on dirt roads. My frames of reference, the environment and technology and popular culture that shaped me, are increasingly out-of-date and irrelevant. I don’t think that invalidates my continuing affection for the things I loved as a kid… but it does make it very difficult to explain to modern kids why these things matter.

Anyway, if you’re at all interested in Star Trek — and I can only assume that you are, if you’ve read this far — I suggest you read Lileks’ comments in their entirety. He reviews the entire history of the franchise and makes some more excellent points (like the fact that the writers and producers of all the various Trek spin-offs were generally incapable of creating a believable male-female relationship, although I disagree with him re: Worf and Jadzia). If you’re not familiar with James, though, be warned that he can be curmudgeonly in his opinions. For example, he has little use for the type of hardcore fan that The Simpsons so brilliantly captures and satirizes in the form of the Comic Book Guy character. But he more than makes up for his burst of bad attitude with his concluding anecdote, a heartwarming experience he once had at the Smithsonian with James “Scotty” Doohan and the filming model of the original, ’60s-era Starship Enterprise.