Star Trek: Enterprise is cancelled. And good riddance to bad rubbish. This cancellation comes about four seasons too late, considering that the hammer should have fallen as soon as the words “Temporal Cold War” were uttered. It could have been good: they could have built a show about the newness of adventuring into an unexplored galaxy — instead, this awesome potential took a back seat to convoluted time travel plot lines and a messy divorce from the continuity of the original series. Sadly, the abrupt end comes just when Manny Coto is picking up the pieces and fulfilling the show’s earlier promise as a true prequel to Classic Trek. The series was just getting good when they cut it down!

So farewell, Enterprise. When all is said and done, I can’t say I’ll miss you all that much, though I’ll certainly mourn this passing much more than I did Voyager’s.

(And farewell to Captain Jonathan Archer, a pathological liar who can’t seem to get out of any predicament without staging some kind of elaborate acted fiction to fool aliens into one Corbomite Manuever after another. Not to say that Scott Bakula did a bad job of the character: he’s a talented actor and a fine addition to the captains of Star Trek. If you ask me, the fact that he performed so well on the one-dimensional writing that plagued the first three seasons puts him on the level of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart. I don’t know about Avery Brooks, though, since I never watched any DS9.)

Flash back to May, 2001, when news of the upcoming prequel series first came out.