Billingsley On Controversial Enterprise Finale
2 min readStar Trek: Enterprise‘s Dr. Phlox shares his opinion regarding the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Many fans may not have been happy with the finale to Star Trek: Enterprise, and Billingsley himself had mixed feelings about it, but he urged fans to rethink their annoyance toward Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.
According to Billingsley, the finale didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the fourth season. “The last season had so much of [writer and executive producer] Manny Coto‘s fingerprints on it that I think one of the things fans felt was a tonal and almost spiritual disconnect between the nature of the scripts throughout the fourth season and the final script. It was as if suddenly somebody from another cosmos dropped in and wrote the script, above and beyond the fact that the Enterprise‘s story was swallowed up by the framing device. I think people had just gotten used to Manny’s voice. I missed it in the final episode. Frankly, it should have been a two-parter. Our storyline needed to wind up.”
But Billingsley felt that Berman and Braga were expressing their emotion over what they felt was the ending of Star Trek after years of hard work on the franchise. “There are obviously mixed feelings among the fans about the legacies of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga,” Billingsley said, “but they were largely responsible for shepherding the franchise through many, many years of shows that people loved and kept watching. So they deserve a lot of credit. I think for them, the idea that they were going to be saying goodbye to Star Trek had a tremendous emotional weight. So they felt, and I can understand this, that they wanted to write the last episode of Enterprise.”
The finale story seemed to trivialize the third and fourth seasons of Enterprise, according to Billingsley. “I’m all over the map on this one because I have a lot of different feelings about it,” he said. “My problem with the final episode, ultimately, was that by jumping ahead however many years we jumped ahead, it was as if anything we did in the third and fourth seasons had no real weight. It seemed like the third and fourth seasons were being dismissed, which I’m sure was not the intention, but that was one of the things that bothered me.”
The finale meant the last appearance of Dr. Phlox. Would Billingsley return as Phlox again if he could in a Star Trek project? “I’d be delighted,” he said. “But is there any chance that one could make a wager on the odds of it happening? I’d bet my house it won’t happen, but if it did, sure, I’d want to be involved. I enjoyed playing Phlox.”
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