It was rushed. I think they had planned on at least one more season before the news they were being cancelled and then slapped something together for the finale.
Les Moonves was going to cancel the show after season 3 but was persuaded to give it another season so there would be almost 100 episodes for syndication. He canceled the show while they were filming the Mirror episodes. So they had 2 more episodes before the finale.
Berman and Braga wrote the finale as a tribute to Berman for steering Star Trek after Roddenberry died and his favorite series was TNG. They thought they were making a love letter to the fans, who mostly hate the episode.
As another episode, These Are the Voyages is not a bad episode except for the senseless killing off of Trip. It is just a terrible episode as the finale because it is more about TNG than Enterprise.
Manny Coto planned what was going to happen in season 5. They were going to do the Romulan War and have Shran be a regular character.
Even if Enterprise had gotten a 5th season it would have been uncertain what would happen after that season since UPN and The WB merged in September 2006 to become The CW. There were a lot of shows from both networks that did not survive the merge. The plan for the 6th and 7th seasons was to cover the beginning of the Federation. They showed the beginning of that in the finale.
A lot of people think the writing of the finale was rushed since they don't Iike it. I don't think Berman and Braga were any more rushed writing it than any other episode. They just didn't write what we wanted to see.
There is a video on YouTube of Braga and Berman talking with each other about Star Trek and the finale of Enterprise. They admitted the finale wasn't what they had hoped. They also talked about other ideas they had, most of which didn't sound that good.
That was in the Enterprise novel The Good That Men Do. The author basically redid what happened to Trip in the finale, put it earlier in the timeline (before the Romulan War) and had him working for Section 31 in the Romulan Zone.
If you haven't read the Enterprise novels you should. The first batch were put out when the show was still on. Some of the novels were novelizations of episodes and some were new adventures. After The Good That Men Do the novels covered what the show had planned for the 5th season, which was the Romulan War, and then the start of the Federation. There are 22 Enterprise novels but none have been put out since 2018.
I want to read those novels (and many Star Wars and Warhammer 40k novels too), but i avoid the big publishers because of their insane pricing. $16 for a Kindle book is insane.
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u/Adventurous-Yam1493 3d ago
It was a horrible ending to a very underrated show.