Star Trek returning to television. Sort of.

[Professor Bear]

Enterprise (apart from the finale, which the cast, production crew, and publishers of spin-off media have disowned) is still canon: Scotty's backstory in the reboot movie is that he killed Captain (now Admiral) Archer's pet beagle while recreating a transporter experiment from Enterprise's fourth season.

[Hawkmumbler]

...Man I really need to watch more Star Trek before reading threads like this.

[TordelBack]

Hmmm, isn't Enterprise set in the 2150s and TOS in the 2260s, making Admiral Archer about 150 in the years prior to  ST2009? I know McCoy was still around in the 2360s for TNG at age 137, but a century more for Archer and Porthos XVI seems... ah feck it. I got nothing.

[The Legendary Shark]

He probably ended up living with Porthos XC on a lonely asteroid, brooding over where he went wrong and tinkering with something dangerous. That seems to be what becomes of most Trek legends.

[Link Prime]

... ah feck it. I got nothing.

We got him. Finally.

[The Legendary Shark]

Could be Admiral Archer II or III re-boot Scottie was talking about? You know how these Earth-things are with their titles and traditions...
.
Although, if memory serves, Scotty only mentions Archer's prize beagle, not Archer himself - so maybe it was stuffed.
.

[Professor Bear]

Well, you can see the Enterprise NX in the display of past starships when Admiral Robocop is talking in that second Trek reboot thing, and if the amount of time between Enterprise and NuTrek is that significant, then surely it wouldn't be affected by NuTrek's alternate-timeline shenanigans?

Although we are ignoring the most obvious answer to any NuTrek conundrum: NuTrek is stupid, so a wizard probably did it.

[The Legendary Shark]

Or Apollo.

[blackmocco]

Voyager really had the closest concept to TOS. A Federation starship lost in completely unexplored space? A crew made up of two rival factions? Great idea. The producers just never had the balls to really go their own way with it. The crew got along straight away. The stories were tired and stale. Didn't take long for the Borg to show up and giant boobs in a skintight suit to try boost ratings. Wasted opportunity.

[Professor Bear]

Later writers came in with good ideas and good intentions for Voyager, but the producers resisted any attempts at changing the formula that wasn't "make my girlfriend the focus of as many episodes as possible."

[Tiplodocus]

Enterprise (apart from the finale, which the cast, production crew, and publishers of spin-off media have disowned) is still canon:

Why is that then?  I didn't read the last episode as "Everything you have seen for the last foru seasons was a holodeck adventure" just "What you have seen in this episode was a holodeck adventure".  I actually thought it was a cute framing device - especially seeing Riker chat about lunch and prepare meals like he was a female character in early season Walking Dead. No reason for it not to be canon.

[Dandontdare]

it's still canon, it's just regarded as a shitty finale because it was more of a guest-platform for Riker and Troi whereas most of the cast of the actual show had nothing at all to do. It was a kick in the teeth for the Enterprise team, as it was seen as more of a TNG episode than a ST:E one. The big speech that it's been building up to throughout the episode, (Archer basically founding the Federation) was not even shown as Riker shuts off the holodeck. Also, the death of Tucker was gratuitous and made no sense.

[Professor Bear]

The short answer is: the cast and production crew felt aggrieved because the finale shifted the primary focus from their show to a show that hadn't been on air for 12 years, while the licence-holders for spin-off novels and comics were aggrieved because they tend to deliberately avoid retconning or ignoring primary canon because that just annoys the fanboys they rely upon, but the nature of Enterprise's finale meant that by necessity they had to retcon it if they wanted to produce stories set after the show's second season.

The long answer is: the finale, written by the original writers/producers who had been sidelined by the network two years earlier and were returning to write only the finale, ignored almost everything that had been gestating for the previous two seasons' worth of stories - like the upcoming Earth/Romulan war and Shran becoming a show regular - by skipping ahead in time and establishing that none of that (anything planned by newer producers on the show) had ended up happening, while also killing off a lead character so that the story couldn't continue as was if Enterprise was renewed by another network or picked up in other media.  It is deeply unlikely that this happened by accident, and several people have gone on record as saying they were not best pleased by what seemed to be a mean-spirited parting shot, such as the pilot bloke, the Vulcan lady, the engineer, and a couple of show writers.  Johnathan Frakes (Riker) has also since disowned it, saying it was a mistake to have a TNG character "shut down" someone else's show.

[The Legendary Shark]

To be frank, I don't think any Trek series had a decent finale.

[TordelBack]

To be frank, I don't think any Trek series had a decent finale.

TNG not only had a cool (if nonsensical) satisfying finale, it also had a magnificent final scene. And amazingly so did the final TOS movie. Which made Generations all the more unforgivable.