The main problem with the entire Star Trek series is that they don't take any risks - at some point, they'd decided to avoid any chance that missing one episode involved a chance that the casual viewer wouldn't be able to familiarise him/herself with any changes in characters or situations (I mean, season cliffhangers aside, how many multi-episode storylines do we ever really get with Voyager or Enterprise? How many epic changes do we get on a season-per-season basis?). It's what makes it a perfect series for someone who only tunes in every now and then, but for someone who tries to keep up with it, it's simply one disappointing cliche episode after another, up to a point that it's no use watching it anymore. And whenever a character "dies", ends up in a life-threatening situation or another timeline altogether, or undergoes serious mental or physical changes in an episode, you just *know* that the character will be back to normal at the end of the 40 minute runtime of it - and that's in my opinion one of the ST franchise's biggest weaknesses, the lack of risk taking.
Enterprise mostly strikes me as an attempt to place the characters in completely impossible situations in the first two minutes, only to come up with even more farfetched explanations as to the "why" and "how" of those situations. Sure, it's still an interesting show to watch, but definitely not to watch many reruns of; every time I see a rerun of Voyager, ST:TNG or early Deep Space Nine, most of the time it takes only a few minutes to recognise the entire episode, plot development and plot line all at once, and all it does is make me reach for the remote to change the channel.
Sure, at the other side of the spectrum, shows like Earth: Final Conflict, Farscape and Babylon 5 made it very hard to keep up whenever you missed a single episode, but I take those any day over *any* Star Trek series or movies, if only for the occasional mindf**k with actual consequences. And, for better or for worse, they have the guts to kill off characters or sometimes even change the entire cast (E:FC), which are gambles that could work (like in season 2-4 of E:FC), or ruin the entire show altogether (season 5 of E:FC) - but at least
they're taking risks, and that's a lot more than you can say of most of the Star Trek series (bar perhaps the later episodes of DSN, with the Dominion War).
I have to admit Enterprise got a lot more interesting with the current Xindi-plotline, and there's at least *some* progression and a red thread throughout the episodes in the fourth season - and, with a glance at the short episode synopses at the official ST-site, they finally plan to have some crew members killed in the final epic battle. Pity the season finale promises an encounter with an alternate dimension copy of Enterprise and its crew, so it doesn't take a genius how they're going to bring back any dead cast members with easy cop-outs.
