Brannon Braga was embarrassed by Extinction

Brannon Braga, the creator and executive producer of Star Trek: Enterprise, was behind many of the series’ better episodes, including Dear Doctor and Stigma, but there is one episode he admits simply didn’t work. That was Extinction, the third episode of the third season of Enterprise. Having previously written Threshold for Star Trek: Voyager, Braga hoped he could, in a sense, redo the episode and make it right that time. Instead, Extinction has become one of the least-liked episodes in the entire series.

And that’s something Braga understands, and he even went on record in one of the Season three Blu-Ray special features to acknowledge how bad the episode truly was. In fact, he called it “one of the singularly most embarrassing episodes of Star Trek I’ve ever been involved with.” As a seasoned writer, that has to sting, but no one can blame him for being embarrassed by it as it was a mess of characters that, after being infected by a virus on a planet, begin morphing into primal creatures that really looked like bad versions of rock stars.

And if Braga’s embarrassment wasn’t enough, Rick Berman’s assistant related that director Levar Burton went to the producers to tell them he was ashamed of having directed the episode. That’s something that not even the director of Threshold did even though fans were pretty disgusted with that episode, too. I have admitted previously that I didn’t find Threshold as objectionable as some episodes of Star Trek, but Extinction was a horrific. In fact, over the many times I’ve rewatched Enterprise, I’ve never rewatched that episode. Once was enough. Sounds like Brannon Braga feels the same way.