Connor Trinneer didn’t understand Trip’s death

Trip Tucker’s death was a bone of contention

The series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise after four seasons still stands out sixteen years later and not for good reasons. Most everyone disliked the inclusion of characters Will Riker and Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as the jump forward in time and the holodeck simulation. Overall, few fans have “These Are the Voyages” on their to-be-watched-again list. And faithful viewers who had grown attached to all of the characters on Enterprise were livid at the death of Chief Engineer, Charles “Trip” Tucker, III.

Trip had gotten out of a lot of situations in his time as the chief engineer, including almost dying from dehydration in the desert, almost dying aboard a shuttlepod in the freezing cold with Lt. Reed, and being trapped on a planet with an enemy who kept trying to kill him. That was another situation where he almost died from heat exposure. On top of those, Trip had helped get the Enterprise out of some pretty gnarly situations without dying. So what ends up killing him is his decision to blow up intruders on the ship? A fact Connor Trinneer said was “scripted somewhat arbitrarily because “I’ve gotten out of much worse scrapes than that”.”

Trip’s death just didn’t make sense

In reality, Trip was killed because, according to Trinneer, someone was going to die, and he just happened to get in the way.

"“They were going to kill somebody and I just happened to get in the way!”"

But the simple fact was the death was just thrown in with no lasting effects whatsoever. Less than three days later, Hoshi, Reed, and Travis were having a conversation like nothing had happened. Not one of them mentioned Trip. In fact, after Captain Archer’s short conversation with T’Pol in Trip’s quarters, he wasn’t spoken of again. Even Dr. Phlox seemed particularly jovial once the Enterprise had returned to Earth. We didn’t even get a death scene for Trip like they gave Sim in “Similitude.”

A beloved crew member died for no reason. The Enterprise’s crew would have been more than capable of handling the intruders who, by the way, shouldn’t have been able to catch up with the Enterprise and board her without any advance notice anyway. It was a flimsy reason to kill a character, and it’s no wonder it didn’t make sense to Trinneer or any of the rest of us.