The point is, I don't care about the mirror universe except as part of the antagonism of a regular show. I suppose that you're right that there couldn't have been any regular characters in it so that Kirk will have been the first person to see the mirror universe. But to me, that's just a reason to not make the episode. The fact that the closest real Star Trek thing it ties to is from another series, just like the finale, is another dismissive swipe at Enterprise, in my opinion.

Add on to that that the story was dull, which may, in part, be due to the fact that I don't care about any of the characters, but more likely due to the fact that the plot was overwhelmingly simple and lacking in actual intrigue, especially considering that it was two hours, and I think you've got a bad episode of Star Trek. Then there's the fact that there were basically no science fiction elements to it. This could just as easily have taken place on an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, or whatever other CBS show your grandmother is interested in, with exceedingly minor changes. (Now I'm not saying that every episode of Star Trek has to be a SFX extravaganza or deal with Einsteinian physics, but this was a mirror universe episode, and any character development is pointless due to the fact that they're characters we'll never see again.)

Argh. Can you tell that story made me angry. Oh, here's a way to tie it back to the "real" universe without having anyone in the show know about it. Have one of the mirror universe characters become stuck in the real universe. Heck, make one of them part of the show's regular cast. Anyway, I'll let it go now.

In regards to the Xindi soap opera thing: I disagree. The Xindi storyline sucked because it sucked. The fact that new viewers can't get into it is a problem, but it's irrelevant. Babylon 5 was tremendous (well, at least the first four seasons), and it was much more integrated than the Xindi story was. Here's an example of why Enterprise sucks from that very storyline. In one episode, Archer is forced to decide whether to turn to piracy in order to save the Earth and, by so doing, committing a ship and her innocent crew to death. He chooses to save the Earth and kill them. This is a great setup, I think. Archer might become conflicted about all sorts of decisions in the future; he might turn completely cold-hearted; he might start to reconsider Humanity's place in the Universe, and whether they should be exploring. There are a lot of things that could develop from that. What do the writers do instead? They completely ignore it, as if nothing had happened -- as if Archer hadn't sentenced dozens of innocent people to their deaths. What is the point of putting him in that situation if it doesn't have any ramifications? It's basically the psychological side of Trip making the engine do things that it's not supposed to be able to do -- Treknobabble when you get down to it. It's just a conflict that we don't understand that will be dismissively resolved without any sort of ramifications. (They did a much better job with the first season episode of "Dear Doctor", which raised similar points and actually dealt with them in some way.) This sort of complete lack of character development is what killed the show for me. Things got better when they hired Manny Coto as showrunner, but they still didn't give him much of a chance.

Anyway, apparently Berman and Braga saw that people actually liked shows with long storylines, so they created one themselves. But the reason that the long storylines work isn't because the story is long, but because you get the opporunity to throw away one of episodic TV's prime tenets, namely that every episode must end with the characters being exactly like they were at the beginning. It was a plot-oriented long storyline, but what they needed was a character-oriented long storyline. What I'm getting at is demonstrable through this exercise, I think: Pick a main character from Enterprise and tell me everything you can about them, and I don't mean a litany of events in the episodes. Then do the same thing with a major character from Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9. I think you'll find that the description of the Enterprise character will be fairly short and succinct, whereas a character from one of those other shows will be long and full of contradictions. They have actual conflict in their lives, not just a series of obstacles to overcome.

Again, sorry. This stuff just gets me frustrated. This is why science fiction TV will never be well accepted; the vast majority of it is just blowing stuff up. Of course, lots of non-SF TV is exactly the same.