See Also: 'The Expanse' Episode Guide

Enterprise's season finale, "The Expanse", will be instrumental in shaping the new course of the series, executive producer Rick Berman said recently.

"It's not so much a cliffhanger as it is a tantalising taste of what next season will bring," Berman told Star Trek Monthly's Ian Spelling (via Sci-Fi Pulse). "Next season will deal with Enterprise being sent on a mission that may last many episodes, but it's not going to be a serialised arc."

"The Expanse" will see an alien probe launch a devastating attack on Earth, killing millions in the process. With the worrying prospect of future incursions by the aliens, the Enterprise NX-01 is sent into a region of space known as the Delphic Expanse to prevent any more attacks. "The stakes are the future of planet Earth. They're going to be sent to a part of space they've never been before; a part of space the Vulcans warn is extremely dangerous. It's kind of our quadrant's Bermuda Triangle."

Enterprise's new mission will introduce different elements into the series, but will also be closely related to one of the show's longest-running arcs, the Temporal Cold War. "There are going to be significant changes," Berman said. "There will be changes in a number of our characters. I don't mean that we're changing characters. But we're going to see changes as we go into a very ominous section of space, and try to find an alien race that we have reason to believe is going to do everything they can to destroy Earth's population. Our knowledge of all this will come from elements of what we've been referring to as the Temporal Cold War."

Berman promised the finale will be jam-packed with plenty of surprises, including some new faces. "So we're going to set up a lot in the final episode. We'll be setting up this new mission and setting up the section of space we'll be going into. We'll be meeting some recurring characters we haven't met before. And we're going to be involved in a rather ominous task. That's the direction we're interested in taking the series in season three, and the finale will set that up in a very dramatic way."

The full interview, in which Berman also talked about other upcoming season two episodes, can be found in issue 104 of Star Trek Monthly. Alternatively, excerpts are available here at Sci-Fi Pulse.

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