A brief guide to star tr.., p.25
A Brief Guide to Star Trek, page 25
Like the original Star Trek (and it is unclear whether this was a deliberate echo or not) Enterprise focused on its trio of central characters – Archer, T’Pol and Trip – at the expense of most of the others. Everyone had their storylines and occasional episodes would focus on them, but for the most part the central trio would dominate events, just as they had back in the 1960s.
Enterprise effectively dropped the complicated and convoluted Star Trek back-story by locating itself in the fertile ground before any of the previous Star Trek series had even happened. In doing so it set up an entirely different problem: how to make sure the stories told worked within the established future continuity of the 1960s Star Trek and beyond. It was an issue that would receive varying degrees of attention from the show’s writers and pro -ducers, but sometimes-fanatical attention from many of the franchise’s die-hard fans. Many initially regarded the latest series as a betrayal of all the Star Trek material that had come before it.
Well-established aspects of Star Trek were largely missing altogether from Enterprise, such as matter transporters (in their infancy and only used for inanimate cargo) and the holodeck, while others were actively explored by the series. The origins of starship force shields – intrinsic to Star Trek from its 1960s debut – were explored through the work of Malcolm Reed, while Captain Archer’s ethical considerations about interfering with new species would lay the groundwork for the idea of the Prime Directive that would so tax Kirk and Picard.
As well as exploring old Star Trek ideas, Enterprise was wise enough to throw some brand new elements into the mix. One of the most significant was the ‘temporal cold war’ concept, in which a mysterious entity (only ever depicted in shadow or silhouette) from the far future of the twenty-seventh century attempts to manipulate the timeline to his advantage. The Suliban – a species new to Star Trek – were the pawns of this temporal manipulator whose true identity (much speculated over by fans) was never satisfactorily resolved on screen. Archer’s dealings with the mysterious ‘future guy’ would be aided (or hindered) by another time-travelling character, Agent Daniels (Matt Winston). Having infiltrated Archer’s crew, he then reappeared several times across the series. Daniels took Archer into the future to experience a galaxy without the United Federation of Planets (in first season finale ‘Shockwave’), to visit a future Enterprise-J (‘Azati Prime’), and on trips to the past (Earth in the year 2004 in ‘Carpenter Street’; World War II in ‘Storm Front’).
Widely explored during the first season – and one reason for the prominence of T’Pol – was the relationship between humanity and the Vulcans. For almost 100 years since the ‘first contact’ incident depicted in the movie, the Vulcans had been nurturing mankind to become a space-faring race. While this involved offering assistance, it also meant withholding much useful knowledge, creating tension in the relationship. With the first steps into the wider universe taken by the Enterprise, the Vulcans never seem to be far away, seemingly keeping watch on Archer’s initial explorations. This aspect created a more interesting conflict between T’Pol and the other Enterprise crewmembers than that depicted between the alien Spock and his crewmates, which was more often played for incongruous laughs. T’Pol was assigned to the ship explicitly to keep an eye on what the humans get up to, as well as to aid Archer in his explorations. Complicating the situation, T’Pol eventually seems to ‘go native’, leaving the Vulcan High Command to properly accompany Archer in his battles with the aggressive warmongering Xindi, joining Starfleet in the process.
Following an outcry from fans, and in an effort to perhaps label the series in a clearer way, Enterprise’s producers decided to re-establish the Star Trek prefix for the show’s third season. The series set out in a new direction, exploring a single season-long story inspired by the events that struck America on 11 September 2001 (when the series was shooting its first few instalments). The Enterprise equivalent of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York was an attack on Earth by a mysterious alien assailant, when an unknown probe cuts a deep swathe across the planet from Florida to Venezuela, killing over 7 million people (with Trip’s sister a victim, giving at least one member of the Enterprise crew a personal connection to events). The final episode of the second season, ‘The Expanse’, sees the Enterprise recalled to Earth and refitted as a warship. The ship and its crew is now tasked with travelling through an unknown area (shades of Voyager) known as the Delphic Expanse to discover the home world of the Xindi, the malevolent alien race believed to be behind the unprovoked attack. This unsubtle echo of real-world contemporary events – the attack on 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – was a return to the kind of direct political comment that had fuelled so many of the ori -ginal Star Trek episodes of the 1960s and featured in many of Deep Space Nine’s best episodes, and it gave Enterprise a new sense of purpose and a clear direction. It also served to distinguish the show from the other Star Trek incarnations, something the producers had been keen to do from the start.
The temporal cold war storyline was effectively woven into that involving the Xindi – a distinctive alien species who did not just exhibit one distinguishing feature as so many previous Star Trek aliens had. Instead, the Xindi came in a variety of ‘flavours’, including aquatic, insectoid, reptilian, arboreal (tree-dwelling) and even an extinct avian variety. The Xindi included a primate branch that appeared more humanoid than the others. This imaginative approach to an alien species was unusual, with many other alien races falling foul of what fans had dubbed the ‘bumpy forehead’ syndrome in which the only distinguishing feature between species was a make-up-based cosmetic change to the forehead area.
The Xindi, it transpires, have been used by a race of time-travelling sphere-builders to attack the Earth in the hopes of preventing the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Making Captain Archer’s activities key to the future survival of the rest of the Star Trek universe (already depicted in the various series and movies) gave Enterprise a little more weight than a simple space exploration theme might have done. As the Xindi regard the sphere-builders, whom they know as ‘the guardians’, as gods (akin to the wormhole dwellers of Deep Space Nine), they are quick to act on their behalf. The season built to an event-packed finale in ‘Zero Hour’ in which Archer and his crew defeated the sphere-builders and destroyed the Xindi super weapon that had loomed as a season-long threat. In an unexpected development, the Enterprise returns to Earth only to discover the ship has somehow travelled in time to World War II – a weird, out of left-field Star Trek cliffhanger.
During its third season, Enterprise had shown a willingness to explore some strong science fiction ideas, such as the sphere-builders and the nature of the alien Xindi, an approach more often found in literary science fiction than on television. The fourth season saw this continue, but also saw the show delve much more into Star Trek lore under the direction of new chief storyteller Manny Coto. For the fourth year, Enterprise moved from its previous Wednesday night slot to Friday – long regarded as a ‘death slot’ for many television series, not least of which was the original Star Trek. Coto rapidly resolved several long-running story arcs, moving attention away from the fan-troubling (due to increasingly complicated continuity concerns) temporal cold war arc and resolving the outstanding Xindi story elements by the third episode of the fourth year.
These moves allowed Coto and his writers to introduce a new storytelling focus connected strongly with the nature and style of the original 1960s Star Trek. Characters, themes and concepts explored in Enterprise’s fourth year would draw heavily on the original tales of Captain Kirk’s time period. One main area explored was that of human (and alien) genetic engineering, resulting in ‘improved’ people known as ‘Augments’. The cre -ation of people with genetically resequenced DNA was used to explain both the Eugenics Wars and the existence of Khan Noonien Singh from The Original Series episode ‘Space Seed’ and the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the changing features of the Klingons between the 1960s TV show and 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (covered in the Enterprise episodes ‘Affliction’ and ‘Divergence’). The forehead ridge-less Klingons seen in The Original Series were explained away as victims of an Augment virus plague, an event that Worf in Deep Space Nine’s ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ describes as a long story Klingons do not discuss with outsiders.
Three episodes (‘Borderland’, ‘Cold Station 12’ and ‘The Augments’) featured The Next Generation’s Brent Spiner as an ancestor of Data’s creator, who is laying the groundwork for sentient androids. This was a transparent attempt to bring disenchanted fans of The Next Generation back to the show by featuring actors and characters they were more familiar with.
Such ‘ret-conning’, or retro-active continuity – providing ex -planations or origins of things already seen in the Star Trek universe – became something of a fetish during Enterprise’s fourth year, much to the pleasure of many fans of the franchise. The series also explored long-standing discrepancies in the ongoing depiction of the Vulcans throughout Star Trek history, attempting to explain variations by creating a splinter Vulcan society who follow the teachings of Surak, a mythical guru who developed the race’s penchant for logic (as seen through Spock). This allowed the Vulcans of Enterprise to be more emotional, even war-like.
The mirror universe of The Original Series and Deep Space Nine was revisited – again, a fan-pleasing gambit. The two-part story ‘In a Mirror Darkly’ was a prequel to The Original Series’ ‘Mirror, Mirror’ episode and saw the show sport a darker title sequence depicting the rise of the Terran Empire. The familiar Enterprise characters were reshaped as the most barbaric members of the evil Empire. Other episodes saw a return to the shuttle diplomacy practised by the 1960s Enterprise, featuring races such as the Tellarites and Andorians, drawing on The Original Series second season episode ‘Journey to Babel’ (which had also introduced Spock’s parents). Although these connections were pleasing to Star Trek fans, it seems that was the only audience the show was reaching. This trio of episodes (‘Babel One’, ‘United’ and ‘The Aenar’) received the lowest Nielsen ratings for the show to date, leading network UPN to cancel Enterprise in February 2005. It was the first Star Trek show to have been cancelled by the network rather than wrapped up by its producers since the original series in 1969. The termination of Enterprise brought to an end eighteen years of continuous Star Trek on television and effectively finished off the franchise for the next four years.
Even so, Manny Coto still had to wrap up the show. The result was a final set of episodes exploring terrorism (a thematic follow-up to the real-world driven Xindi attack storyline of season three). RoboCop actor Peter Weller starred as the leader of an anti-alien faction attempting to use an artificially created half-alien baby (using DNA from T’Pol and Trip) to rouse alien-fearing humans living in dread since the Xindi threat. This anti-immigration storyline was ripped from the day’s headlines, but was also seen by the producers as a dramatic narrative stepping-stone, taking humanity towards the utopian depiction that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had intended in his original conception. The episodes were additionally packed with fan-pleasing references to other Star Trek shows, but came far too late to do anything to save the series from the ignominy of cancellation.
As the end of Enterprise was announced before the writing of the final episode, and with the producers’ awareness that this was likely to be the last Star Trek seen on television for a while, the decision was taken to broadcast an unusual finale. Not only would ‘These Are the Voyages . . .’ be the final episode of Enterprise, it would also function as a franchise finale for the whole eighteen years of modern television Star Trek, from The Next Generation through Deep Space Nine and Voyager to Enterprise. This decision was yet another taken by Star Trek’s long-serving producers that would be extremely controversial with fans of the venerable franchise.
The setting of the episode was not Enterprise’s time period of the twenty-second century – instead, events featuring the NX-01 crew were part of a holodeck recreation experienced on the Enterprise-D in 2370, observed by The Next Generation’s Riker and Troi. The events were even tagged as having taken place during a particular The Next Generation episode, season seven’s ‘The Pegasus’.
Faced with a decision about whether to make a difficult admission concerning a cover-up to Captain Picard, Riker (a returning Jonathan Frakes) visits a simulation of the final mission of the original Enterprise, commanded by Captain Jonathan Archer. He sees the creation of the Federation, within which all following Star Trek captains will operate.
Although co-writers Berman and Braga intended the episode to be (in Braga’s words) ‘a valentine’ to the fans, its intended recipients reacted badly, especially to the surprise death of ship’s engineer Trip Tucker. Fans of Enterprise in particular felt short-changed that their series’ final episode had been essentially hijacked by The Next Generation to form a coda to the overall Star Trek television franchise. That the episode did not feature the actual characters from Enterprise but merely holographic re -creations on board the Enterprise from The Next Generation also rankled with loyal fans of the series. Although, across its four years on air, ratings for Enterprise had fallen from over 12 million to around 3 million, many fans appreciated an increase in storytelling quality across the last two seasons – mainly because the show became more Star Trek-like. For his part, final-year writer– producer Manny Coto regarded the penultimate episode, ‘Terra Prime’, as the end of the Enterprise story, as it wrapped up the final narrative arc he’d been producing.
As previously with The Next Generation and Voyager, the final episode ended with the same words that had opened the show’s debut four years previously – ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’ – concluding a montage of opening narration lines from Captains Picard, Kirk and Archer (working backwards in time, narratively).
‘I would have never done it if I had known how people were going to react’, admitted producer Rick Berman to startrek. com. ‘We were informed with not a whole lot of time that this was our last season. We knew that this was going to be the last episode of Star Trek for perhaps quite some time . . . It was a very difficult choice, how to end it. The studio wanted it to be a one-hour episode. We wanted it to be special, something that would be memorable. This idea, which Brannon and I came up with – and I take full responsibility – pissed a lot of people off, and we certainly didn’t mean to. Our thought was to take this crew and see them through the eyes of a future generation, see them through the eyes of the people who we first got involved [with] in Star Trek eighteen years before: Picard, Riker and Data. [We wanted] to see the history of how Archer and his crew went from where we had them to where, eventually, the Federation was formed, in some kind of magical holographic history lesson.
‘It seemed like a great idea, [but] a lot of people were furious about it. The actors, most of them, were very unhappy. In retrospect it was a bad idea. When it was conceived it was with our heart completely in the right place. We wanted to pay the greatest homage and honour to the characters of Enterprise that we pos -sibly could, but because Jonathan (Frakes) and Marina (Sirtis) were the two people we brought in, and they were the ones looking back, it was perceived as “You’re ending our series with a The Next Generation episode.” I understand how people felt that way. Too many people felt that way for them to be wrong. Brannon and I felt terrible that we’d let a lot of people down. It backfired, but our hearts were definitely in the right place. It just was not accepted in the way we thought it would be.’
Equally, in later years Braga was just as candid about what had gone wrong with the Enterprise finale: ‘I do have some regrets: it didn’t quite creatively align with the rest of the season. It had some great stuff in it and it was a cool concept, but I don’t know if it fully delivered and it really pissed off the cast. Rick [Berman] and I were involved in the franchise for years, Rick for eighteen, me for fifteen. We felt like we wanted to send a valentine to the show, but I do concur it was not a complete success.’
T’Pol actress Jolene Blalock called ‘These Are the Voyages . . .’ ‘appalling’, while Anthony Montgomery felt ‘there could have been a more effective way to wrap things up for our show as well as the franchise as a whole. It seemed to take a little bit away from what the Enterprise cast and crew worked so diligently to achieve’. Even Jonathan Frakes recognised the folly of bringing in his character from The Next Generation: ‘It was a bit of a stretch having us shut down [their] show.’
Critical reaction to the episode was the most negative that a Star Trek finale had ever received. Objections ranged from the inclusion of The Next Generation characters getting in the way of the Enterprise characters’ farewell, to the suggestion that The Next Generation cameos simply served as a painful reminder of a time when Star Trek on television had simply been better than it was in the twenty-first century. The Toronto Star claimed that the way Enterprise ended robbed ‘the characters (and their fans) of a significant long-term development or satisfying sense of closure’. Most critics laid the blame for the botched episode at the feet of Berman and Braga, while acclaiming Coto’s popular take on the Enterprise prequel idea.
