A Brief Guide to Star Trek (35 page)

Archer would find himself surrounded by avatars of the key characters of the 1960s
Enterprise
. There’s the logical, unknowable, inscrutable Vulcan – but this time she’s female, in the shapely form of T’Pol (Jolene Blalock). There’s a crusty, ornery Southern character who can advise the captain, but instead of being the doctor like McCoy, he’s Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer), the ship’s engineer. Linda Park as Hoshi Sato faced a task almost as thankless as that handed to Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura, as the ethnic communications officer. The ship’s doctor
has been dramatically different on each version of
Star Trek
: Southern, female, genetically engineered, sentient hologram and now alien. Doctor Phlox (John Billingsley) would largely provide the series’ comic relief as the Denebulan doctor unafraid of flaunting his alien ways. The callow youths – the equivalents of Chekov or Wesley – were Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating) and Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery). Perhaps the most interesting and dramatically different addition to the
Enterprise
cast – and something no other
Star Trek
had yet featured – was the captain’s pet dog, Porthos.

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.