A Brief Guide to Star Trek (36 page)

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.

The unexpected death of Trip Tucker was seen as a pointless stunt that had been pulled with little impact. Again, the
Toronto Star
noted ‘a major character is pointlessly killed off in service of a pointless plot device’. Even Tucker actor Connor Trinneer said he felt that the death of his character was ‘forced’ and was simply a device to manipulate the fan audience. In general,
Enterprise
was the most poorly regarded of all the
Star Trek
TV series, even after
Voyager
. Melanie McFarland, writing in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, noted that the series ‘never found the sense of uniqueness within the
Star Trek
universe that every version that came before it possessed’.

What Berman and Braga failed to recognise was that in re -creating the
Star Trek
of the 1960s, they were sticking with
storytelling techniques that were slow and old-fashioned. Television – and science fiction shows in particular – had developed and changed hugely over the years, drawing inspiration from contemporary movies and science fiction literature of more recent decades.
Star Trek
had almost stopped being television science fiction and had become a period genre unto itself, with
The Next Generation
,
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
all being variations within that fixed, 1960s style of storytelling. For all its attempts to do something ‘different’, because it was still essentially Gene Roddenberry’s
Star Trek
,
Enterprise
was doomed almost from the outset to contain all the positives and negatives of every other
Star Trek
TV series and movies that had come before it. It couldn’t help itself, and it wasn’t possible for it to be any other way. Those in charge, however, didn’t seem to realise they were not making science fiction television, they were specifically making
Star Trek
television, a sub-set all its own.

According to Brannon Braga, ‘If
Enterprise
had continued, we would have kept going with Manny Coto’s unique vision of the show. Also, we would have explored the temporal cold war to its conclusion. We all felt that there were many more
Trek
stories to tell with that crew, and we were saddened by its premature end. Manny and I speak often about this – the show had really caught fire in seasons three and four.’

Among the ideas planned for the aborted fifth season of
Enterprise
were the origins and birth of the Federation (partly covered in ‘These Are the Voyages . . .’) and the first moves in the war with Romulus described in
The Original Series
episode ‘Balance of Terror’, with the Romulans developing as the season’s major villains. Braga even hinted that he and Berman had considered making the mysterious ‘future guy’ of the temporal cold war a Romulan, to fit in with Coto’s proposed story arc.

Following his work on year four, Coto planned to continue to strengthen the connections between
Enterprise
and the other
Star Trek
shows. One planned episode was a sequel to ‘The Slaver Weapon’, an instalment of
The Animated Series
featuring the alien Kzinti race, created by renowned science fiction author Larry
Niven. The construction site of the first ever Starbase and the cloud city of Stratos, previously seen in
The Original Series
episode ‘The Cloud Minders’, were also under consideration as settings to be further explored. An origin story for
Voyager
’s Borg Queen was also in the works, as was the revelation that T’Pol’s father was a Romulan agent (perhaps tying in with the Romulan war arc). Another mirror universe story was also in preparation, perhaps to focus on Hoshi Sato in her alternate role as Empress of the Terran Empire. This may have taken the shape of a four- or five-episode mini-series spread throughout the season.

Coto even planned for an addition to the
Enterprise
crew in the form of Andorian Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs), a recurring character who’d already appeared in ten episodes of
Enterprise
. The character might have joined the crew, in the words of Coto, as ‘an auxiliary or adviser’.

The cancellation of the series meant that none of these ideas would come to fruition, although in response to the fan outcry about the death of Trip Tucker, tie-in novels were published by Pocket Books, beginning with
Last Full Measure
and
The Good That Men Do
(both by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin), which revealed the holographic depiction of his demise was a fabrication covering up Tucker’s involvement with the shadowy Section 31 intelligence agency. According to the novels, Tucker faked his own death in order to be sent undercover to infiltrate Romulan space, aiming to prevent an interstellar war. These novels, and further follow-ups, presented an opportunity for the authors to expand upon the back-story and future of one of
Enterprise
’s most loved characters. It was an unusual example of those who police the expansion of the franchise in licensed spin-off material allowing an on-screen development to be superseded by ancillary material, a development that played well with Trip Tucker fans.

Almost immediately after the demise of
Enterprise
, Rick Berman attempted to further prolong the
Star Trek
franchise by beginning development work on a new film to take place after the events of
Enterprise
but before those of the original
Star Trek
TV series. An executive reshuffle at Paramount put paid to Berman’s efforts and he was finally removed from controlling the
Star Trek
franchise after eighteen years in charge, the most influential person on its development after creator Gene Roddenberry himself.

Berman was a television production professional, responsible for delivering hundreds of hours of technically complicated television on time and to broadcast standard over a period of eighteen years – no mean feat. He was not primarily a creative storyteller himself, but he’d been surrounded by key figures who’d used the
Star Trek
format in various ways to tell modern, meaningful stories. Key among those whom Berman had supported in their project to reshape Gene Roddenberry’s universe were Michael Piller, Ron Moore, Ira Steven Behr, Jeri Taylor, Brannon Braga and Manny Coto.

The opening episode of
Enterprise
in 2001 had attracted 12.5 million viewers, but the number of people watching regularly dropped to less than 6 million very quickly. By the final season that number had halved again to under 3 million viewers, with a series low of just 2.5 million in January 2005, resulting in cancellation. Based on the number of viewers alone, the show must be considered a failure, whatever narrative achievements may have been made. It was a downward spiral Rick Berman could not deny. ‘The show certainly had a great start. It got very good reviews and it had a huge audience for the first half dozen episodes and then it started to slip’, he said. ‘I could take the blame for it. I could put the blame into the scripts. I could put the blame into franchise fatigue. I don’t know why it didn’t work.’ Brannon Braga suggested that the reason for the cancellation was viewer fatigue, noting that ‘after 18 years and 624 hours of
Star Trek
, the audience began to have a little bit of overkill’.

It would take almost exactly four years from the transmission of the final episode of
Enterprise
, but
Star Trek
would return – not on TV, but back on the big screen once more – and it would become bigger and more successful than ever before.

‘I think there is a need for the culture to have a myth. People look to
Star Trek
to set up a leader and a hearty band of followers. It’s Greek classical storytelling.’
William Shatner