A Brief Guide to Star Trek

simply having a starship crew in space, as
Voyager
had done. Their idea was to build a similar mix of characters as seen on the original
Enterprise
, but move the time scale further back, pre-Kirk and nearer to contemporary Earth. A show set in the near future – about 150 years from now – would be more accessible to a wider audience than the technobabble-driven tales of the twenty-fourth century. It could show the events that led to Kirk and crew embarking on their five-year mission. What came before: how did humanity progress from the strife-riven twenty-first century to the creation of Starfleet and membership of the United Federation of Planets?
    Using a scene from the conclusion of the movie
First Contact
as their jumping-off point, Berman and Braga set out to explore what happened after the Vulcans made contact with humanity. This key event would launch mankind on a larger voyage, one that would take the crews of the first starships out into thedepths of space where Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Janeway would eventually follow.
    Radical and different were the key words for
Enterprise
. Berman considered setting the entire first season of a hoped-for seven-year run on Earth. The drama would take place in and around the first space dockyard where humanity’s first ever warp-capable starship was being constructed. The main characters would include those involved in the creation and construction of the ship, as well as those in training to become the crew of the first ever ship named
Enterprise
. Eventually it was felt this approach was too far removed from what might be expected from a show within the
Star Trek
universe, so the series would start with the ship already operational, crewed and beginning to explore the universe, following Vulcan contact.
    Perhaps the makers of
Enterprise
were too slavish in their attempt to recreate what had worked on the original 1960s
Star Trek
, especially when it came to the central characters. Captain Archer was certainly no Kirk, but he filled the leadership and man-of-action role in a way that no other
Star Trek
captain had since the 1960s. Casting
Quantum Leap
’s Scott Bakula in the role, following in the footsteps of Shatner, Stewart, Brooks and Mulgrew, seemed to owe as much to studio politics as to artistic choices. ‘Bakula had a good relationship with Kerry McCluggage, who was running the studio at that point’, admitted Berman, ‘and he was the first big name that seemed to be interested. He was an actor who I’d enjoyed [and] we thought [we were] putting together something that was fresh and unique and with some wonderful new actors.’
    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 doctorhas 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