A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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 perhapslabel 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