A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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