A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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 withstorytelling 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 LarryNiven. 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,