A Brief Guide to Star Trek

make it work, feeling the return of a ‘fake’
Voyager
crew would undermine the return of the real team later.
    The arrival of
Enterprise
saw a return to a looser commissioning structure and so resulted in a higher number of well-developed ideas that never made it to the screen, most of them apparently coming from
Star Trek
cast members past and present.
    According to Hoshi Sato actress Linda Park, her co-star Connor Trinneer proposed a story inspired by the Quentin Tarantino movie
Pulp Fiction
, told from the point of view of an alien race. The alien perspective would have been depicted through the
Enterprise
crew talking incomprehensible gibberish until a method of communication was discovered (some might say many
Enterprise
episodes were ‘incomprehensible gibberish’ anyway).
    Following up on his story pitch of 1966, William Shatner was set to return to
Star Trek
by appearing in an
Enterprise
two-parter. Fourth season showrunner Manny Coto recalled that the plan was to feature Shatner in a mirror universe-set tale written by Shatner’s friends and novel co-writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who were also staff writers on the final season of
Enterprise
. The story pitch came from Shatner himself over lunch with Rick Berman, Coto and Brannon Braga. The mirror universe featured a device called the Tantalus Field that disintegrated targets remotely. The writers wanted to revise this, making it instead a time travel device that sent prisoners back in time to a penal colony. The
Enterprise
discovers the prison colony, finding mirror-Kirk (called Tiberius) imprisoned. Tib -erius sees the ship as an opportunity for escape, but he discovers that in this time period the mirror universe does not yet exist. Tiberius and Archer work together to investigate what creates the mirror universe, only to find that it is their own actions that bring it about. Although the ideas were well received, Berman had an alternative take from Mike Sussman, one of the producers on both
Voyager
and
Enterprise
, that would see Shatner playing the chef (perhaps riffing on his presenter role in TVshow
Iron Chef
) on board the earliest
Enterprise
, a comic equivalent to
Voyager
’s Neelix. As neither Shatner nor Paramount could agree terms for his appearance, the ideas progressed no further, although ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’ saw the return of the mirror universe with an alternative explanation of its origins. Coto’s exploration of the links between his show and the 1960s
Star Trek
resulted in a handful of other aborted ideas. Coto became fixated on returning a little known character, Colonel Green – an eco-terrorist involved in the third world war and seen in the episode ‘The Savage Curtain’. Coto planned to have his
Odyssey 5
star Peter Weller (best known as RoboCop) play Colonel Green in an episode that returned to some of the issues explored in the earlier 1960s instalment. Both Weller and (briefly) Colonel Green would appear in the
Enterprise
episode ‘Demons’. That same episode featured the idea of terraforming Mars, home of rebel separatist Paxton (Weller), which had its origins in a Coto story dealing with the independence of the Earth colony on the red planet. Coto envisaged an attempt to change the atmosphere of Mars using comets that would instead be aimed at Earth by terrorists, an incident Coto described as the Cuban Missile Crisis in space.
    Some of the more unusual unused ideas for
Enterprise
featured Captain Archer’s dog, Porthos. Stories pitched included Porthos becoming intelligent and conversing with the crew, the dog being the only one able to communicate with an alien canine race and Porthos becoming captain of the
Enterprise
. While these stories were inherently silly, the official reason for their rejection was that the showrunners did not want Porthos becoming the star of the show, in the way that some robotic sidekicks of the 1970s (such as Twiki on
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
or robot dog K-9 on
Doctor Who
) had done. Many of these story claims came from Andre Bormanis in a DVD extra on the box set of
Enterprise
season four, resulting in some fans believing he’d actually just invented them . . .
    The lost voyages of
Star Trek
, from the 1960s birth of the show to its final end (on television at least) at the beginning of thetwenty-first century, provide a secret history of the series. It’s a glimpse into an alternative world – a kind of mirror universe of
Star Trek
storytelling – in