This Week In Retro: Star Trek: Enterprise (Patreon)

September 26, 2001: Star Trek boldly goes backwards

by Diamond Feit

There's this saying that's never sat right with me: "too much of a good thing." I object on the grounds that good and bad are opposites and if something is truly good, then it is not bad and I want as many good things as I can possibly have. These terms exist on a spectrum, not a circle; you cannot loop around from one to end up on the other side (I am also no fan of identifying a work as "so bad it's good" for this reason).

In the 1990s, Star Trek fans experienced a previously-unheard-of level of satisfaction as three separate series aired in succession. The Next Generation had been a syndication success story, resulting in spin-off shows Deep Space Nine and Voyager, the latter two actually airing against one another in certain markets. Each show had their fans and detractors, but after the original series' sudden departure in 1969 after only three years, receiving 14 years of brand-new material was pure joy, and all three 24th-century Star Trek incarnations ran for seven seasons apiece.

Yet as we reached the 21st century here in the real world, suddenly Star Trek teetered on the edge of oblivion. The Next Generation had graduated from the small screen to movie theaters, but their big-screen adventures underwhelmed audiences. Deep Space Nine ended in the year 2000 with a definitive finale, suggesting that no motion pictures would be in their future. The following spring, Voyager defied the odds and returned home at last, wrapping up that show's premise unambiguously.

This meant that in the fall of 2001, there would only be one Star Trek series on the air, a new creation which would serve as a prequel for all previous stories. After outlining an entire galaxy's worth of species and intrigue in the distant future, the creative team wanted to turn back the clock to the 22nd century and tell the tale of Earth's first steps into the final frontier. There would be no United Federation of Planets, no established alliances or antagonists. There would be only one ship, and her name would be Enterprise.

Before you roll your eyes, know that 20 years ago the present glut of reboots or remakes did not overwhelm the market as they do today. Taking an established franchise like Star Trek, stripping away decades of established lore, and asking fans to accept a less-experienced, less-advanced crew represented a significant gamble. The Next Generation had risked alienating devoted Trek viewers in 1987 by jumping ahead in time past the lifespans of the original crew whom fans knew and loved. Enterprise took an even bigger risk by leaping back to before Kirk and Spock had even been born, let alone saved humanity or achieved galactic peace.

According to the Enterprise bible, "By setting the series in STAR TREK's 'past' we are also setting it closer to our present. This will allow us to create more 'contemporary' characters; a pioneering cast which can embody the positive, uplifting elements of the original series and The Next Generation." Development for the series followed production of the film Star Trek: First Contact wherein the Next Generation crew goes back in time to the year 2063, encountering unexpectedly flawed human beings from their past. No doubt the producers wanted to explore those sorts of characters for a change, after spending years in the more enlightened setting of the 24th-century.

A practical matter also made a case for a Star Trek prequel show: After 14 years of telling stories featuring advanced technology, the writers had become increasingly dependent on using non-existence "science" to create tension and settle dilemmas on-screen. Regular viewers could name dozens of episodes that revolve around a transporter or holodeck malfunction, and had grown to accept that in the end, everything came down to someone looking for verteron particles or tachyon pulses or antichroniton fields to resolve that week's particular crisis.

However Enterprise looked on paper, in practice the production never measured up to its peers. One problem lay with the casting, as this pioneering crew would be the first in 30 years to sport a majority of white male actors. From the very start, Star Trek always pushed against tradition by including a variety of performers on-screen, and that policy continued and evolved through the 1990s. Deep Space Nine and Voyager both centered around non-white-male leads with their supporting casts likewise including people from different backgrounds. Yet Enterprise gave us a white guy captain, white guy engineer, and a white guy tactical officer, plus a white woman as a Vulcan science officer and one more white guy in sick bay as an alien doctor.

Diversity gripes aside, the actors who were cast did their best to make these characters familiar and fun, but the scripts they had to work with did them no favors. The attitude of these untested space explorers bordered on ignorance and even leaned towards hostility. A new premise dictated that the crew had to "decontaminate" after away missions, leading the actors to disrobe and rub oil on their bodies. These scenes were supposed to be "sexy" but instead read as pandering to the basest of male fantasies; an early example saw young Ensign Sato accidentally tear her shirt off sneaking through the corridors, forcing her to navigate the ship topless.

The first two seasons did feature running story threads setting the table for the formation of the Federation, but the looming villain was a shadowy figure instigating history-altering incursions from the distant future. This "temporal Cold War" plotline never made much sense and ultimately the identity of "Future Guy" was not resolved; subsequent interviews have revealed no one in authority knew who he would turn out to be, later speculating that he might have been a Romulan or even an older version of the captain. That either of these ideas stands as plausible demonstrates how vague a threat he represented.

Enterprise debuted to strong ratings (12 million households tuned in for the pilot), but audiences did not stick around for long as the numbers dropped off quickly. The series went through significant changes at the end of the second season when Earth experiences a 9/11-style disaster, leading to a season-long arc putting the Enterprise on the offensive against a new enemy. The following season shifted the focus again to multiple short arcs of two or three episodes apiece, establishing alliances that would ultimately lead to the creation of the Federation. None of these alterations brought back viewers, however, and the show would be cancelled in 2005 after only four years.

I realize this reads like a laundry list of complaints warning people away from the show, but in truth I really enjoy what Enterprise became in its second half. Every Star Trek series experiences growing pains, but only Enterprise had the pressure of carrying the franchise and a floundering television network on its back (its home channel, UPN, would leave the airways one year later). I would never place it on the same tier as Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, but when it worked, it worked wonders.

The Enterprise finale (one of the worst ever, for the record) would lead to a long hiatus for Star Trek, one where the series journeyed back to movie theaters for three action-packed "reboot" stories set in an alternate timeline. Even as I enjoyed those pictures, I yearned for a return to episodic adventures, for Star Trek is at its best when it reflects our current society back at the audience, forcing us to confront our own failings and recognize how far we have to go before things improve.

In 2021 there's more Trek than ever before with no fewer than five different series in production right now, plus an additional three "under development." Is this "too much" of a good thing? Not hardly, because not all of it's "good," but I'll take the show in its current imperfect form over another decade-long absence. Maybe Strange New Worlds will be a return to form. Maybe next season Discovery and Picard will demonstrate growth. Maybe Lower Decks will keep kicking total ass, delivering laughs and hardcore continuity in unexpected ways.

Maybe, maybe, maybe...that's what Star Trek has always been about. Maybe we won't destroy ourselves. Maybe we can work together to solve our problems. Maybe we're not alone in this galaxy. Maybe baseball is the perfect metaphor for life. Maybe the universe is a source of infinite wonder, and maybe exploring the unknown is what we're meant to do with our all-too-brief time here.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.