So, when I heard about the concept for a pre-Kirk era show highlighting the "pioneer days" of Starfleet, I was cautiously optimistic. Hearing that Scott Bakula was cast as Captain raised my expectations as well and I eagerly tuned in during the first season. It was a bit weak, but my thoughts were "Well, it's the first season, even TNG took a couple of seasons to really get off the ground."
Unfortunately although I continued to watch Enterprise, after a while I started to wonder why I bothered. Bakula played it too warm and fuzzy, the other characters didn't stand out (except for T'Pol) and I didn't feel a sense of connection to what was to come in the Star Trek universe.
Along comes season 3 and the producers decide they need to try something completely different to bring interest back to the show: They create a massive threat of desctruction of the Earth, and send Enterprise to a far corner of space in order to disrupt the plans of the attackers.
I appreciate the risk of a season-long arc, but there were problems:
- The Temporal Cold War storyline was moving much too slowly, not really going anywhere.
- Sending Enterprise to an area that was out of communication range of Earth was too much like the concept of "Voyager".
- This also made the show more "stand-alone" instead of connecting it to the history of Trek and the formation of the Federation, which was really the selling point of the original concept.
- Transforming Archer from "puppy dog" to "perpetually angry".
So. From somewhere happy, Manny Coto comes to be associated with the show as a writer, creating a couple of the better episodes to air in Season 3. From a further happy place, for some reason Berman and Braga decide to entrust Manny with the production of the series.
For the first time ever, I can say: "Thank you, Berman and Braga."
Manny has stated that he's a huge fan of classic Star Trek, and has stated that his mission is to tie Star Trek: Enterprise into the history of the Star Trek universe. He wants to bring in characters and stories that fill in the gaps that fans have wondered about.
Article comments
1 - Justene
This review was chosen for Advance.net. You will be able to find it on newspaper sites including Cleveland.com.
2 - Jim Carruthers
I'd mostly avoided all of last season Enterprise because Star Trek was moving more to a relation with science fiction like "cheese food" has to cheese. The characters were tedious, and the writing was just insulting.
I watched the three story arc with Brent Spiner, and it was better, largely because Spiner gives great villain (and Enterprise really lacked a villain with personality). After all, he took the worn device of "evil twin" on ST:TNG and made it work.
But, subtracting Soong, the rest of them are really riding the interstellar short-bus. Since they have the canon to prop them up, we know none of them are in any danger. Which makes for a series which only aims to pander to fans, not present something interesting.