Before cancellation, Enterprise had one goal

While the series has its fans, it’s hard not to call 2001’s Star Trek: Enterprise an unmitigated disappointment. Beginning in 1987 and continuing throughout the 1990s, Star Trek was at its height, enjoying massive popularity after Star Trek: The Next Generation and the debuts of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Voyager . ” in quick succession. Several feature films were released in theaters and merchandise sales increased significantly. It was a great, great time to be a Trekkie.

Enterprise, however, debuted two weeks after 9/11and nobody seemed to be in the mood. The show’s creators seemed a little jaded, and post-9/11 audiences really weren’t in the mood for a series about exploration, diplomacy, and making peace with enemies. The three previous Star Trek series ran for seven seasons each. Enterprise was canceled after its fourth run in 2005, officially ending its glory days.

The premise of the Enterprise, to remind readers, was intriguing. Set a century before the original Star Trek, the Enterprise chronicled the adventures of the very first Starfleet ship launched from Earth. There was no Prime Directive yet, no shields, no photon torpedoes, and most importantly, the Enterprise, which was so truncated and precipitous to bring back the “wild west” atmosphere that had been missing from several previous Star Trek shows.

But since the series was canceled after the fourth season, some of the more ambitious plans were never fully realized. One of the writers of the show and former head of “Star Trek”. Rick Berman spoke to StarTrek.com back in 2011and he lamented the missed opportunities, including his failure to fulfill his one primary goal: to mirror the formation of the Federation.

Some of the world’s more enthusiastic Trekkies will be able to tell you that Enterprise is set in the mid-2150s, and that the United Federation of Planets was founded in 2161. The Federation was founded by a quintet of species, respectively descended from Earth, Proxima Centauri, Vulcan, Telar, and Andoria. Rick Berman most likely staged the Enterprise when he did so that the events of the series would lead to the founding of the Federation.

But with the series canceled after just four years, the story of the Federation couldn’t be told the way Berman or his co-writer Brennan Braga wanted. There was no set plan for the story of the Federation, but it was always in Berman’s mind. He said:

“We wanted to basically develop a show that, by season seven, would lead us to a logical and dramatic method of setting up the Federation. It was something that (showrunner) Manny Cotto and Brennan and I didn’t talk about specifically, but our goal was for seasons six and seven to be there.”

The Enterprise finale did dramatize small bits of the founding of the Federation, but in what many might say was a truncated, unsatisfying way. Instead of having the crew of the USS Enterprise form alliances and engage in diplomacy, the series decided to make the last episode of the series (titled “Here’s to the Journeys…”) a holographic recreation that took place several centuries later, witnessed by William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Troy (Marina Sirtis) from Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Unfortunately, the show’s ratings disappeared before such a foundation could be laid. Yes, there were scenes of the Federation signing agreements, but the fact that the Enterprise characters were mere holograms didn’t have the same impact.

The cancellation of “Enterprise” came as a surprise to Berman, Braga and Cote. They were still writing Enterprise in a very episodic format (considered old-fashioned before 2005) and had yet to look ahead to future seasons. So when it was revealed that the fourth season would be the last, they had to work fast to write a satisfying finale. When asked what the unfilmed fifth season might contain, Berman was at a loss. He said:

“We had no idea. We haven’t gone that far. We had done maybe six or seven shows before when we got canceled and we hadn’t decided what the final episode of season four would be. there may or may not have been a cliff, but we didn’t make that decision until we knew the plug had been pulled.”

Enterprise struggled a lot with the structure. In the early 2000s, many high-profile shows were moving away from the syndication-friendly episodic model to the booze-friendly serialization model. Many series had stories that took entire seasons to complete, while others had story arcs that spanned years. Star Trek previously thrived on the episodic model and has just begun to branch out into serialization from Deep Space Nine. In its third season, Enterprise transitioned to a long-running serialized narrative, and then had several miniseries (three to four episodes each) in its fourth season. The show had to evolve as it went along.

This, unfortunately, could turn viewers away. It was not ambitious enough for a serial model, and it had already developed an episodic model. Four years, it seems, is all that was destined for the Enterprise.