Star Trek: Enterprise

This was the last of the Berman era Star Trek productions.   This one didn’t do what TNG/DS9/VOY did which was overlap its predecessor.  This show didn’t air until after Voyager had completed.  As I recall, there was already talk of franchise burnout, hence no overlap.  There was a huge gap after the end of this and the next production.

It was a prequel to the original series set about 100 years (if I remember right) before the events of the OG “Star Trek”.  It’s not the last time a Star Trek show would be an intentional prequel to the original series (hello Discovery).  But unlike Discovery, they leaned into the fact they were earlier than Kirk/Spock era Trek.  The series’ ship (also named Enterprise, registry NX-01) was limited to Warp 5, and the gear and sets were intentionally constructed with a submarine feel.  I quite loved that – unlike Discovery which took a different tact to prequel. This was even extended to the outfits which had an earlier feel to them.  In fact, I quite liked this part of Enterprise’s (the series) creation – set as a prequel, things didn’t handle the same way..  We didn’t have tractor beams, we had to deal with physical towing of things.   It still felt like Star Trek, just an earlier version.

Except it stopped there.  Mostly other than the fact of where it was set, we didn’t lean into being a prequel a ton.  Oh, there were loose references to what came later, but not direct “prequels” to stuff.  We did get to see some of the races in earlier versions of what we knew (Vulcans, Tellarites, Andorians to name a few).  But for the most part, Enterprise did their own thing.  Season 3 was a full season arc (the Xindi arc), expanding on what DS9 did with large arcs – this one ran the full season of 24 episodes.  It felt like Star Trek, but definitely not the prequel we were led to believe the series would be.

At least until Season 4 – when at that point the show was barely hanging on, and they finally changed production teams – Manny Coto was the new showrunner for the final season and they leaned HARD into prequels.  Quite a few things got visited – including the Mirror Universe, and we actually got an in universe canon reason for why the Klingons in the original series had no ridges on their heads.

Overall the series main cast was run by a bunch of actors that were unknown to me – EXCEPT for the Captain.  This show was led by Scott Bakula who I knew well already.  Mostly from Quantum Leap, but also from a show I watched – the  TV version of the 80’s comedy “Gung Ho”.  Bakula’s casting I felt was an attempt to draw an immediate audience.

There is one other thing that this series shared with the original.  The stories focused on the main characters in the cast (Archer, T’Pol, & Trip).  The others (Phlox, Mayweather, Hoshi, & Reed) were there, got the occasional attention – but the lion’s share of the stories went to the big three, much like Kirk, Spock, & McCoy did in the original.

There’s also the story of T’Pol and expanding on the “sexiness” they had in Voyager with Seven of Nine.  Now Voyager and Seven really played up the physical aspects of Jeri Ryan, but on that show, Seven was shown to be a whole lot more than T&A.   They went down that path with T’Pol as well.  They created a character for her, and Jolene Blalock I thought did an amazing job playing a full Vulcan dealing with humans.  But there’s no denying it – they cast Blalock as T’Pol for her physical attributes as well.  But they exploited it with her more than they did with Ryan.  Don’t get me wrong, as a red blooded American male I like a good looking woman as much as the next guy, but I always felt they exploited Jolene Blalock far more than they did with Jeri Ryan.  I mean all the decon scenes in Enterprise were fun to look at – I mean you have to have exposition scenes in any show, but they could have found a way to have them not appear in their underwear rubbing themselves down with gel.  And then the one episode where T’Pol appeared fully nude and the camera angle showed about half of her backside.  Again, nice to look at, but didn’t service the plot AT ALL.  That’s where I felt Blalock got a raw deal.  She was obviously a good actress, but they played the T&A harder with her than they did with Seven.

As I write this, I haven’t started watching any of the episodes, I write these intros from memory from the past.  I did watch all of Enterprise – mostly liked it too.  But the vast bulk of this series I’ve watched just once on original airing.  When I go back to watch Enterprise now, it’s mostly a handful of specific episodes (and honestly, all of the from Season 4 – the best of the four seasons).

I’ve maintained that if they made Season 4 of Enterprise FIRST, the show would have been received better than it was, and not canceled early after just four seasons.  There were plans for more, but we never got to see them.

One final thing,  the show tried a minor course correction after Season 2.  For the first two years, the show was officially titled just “Enterprise”.  When they were having ratings problems one of the attempts to fix it was to formally rename the show to “Star Trek: Enterprise” as some thought perhaps audiences were confused thinking because it didn’t have the words “Star Trek” in the title, people weren’t watching.

That wasn’t why – it was mostly franchise burnout at this point.  Still, there were 98 episodes of this series, so let’s take a rewatch of this show and see how it holds up (or maybe even improved with time).

.. oh yeah.  The theme song.  People HATED THAT.  I have to confess that I wasn’t a fan at first, but it’s grown on me over time.  They did tweak it a bit at the start of Season 3 when they changed the show name officially, but things were rolling downhill by that point.

 

Season 1

It’s been quite awhile since I watched early Enterprise, so I don’t want to pre-write this section.  I’ll write a summary of the season once I’ve watched it all.   Season 1 had 26 episodes and ran from 26 Sep 2001 through 22 May 2002.

I do recall it being unstable in terms of quality (which isn’t a surprise for most Trek series, to be honest).  See how that plays out as I rewatch some of these for the first time ever.

• Unexpected (6/21/2026) - (17 Oct 2001) – Season 1 Episode 5 (Serial 105)
• Strange New World (6/20/2026) - (10 Oct 2001) – Season 1 Episode 4 (Serial 104)
• Fight or Flight (6/19/2026) - (3 Oct 2001) – Season 1 Episode 3 (Serial 103)
• Broken Bow (6/18/2026) - (26 Sep 2001) – Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2 (Serial 101 & 102)