20 Years Later, Star Trek: Enterprise Is A Breath Of Fresh Air
Trek’s radical reinvention often stumbled, but its first season had plenty of potential.
With the Star Trek saga officially crossing the 60-year threshold, there’s no better time to be nostalgic. The franchise has been chock full of ups and downs — for every fantastic season of television, there’s a sequel that sends the finicky fandom into an uproar — but for the pure of heart, there’s something to like in nearly every Trek story. Even the gritty prequel that took a gutsy approach to the earliest days of Starfleet.
Star Trek might purport itself as a forward-focused sci-fi utopia, but the franchise is more obsessed with the past than it’d like to admit. The shows and films are constantly sending their heroes back to the 20th century — that, or referencing the good ol’ days with tributes to Shakespeare or incessant riffs on the Old West. It’s a wonder that the powers that be didn’t conceive of something like Enterprise sooner.
Enterprise was to Trek what Casino Royale was to James Bond.
The 22nd century-set series, which premiered 20 years ago on September 26, 2001, is to Star Trek what Batman Begins or Casino Royale would be to their respective franchises. Dark-and-grounded reboots were all the rage in the early 2000s, and Trek was not immune to the appeal. Of course, as the earliest point in the timeline, Enterprise was still beholden to the canon to come. That, among a myriad of other weaknesses, kept the series from soaring: it wouldn’t find anything remotely close to a groove until its fourth and final season. That said, its premise had great bones, as its pilot proved in 2006.
After decades of watching intrepid Starfleet captains grapple with the Prime Directive and question their influence over less-advanced alien species, it was fascinating to see the shoe on the other foot. Enterprise turns the clock back a full century before James Kirk would become the captain of the titular ship, starting its story on an Earth that’s still light-years more advanced than ours, but otherwise hampered by the Prime Directive. When Enterprise begins, humans have made contact with their first alien race: the Vulcans. They agree to help society advance and improve Earth’s capacity for space travel, but they’re determined not to rush the process.
It takes 100 years from Earth and Vulcan’s first contact to bring humanity up to Warp 4, much to the chagrin of the hotheaded Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula). He’s eager to get out into the galaxy and explore — and when a Klingon courier crash-lands in Oklahoma, he finally gets his chance. Archer hastily assembles a crew to man the newly christened Enterprise and deliver this Klingon back to his homeworld. What should be a routine mission is compromised by a shapeshifting race of aliens called the Suliban, with whom the Klingons are locked in a Temporal Cold War, among a handful of other issues on the Enterprise.
Though the series often stumbled, its role as a grounded prequel delivered occasional brilliance.
Series co-creator Rick Berman introduced the concept of a Cold War to give Enterprise another element that was common in its contemporaries: a mystery box. It’s probably the weakest element of the pilot, and the fact that Enterprise never fully got the chance to figure out said mystery speaks to that. The series worked better as a proper prequel to the well-oiled Starfleet machine most fans already recognized. It was admittedly really intriguing to watch the crew try to figure out technology that was otherwise a banal part of life in future shows, like the transporter. At the start of the series, it’s only just become capable of teleporting organic beings — but skeptics like Lt. Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating) are understandably wary about surrendering to such new technology.
It’s those growing pains that actually make Enterprise worth watching; ditto for humanity’s struggles to understand the alien races that were already staples in other Trek shows. Archer’s second-in-command is T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), a Vulcan clearly designed to fulfill the early aughts quota for sexy female supporting characters. What Enterprise later did with T’Pol would subvert those expectations brilliantly, but it all began with its pilot, which introduced her as an answer, of sorts, to Spock, just with none of his empathy. T’Pol’s role as the voice of reason often swerves into downright apathy, which grates against Archer’s own bleeding heart. Enterprise was not always perfect — quite the opposite, really — but the show found magic when it stuck to the strongest elements established in its pilot. The series never fully met its potential, but in 2006, the possibilities seemed endless for this prequel, and the future bright for a franchise working to establish a fresh identity.
