Enterprise: 20 Years Later...Retrospective

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing quite well. So today is going to be a little bit different. Instead of a review or talking about something I've watched recently, today I'm going to be talking about a show that I haven't seen in 16 years outside of random episodes here and there. With this year being the 20th Anniversary of several TV shows, there are three in particular that I'd like to talk about. The first being the fifth live action Star Trek series, Star Trek: Enterprise, which was also the last Star Trek series until Discovery started airing in 2017. So let's talk about it.

When Enterprise was airing I was in high school. In fact the first season aired during my first year of high school. Back then I didn't have alot of friends who were Trekkies. In fact I really only had two. One of them was still in middle school and the other lived forty minutes away from me, so I only saw him at school. And we didn't really talk about the show that much, even though I enjoyed it, because this was my high school in 2001 where being a geek and being into Star Trek was frowned upon. We still talked about Star Trek in general, but we very rarely talked about the episodes at school the day after they aired. 

Like I said, my high school was very geek unfriendly, so I was super embarrassed to like things like Star Trek and comic books, even though I absolutely loved them. Plus this was the era of awesome sitcoms like Friends, The King of Queens, and Everybody Loves Raymond so my interest in TV shows widened to include them as well as Star Trek and Smallville. Luckily Enterprise aired twice a week here in Canada. Once on CityTV, a Toronto network, and an encore airing on Space Channel, which is currently known as CTV Sci-Fi Channel and will be renamed SyFy Canada come the New Year. 

To be honest I quite liked Enterprise when it was originally on, though apart from certain episodes I only saw each episode once and don't really remember most of them. However my liking of it waned over the last twenty years. Mainly because I haven't seen the majority of the series for so long and also because people just don't talk about it online that much.

I never cared that Enterprise was a prequel. Unlike the first two seasons of Discovery and the upcoming Strange New Worlds, Enterprise took place far enough back and featured original characters that the writers could do anything they wanted and really wouldn't impact the continuity of TOS all that much. There was an episode in early season 1 where the Ferengi appeared, and I actually didn't care, because of the way the Ferengi did everything they could to minimize exposure by the Humans. Also, they never actually revealed their species name, so it wouldn't feed back on "The Last Outpost", the introduction of the Ferengi on TNG where Picard stated they'd never seen the Ferengi before and knew nothing about them apart from rumours, hearsay, and second hand reports, most of them which did conflict with each other. 

I've been watching clips of episodes on YouTube and as I was doing that, I came to realization, Enterprise was different from the three Star Trek shows that began in the late '80s and the '90s for a reason. That reason has to do with television in the 2000s in general.

As I mentioned above alot of sitcoms were on in the early 2000s, around the time that Enterprise was on. However the 2000s also saw a resurgence in quality Science Fiction programming like Stargate Atlantis, the remaining seasons of Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, the revival of Doctor Who and weirder ones like Lexx and Farscape, as well as police procedurals like CSI, Law & Order, and NCIS, and teen dramas like Degrassi: The Next Generation, One Tree Hill, The O.C., the remaining seasons of Dawson's Creek, and Everwood. 2006 would see the birth of The CW after UPN, which Enterprise aired on, and The WB merged into one network. Because audience's attention had been drawn away from Star Trek, because, let's face it, Star Trek had been doing the same thing for 14 years by the time Enterprise began airing and quite frankly the way they were telling stories was becoming outdated. Particularly since, aside from DS9, Star Trek maintained it's episodic format rather than going completely serialized, and it remained fairly safe in terms of the content they showed onscreen, again, aside from a few episodes of DS9 and Voyager. Which meant it couldn't necessarily compete with shows like Alias and Smallville. 

The thing I liked about Enterprise is that the characters were allowed to show their flaws and struggle with them. DS9 was the same way, but the characters on DS9 were built from the same cloth as the characters of TNG, so there was always that safety to them that the Enterprise characters just didn't have. I liked the fact that Archer was allowed to be prejudiced against Vulcans and didn't just get over it overnight just because T'Pol became his friend and first officer. I liked that Malcolm Reeds's ties to Section 31 caused tension between him and Archer. I liked that Phlox wasn't just a sarcastic do-gooding doctor. He had morals, but he also failed sometimes and carried those failures with him. I loved that by the end of the show you knew these characters and they became a true family in a way that they didn't even really do on Voyager.

In fact many of the things that I love about Discovery, particularly in the last two seasons, started with Enterprise 20 years ago. Yes, the writing wasn't always great and the CGI looked really bad at times, but there was a charm to it that no other Star Trek show posesses. I remember episodes where I actually laughed because Archer said something funny or he and Trip teased each other, showing us that they are best friends and Archer becoming captain didn't change that. We actually saw them hanging out together off-duty, something we never saw with Kirk and McCoy (until the Kelvin Timeline movies), Picard and Beverly (they ate meals together but it felt so stuffy that I never classified it as "hanging out"), or Tom and Harry (the Captain Proton program being an exception I suppose). I didn't mention Chief O'Brien and Doctor Bashir, or any of the DS9 characters, because that show is also very different from the other Star Trek shows, though again, they were still cut from the TNG cloth, so they weren't THAT different from the TNG characters. 

There were also big emotional moments too, like Trip's sorrow over the loss of his sister when the Xindi attacked Earth in the season 2 finale "The Expanse", Archer's feeling sorry for himself because Enterprise may have caused the destruction of an entire civilization, forcing Starfleet to cancel their mission in the season 1 finale, "Shockwave Part 1". The joy the crew felt when Archer announced that their mission to Kronos had been a success and that Starfleet announced they could begin their mission of exploration in the pilot "Broken Bow". Their relief that they saved Earth from destruction in the first two episodes of season 4. 

Despite Star Trek having been around for 35 years by the time it started, Enterprise felt fresh, new and exciting. Like nothing that had ever come before on Star Trek. It had it's problems. Like the whole Temporal Cold War thing fizzled out because Berman wouldn't let the writers commit to it. Everyone blamed UPN for the problems the show had, but Berman was in charge of the franchise at the time, he knew everything that was going on, and he didn't stop any of it. And like I said, the writing was really bad at times, but no more than writing can be on any TV show. 

People also blame UPN for cancelling the show, but in all honesty, even if UPN hadn't cancelled it when they did, The CW would've. 2005 is when the merger between UPN and The WB happened, forming The CW, and back then The CW wasn't interested in doing Science Fiction shows. They cared more about the teen dramas and the more supernatural shows like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries than they did about Sci-Fi. So if UPN hadn't cancelled Enterprise when they did, I think we would've found it on the chopping block at The CW within a few months of the merger happening. Which is why very few UPN shows ended up on The CW and most of the shows that were on The WB ended up on The CW after the merger to begin with.

I'm not trying to change people's minds about Enterprise but it felt like an evolution that Star Trek desperately needed after 14 years of straight production and broadcast. Because, as much as I love Voyager, it's unwillingness to do nothing but play it safe very nearly killed the franchise permanently as we saw with Voyager's ratings by the end of the series. Plus I just think people, a.k.a. non-Trekkies, got tired of Star Trek. The franchise spent the entirety of the '90s with two TV shows in production and on the air, and one movie in production at all times, which is alot of Star Trek during a time where Space Opera Sci-Fi wasn't very popular. Especially on TV. 

At some point I'm going to watch the entire show from start to finish and do a full review to see how it holds up today compared to how I felt about it when I was watching as a high schooler in the early to mid 2000s. For now though I just wanted to talk about Star Trek: Enterprise since it had it's 20th anniversary this year. I'll be back tomorrow for my discussion on Smallville and the impact it had on the comic book based shows and the superhero shows that are out now. So until then have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.