I’d like to recommend something to you that may sound implausible at first.
Take another look at the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise.
Things are not as they were.
When Enterprise first took to the air, I was very hopeful. There were all kinds of dramatic potential in a prequel to the original Star Trek series. E.g., getting to see all those "lost ships" the Original Series Enterprise went in search of and, in particular, seeing the founding of the Federation.
Unfortunately, danger signals started coming from the series almost at once. It seemed to be set too far in the past for the show to deal with the founding of the Federation, and most of the shows seemed misdirected towards a kind of "gee whiz" exploration of the galaxy.
My personal ability to bond with the series was also hampered by the fact that (at the time it went on air) I couldn’t even get the series due to living in an apartment complex with the dinkiest cable in the world, though I managed to see some episodes anyway.
Things didn’t seem to get better in the show’s second season, and its ratings declined. Taking this decline seriously, the show’s third season focused on a year-long story arc that posed a direct threat to the survival of everyone on Earth (the Xindi arc).
I thought this was a step in the right direction, like the lengthy arcs that drove the shows Babylon 5 and (in its latter seasons) Deep Space 9. The quality of the show definitely improved in season 3.
Despite this, the series almost was not renewed for a fourth season, but in the end it was.
I thought, and still think, that the series needs to move to the Roman War that leads to the founding of the Federation as quickly as possible to get things back on track.
They’re not moving to that as quickly as I would if I were the show-runner (though they are definitely moving toward it), but the quality of the show has improved even more in the fourth season, and I want to recommend that you take another look at the program (or a first look, if you haven’t seen it before).
The characteristic of the present (fourth) season is that for the most part it features stories that are longer than one episode but shorter than a whole season. Most stories are three or four episodes long.
More important than the format is that the show’s creators are focused on integrating the series more closely with the established Star Trek mythology, letting us look at corners of things that we have heard of but never seen or never seen explored in detail.
One three-part arc, for example, featured Brent Spiner (Next Gen‘s Commander Data and his "father" Noonien Soong) as Data’s "grandfather" Arik Soong. At the time of Enterprise, the line of family geniuses was not intersted in robotics but in genetic engineering. Arik Soong tried to bring to fruition a line of genetically "improved" humans dating from the late-20th-century Eugenics Wars (a la Kahn Noonien Singh). His disastrous failure in these episodes convinced him that trying to improve on the breed was a mistake, and by the end he turned to cybernetics, paving the way for the creation of Commander Data by his son.
Another trilogy of episodes focused on the planet Vulcan. We got to see things we’d heard about before, like the harsh desert known as Vulcan’s Forge (a reference to Roman mythology, incidentally) and we got an explanation for something Enterprise fans had long complained about: The Vulcans we saw in the series don’t seem the same as the Vulcans we know from the Original Series. They aren’t pacifists. They’re (somewhat) more emotional. They aren’t normally mind-melders. And they tend to be suspicious toward humans rather than respectful of them. In fact, they’re more like Romulans than the Vulcans we know from previous Star Trek shows.
Turns out that these differences are explained by a simple fact: Under the (hidden) influence of Romulans, the Vulcans of Enterprise‘s day have strayed from the teachings of their planetary peacemaker, Surak (who we kind-of met in the Original Series). But due to the intervention of the Enterprise crew, a social revolution starts that will lead to the dominance of the philosophy of the Vulcans that we know and love.
Upcoming episodes and min-arcs seem no less ambitious.
One such episode features the inventor of transporter technology.
A quadrology of episodes focuses on the Andorians and their homeworld.
An upcoming trilogy focuses on the Klingons and holds the prospect of finally offering an on-screen explanation of why the Klingons we saw in the Original Series are so different visually from the Klingons of the movies and subsequent series.
And Bill Shatner is likely to appear soon.
However things work out, a change has definitely been made in the Star Trek: Enterprise series. I’m already seeing messages on Internet boards like "What’s happening to me? I am actually loving Star Trek again."
There’s something to love here, again.
Tune in Friday nights to see what it is.
Start watching this Friday and be ready for the dramatic episodes that will start airing in January.
