Combs Thinks More Alien Exploration Could Have Saved 'Enterprise'

Jeffrey Combs objects to the fact that the three-episode Star Trek: Enterprise storyline comprised of "Babel One", "United" and "The Aenar" gets referred to as "the Romulan arc."

"I beg to differ," he told the UK's Star Trek magazine (via Sci Fi Pulse). "It was sort of an Andorian arc because it ended up on Andoria and we explored a little bit of what the Andorian culture was like. I thought this was the kind of thing this series should have been doing a little more."

Having appeared on Deep Space Nine in two recurring roles as Weyoun and Brunt and on Voyager as a guest star opposite The Rock, Combs was delighted to be asked to play an Andorian on Enterprise.

"I loved Shran," he said. "I loved his edge. I just loved the notion of taking the Andorians, how they started out on Star Trek: The Original Series with their big, fat clay antennae and their albino Beatles wigs, and giving them this edge, too."

In playing Shran, added Combs, he tried to use "this Jimmy Cagney little tough guy" quality to show the Andorians as "a proud and sort of repressed people." He felt that the Andorians had a deep sense of injustice and some righteous anger about it, "because science fiction is always a metaphor for today or yesterday and for what’s going on in the world."

Combs does not believe that the cancellation of the series marks the end of Star Trek, but he thinks that perhaps it was avoidable. "I think things might have worked out differently if, at the beginning of Enterprise, they’d done [more] exploration of the background of a lot of the familiar characters and races and planets. That's when Star Trek is at its most successful, when it starts fleshing out these people and things.”

The full interview is in issue #123 of Star Trek magazine. These excerpts are from Sci Fi Pulse.

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