Bakula: Enterprise Was The Wild West
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For Scott Bakula, the time setting was what attracted him to Star Trek: Enterprise.
The actor shared his thoughts on the series ten years after the last episode aired.
“The reason I did the show was because it was before,” he said. “I think if they had said ‘It’s going to be two hundred years after Voyager‘ I probably would have said no to it because I don’t know what that would have been. I just had a clear sense when they said ‘It’s the Wild West, before Kirk.’ I saw what that could be and was excited by the idea.”
Although Enterprise didn’t go the full seven years, Bakula believes that it was a quality show and that fans would appreciate it more over time. “I think I felt, at the time, and I think we’ve kind of proven this over time after we were off the air, that fans would grow to appreciate the show more as time went on, and discover it, and that has borne itself out,” he said. “My experience with meeting fans and meeting them at conventions is that there’s a great delight about our show that wasn’t there when it was on the air, but I’m happy and pleased that people are still discovering the show and that it has legs, basically.”
“I always look back very fondly on it,” Bakula added. “We had a great cast, and it was an honor and a pleasure to work with all the technical people behind the camera that had been there for years and were pioneers in so many respects in the ways of effects, makeup effects, and different things that they had honed on prior shows really starting with The Next Generation for those many, many years. There is just a great pleasure to work with such wonderful, bright, intelligent people who had a history on the show and cared so much and tried to just do everybody proud, first and foremost the fans, and they really responded.”
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Agreed.
I remember watching Enterprise when it first came out and being very on-the-fence about it.. Most people hated it, I liked it but in a lukewarm way.
Revisiting it on the blu-rays, I realized the show was much better than I realized at the time. Specifically season 3, is one of the best seasons of Trek across any of the series.
The only really bad season of Enterprise was 2, and even that had some great eps.
I agree. I think the reception of Enterprise was poisoned by die-hards who couldn’t get over the Akira-based design of the ship, and the gall of the producers to play fast and loose with canon. It’s a shame, really, that these attitudes prevented people from enjoying a show that presented a different take on the exploration of the Galaxy — from a time when the crew were the underdogs in just about every encounter, and still made it work.
I’m fond of Enterprise despite its problems, because I liked the characters and the look of the show. Admittedly it did suffer from inconsistent quality (it’s almost good episode, bad episode, good episode, bad episode). It’s interesting to rewatch and find some episodes have paled but others are better than remembered. For all the good stuff, I’m glad the series was made.
I entered the fandom after TNG had started so for me DS9, Voyager and Enterprise were the ones I paid attention to from the start and of those three, Enterprise is the one I was the most excited about. The setting in my mind was the most “Star Trek” since the original series. Despite supporting the show from the start, I sometimes do wonder what it could have been if A.) The studio hadn’t have demanded a “futuristic” part to it and B.) Manny Coto had be on board from episode one.
I’m not as down on Berman and Braga as other fans, but they needed Coto for this one. He gets that era of Trek.
I still love that show, and I was onboard from the get go, but I think the truth is that someone running it really “earned” a cancellation. I consider the fourth season to be by far the best,(and easily one of the best of all trek), and the third not far behind, but too late for the audience. While the first season meandered predictably in various directions, looking for footing, they had the advantage and the baggage of previous Treks to leap off from. By the time the second season started it was PAST time, in my fervent opinion, to have solidified into an impactful and relevant ongoing saga. Instead we were given more one-offs and tangents that rarely seemed to be building to anything. It reminded me of the most frustrating voyager eps when everything seemed designed to be self contained and missing an ep would never leave anyone confused in the least. It was time to take bold direction, double down on the great premise, and start filling in the history of the future with essential elements.
The third season’s 22 ep arc was a great idea, and largely worked, but by then the audience had waned greatly. The fourth season was what I felt the show always should have been, and the hiring of the Reeves-Garfields and Manny Coto was no small reason. It seemed that the creators needed to let new blood take the riegns, which historically has always improved Star Trek, with DS9 being the prime example. It still bothers me greatly that the show reached such tremendous quality when relatively few were watching, and then was predictably cancelled and not even picked up by another channel. (I was in the campaign to save the show, and tried hard, but wasn’t surprised it didn’t work.).
As I expected at the time, there are many fun and even outstanding eps in the first two seasons, but their quality was hugely dampened in my mind at the time by the impending sense of franchise doom and the distinct feeling that nobody had the inspiration needed to right the ship. I knew those gems were going to be more fun someday when uncoupled from the current state of the franchise, and I was right. I will never forget the disheartening dread that a second season ep like Carbon Creek would bring me every week. “This ep doesn’t matter.” I would say. The past mattered little to inconsequential eps, nothing of any note changed whatsoever in them, and when they were over we were exactly where we were in the previous eps. It was Voyager mistakes come back to life at the worst possible time, and I suspected the creators were burned out, out of ideas, or simply not capable of finding real direction for the show.
And yet Carbon Creek is one of the best-loved episodes of ENT. I’m not a huge fan of it (it’s a bit dull), but it works as a character study and a look at how Vulcan non-interference protocols might be bent in an emergency. I don’t think you can group it with those episodes of older series where they’d meet the alien-of-the-week and have some amazing experience which is completely forgotten next episode. ENT season 3 generated suspense with its continuing plot, but rewatching it I find many of the episodes less impressive than I remembered. A well-written stand-alone episode is better than a mediocre episode that’s part of an arc.
Enterprise deserved seven years.
Voyager did not.
I wish they had been in the reverse so far as number of seasons. I think four seasons might actually have helped Voyager some.
Loved the show, but was not a fan at all of Archer. Trip was a great character, and really well acted too.
I enjoyed Enterprise quite a bit. It’s a shame they cancelled it right when the show found its stride.
I tend to agree though there were certainly some episodes that were sub-par in story. I can understand why some people were turned off by them. However overall I’d say the show was a good one and many Star Trek purists just wouldn’t accept it. Enterprise deserved a better end than it received.
Coto gets TOS, not so much Enterprise. – When he came on board he tried to replicate that. I think his season was by far the dullest and most derivative. Yes there were a handful of good eps but he should have been focused on the theunique qualities of a trek Before Kirk not trying to make another tos season.