DBWI: "Star Trek: Enterprise" is cancelled after four seasons

The series finale of "Star Trek: Enterprise" has finally been broadcast in Australia (almost a year later than in the US, on a Tuesday night at midnight - thank you Channel 9 :rolleyes:). I managed to avoid spoilers, so I was blown away at the finale - although I kinda guessed that the Enterprise would be destroyed in battle (I mean, why else would you stop a series mid-war?).

Anyway, it got me thinking: what if the Sci-Fi Channel didn't buy the rights to "Enterprise" off UPN, so the show was cancelled in 2005 instead of playing out its full seven seasons? Almost certainly we wouldn't be getting the Romulan War TV miniseries they're making now (which should be pretty cool, BTW - I really like the multiple-ships idea, rather than just centering it around one crew), but what would we get instead? A new TV spinoff? A new movie? Nothing, even?

Another thing - what about the production team? Might Rick Berman have quit Star Trek if Enterprise had failed? If so, who would replace him? Or maybe the opposite would have happened: might this have made Berman persuade Brannon Braga to stay?

In case you're wondering, the reason I picked season 4 rather than 3 is because, from what I can tell, if Enterprise had been cancelled after three seasons then Star Trek would basically have been killed off permanently. Season 4 showed a huge increase in quality: even if it weren't enough to save Enterprise, it still might have been enough to save Star Trek.

(OOC: "CoP" = Coalition of Planets, the forerunner to the Federation. If you haven't seen "Enterprise", the Coalition of Planets was formed at the end of season 4)
 
If Enterprise had been cancelled, would anyone have noticed? Maybe the engineer guy could have played the Wraith-Human hybrid on Stargate Atlantis instead of Bruce Boxleitner.
 

ninebucks

Banned
I was among the scores of people of stopped watching Enterprise during the first series and then only tuned in again during the fifth series. So if it'd been cancelled after series four, I probably wouldn't've missed it - which is sad because I actually quite appreciated those 'lost series' when I decided to watch them online after I got back into the show in '06.
 
Well, we wouldn't have gotten to see JMS & Manny Coto's take on the Romulan War, which would have been a loss, IMHO. Bringing JMS in for Season 5 was what got me watching the show, again.
 
Well, we wouldn't have gotten to see JMS & Manny Coto's take on the Romulan War, which would have been a loss, IMHO. Bringing JMS in for Season 5 was what got me watching the show, again.

You kidding? The JMS experiment was a disaster. It brought in a few of the Babyloniacs but pissed off the few diehards Enterprise had left, leaving the show effectively without its organic fanbase. It was a bold choice, to be sure, but JMS is the definition of a one-trick-pony -- the Tellarite arc, the T'Pol-Trip-T'Pau love triangle, whatever the hell they tried with Shran all show that JMS should never be trusted after 1998.

I lasted about halfway through the fifth season, came back for the sixth. Sixth-season Enterprise wasn't actually all that bad -- they cut away most of the past cast, handwaved away a lot of the Season 5 innovations and had a basic idea of where they wanted to go -- they would be the 'character' show, toning down the 'exploration' aspects. But even that was really just a partial failure. Enterprise was a 1995 show in a medium that has evolved way, way beyond that -- even DS9 was more advanced, dramatically, than Enterprise. Every season after season 2 was basically 'what gimmick will save us?' The Xindi didn't work, continuity-porn didn't work, JMS didn't work, the bottle shows didn't work. You could just tell, throughout season 7, that they were playing for time -- tapping their feet and watching the clock till they could finally go home and stop caring about Star Trek.
 
You kidding? The JMS experiment was a disaster. It brought in a few of the Babyloniacs but pissed off the few diehards Enterprise had left, leaving the show effectively without its organic fanbase. It was a bold choice, to be sure, but JMS is the definition of a one-trick-pony -- the Tellarite arc, the T'Pol-Trip-T'Pau love triangle, whatever the hell they tried with Shran all show that JMS should never be trusted after 1998.

I lasted about halfway through the fifth season, came back for the sixth. Sixth-season Enterprise wasn't actually all that bad -- they cut away most of the past cast, handwaved away a lot of the Season 5 innovations and had a basic idea of where they wanted to go -- they would be the 'character' show, toning down the 'exploration' aspects. But even that was really just a partial failure. Enterprise was a 1995 show in a medium that has evolved way, way beyond that -- even DS9 was more advanced, dramatically, than Enterprise. Every season after season 2 was basically 'what gimmick will save us?' The Xindi didn't work, continuity-porn didn't work, JMS didn't work, the bottle shows didn't work. You could just tell, throughout season 7, that they were playing for time -- tapping their feet and watching the clock till they could finally go home and stop caring about Star Trek.

Oh geeze. Another one of those types of posts:rolleyes: Look, I'm a hardcore Trekkie, have been since I was watching DS9 with my parents back when I was in about the second grade. Liked VOY until the seventh season, and liked ENT on the whole. Turned off during the Xindi arc, and then managed to pick it back up late in four. (IaMD being the turning point. KICKASS episode.) JMS may have been a mixed bag, but he kept me in Trek. And the financial and social sucsess of the show both during his time and later point to the rest of us disagreeing--else why the new Romulan War spin-off? If you just want to troll Trek, do it on a Trek board--TrekBBS could always use more trolls.

Also, does anybody agree that the NuBSG/ENT(5+) Thursdays were what got SciFi the cred it needed to become the stop for great scifi television? Those were the highlight of my week until last year's Enterprise finale.
 
Top