Scott Bakula Says Star Trek: Enterprise For A Weird Reason
It was a dark time for Trek fans when Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air after only four seasons. For the first time since The Next Generation premiered in 1987, there were no new episodes of Star Trek on the airwaves.
While Star Trek: Enterprise does still have some fans, it was clear that something had gone wrong, leaving the Trek franchise in uncharted waters (at least until J.J. Abrams came along). So why did Enterprise flounder? According to series star Scott Bakula, the show was a “victim of circumstance.
In an interview with Jam! Showbiz, Scott Bakula claimed that Star Trek: Enterprise was, in some ways, a case of “wrong time, wrong place.
Scott Bakula said about Star Trek: Enterprise, “I have to tell you, there were so many political things that happened in the time that we were on the air, with networks being bought and sold and studios changing personnel completely. I never really felt like we had failed as much as we were victims of circumstance.”
There was more about Star Trek: Enterprise, with Scott Bakula saying, “I felt like our show got better and better, and the overwhelming conversations I’ve had with people are like, ‘Oh man, that last season was the greatest. You guys were just hitting your stride.’ I said to the cast going in ‘Please don’t count on seven years. We’re on a network with completely different rules.’ We made 98 hours of television, a huge success by most standards.”
Scott Bakula may well be right about behind-the-scenes politics playing a role in the show’s demise, but I also think Star Trek: Enterprise suffered from never really finding its own identity. The first two seasons mixed standard-issue Trek-style plots with an ongoing ill-defined “temporal cold war.”
Star Trek: Enterprise Season 3 saw Earth attacked by the Xindi, and the series began to take on thematic parallels to the real-world “war on terror.” Season four saw yet another change in direction as the show began pumping out fan service by the bucketload, introducing tons of ties between Star Trek: Enterprise and The Original Series.
It was fun to see the show try to explain things like the discrepancy between the look of Original Series Klingons and the modern versions, but in the end it was too little, too late.
Regardless of the real reasons for Star Trek: Enterprise‘s cancelation – assuming we need more than simply “low ratings” – Bakula’s thoughts no doubt added fuel to the conversation amongst fans.
