Assuming ENT had gone a full seven seasons, like the last three series before it, that would've taken it into the 2007-2008 TV season. For those who don't recall, in late 2007 the writer's union, the WGA, was attempting to negotiate a new deal with the studios since the shows and movies they wrote were now being presented on new media like DVD's and online streaming and felt they deserve appropriate compensation. Negotiations failed and WGA members went on strike for several months before an agreement was finally reached in early 2008. There were a number of consequences for TV series, with shows stopping production for months at a time. Once the strike ended, some shows like "LOST", "Cold Case", and "The Office" resumed production and finished out the season(albeit with a reduced number of episodes). Others like "Prison Break", "Heroes", "Chuck", "Pushing Daisies", and "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" did not start up again and no new episodes would air until the fall. (Sadly, in the case of the latter two shows, it made it much harder for them to build an audience and neither would get a third season). How the producers of "Enterprise" would've dealt with this is particularly interesting, given that it presumably would've been in its last season. Would we simply have gotten a season shorter than the rest? Might they have produced some episodes for an abbreviated eighth season? Would they have simply dropped a planned two-to-three-episode arc or two (assuming they were still doing those at that point)? What do you think?
Well, one problem in your hypothetical scenario is UPN folded in 2006. The show would have somehow had to survive that and get picked up by another network. The ratings were never really that good after "Broken Bow". In the fourth season, which fans and critics tend to consider the best year, only about 3 million people were watching each week. With those kinds of numbers, it seems unlikely another network would have picked up the show after UPN's demise, even if they had gotten a fifth year. But if there had been a writers' strike, we probably would have gotten an abbreviated season, as happened with TNG Season 2.
Well, you never know. Heck, they might've even returned it to syndication (in fact, in retrospect, they probably should've been there from the beginning). Enterprise, was a really bad fit for UPN.
I doubt the show would have done any better syndicated, and possibly would have performed even poorer. The syndicated TV landscape was completely different by the time ENT premiered. When TNG premiered, the market was wide open and had yet to be exploited to the fullest. During the 90s, in the wake of TNG's success, the market became crowded, and even more so when UPN and the WB began snatching up many of the country's remaining independent stations. I don't think syndication was viable option for ENT.
I think we would have just ended up with a shortened final season. Sucks, but them's the hypothetical breaks.
Well, obviously, the thing to do would be have a couple episodes where the characters just stand around humming, and then another episode where the actors just make it up as they go along, same way they wrote ``Storm Front''. (I'd expect they would just cut the episode order, particularly since if Enterprise were going into its seventh season, well, that's when Modern Trek had expected to close things down anyway. This might result in a finale that's unsatisfying, though, as the rush to get a script finished before the strike deadline means that plot holes might go un-considered and running story lines or character plot threads get forgotten or jumbled up, if you can imagine the series suffering such an ignoble fate.)