What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS

What if the hero ship, and hence the series, had a different name?

What if the NX class was the predecessor to the Constitution Class?

It seems to me that a whole slew of discontinuity issues would have been avoided if the show runners had taken this route.

Thoughts anyone?

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Placing the show 50 years (better still 100 years) prior to when it was set would have put it in line with a large number of references from previous Star Trek series.

According to LaForge in First Contact, "fleets" of Human starships were exploring the galaxy fifty years after Cochrane's flight. Previous series say that Humans exploration began within only a few years of Cochrane's flight.

If the the show had gotten rid of the ridiculous "Vulcan held us back for a century" and had Archer's ship leave Earth around the year 2070 or so, great.

A show set 50 years before the events of TOS still could of had the adventures of the bumbling clueless Jonathon Archer.

A show set 50 years after TOS would have been in (somewhat) virgin territory, not a lot of canon info on that time period.

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Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Yes, 50 years prior to TOS is 50 years after "Enterprise" was actually set, give or take a decade or so.

Plus, part of my title was cut off. I've asked a moderator to fix that, but no response as of yet.

The whole Klingon first contact thing would have made more sense, though.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Well, the Romulans weren't a big presence in Enterprise anyway, outside of Minefield and a few fourth season episodes. So moving the Klingon First Contact, the Temporal Cold War, and the Xindi crisis and a few other things to the 2210s, liberally edited to allow the existence of a small Federation, is achievable. It wouldn't be building towards the Romulan War or the Federation. It would be building towards the state of affairs that existed during "The Cage."

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

I doubt it would make much difference. Whining about continuity errors is a symptom, not a cause, of fan disappointment. If the show were more engaging, more exciting, right out of the gate then fans would rationalize away any complaints about Romulan cloaks and Ferengi names and never having heard of Suliban before. Indeed, the folks who quite like Enterprise are quite happy to explain why none of these complaints are fair. Anyway, little of that would depend on whether the show was set in 2151, 2101, or 2201.

(Well, the Suliban complaint was never fair, like the show or not.)

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Well, just for the record, I'm not whining, I like "Enterprise" it's my second favorite series after TOS.

Also, I'm not bothered by how the sets make the ship seem more "advanced" and things like that, because these really can't be helped.

My thinking was that since "the suits" supposedly got involved and basically insisted that everything be pretty much the same as we've seen in other Treks, and thus compromising the original "primitive spaceflight" concept, perhaps B&B should have just changed the time period to reflect an era that would be more typical of what they ended up with.

The fewer continuity issues would simply have been an added bonus in this case.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

No, Troi says that poverty, disease and war would all be gone "within the next 50 years." Geordi says that Cochrane's theories on warp drive "allow fleets of starships to built, and mankind to start exploring the galaxy," but doesn't specify how quickly this would happen. In his time, there are fleets of starships exploring the galaxy.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

I can see 50 years after. Shran and Archer could already be best buddies. I agree about the continuity errors.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

I'm afraid I don't agree, Geordi's comment immediately followed Deanna's and would seem to be tied to it and it's time figure. Also fifty year until there were "fleet of starship" would agree with dialog and visual displays from the TV series.

The different shows says that multiple Human starships were leaving Earth on voyages of exploration and colonization within only a few years of Cochrane's first flight.

Enterprise's position that Humanity basically sat on it's hands for a century is the odd man out in terms of overall Star Trek continuity.

It's important to remember that Star Trek is the property of CBS Television and belongs to "the suits." The producers and writers are being permitted to play in someone else' sandbox.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

But based on what we see in ENT (100 years after FC), Earth doesn't really have much of a "fleet," and they certainly haven't done much exploring. We saw only a handful of pre-NX class ships, and two NX's. And those pre-NX class ships could only go Warp 2. Mostly what we hear is that the Vulcans held humanity back, so Geordi's comment was probably meant to be in the context of his own time.

I think he's referring to the studio meddling UPN did with ENT. UPN was not CBS, it was Paramount.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

It wouldn't have made any difference, if the show began with the same recycled stories and bland characters that it did.

Had Enterprise begun with the direction it acquired in season 3, it might have lasted longer.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Agreed. And that goes for the new show coming in 2017 too.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

Yes, that's it essentially; also I disagree slightly with T'Girl's take on this. While a fan production, could be said to be "playing in someone else’s sandbox" the producers of Enterprise were hired to do a job for "the suits", a job they were not allowed to do effectively due to meddling by their bosses’ micromanagement, thus compromising their creative output.

 

Re: What if Enterprise had taken place +/- 50 years prior to TOS inste

I think the amount of complaining would have been about the same.

 

Which is the point: ENT shouldn't have done that, because now it's the odd man out.

However, ENT doesn't exactly contradict the idea of "fleets of ships exploring", as it does make mention of all sorts of ship activity, including fleets of tramps exploring business opportunities. ENT merely establishes that all that effort amounted to nothing much - it took a warp five engine to actually reach points of any interest. Which I think is a fun thing to bring up.

Or then warp 4. The only speed limitation we hear of is for the civilian freighters, and those still do only warp 2 in the TOS era ("Friday's Child"). (Oh, and for the early versions of the Warp Five Engine, but that adventure never established or suggested that other ships of the era were doing as poorly as the test rigs.)

Whatever the nature of Earth's "fleet of ships", we know that there was a Starfleet in place where many officers reached high rank decades before the show. Via ship assignments or shore jobs, we don't know for sure. But there's no real mention of lack of starships before NX-01, either.

What this choice of time frame means is that Earth has a full century to come up with tech that is at least roughly on par with the local interstellar standards, making it a bit more plausible that our heroes could survive beyond their first episode. But this also means that Archer has all the same goodies as Kirk, these apparently being the minimum requirement for survival in the interstellar environment. So we're left to wonder how there was progress between the 2060s and 2150s but none between the 2150s and the 2260s.

Would that issue be alleviated by a 2070s or 2110s show? If we believe in minimum requirements, this would then mean even longer stagnation, but that's plausible if humans get "on par" by buying or begging from Vulcans and make little indigenous progress. If we ditch the minimum requirements idea and allow Archer to venture into space armed with a Steyr machine gun borrowed from Lily Sloane, parachuting down to planets in capsules that have just enough fuel for one takeoff, we do get a show rather different from all other Star Trek... But while it complicates the technological aspects of writing and threatens to slow down the stories (the transporter was invented for a reason!), it's unlikely to affect any of the other, "continuity" issues.

Timo Saloniemi

 

When it was set was ideal. The premise was perfect.

It was the execution that was the problem.

 

One issue with Enterprise among a number of issues was to make it a credible prequel to TOS. Given TOS's dated and corny looking set, that's a tough ask.

What they gave us an interior of a ship that was just a cramped looking Voyager without any real imagination or interest and difficult to pin down as a TOS prequel.

I would've given the ship a nuclear submarine aesthetic where you'd hear the bulkheads heaving and buckling as it goes to warp. Where they use warp engines, sure, but just haven't a full handle on the health consequences that comes from using warp engines. We'd have the doctor chasing the health issues of some of the engineers much like sailors of old suffered from scurvy. That kind of stuff.

I think that would've put it firmly and recognisably in the prequel zone and plausibly a 100 years before TOS.

 

Really? They went to a lot of trouble to show us pressure doors, zero-gee grips and prominently bolted-on "metallic" vanity covers instead of soft carpeting and plastic surfaces. It's difficult to see what more could have been done. Or how the interior could have looked more like a submarine's...

Now that I might have paid to see. (But no, I won't be paying for the 2017 show!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

IIRC, the submarine look was what they went for. They toured actual modern day subs for inspiration. Which is why you see a lot of handrails and stairs on the ship. The ship looked very "five minutes into the future" to me.

Heaving, buckling sounds come across as a bit dodgy. Like a poorly executed design from a real world perspective. As does the health consequences. I'd want those solved before launch.