Braga: "Archer was supposed to be Future Guy"

You're so on the money.

 

because people don't always tell the truth?

 

Well he had said it wasn't decided and it probably was a Romulan. Perhaps he was saving the Archer idea for a comic.

 

It seems Brannon Braga has been saying quite a lot of stuff lately. I just saw a recent youtube video where he said the original idea for Enterprise was a multi-season long story-arc with season 1 primarily be an Earth-bound series. It starts almost identically as we've seen in Broken Bow, but most of the season 1 was going to be about the rush to get the NX-01 built in order to handle Suliban threat and season 1 was going to end with the launching of Enterprise. Apparently, TPTB insisted on using the old TOS/TNG/VOY episodic "starship encounters alien of the week" formula so Braga was forced to launch the Enterprise in Broken Bow.

 

That sounds mostly in line with what Braga has said over the years. The original idea for Season One (or at least part of it) was to have it set primarily on Earth, with Archer putting his crew together while the NX-01 is under construction.

 

* YAWN *

 

Imagine there's a (regular) cold war going on as Romulans keep trying to Blow up Enterprise and blame it on the Vulcans because no one knows that Vulcans and Romulans are identical.

Political squabbles between Earth and the Lunal, Martian and Jupitarian Colonies, and just because they haven't left earth, that still doesn't disqualify the introduction of the temporal cold war and the Suliban come to Earth... And just because Enterprise is half constructed, you don't think anything called "Starfleet" only had one ship and before 2151 had no ships? Sure they needed warp 5 to explore the "sector" but as long as the bad guys kept coming to them, they had plenty of firepower enough to keep their flag planted.

Thought...

When mirror Archer got hold of the Defiant, short on a change of clothes, his crew began looting the ship for fresh underwear and other accoutrements, so maybe Future Archer looks like he's dressed as a Romulan, because he's driving a stolen Romulan Warbird and he's dressed as a Romulan?

In the Napoleonic war pulp novels "Sharpe", Richard Sharpe used to get into a lot of trouble with the proper officers because half his kit was French. So what if the French were all evil and inbred, they really knew how to stitch up a pair of jodhpurs.

I imagine Starfleet briefs are cotton, and Romulans wear silk boxers.

Not much of a choice really.

Klingons obviously have as yet not invented underwear by the 22nd century.

 

Cold war and politics and terrorism should be a very interesting show but I'm taking the lackluster pedestrian quality of seasons one and two and applying it to the idea that season one was meant to be on earth. Without surprising things coming at them out of space I think it would be very dull if you had the same writers etc..

 

I would have had Reed hook up with Archer's mum if they were going to stay on Earth.

(Seriouslly! Why did Picard run from Lwaxana? In the 80s she was still hot, and to a 60 year old man like Picard she would have been and should have been a stone cold fox.)

The season 1 authors were shite, but could the season 4 authors have tackled a series of Earth centric stories?

Actually, season four running between Earth, Romulus, K'noS, Vulcan and Andor... it was nothing but about keeping the home fires burning.

 

Wow. I did not know that.

And it doesn't begin to answer my question.

People who live on third-hand information sometimes seem so desperate to have all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense to them - or, even more unrealistically, in a way that makes satisfying sense to them.

That doesn't mean anything.

Again, he knows what he's talking about, from memory and experience, and no one here does. All you have is "I heard something else once that contradicts this" - perhaps from Braga himself in a different situation - or "that doesn't make sense with what I get out of watching the show."

And again, that doesn't mean anything. They might have intended many things different than what was produced. But sure, if it doesn't sound right to you just assume that the person who knows is a liar.

BTW, the "spend a season building the Enterprise" is not a new piece of information; either Braga or Berman has spoken of that more than once.

 

That means that Archer killed Trips family in season 2.

Do you really think that Trip would have stayed on the ship after finding out in season 5 that Archer killed his sister or that he would sacrifice himself to save Archer in season 9?

 

Be that as it may...I still think he's full of shit.

 

The timing of it(claiming this so many years later), and as you write, the contradictions to previous info(second-hand as it may be), and finally the motive that he knows this "revelation" will cause discussion and get him attention, lead me to think that he's just saying this as a way to get that attention, and that it's not serious.


I could be wrong. It's just one guy's speculation on a message board, so it doesn't really matter.

 

Clearly a Congressional inquiry is in order...

 

This IS the inquiry. We are the people that matter.

 

It's very possible at some point FG was planned as Archer, but once the story started to take shape, it must have changed immediately.

 

If the people who created something say that they had a certain intention, you have no basis on which to challenge that.

None at all.

You can only argue about whether they effectively acted on their intention, which is quite a different thing.

 

Everything Future Guy did HELPED humanity.

Destroying the Kingons, saving Enterprise from blowing up , not quite sure about Shockwave but it was Daniels who destroyed the universe, then finally explaining the first Xindi attack on Earth.

Does he really sound like a villain?

 

There are a number of literary critics and Derrida-esque theorists who should be made to copy this on the blackboard a few hundred times.

 

I REALLY don't care for this theory, I'm afraid.

Future Guy was stated by Daniels, as being from the 29th Century. He's from even further ahead and ought to know. Earlier factions don't appear to employ time-travel, and get natives of the 22nd Century to do their dirty work. Simply broadcasting themselves back through time, to give schematics for technology that's too advanced or does in fact exist and is just beyond the Suliban/Tholian/whoever it is being aided.

Assuming Archer spends his dotage, thanks to some accidental transport to the far future... how and why would he reward the Suliban with genetic alterations and cloaking technology... that make them such a threat to the 22nd Century?

They killed a whole colony in "Shockwave" and framed it so an Enterprise shuttlepod ignited the atmosphere, with the express purpose of setting humanity's deep space program back. Millions of people wiped out. Decades until Starfleet tried again in all probability. How would Archer have benefitted from that? What's more, why would an older version of the same character, authorise something like that?

A Romulan would be my suggestion. How different would their history be, without pesky humans throwing their weight around the galaxy? A Vulcan-Romulus reunification by 2161, instead of an alliance of that cuts them off permanently from their ancestral brothers. Ultimately given what happened in the last film, they might even still have a homeworld without the Federation around. Or else, Vulcan as the capital planet in their quadrant spanning Empire.

In my opinion, whoever might've turned out to be Future Guy, would have to have been introduced during one of the later, unmade seasons. Probably become deceased quite swiftly, to throw everybody off the scent... Meanwhile the Suliban have been replaced by the Xindi, and then by the Romulans as the main enemy race. Future Guy naturally switches sides by appearing to betray Silik, and giving assistance that enables them to conquer both the Suliban and Tandarans. Bringing the borders of their Empire closer to areas of deep space, the Enterprise NX-01 had already passed by during late Season 1/early Season 2.