How different would Enterprise have been if it wasn't burdened with the Temporal Cold War? Instead in its place would be the growing, impending threat of the Romulans against Earth. In what ways would that change the overall show in your opinion?
They weren't even aware of the Romulans in the first season, so I'm not sure how that would have worked at all.
That essentially started with "Minefield". We knew who they were, but they didn't. Even T'Pol didn't recognize the language. We saw more of them in Season 4, but they still weren't met by the crew and never identified. I disliked the TCW myself, found it completely confusing, and suspected they were trying to establish the whole series as being in an alternate universe of some kind. Whoa. I hit Vice Admiral rank during the last hour or something. Can't get to their lounge until November though.
I've often thought how the Temporal Cold War could ultimately be used as an in-built way of rebooting the show. Taking it out, leads to the NX-01 being launched years later and for a completely different reason than a mission to return Klaang home. Probably with a rejigged crew assigned. So whole new characters. Following this line of thought, seems to make an exception of Archer and Trip, whose involvement in the Warp 5 program pre-dates any TCW influences. Then as the reimagining continues - Phlox, Reed, Hoshi, Travis can still be encountered working elsewhere within Starfleet. T'Pol among the Vulcans presumably. And you can play on the deja-vu, Archer and Trip the only remaining crew members have, when they turn up. Like they met in a different life. So effectively the first four seasons haven't been a complete write-off and even still have some relevance, as the story begins to unfold slightly differently than before. You have various technological issues at an earlier state too. No Suliban around, with stealth tech provided by Future Guy. The Enterprise NX-01 tested earlier and closer to Earth, sent back to drydock and launched with a few more design improvements. Throw in a major transporter accident that means the next time it's experimented with becomes a big deal and massive risk. Set back phase-pistols with a similarly horrible event that sends them back to Reed on Earth, sitting at his drawing board. But playing around with the 22nd Century, you can essentially create a new Star Trek show, with a mixture of old cast members and new characters. Plus wholesale changes, learning whatever lessons that are supposed to be learned from Enterprise's perceived failures.
Well, it was never really "burdened," per se. How many episodes throughout the entire run of the series were actually devoted to it? Six? Maybe seven? And then Coto comes along and says "fuck that, I'm killing this silly idea with the premiere episode of the fourth season and then doing my own shit." Well, that's really what the focus of the show should have been about from the get-go. And no Klingons either; they were already overused by the time VOY ended. But they should never have actually shown the Romulans. We all know who they are, but the characters in the show wouldn't, and it should have been their point of view.
When I first saw the show, I was really intrigued when Daniels had taken Archer to the past, and they were in that library. The library with...books..on paper. They went out of their way to mention that. I had gotten the impression that there was something in mind to tie that in with the original series, and some tie-in to the "lower tech" of it all. They seemed, to me at least, to have something cooking which never materialized. I was really disappointed that that idea went nowhere.
Every season opener and closer (with the exception of TATV, though that's not an improvement), which is pretty significant on its own, and eight episodes just with those. Every episode with the Suliban is a result of the TCW. Oh, and the whole bloody third season.
If you simply replace Futureguy with a Tal'Shiar contact (and have Daniels as either Starfleet Intelligence or Section 31) it wouldn't have been all that difference at first. The Suliban would be proxies for the Romulans, as would the Xindi eventually. But pinning it to the Romulans would have forced the writers to develop the story differently: 1. No time travel nonsense. Shockwave and The Expanse would have played out differently, with Archer having to get his information in a less convoluted way and would now have a legitimate reason to take it with a grain of salt. 2. It would completely change the Xindi Crisis and change the writing for that entire season. Instead of anomalies, it's just oodles and oodles of minefields setup everywhere (and Enterprise begins to notice how similar they are to the Romulan mines), and the spheres would be much more conventional teraforming devices planted by the Romulans to colonize this region of space. The Xindi wouldn't "worship" the Romulans like they do the sphere builders, it would just be a political alliance on the basis that the Romulans fleet protected them during the early diaspora or something. The direct Romulan intervention in defense of the Xindi Superweapon would lead to the Xindi turning their backs on the Romulans (realizing that Romulus manipulated them into fighting a war for them) and would lead to Earth declaring war on them for Season 4. 3. It would make the Romulans fodder as a recurring villain in season 4: it would be Romulans, not Klingons, in the borderlands, Romulans dealing with the augments, etc. The Kir'Shira story ark could be tweaked a little and converted into a front of the Earth-Romulan War, with the Vulcan government threatening to align with Romulus (and briefly doing exactly that when they fire on Enterprise) because of the Embassy bombing and what appears to be Earth support for the Syrannites. 4. Finally, it might actually save "These are the Voyages" from one of its major flaws: instead of a meaningless and inexplicable death, Trip dies when the Enterprise is shot to pieces in the Battle of Cheron, and the episode ends with the signing of the neutral zone treaty.
I don't know if you can really blame the Temporal Cold War for what happened in terms of the shows quality and misdirection, or if that Temporal Cold War plot-line is really the symptom rather than the disease. I really didn't like it. Enterprise had so much potential and fans were very interested in the premise when we heard about it (and really the ideas they said of "Oh, it could turn out like this" were better than what seasons 1 to 3 produced). It was much more of the near future, so it was much more relatable; it was before the Federation, and was human-centric (even more so than the other Star Trek's) and was more relatable; the technology was more primitive and more relatable; it was more us, it was people finding themselves, it was an uncharted era of Star Trek leading into TOS, it was setting up all the big historical things of Star Trek, etc. The premise was extremely fascinating, and it was squandered and misdirected from the get-go with running the show by time travel. Time travel gets convoluted as it is with just one story, but the series was framed in terms of time travel. Not to mention I do remember them saying, like Lost, they started out and didn't plot out how things were going to end or what they meant; that doesn't work. On the whole, though, Enterprise suffered from the same sort of things Voyager did, including largely squandering it's premise and having things be Star Trek that could have fit in any series as a filler episode. And I will say that if you want to go the episodic route, that can work as TOS showed, but as TOS showed, you also need consistent and strong characters and characterizations clearly defined and outlined, and those didn't exist from Voyager onward leading to bipolar and inconsistent characterization. Ronald D. Moore talked about the problems with Voyager and why he left once, and all of those problems he mentioned carried on into Enterprise; I recommend reading that. As an aside, his experience on Voyager and what he saw was wrong with it probably lead to what he did with Battlestar Galactica. So on the whole, Enterprise without the time travel malarkey would have been better, but it had serious issues. And there is a defense that it was UPN; it wasn't just UPN, it was indeed what Berman and Braga did with that series of their own accord, and doing things better would have staved off and survived any silliness the network asked for, and turned out something good out of any silliness asked for. I also would say that the show could have survived if Season 3 were better. I think two bad or even lackluster seasons would have been acceptable; that happened to TNG and tends to happen to everything but the Original Series. Season three was what needed to count, and it needed to be when the series finally found its voice and uniqueness, and it was squandered on that season long arc while continuing the same issues as before. I think even TNG would have been cancelled if Season three of that series had been like the first two seasons. By season 4, it was a good last effort, but it was already too late.
I disliked it, and I think most people were skeptical of it because of a lack of faith that the Temporal Cold War would be a story that went anywhere. It seemed at most a way to offer an escape hatch: if the show did anything that really, seriously, produced an important canon violation that couldn't be argued around [1], then, the Temporal Cold War would be summoned to provide an excuse for why this apparent glitch happened. Mind, my personal objection was based on more abstract grounds: a ``cold war'' is one that's fought by proxy, over issues that aren't the ones that the great powers really care about. Losing South Korea would have bothered the United States, and losing Cuba would have irritated the Soviet Union, but neither Washington nor Moscow would be shaken to its core by the defeat the way that London or Berlin were threatened with in World War II. Being the unimportant battlefront can be awfully exciting for the people caught in the combat, but the participants are distant from the big issues that make the war worth fighting. And this seems to have ultimately been one of the Temporal Cold War's big failings: nobody ever worked out what anyone was fighting about, or for, or against, or who exactly with. At least the Sphere Builders had an objective that could be supported or opposed. [1] And I have to point out, it really didn't; I think the only one of substance amounted to Romulans with invisible ships (much as I find the secret Ferengi contact to require an impossibly high grade of idiot plotting to sustain). But the number of really unresolvable discontinuities in Trek is shockingly low considering how vast a project it is.
I always thought that the Temporal Cold War had changed the timeline, based on the fact that the NX-01 Enterprise never existed until "Star Trek: Enterprise". In fact, if you recall the one scene in TMP, where Decker shows the V'Ger probe Ilia other vessels named "Enterprise".
I never saw the third season. Were the Xindi and Sphere Builder stuff part of the TCW? That doesn't mean anything. There were other vessels named Enterprise that weren't shown in TMP either.
I think having the Romulans as a background presence would have worked well. A few encounters in season 1, silent enemy etc, season two and colonies are being mysteriously attack. The end of season two would have the lid blown off with the Romulan attack on Earth leading to war and the Enterprise on a mission to make a strike at the heart of the Romulan empire to prevent a more deadly attack. Season 4 Earth tries to gain allies through Vulcan and Andor but the Romulans know this and try to mess everything up.
I always assumed Future Guy was Romulan and the TCW would result in the Earth/Romulan war. The Suliban would have turned out to be part of the Romulan Empire, and the "face" of the war (since humans and Romulans supposedly never meet. Or those that do never live to tell the tale.) But (IIRC) the only one who still used books in TOS was Kirk's lawyer? I loved how the mirror-NX crew treated the USS Defiant - as incredibly advanced technology-meets-art. I thought it a wonderful way to reconcile the differing looks of the Trek eras. In 2266, toggle switches are kewl. That's what I thought at first (especially after season 3), but with all the crossovers and references to later Treks in season 4 I think the only way to reconcile it all is to say the timeline was changed, but that those changes led to the Trek history we know and not away from it. For example, without the events of "Zero Hour", the Delphic Expanse grows until it fills the entire quadrant, leading to the future war we see briefly in "Azati Prime". Since the Expanse was never seen nor mentioned in TOS, TNG or DS9, the Enterprise must have destroyed it in 2153.
The TCW was one of the few things I really liked about Ent right out of the box. It always made sense to me that a prequel series with such a vast tapestry of filmed material would be foolish not to access all that stuff. But, being a prequel, that automatically implies time travel. I loved when Daniels would show Archer holograms and we the audience would recognize half the stuff in them but Archer wouldn't. We were cued into stuff that Archer still had to discover for himself. The TCW also set the stage for season 3, one of my fav seasons of any Trek series. The constant meddling of the Sphere-Builders and their manipulations of the timeline created a sense of urgency as our uninformed 22nd century heroes had to try to stay ahead of them. I just don't see Ent working without the TCW.
I don't think no Temporal Cold War would make that much of a difference since there weren't that many dedicated TCW episodes and time travel wasn't announced as being real to the general public of Earth although it probably would mean no Xindi conflict. So ENT would have less of a tactical tone until the Romulan War rolls around. And the Xindi would simply be a technologically advanced civilization that the Enterprise maybe encounters. And the Romulan cold war would probably develop at the same pace.