I was in 8th grade when the show premiered. There has been a lot of time in between when rewatching the show thinking they messed this up or that could have been better, including when they switched over to phase pistols midway through “Broken Bow”. And thinking that the Enterprise that I was looking for from the show was best represented by the Kelvin films.
Knowing what I know now about everything behind the scenes as to how the show came to be, what ideas did and did not make it into the show and why, I can lighten up and see that the “mistakes” aren’t really mistakes. The show just ran into issue after issue, and if it had continued, would have run into more issues with the changeover from UPN into the CW, and the writer’s strike. The issues were never really going to end. That might just be a part of the Enterprise experience.
In hindsight, there was room for both the Temporal Cold War, the Birth and subsequent Rise of the Federation, and a bunch of filler stories that built the ENT universe in between. It’s just storytelling in the end; being a prequel should not hamper that. And all are integral to the identity of the show.
It’s a shame that the studio did not see the potential in churning out tv movies every two to three weeks with the cast at the time as an alternative for S5, as the mini arcs in S4 were basically that. And they were produced at a quick rate too.
But it good that Enterprise is more accepted now as a show from when it first aired. And “Broken Bow” is still an amazing premiere.
Knowing what I know now about everything behind the scenes as to how the show came to be, what ideas did and did not make it into the show and why, I can lighten up and see that the “mistakes” aren’t really mistakes. The show just ran into issue after issue, and if it had continued, would have run into more issues with the changeover from UPN into the CW, and the writer’s strike. The issues were never really going to end. That might just be a part of the Enterprise experience.
In hindsight, there was room for both the Temporal Cold War, the Birth and subsequent Rise of the Federation, and a bunch of filler stories that built the ENT universe in between. It’s just storytelling in the end; being a prequel should not hamper that. And all are integral to the identity of the show.
It’s a shame that the studio did not see the potential in churning out tv movies every two to three weeks with the cast at the time as an alternative for S5, as the mini arcs in S4 were basically that. And they were produced at a quick rate too.
But it good that Enterprise is more accepted now as a show from when it first aired. And “Broken Bow” is still an amazing premiere.