Soooo, I wrote a lengthy retrospective on Enterprise
, with a particular focus on "Chosen Realm." None of the history or insights will be at all novel to anyone here, but in case anyone is interested, here are my general (and a few specific) thoughts:
When I first learned, long ago, that
Voyager was nearing the end of its run, I was alarmed: for as long as I could remember, at least one
Trek series had been on the air, so what would life be like
without one? My concern was soon allayed, therefore, by the announcement that another show would premiere just months after the extant program’s finale. And, hey, this one would be a prequel to
The Original Series, depicting humanity’s first serious exploratory foray into the stars; that sounded neat.
Sometimes a single narrative decision, however, is so harebrained that it fundamentally derails its whole story. The
Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, for instance, had
two such blunders, one character-based and one plot-centric: it gave Anakin Skywalker a relatively happy childhood, despite him being a nominal slave, and it revealed the Clone Wars to be a gigantic galactic charade in which both sides were puppeted by the future Emperor Palpatine, thus making the entire Jedi order a bunch of feckless jabronis.
Enterprise also featured such a premise-sabotaging element in the pilot’s introduction of a “Temporal Cold War,” in which factions from far beyond Picard, Sisko, and Janeway’s time vied for control of history itself, with one such incursion changing the course of Captain Jonathan Archer’s first mission aboard the NX-01 in 2151.
Time travel, through various means, had of course been a staple of
Trek since
TOS’ first season, with the Borg demonstrating the ability to do so at will in
First Contact, and
Voyager establishing that the 29th-century Federation had officers and ships devoting to protecting the timeline. But these stories had always been self-contained, with the only long-term ramification (that I know of) being
Voyager’s acquisition of a future-made mobile holo-emitter, allowing the Doctor to roam freely beyond the ship’s sickbay and holodecks. This practice offered continuity-minded fans an implicit bargain: don’t dwell on why nobody ever seems to use time travel for civilization-level strategic advantage, and the writers won’t abuse the tool to destabilize the saga’s overall narrative on passing whims.
The Temporal Cold War, however, voided this delicate balance. Allegedly conceived at the request of the studio, which feared a purely pre-Kirk series would dissuade viewers, the story arc, although it only played a minor role and was rarely even mentioned during the first two seasons, hung above the series’ head like a sword of Damocles: if an adversary from the far future had the means and intent to disrupt or eliminate humanity at any time, how could Archer and his team possibly counter them in any meaningful way? It didn’t help that the story arc wasn’t in any way planned out from the start, but then, I doubt any amount of preparation could have redeemed the idea.
At the close of its second season, the series, which was beset by exhausted writers, a mediocre cast, restive fans, and diminishing ratings, pulled a Hail Mary by introducing a year-long Xindi War story to shake up its third year. Launching just four years after
Deep Space Nine concluded
its multi-year Dominion War arc, this new tale would reflect the country’s post-9/11 martial spirit, starting with a mysterious surprise attack on Earth civilians. Alas, the disastrous decision was made to make
Enterprise’s quest for answers the centerpiece of its Temporal Cold War narrative, revealing that the attackers, the multispecies civilization called the Xindi, struck at Earth because they were assured by
another species called the Sphere Builders that humanity would destroy the Xindi homeworld… some four hundred years hence, long after all the characters involved would inevitably die. The resulting story, therefore, was doomed to dramatic and thematic incoherence from its inception.
For all its flaws, however, the Xindi War arc
did bring a focus and sense of stakes to a series that had been disastrously lacking in both. The third season also saw the hiring of writer Manny Coto, who took over showrunning duties for the fourth season; this marked the beginning of the end of executive producer Rick Berman’s tenure as
Trek’s leading honcho, which dated back to when franchise creator Gene Roddenberry was sidelined early on in
TNG’s run. Despite budget cuts, the fourth year is widely acknowledged as the show’s best, but by that time, I was no longer a regular viewer, and its cancellation at the end of the 2004-05 season brought an end to 18 consecutive years of live-action
Trek on TV.
The franchise then lay dormant for all of four years until the release of J.J. Abram’s big-screen
TOS reboot, simply titled
Star Trek, in ’09. At the time, George Lucas still maintained that there would never be another live-action
Star Wars film following the conclusion of his Prequel Trilogy (also in ’05), thus creating a key opportunity for the older franchise to corner the market on space adventure and Abrams, who made no bones about preferring
Wars to
Trek, delivered a lavish, lightning-paced Hero’s Journey origin story for his recast Kirk and Co. Longtime Trekkers such as myself were thrilled by the fresh energy the movie brought to the saga, but also wary of its unapologetic prioritization of style over substance;
The Onion brilliantly captured these mixed feelings with the classic headline
“Trekkies Bash New Star Trek
Film As ‘Fun, Watchable.’” Even the studio dabbled in needling long-time fans, with an infamous TV spot boasting
“This is not your father’s Star Trek
.”
Although the movie was a big hit, Abrams took a leisurely four years to deliver a sequel, and in the interim, Disney had purchased Lucasfilm from Lucas, announced an upcoming
Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, and named Abrams himself as its first director. When the follow-up, the oddly titled
Star Trek Into Darkness, was finally released in the summer of ’13, and instantly became widely jeered for being an uninspired rehash of
The Wrath of Khan, it felt as though the franchise had reverted from being pop culture’s newly pre-eminent space epic to second banana in the course of a single flick. (Nor did it help that a totally different prequel/franchise restart released in the interim, ’11’s
X-Men: First Class, managed to blow the ’09 movie out of the water by marrying a similarly breakneck pace with actual substance.) Marvel Studios even debuted a smash hit cosmic franchise of its own in
Guardians of the Galaxy the following summer, instantly making
Trek the
third banana, before Abrams’ own
Star Wars: The Force Awakens smashed all box-office records at the end of ’15.
Trek would return to the small (streaming) screen in 2017, with the debut of the sixth live-action series
Discovery, kicking off a massive franchise output which continues to this day. This renaissance (in terms of quantity, though not necessarily quality) has seemingly made almost no cultural impact outside of the dwindling fandom, however, and I’ve mostly found myself completely uninterested in its bounties, which would have utterly baffled my teenage self. Indeed, in spite of my general belief that, given enough branching webs, fiction franchises can continue producing high-quality work indefinitely, I retain a stubborn gut feeling that the
Trek saga should perhaps have concluded with
Voyager’s finale in the spring of ’01. But, back to
Enterprise.
Yep, that bit player in the middle is Taylor Sheridan, creator of Paramount+'s wildly popular Yellowstone franchise.
The episode which best highlights the transition from the usual Berman-era fare to the fresher and edgier take Manny Coto brought to the series may be Coto’s second credited outing,
“Chosen Realm” (3x12, 2004). A riff on the infamously blunt
TOS anti-racism allegory “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (3x15, 1969), “Chosen Realm” centers upon a fanatical cult of Triannon aliens who take the crew hostage with the threat (and a murderous demonstration) of suicide bombing, in order to use Enterprise’s firepower to win a religious civil war on their homeworld. Their cult’s leader, D’Jamat, then informs Captain Archer that, for their blasphemous crime of having examined a Sphere up close, he must select one of his own crew to be executed – and that this is a
merciful judgment, as by rights the whole crew should suffer that fate. Archer chooses himself, and, in a nifty twist, successfully gambles that the Triannon are unfamiliar with transporters, allowing him to be “humanely” dematerialized to another part of the ship, whereupon he sets about retaking the vessel.
This third-season tale ties directly to the Xindi Crisis, in that its humanoid aliens worship the Sphere Builders, but the connection is strictly incidental, as the story is never referenced again. With its themes of religious extremism, suicide bombings, and advanced firepower being sought to settle far-off regional conflict, the story could hardly have failed to remind viewers of both the 9/11 attacks and various Middle Eastern factions’ search for weapons of mass destruction, all of which were dominating the news at the time. While Berman-era
Star Trek had always assailed the senselessness and cruelty of warfare in general, the conflicts it depicted tended to the generic and flavorless, whereas the suicide bombing element of “Chosen Realm” gave the episode an unusually contemporary valence. Leaders of warring factions, moreover, tended to be portrayed as hypocrites, buffoons, or madmen, but D’Jamat (nicely played by Conor O’Farrell, likely best known as the father of
Jurassic Park’s Joseph Mazzello in the HBO miniseries
The Pacific) is an exception: he’s consistently sincere and unnervingly gentle, speaking in conciliatory, rueful tones about the killing he’s perpetrating as unfortunate but necessary acts of devotion, and the result is a bracing character that may just be the series’ most memorable villain.
Alas, the purity of D’Jamat’s nefariousness leaves little room for growth, so the episode falls back on one of the franchise’s hoariest clichés: the doubting adversarial underling who one of our heroes convinces to turn against their misguided leader. It’s easy to see why the writers liked this device: it lets the Starfleet protagonists win the day with words and values, often resolving the crisis without further bloodshed, and adds depth to what would otherwise be a one-dimensional henchman. The trouble is, the various series fell back on this trope so often that it became downright tedious, and often seemed like the default way to burn a few minutes when the scribes couldn’t the scribes couldn’t devise any more interesting scenes.
A bloated sequence of
pew-pew-punch-punch retaking the ship follows, with the supposedly elite soldiers brought on the Xindi mission performing no better than the ship’s regular security officer, whose defining trait was always seeming as though he needed a long nap. The yarn ends on an uncharacteristically harsh note, with perhaps the most biting anti-religion statement in the whole franchise, but it’s undercut by a particularly petty and wholly unnecessary explication from earlier in the episode of the nature of the theological argument between the two factions. An abrupt and coda-less fade to credits follows, with no indication of how the crew offloaded their unwanted passengers in any kind of safe manner.
All in all, “Chosen Realm” is more flavorful than most of the grayish slop that constitutes
Enterprise’s 97 episodes, but that’s not saying much. If any
Trek show had to be rushed into production as soon as
Voyager ended, I still believe a pre-
TOS prequel series was the right idea, but only much more serialization (without any temporal conflict nonsense), a far sharper creative staff, and a vastly more charismatic cast could have made the effort worth its dilithium. It
did finally explain the smooth-foreheaded Klingons of Kirk’s time, though, so… that’s
something, I guess?
“Chosen Realm” grade:
B-
Series grade:
C-
