February
Second, Two Thousand Five. The day Star Trek died.
It’s
all over the world wide web. Star Trek: Enterprise,
after too many close calls to count, has been cancelled.
Even though the writing has been on the wall for months
it still comes as a shock. Star Trek, in one form or another,
has been on the air for seventeen consecutive years. The
legacy of the next generation of trek shows has been a memorial
for the early demise of the original Star Trek.
And now the fourth spin off has been taken before her time.
Enterprise
was in troubled waters from the start. The numbers for Star
Trek franchise numbers had been sliding. People, on the
whole, have been losing interest. And many fans just didn’t
make the jump into the past. Enterprise has tried
everything to spark an audience. Klingons in the series
pilot. Last season it was an entire year long story, in
the vein of 24 and Lost. This season they’ve
brought in Brent Spiner (Data on TNG) and featured
story lines centered on the Eugenics War. Right now they’re
airing a three part story showing the origins of the Federation.
But no one cares.
Jolene
Blalock, T’Pol, smelled doom last year. In an interview
at IGN,
she went on record back in November of ’04 saying
she felt it was their last season. She’s a self proclaimed
Trekkie, and has been watching the shows since she was a
kid. She knows Star Trek and felt Enterprise wasn’t
living up to standards. That can’t be good.
UPN
wanted to cancel Enterprise at the end of the third
season, but Paramount reworked the budget and dropped the
price per episode almost to half. It was a deal UPN couldn’t
pass up. But to keep the show on the air, they’d have
to make one small adjustment.
The
first three years of Enterprise were slotted for
Wednesday nights at 8:00. And when they bumped it to Friday
at 8:00 in the fall of ’04, the stench of doom became
so strong the fans could now smell it. But The X Files
lived happily on Friday nights. Friday may just be a good
sci fi night. Well, the Sci Fi channel agrees, and in January
launched its biggest night of Sci Fi… on Fridays at
8:00. They pitted Star Gate: Atlantis, Star Gate: SG1
and the new Battlestar Galatica up against poor
little Enterprise. Homer Simpson stole Cosby’s
audience but Sci Fi finished off Enterprise.
Some
small part of me prays that Sci Fi will pick up Enterprise.
It already runs the original Star Trek eight million
times a week. Or perhaps it’s just better to let the
show die, peacefully.
It seems
so unfair. TNG, DS9 and Voyager all RETIRED
after seven years. And if Voyager could last seven,
why not Enterprise? I've tried to refrain from
bagging on Voyager, but these are emotional times.
If a show with bland characters, obvious plots and boring
villains can last seven years, why can’t Enterprise,
a show stretching the boundaries of Star Trek, creating
original characters and interesting story lines with thick
continuity, last seven?
And
to have it die before its fifth season is the real kicker.
As a rule the later half of a Trek series hosts the better
episodes, Deep Space Nine being the best example.
It’s the year when they sorted out the Klingon war
and establish the direction for the final three years. Enterprise’s
Xindi story arc of season three was the sort of thing we’d
laugh at in the final episodes of season seven. “Remember
when we wasted a year on the Xindi?” Now we’ll
never learn how the Earth-Romulan war unfolds. Or how the
Federation evolves. Or any of the other prequel mysteries
left undiscovered by Archer’s crew. Honestly, we’re
getting robbed.
No Star Trek show has ever hit the air waves
without someone saying, “It won’t last.”
And three times Trekkers and Trekkies have proved them wrong.
And now… we’ve failed.
Enterprise
is scheduled to start syndication this fall. It’ll
show up late nights after reruns of Frasier or
Everybody Loves Raymond. And people will start
to watch it, and think, “Why didn’t I get into
this show?”
After
98 adventures, the final episode of Enterprise
will air Friday May 13th at 8:00.
