Star Trek: Enterprise Quotes

“We started out with 13 million viewers on the pilot, and we somehow managed to drive 11 million of them away.”

“Wikipedia: Star Trek: Enterprise”

“Internet Movie Database (IMDb): Enterprise”

“I had assumptions, and we all know what happens when we assume. I assumed that the ending would be about our show and not a wrap-up of the conglomerate.”

“It (the romance with Tucker) was so monotonous. There were a lot of feelings, but nothing ever happened. We repeated the same story over and over. Either make it a relationship or don't, but you can't walk this line forever. It's boring.”

“Well, Enterprise too was literally going in the wrong direction. Gene was always forward looking and in terms of drama he wanted the shock of the new: new life, new civilizations. When you go backward people start nitpicking at the cannon and the technology.”

“There was a flood of letters from every corner of the world advocating for this Excelsior series and then Paramount suddenly decided they didn’t want fan advice or participation and went ahead and did what they wanted to anyway with Enterprise which was a disastrous failure.”

“Things were dictated by the times, by it being post-9/11, but I wanted us to hopefully get back to having a little bit more fun on the show and to get out of that whole Xindi thing. That would have been fun. I think we were pointing in that direction. I think the group was ready to go. The cast was ready to get there, and I think we could have had a blast. But we just didn’t get to go there. And I wanted Archer to kind of grow up and lighten up a little bit.”

“Star Trek: Enterprise was the first Trek series to appear after 9/11, and reflected these new realities. The prequel series crew stumbled as they confronted all manner of unfamiliar civilizations, and did not even get along with the Vulcans very well. Then, in season three a 9/11-style attack on Earth forced Starfleet to launch an expedition to go after the shadowy Xindi, who had launched the strike. Making the Xindi potentially scary was the consortium nature of their alliance, including humanoid, arboreal, insectoid and aquatic species. Just as al Qaeda was an international terrorist consortium, the Xindi was more dangerous together than separately — a fact the Enterprise crew use to pry away some of the species from the organization.”

“TrekCore: What were the things on Enterprise that you really wanted to do in the fifth season? The biggest tragedy is when it got cut short. Where were you going to take it?
Brannon Braga: Well, Manny Coto had taken over the reins of Enterprise at that point, I was doing some other show for CBS, we were going to continue on with the Mirror Universe, in a major way, I think the Cold War thing would have continued, but Manny Coto, who’s a great guy to interview, he had some big plans for the Mirror Universe.
The Mirror Universe episodes were very successful. The Mirror Universe of the movie First Contactwhere Zephram Cochrane blows away the Vulcan with a shotgun? I mean, when I saw that, it was like, “This should just be a whole season!” There were some pretty big things we discussed.
TrekCore: I know there’s a large body of work on Voyager and Enterprise where we see the writers credited as ‘Brannon Braga and Rick Berman’. When did that partnership develop between you guys? What was Rick’s input; what was yours?
Brannon Braga: Rick was involved with the writing of every episode. He gave incredibly detailed notes on every episode, so his hand as the ultimate executive producer of the show, for better or worse, depending on who you talk to – I think for the better, there were ideas that he’s not credited with, that would make episodes. It would just make them.
I don’t know why we decided to write the pilot of Enterprise together, the first time we wrote together. We were working out the story; beating out the story, scene by scene, and one of us just said, “We’re practically writing this together. Let’s do it!” We had a great time, here’s how it worked: we’d come up with the story, lay it out, and they we would sit in a room together. I would type, he’d sit on the couch, and we’d just write the episode.”

“Q: The prequel concept sounded so promising, but fans never embraced Enterprise the way they had the other shows. Assuming you agree with that statement, why didn’t Trek fans connect with Enterprise to the same degree they had the previous series?
Berman: I think everything you just said is true. I think Enterprise was embraced, but by certainly a smaller audience. It was not embraced by a lot of people. There are a lot of different guesses one could make about why. I always felt that whoever came up with the term “franchise fatigue” was right, that there was definitely some of that. There was just too much going on at the same time. By then, DS9 had ended, Voyager was still on the air, a third TNG movie was coming out, and there was definitely a feeling that maybe we were pushing it. “Oh, my God, here comes another Star Trekshow.” It was the fourth Star Trek series in a decade. The prequel idea I think was a good idea. After Voyager we certainly weren’t going to say, “OK, now it’s time for a new show. Voyager is going to go off the air in May and in September you’re going to get a new crew on a new ship in the same century.” The idea of going back and learning a little something about what went on for the very first people who were stepping out into space… it seemed to us to be a great idea. Scott Bakula had a good relationship with Kerry McCluggage, who was running the studio at that point, and he was the first big name that seemed to be interested in doing a series for us. He was an actor who I’d enjoyed in his previous series. So we thought that we’d put together something that, again, was fresh and unique and with some wonderful new actors (around Bakula). The show certainly had a great start. It got very good reviews and it had a huge audience for the first half a dozen episodes and then it started to slip. I could take the blame for it. I could put the blame into the scripts. I could put the blame into franchise fatigue. I don’t know why it didn’t work.”