By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a nostalgic English professor, I often think about these wise words from John Greenleaf Whittier: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” No matter what current events are bringing you down (and boy, do you have a lot to choose from right now), nothing will be quite as tragic as the idea that things could have turned out better. That’s not just true of personal or global events, either. In this case, it’s also true of Star Trek: Enterprise.
At this year’s TrekTalks (the annual livestream telethon that raises money for the Hollywood Food Coalition), several Enterprise writers and producers were reunited, including Brannon Braga, Mike Sussman, Phyllis Strong, André Bormanis, and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. During the stream, they dished on some of the coolest Enterprise episode pitches that were rejected. Some of them (including a Borg Queen origin story and a crossover with both The Original Series and Deep Space Nine) would have been amazing, and making those episodes could have done what once seemed impossible: saved Star Trek’s most hated spinoff from getting canceled.
Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud
Star Trek: Enterprise was a show that, to put it mildly, couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. Sometimes, it was a proto-Original Series frontier adventure, and other times, it was a post 9/11 nataionlistic parable. By Season 4, showrunner Manny Coto had transformed Enterprise into a must-see Star Trek show, but the damage was already done, and the show was canceled. That made it the first Trek show since The Animated Series to get fewer than seven seasons, and Enterprise was deemed a failure. However, the assembled writers and producers who reunited for Trek Talks revealed some rejected episode pitches that might have saved this underappreciated series.
For example, André Bormanis pitched a prequel to the Original Series episode “The Cloud Minders,” which featured an upper class of citizens literally living in the clouds while an underclass labored in the mines below. Bormani pitched an episode that would have shown the city in the sky being built while social unease and income inequality grew worse. Coto wanted to shoot this episode for Season 5, but Enterprise was canceled before that could happen.
From The Romulan War To World War III
Speaking of the Coto and his scrapped plans for Enterprise, he was really keen on finally portraying the Romulan War onscreen. Mike Sussman confirmed that the late showrunner wanted to finally show the audience the Earth/Romulus conflict that had only been referenced in passing back in the Original Series. Brannon Braga chimed in and alluded to Coto having this planned out for Season 5, confirming that the early cancellation of Enterprise took yet another awesome story away from us.
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens confirmed they had pitched an episode where Colonel Green (previously seen in the TOS episode “The Savage Curtain”) would survive and torment the descendants of those who fought him, with the audience discovering that Reed’s grandfather supported Green. In case his name doesn’t ring a bell, Green is the war criminal generally credited with starting World War III. Bringing him into an Enterprise episode would have shed light on Star Trek’s most mysterious and generally unexplored time period, but this episode was rejected because it was too similar to storylines involving the Khan-like Augments, themselves a remnant of WW3-era Earth.
Borg Queen Origin Story
This same writing duo also pitched an episode where Alice Krige plays the head of Starfleet Medical and willingly chooses “to join the Collective.” For better or for worse, this would have provided an origin story for the Borg Queen, a character that many Star Trek fans feel has never made much sense.
This would have been a high-risk, high-reward story because it would either finally nestle this strange character into existing canon or ruin the Borg altogether. However, Reeves-Stevens have a great track record(they also wrote some of the best fiction and non-fiction books in Trek history), so if anyone could pull it off, it’s them.
Archer Meets Both Kirk And Sisko Amid The Trouble With Tribbles
The husband/wife writing duo’s final rejected Enterprise pitch was, far and away, the most ambitious. Had the show made it to Season 7, they wanted to feature one last Temporal Cold War episode in which Captain Archer and his crew would have to return to space station K-7 during the events of “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
There, they’d run into both Kirk’s crew from the original episode and Sisko’s crew from “Trials and Tribble-ations.” In retrospect, such an ambitious episode would have been far better than the Enterprise finale, which turned the show’s final story into Commander Riker’s bizarre holodeck simulation.
The Path Not Taken
That series finale was so bad that many Star Trek fans are grateful that Enterprise was canceled before it could get any worse. However, aside from the finale, Season 4 was a high point for this controversial show, and these rejected stories reveal the series’s still untapped potential.
Now, I can’t help but wonder if these episodes could have turned the metaphorical ship around, getting both fans and the network on board for more adventures with the franchise’s quirkiest crew. Had that happened, Enterprise would not have been canceled, and the future of Star Trek might not have landed in the hands of the creative world’s most fearsome villain: Alex Kurtzman.
