Star Trek: Enterprise Facing Cancellation?

Lots of news on the Star Trek front, so I'm combining them here.

First, via Trek Today, comes news that Enterprise may be cancelled at the end of this (short) season. Although the producers remain publicly optimistic, many of the actors and Les Moonves of CBS/Viacom are less so. Ratings for the show aren't moving up. The most recent episode had ratings so low that the Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica is beating it! (Digression: I really, really like the new imagining of BSG. Ron Moore, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine alumnus, proves he knows what he's doing. Trek's loss is SciFi's gain.) Slahsdot discussion thread here.

The promised stunt casting of William Shatner seems to have fallen apart, but now comes word that William Riker and Deanna Troi (of Star Trek: The Next Generation) will appear later this season. Stunt casting is a Trek staple, but also a bad sign. Open recycling is a mark of a dearth of creativity.

I'm kinda sad to see this looming end. I think new producer Manny Coto has done wonders with the franchise this season. Shows have more interesting settings and characters. The main cast seem more fired up. We've been revisiting some Trek bits of history and fan love, to mostly good results. The episdoes with the return to Vulcan, that "fixed" the problem of Enterprise's over-emotional Vulcans, were stellar.

The last new episode, "Observer Effect," I thought was among the best. Yes, we've seen the plot many times before. Can't help that, with well more than five hundred Trek episodes produced. And it did smack a lot of Kirk and TOS (The Original Series) in the speeches about humanity and compassion.

But darn it! The writing was sharp. They gave Hoshi and Mayweather and Phlox lots to do (and the actors did it very well). The direction was simply non-pareil. Think about it. This was a classic talking-head episode: lots and lots of dialogue. But the camera was constantly on the move, as were the actors during their dialogue exchanges. The editing of scenes was busy -- jumping around in points-of-view and angles to keep an illusion of action. Even the score suited things. The use of musical cues to herald the change of bodies by the aliens was fairly subtle. I really liked this episode a lot.

Upcoming episodes promise more. Tonight's episode has Tellarites, Vulcans and Andorians. Oh my! It promises conflict and fun. Yeah, it sounds like "Journey to Babel" but give it a chance. We get Jeffrey Coombs as Shran, always a delight.

Later this season, we visit the "Mirror, Mirror" universe yet again. But with a twist. The whole episode is reportedly done in the "evil Federation" style, including the opening credits, as though it was produced in that universe. We revisit the First Contact between Earth and Vulcan, only this time, when the Vulcans come down from their ship and pull back their hoods, the humans attack them. They've even built sets for a TOS-era ship's bridge that figures in the story.

Orion slave girls make their return, too. How can you not want to see that?

My only complaint is how Coto and the writing staff focus so much, it seems, on Trek's past and on bringing back so many fan favorites. Yes, at this point in space exploration, it should be all about our earliest contacts. But remember how often TOS encountered overwhelmingly powerful aliens and new species? Enterprise seems to avoid that. It should all seem new, but it just seems nostalgic somehow.

I also believe part of what made TOS so very successful, when it should have been cheesy, was that the producers actively brought in outside writers, both from the science fiction community (Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Robert Bloch) and from other shows. As long as you have a core staff who have a clear idea of the characters, it allows for possibilities your own myopia doesn't see. Today's science fiction community are far more media savvy (William Gibson and The X-Files, anyone?) and should give some spectacular results. Try it! (I will give credit to the hiring of Trek-novel writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, though. They can write a sharp plot.)

That's been part of Enterprise's problem. They haven't had a clear idea of their characters, nor of how to use them. For example, Mayweather's life in space, as a "boomer," should have given them a lot to work with but has gone unexplored. Hoshi, in "Observer Effect," gave a bit of her backstory that made her character come alive, made her complex because it didn't fit preconceptions of her but did, on second thought, fit the nature of her character. With everything her character was put through last season, she should be a tremendous source of emotional turmoil to explore.

I've said it before, and will repeat it: Trek needs to lie fallow for a few years. Maybe a decade. Then, instead of a series (Braga and Berman are proposing yet another prequel, set in an early "Starfleet Academy." Oy! Gah!), they should come back with a tele-film or miniseries approach. They've got the production depth already, but having a regular flow of two hour movies, or multi-night special events, frees them to go anywhere in Trek history, with minimal expense. Fans and George Takei have long wanted a "Star Trek: Excelsior" series. A two-hour movie lets everyone be happy, with little downside. Fans of the Klingons want to see an all-out, balls to the walls, battle movie. That could be done! The origin of the Borg? A Surak story? Life on volatile Vulcan, pre-Surak? A Romulan movie? Alternate-Trek universes? The sky's the limit here. Not only that, but you can routinely bring in new production designers (something Trek's desperately needed) and new writers, especially ones with "wide-screen space opera" ideas. Casting is wide open to any star who is available, and a lot are Trek-fans.

But it won't happen. Too bad.