Enterprise - the only post TOS show to get less than seven seasons...

It's been almost exactly two years since this ill fated show departed the small screen forever - managing to surpass DS9 effortlessly for worst finale ever - and it's not really surprising that it didn't last long. Much as with Voyager, it was a concept that was not beyond redemption. In fact, it could probably have been done rather well if any thought or coherence had been lent to the idea.

Naturally, it wasn't though and so even the hopelessly loyal Star Trek fans who swore death before dishonour switched off in their droves - not that the omission of the words "Star" and "Trek" from the title, for a substantial amount of time helped - and by the time Manny Cotto was given creative control over the still warm corpses of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, it was too late.

The show was a step back, both literally and figuratively. By the end of Voyager many fans were starting to feel that there wasn't much to do... TOS and TNG had done the Alpha and Beta Quadrant, DS9 did the Gamma and Voyager did the Delta - which really wasn't the case given that little of the Gamma Quadrant was explored and despite Janeway's deranged detours because of the several big jumpers

Enterprise was clearly conceived to get back to that spirit of exploration that TOS and early TNG had captured and which had so clearly been lost, so much so that in Star Trek: Insurrection Picard even comments "Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?" Not just that but to have that... Old West sensibility that could sometimes be felt in TOS, people on a frontier... and of course, to dramatically cut the amount of treknobabble.

You can tell that they wanted to send a message that there'd be less treknobabble when in the first episode, Archer is confronted with the phrase "Temporal Cold War" and doesn't understand it. Ironically, the Temporal Cold War would go on to be one of the more problematic elements of this troubled show - a case in point that storylines should be planned out and not just made up as and when it's required.

The main flaws with the show were really more general... its place in continuity, the characters and the plot...

Its place in continuity is rather precarious... Shortly before the formation of the Federation and a couple of generations before Kirk would take the helm. You'd think THE first Captain of a big fancy ship who goes out, does some exploring and saves Earth a few times would be as big a legend as Kirk... oops. Then of course you have the fact that many species introduced in Enterprise - Denobulans - are never seen or heard of again... which makes the already overpopulated Trekverse even more so. Then of course, there was the fact that instead of the Earth/Romulan war we got the Earth/Xindi war... if you could CALL it a war. More like a quest... a pretty dull quest.

Next we have the characters... initially we were promised characters who were "rough around the edges". To be honest, there was no real reason for that... NASA crews aren't rough around the edges... it's not hard to get a ship to be crewed by professionals, after all. As it was - they were all bland... Phloxx was happy and easy going, T'Pol wore a jumpsuit and was stuck up... Archer shouted "REPORT!" a lot and generally taking the moral high horse only when it suited him and the rest just blended together. This was an obvious mistake... TNG could sometimes pull off what wasn't really that great an episode because of the strength of characters... and even in Voyager you could at least relate to the fact Janeway was a crazy bitch or that Tom Paris was irritating.

The plot was problematic - in that it hadn't really been thought through. You'd think that if you were doing a prequel, you'd want it to fit in with the existing stuff... and hence, plan carefully but no... we got a lot of dull episodes. Enterprise was a good chance to establish more precisely how the Trek universe ticked and how the Federation came to be... they ran so low on ideas, they had to have a Borg episode. Then there was mess of the Temporal Cold War... which never really felt it was going anywhere... and of course, the Xindi War... which admittedly had its moments but was problematic in that Archer seemed fairly capable of just switching off his morals - most likely making him an ancestor of Janeway.

The potential for success was there but they made a real fudge of things. The technology was too advance - transporters? Grav plating? And so on. Sure, it wasn't the button pushing ease of Voyager but it still felt better than TOS and that was always going to be a problem. They also totally failed to instil any sense of awe or wonder. It was pretty much the regular "what's going to happen at this planet"? And so on and it all came at a time when Trek couldn't afford such mistakes. The new film looks set to be readying itself to not learn from history.