Lately, I’ve been staying up later and later every night. While 2 in the morning was an uncommon but not unprecedented bed time for my self over the last year, more recently it’s become the earliest I make it to bed. Because of this I’ve been catching bits and pieces of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I’ve spoken previously about my distaste for Voyager and how overall even Enterprise was a better show. I’ve espoused this for quite some time both here and in one-on-one conversations with fellow Trekkie friends. Clearly, I have some retractions to make.

Enterprise is not a better show. Once Manny Coto took over the show and shifted the plots away from the Temporal Cold War nonsense, the show got markedly better. And at that time, it was probably better than most, if not all, of Voyager. But overall? Not even close.

In truth, I’ve never even seen the majority of Enterprise. I missed most of seasons two and three and what little I’ve seen of it hasn’t made me want to go back to it. Watching almost any episode of Voyager makes me change the channel just as fast but that’s due to the accumulation of ill will. It took seven years of consistent underperforming to get me to that point. Enterprise did it in just one.

But, like Voyager before it, Enterprise had a great premise. Not the specific premise they had, but rather their general idea. Telling the story of the first exploratory crews of Starfleet before the Federation had been created could have been spectacular. There had been stories of pre-Federation colonization from the very beginning of Star Trek, and to see the first official envoys head out into those waters was a tantalizing prospect. There are elements of this in Enterprise but too little of it. Their ship is a little too tip-top. NASA put a lot of work into the Apollo capsules but they were still barely capable hunks of metal.

Beyond this, the very first premise the show pushes on you is that for fifty years after Zephram Cochrane’s first foray into Warp speed, Earth barely ventured out again. Not because the people of the world didn’t suddenly and miraculously form a global government, but because some Vulcans said we weren’t ready.

The real problem is that they wanted to show the birth of the Federation while ignoring all the aspects of humanity that would have led to Earth being impactful enough to be at the head of a large Federation. Aside from our ability to work with each other and form consensuses — a quality the show rarely brings to light — we’re also a fairly egotistical and brutal species. We wouldn’t have listened to the Vulcans, and while we’d play nice with neighbouring species, we’d also be constantly working on attaining military dominance. It’s a show that came out a decade too early. The kind of rough and ragged sensibility behind Battlestar Galactica would have been ideal for a Star Trek prequel.

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are ultimately at fault. They were involved in TNG and DS9 but there must have been some checks and balances further up the food chain on those shows because once they were the lead architects of Star Trek it went down the crapper. So I hereby rescind any and all endorsements of Star Trek: Enterprise I have ever offered. That show fucking sucked. And I pray I never stay up late enough to see it on my television again.