Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Jonathan Archer

Captain of Earth's first warp five mission and (co-)founder of the Federation, Jonathan Archer is one of the most important people in human and interstellar history. Look what effect removing him from the timeline at the wrong moment had on the timeline — pretty much no more timeline, as anyone would recognise it.

If, on screen, the NX-01 and crew were most recently celebrated with 250 Frontier Day birthday bumps and antimatter fireworks from Admiral Shelby aboard the 1701-F, then, off-screen, fan reaction to Star Trek: Enterprise has been as tempestuous as the swirling gas clouds of Jupiter that followed, and Archer has undoubtedly divided more than the Borg Queen.

Critiqued, criticized, and cancelled at the time, then, like everything you never knew you had, reappraised upwards in the years after, Enterprise has achieved the popularity it never managed on its first flight. Archer himself has yet to make a now much-desired come back to the franchise in any form other than a tip of the (baseball) hat, and we only got to spend four seasons with him in the first place, but there's still plenty left to say about this trailblazing captain. So, let's take a look at some of the things you might not have known about Porthos' dad.

Having wanted another series set in the 24th century to follow on from Star Trek: Voyager, the folks at Paramount were initially rather hesitant about Rick Berman and Brannon Braga's idea for a prequel. "We needed to find something that got back closer to the beginning of what this whole franchise was about," Braga said in the season one DVD extra Creating Enterprise. If they hadn't, there probably wouldn't have been a Jonathan Archer or, at least, not the one we know today.

Moreover, it's highly doubtful Scott Bakula would have played whatever captain was in it. As the actor told William Shatner in The Captains, "I [wasn't] interested in the next captain…cy" and the "curse" of having to follow. Whilst Bakula did eventually accept (more on that next), and the prequel did, of course, get the green light, the studio still insisted, and without a shred of irony, that "something futuristic" be included in the form of the temporal cold war, as Braga revealed in the season DVD extra Time Travel, Temporal Cold Wars, and Beyond.

The end of Enterprise could have also seen a different kind of beginning for Star Trek in the abandoned, but fully drafted, film Star Trek: The Beginning. The story, completed in late 2006, was set four years after Terra Prime and featured (for the most part) an entirely new cast of characters. Captain Archer does get a fleeting mention, nevertheless. When asked about them, Archer and crew are said to be on Risa. I guess you've got to get your downtime sometime, even if the Romulans would prefer otherwise.