4. Enterprise
When Star Trek: Voyager was coming to an end, Enterprise was announced as the next Star Trek series. It was going to follow the Hollywood trend of the early 2000s by being a prequel. Enterprise was going to be set before the Original Series and tell the story of how the Federation was formed. The concept was an interesting one and one that hadnt been explored before. Unless you happened to read some of the Star Trek novels, for most people, Star Trek began with the Original Series. How did Starfleet develop? How was contact made with the Klingons and Romulans? Would the Klingons have ridged foreheads? How did Earth become the driving force of peace in the Alpha Quadrant? All were questions that Star Trek fans were looking forward to being answered. From the get-go, Enterprise was earmarked to be a different Star Trek series. The ship was not going to be a sleek, comfortable working environment; instead the NX-01 was cramped and basic. There were no Holodecks or Ten Forwards on this starship. The Vulcan and Human relationship was not the perfect romance that we witnessed in the other Star Trek shows and forget about the Universal Translator getting you out of every tight spot, it hasnt been invented yet. All-in-all, it was a Star Trek show that promised to be darker and stripped to the basics. If some of the creative decisions offered a genuine diversion away from the normal Star Trek we were used to, others firmly stuck to the same tried and tested formula. They might have dropped Star Trek from the title, but they stuck to the story-of-the-week writing style that was becoming very out of vogue by the time Enterprise premiered. The quality of most of the episodes was weak and failed to engage with the audience; and most of all, the new crew were bland, almost as if they were the leftovers from the past incarnations of Star Trek. And less said about the theme tune the better. To be fair, Enterprise wasnt the total failure that it is labelled as, it had some great characters like Shran and Trip, and some superb episodes that easily stood with the best examples of Star Trek. But it was a show that needed fresh thinking behind the scenes but instead the same people who produced the other Star Treks made another version of Star Trek: Voyager with a different skin. The bits of Enterprise that should have been the most interesting - like how the different species came together to form the Federation - played in the background rather than being a focal point of the show. It was the same product we had been presented with since the late 1980s and it was becoming stale. By the time things started to change during the third season, it was too late and the shows ratings failed to rise in line with its quality. It was cancelled by the end of the fourth season and everything Enterprise should have been about was squeezed into a two-part, lacklustre finale. Enterprise should have been a fresh start for Star Trek; instead it was exactly the same. While not a total screw-up, the birth of the Federation should have been much more exciting than this.