10 Scrapped Ideas For Star Trek: Enterprise Season 5
We were robbed, I tell you. Robbed! The fifth season of Star Trek: Enterprise could have been GREAT.
By now, we all know that Star Trek: Enterprise was the first live-action Star Trek series to be cancelled since the Original Series, back in 1969. This left a bitter taste in the mouths of Trekkies but also had the secondary effect of retroactively making the show seem like the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Oh, that's the one that was cancelled, pass on that!
However, with enough time passing, Enterprise is finally getting a reappraisal that it deserves. This leads us to look at what the plans for the fifth season that never happened actually were. With whispers of returning characters, beefed up ships, and more tie-ins to classic Star Trek, it sounded like they were gearing up for their best year ever.
Showrunner Manny Coto undoubtedly raised the bar when he joined the series, and his ideas for the next year sounded absolutely fantastic. There were even plans to re-introduce an alien race that had only appeared in the Animated Series, thanks to the kind permission of SciFi author, Larry Niven.
Although a fifth season may never materialize, here are some of the best ideas that we never got to see.
10. Regenerating The Borg Queen
Star Trek: Enterprise managed to do the seemingly impossible in its second season. Regeneration made the Borg properly frightening again, thanks to a combination of smart writing, tight directive, and Brian Tyler's outstanding score for the episode. As this episode was a real success, Manny Coto wanted to revisit the Collective, while still keeping Star Trek canon intact.
Alice Krige was approached with a view to returning to Star Trek again. She had previously played the Borg Queen in both Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Voyager. In the proposed fifth-season episode, she would appear as a Starfleet technician who came into contact with the Borg, thanks to the events of Regeneration. This would serve as an origin story for this particular Borg Queen.
As shown in Star Trek: Picard, any drone can become a Queen, so this fits canon as well - she need not necessarily be the same individual physically encountered by Jean-Luc Picard or Kathryn Janeway, yet could still very much bring the menace that she brought in the movie and Voyager's last episode. This is one of the many shames of Enterprise never receiving a fifth year.