10 Scrapped Ideas For Star Trek: Enterprise Season 5
6. T'Pol Gets The Saavik Treatment
We were introduced to T'Pol's mother, T'Les, in the fourth-season episode Home. This episode was a little like Enterprise's take on Family, the fourth-season episode of the Next Generation. Both followed drawn-out periods of strain for the ship and crew, both saw crew members returning home, and both featured crises for them to face. Here, Trip was introduced to T'Les, which is stressful, to say the least.
However, T'Pol's father never featured in Enterprise, as he had died an uncertain number of years previously, sometimes before 2154. He was described as a stranger with whom T'Les fell deeply in love. Manny Coto had a twist planned.
T'Pol's father would turn out to have been a Romulan agent, operating on Vulcan. This would make T'Pol half-Romulan, which would go some way toward explaining why she was given to bouts of emotion, more so than the audience was used to. This had originally been proposed as the backstory for Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but was dropped by Leonard Nimoy going into the next film. As the fifth season was a chance to further explore the Romulans, this would have been a perfect chance to explore T'Pol's loyalties.