Season 5 and beyond ideas, what would you have done?

An episode focusing on Chef, where Chef is portrayed by Isaac Hays.

 

An equivalent type of story to Babylon 5's "Sleeping in the Light". Rounding out the series and nodding to the next chapter.

Old Admiral Archer clings on to life, long enough to witness the Original Series U.S.S. Enterprise set off on its journey.

He relates an epic story to a bunch of youngsters around in the 23rd Century. Any inaccuracies in the flashback scenes apparently dismissed as his failing health and memory... After he's laid to rest, one of those who doubted the story ends up bumping into a witness who confirms the truth. T'Pol or Tucker's daughter, something like that.

Actually, if they made this story now, you could use that unreliable narrator structure, to explain away why the Enterprise NX-01 bridge looks more like the one from the U.S.S. Kelvin. Everything else aboard that ship, in those early scenes from the '09 film, could pass for 22nd Century frankly. Not those uniforms however. NASA style flightsuits please. Departmental colours all over... so they are suddenly reminiscent of fatigues worn by miners and colonists in the 60's show.

 

Something I would like to see in a future season of Enterprise...

The fall of the Andorians. In Enterprise they have a major fleet that can battle the Vulcans and become a major building block of the Federation. In TOS they are hardly noticed. What happened to them? Did they take a major hit during the Romulan war? Did they continue with their treachery only to have ot come back on them? Did something else happen?

 

And let the show turn into a pile of Deus Ex machina bullshit? No thank you.

Leave the show in the hands of Manny Coto and Mike Sussman, with occasional input from I.S.B. AND Brannon Braga! Braga can do a lot of good, provided he is kept on a tight leash. Give him free hands and he'll go all George Lucas on you, though.

My season 5 ideas?

Promote Archer to Admiral and give him Gardner's job. Do a lot of Earth-based episodes and make him instrumental in the ongoing Romulan arc.

Meanwhile, make SHRAN the Captain of Enterprise! This would create infinite plot possibilities; Shran's and the crew's adjustment to each other etc., not to mention the fact that Archer never even had a fraction of Shran's charisma.

OPTIONAL: Kill off Mayweather. No one would even notice.

MANDATORY: Declare TATV an "alternate-universe episode" (by doing a followup ep in which we learn some more about that alternate reality, lets say that in that one the Xindi never attacked Earth and no one ever even heard of TCW). Then completely disregard it. It never happened. Because that reality isn't that interesting anyway.

 

^ Unfortunately "These are the Voyages..." had a reference to Shran's assistance in helping Archer board the Xindi Superweapon. So that's a no-go. Not that I minded the TCW (although many did). Like a lot of other things it only needed to be tied into something important in Enterprise's flightpath... rather an anomalous spat between fractions from different centuries, whose ancestors likely didn't even have any connection to this series. That's where the desire for Future Guy being a Romulan most likely comes from. In any case, like it or not, the TCW was part and parcel of Enterprise's premise. So refute the evidence seen in an inconsistant holoprogram, shift the TNG era scenes to a parallel universe... but don't press a reset button on quite so much ENT history. It's all interconnected isn't it? From the very first mission to take Klaang home, and everything from the Suliban to the Xindi, being motivation for an increase in Terra Prime sympathizers.

But back to TATV - I found that remark to T'Pol telling of how much Berman & Braga had been paying attention to Season 4 - in that there had been a few more quid pro quo events in Archer and Shran's relationship since "Zero Hour". The Captain still using that as the most recent thing, in his reasoning to risk the Enterprise so late in the day, to help Shran. Helping save Earth's a pretty memorable one sure enough, but hmmm... he hadn't done something even bigger during the Romulan War. You know, something before he was seemingly forced to fake his death?

 

OK, so why not make it an alternate universe in which Humans never even heard of the Romulans before "Blance of Terror"? It gave absolutely no clue whatsoever that Earth just got out of a years-long war anyway.

That episode looked so "off" that making it AU really doesn't sound difficult at all.

Imagine this. Season 5 opens with a, lets call it, "TATV pt2" which begins with Riker and Troi riding the turbolift, when the read alert klaxon sounds off, and the ship starts shaking, as if being under attack. Riker and Troi then step onto the 1701-D's bridge, BUT, the bridge looks NOTHING like in TNG, there's no Worf anywhere, Picard (played by a stand in) lies on the floor dead, face charred beyond recognition. Then we learn that the Rommies just found Pegasus, and they've reported back to the Empire, transmitting evidence of Starfleet's illegal cloaking device.

Riker assumes command, puts Pressman in the brig, and the rest of the episode is about him trying to avert a new war. Ultimately, he fails, and the episode ends with a spectacular shot of Romulan and Federation fleets clashing.

THE END

 

Now you're talking!

A few centuries ahead in that alt-Pegasus timeline, there's a Romulan who turns out to be Future Guy. There the Federation has fallen, but he's somehow worse off without them around. So he ends up meddling in the Prime Universe. Ultimately hoping to instigate the Romulan War, which hadn't happened in "These are the Voyages..."

 

Because the Romulan Empire, weakened by decades of devastating war against the Federation, simply doesn't have the resources to counter the Klingon expansion.

 

It would be totally worth it, if the NCC 1701-D got destroyed during this... just to ram home how WRONG everything is.

Question is, would you risk angering ENT fans by opening "These aren't the Voyages... Part II", with TNG-style titles.

 

An old article from trekmovie.com done a couple years back, when Brannon Braga and Manny Coto did Star Trek VegasCon '09.

http://trekmovie.com/2009/08/10/vegascon09-braga-coto-talk-enterprise-season-5-star-trek-2009-more/

Nothing really that hasn't been mentioned in the thread, just thought its worth bumping for a mention.

I must admit I don't know how continually going back to the Mirror Universe three or four times that year, would've worked. Although a follow-up to "In a Mirror, Darkly" was a must.

 

I think four or five episodes would have been a little too excessive. A two-parter every season would have been fine.

 

I remember a couple more points. There were a few of us TrekBBS forumites there that year so if I am wrong one of them can correct me.

One reason to do more Mirror Universe episodes was the sets were constructed and they were expensive. They definitely wanted to get more use out of that investment.

They were not going to leave Hoshi in charge in the Mirror Universe. It sounded like they would be quick to topple her reign.

They were going to dig into T'Pol's history and the fact that she was more emotional than most Vulcans. I cannot remember if they mentioned the possibility of her bing half Romulan at the convention or if that came from somewhere else.

 

^Yeah, we were gonna meet her Dad, who was gonna turn out to be a Romulan spy who faked his own death. No idea where it's from, I think I read it on Memory Alpha.

 

Does anyone know what difference there was between a Vulcan and a Romulan in TOS? Was it their blood? How can a Vulcan prove he's not a Romulan? Spock lied in one episode in the third season quite blatently to an alien high official. Maybe he was incapable of fooling Federation computers but he did evade the Klingon mind sifter so you can't trust Spock as far as you can throw him as evidenced by him selling out the TOS universe to J.J. Abrahms.
Oh, and about inconsistancies in TOS. There was none. Gary Mitchell getting Kirk's middle initial wrong, R. instead of T., was intentional, to show that a Human god was not infallable. Just a shout out to the other hypocrits in the other forums. Novel writer's who dis TOS and make money off of it. and the Khan thing was an alternate universe, just like many episodes of the twilight zone were that employ specific past dates.

 

Good one.

According to the writers interviewed in the special section of the blu-ray release it was a mistake not realized until after shooting and they used that as an excuse. It could have been corrected in the updated effects version but after some debate they decided to leave it because it is a well known discrepancy.

 

There evidently was a way of telling a Romulan from a Vulcan. It's something Chekov has to determine using the science station viewer, in "The Enterprise Incident".

But of course, they had been dealing with Romulans for almost two years by 2268. Plenty of classified information reluctantly released by Section 31, since the first "official" face-to-face contact. And the level of Human-Vulcan bigotry having died down on Earth a century later, no Terra Prime around no more, means it's not likely to cause much of a fuss. Aside from the odd one or two with old world-views like Dr. Leonard McCoy obviously.

Or did our first contact happen in 2233? Shortly before the loss of Captain Robau, George Kirk and several dozen casualties during the destruction of the U.S.S. Kevin? Or perhaps in the heat of battle during 2160? My memory of the timeline is in such a complete muddle sometimes.

 

This post is from the Twilight Zone.

 

Correction: I went back and watched the commentary version of that episode on blu-ray. The scene was filmed as the second pilot. At that time the characters were not fleshed out to a point that Kirk's middle name was chosen. When it was filmed "R" was not an issue. When someone decided on "James T Kirk" no one thought about the scene with the "R".

 

^ I was just thinking about that J R K issue.

Wondering precisely when it changed...

Possibly they changed it simply because it didn't sound right, when spoken by "Leo Walsh" in Mudd's Women.


"....it won't be Harry Mudd that's trapped! It will be a gentleman named James (Ha-haaa)RRRRRRRRRRR Kirk."


Too on the nose piratey perhaps?

 

It was a time long before home video, and when no-one involved expected the kind of OCD rewatching that Trekkies like indulge in. They either changed it from R to T, or they simply forgot there was an R on the gravestone prop. Either way, it certainly wasn't meant to be an intentional error.

(there's a novel trilogy called My Brother's Keeper which explains it away as a goofy in-joke between Kirk and Mitchell going back to their academy days. Alternately, the novel Q-Squared puts the whole episode -odd uniforms, slightly different sets and all- in an alternate reality leading to a bizarro TNG where Picard is first officer of Jack Crusher's Enterprise-D)