oops I stayed up late smashing the keyboard about Enterprise
So I've been thinking more and more about how I want there to be a reboot of Enterprise but I'm in charge, so instead of clawing my way to the top of Paramount by undisclosed means, I'm just going to rant about it in bulleted list format.
(Obviously, massive Enterprise spoilers, and spoilers for much of trek lore below)
Section One: Captain Archer Is Basically O'Brien
We all joke about the suffering of O'Brien but it created a spiritual anchor point for DS9 that was super valuable
Captain Archer has this big, awful hurt in the show that I want to see explored at length: he sets off from Earth with stars in his eyes, believing it's going to be the ultimate road trip, science expedition and diplomatic mission all rolled into one, and gets bludgeoned with the godawful reality of the Alpha Quadrant On Petty Dipshits With Grudges
Like this theme was WAY underserved in Enterprise and would make for an incredible load-bearing story pillar
First of all, it's a very personal story because Archer's world view was this vision of the Vulcans as a kind of overbearing parent race that wanted to make sure humans had developed all this chill and wisdom and what do you MEAN every other species in the galactic neighborhood are visibly less put together than us and all have centuries-long grudges with each other, you've been making us study Victorian table etiquette before entering a mosh pit
He also embodies everything that the Federation will eventually imagine itself to be but like it's just him and everyone else is in a really shockingly fuck-you-got-mine mood out there
Oh oh oh and the Vulcans???? Are being dicks about their neighbors???? OH MY GOD
Like it wasn't fully fleshed out but you could kind of squint and imagine Archer kind of low-key inventing the root beer doctrine
Like putting him through this three act play of "let's see what's out there!" collapsing into "life's a bitch" and eventually elevating into this Space Sage would be sooooo satisfying
His personal relationships with T'Pol and other Vulcans are of huge interest
The thing with him mentally cohabitating with Surak (AKA Vulcan Jesus) should have been an entire season and consist of near-constant scenes of him schooling Vulcans on Vulcan philosophy and at the same time contribute to his becoming a Space Sage
No seriously give me an episode that is mostly him talking in his head with the guy and also he complains about the nuclear warfare and Archer harbors lots of dad issues about this because his dad survived the wind-down from WW3
Basically Archer was criminally underdeveloped given his potential which is wild considering how much they jammed him into the plots of episodes
Section Two: Shrink the Stage
Alien races we never saw before are too common in Enterprise and ones from other shows are too rare
I say this knowing full well how great the Tellurites and Andorians are in Enterprise, they're proof that this is a great plan
Romulans and Klingons make for a great pair of antagonists, foreground them way more
Give me an entire Tellurite Captain Arc similar to our boy Shran from Andoria, also Bolians and Betazoids
Come to think of it please please please can Vulcans be fucking uptight as FUCK about Betazoids
Like they're fucking mortified by everything about them
Like they can read thoughts and emotions? NOPE NOPE NOPE WE OUTTIE 360 NOSCOPE
Catians. Live action Catians like you occasionally spot in the background of live action trek and are divided into the hip new Catians who are absolutely stand-up pre-Federation members and their racist parents who want to eat like 80% of sapient species and think kids these days are garbage for not wanting to
No Farengi. No Borg. ALMOST nobody we don't see before TNG. Any race that first appears in TNG had better be like, a member of the Federation by TNG. This is really important thematically like come on man
Dr. Phlox gets a pass however as the Denobulans are frickin delightful
Orions are super interesting as well just from a And Then There's These Assholes perspective, at least in this time period, also y'know how on DS9 it took too long to really get the Cardassian Resistance stuff going? Do that with Orions, lots of rebellion themes going on, also plz make the rebellion very clearly the precursor to the sort of Pirate Princess Situation we get in Lower Decks
Section Three: Fuck the Xindi War
I liked the Expanse itself a fair bit but it didn't need to be such a big thing, shrink time spent in the Expanse in favor of MOAR VULCAN NONSENSE
The Xindi war only existed because of 9/11 and while it occasionally did a good job of expressing a very specific sort of awful melancholy that permeated the post-9/11 US, leave it in the past, it's not in the reboot
This actually could be a good way to justify the reboot because this is the timeline before it got fucked by the time war
Section Four: Fuck the Time War
Time travel makes most stories worse because it casts a pall over every supposedly important decision of "well that could get retconned at the snap of any execs fingers"
Everything involving the temporal cold war smacked of "how how how do we make this relevant to people who already don't like Enterprise because it's not happening in the TNG era"
There were HINTS of a good story about the Suliban but in the end I want any of that content moved to one of the pre-existing species. Maybe the Bolians? We didn't get much about them anywhere and it'd retroactively make the barber on TNG more fun
Like I'm not against an episode or two or even the odd two-parter that deals with time travel shenanigans that impinge on TNG era content in some way but it's not story pillar material
Section Five: You know what IS story pillar material? Mayweather.
Bro are you telling me there's humans who have been exploring space since like 20 minutes after the Vulcans showed up because it turns out you can eke out a living shipping freight??? HOW IS THIS NOT CONSTANTLY RELEVANT
Mayweather should know 80% of everything about everywhere
He's like if Neelix was competent
Like he should know more than T'Pol about half the time because why would she know what's on this rinky dink planet
Well ACTUALLY, T'Pol, that rinky dink planet has some of the richest hydrogenated soil deposits in the Alpha quadrant and it's a ten year waiting period to get a license to ship from there
The fact that his family shipped out while Montanna was still slightly on fire from WW3 should have made everybody on that ship into a weird subculture that's still sorta skeeved about having full gravity plating and all have grandparents with Highly Questionable Opinions About Augments
Like give me an entire episode about Mayweather struggling with his Kahn-sympathizer great uncle who is 114 years old and says just the most out of pocket shit about Augments being a great idea actually
Like it's not a threat just really really awkward
Speaking of which
Section Six: AUGMENTS AUGMENTS AUGMENTS
Everything about the Augments storyline was fucking pure gold from start to finish give me MORE
The Eugenics war was nowhere NEAR present enough in the zeigeist of the 2150's. That shit was closer to Archer's voyage than we are to the civil war and nearly obliterated humanity, SHOW ME THE SCARS
One of the best things Strange New Worlds did was show lingering scar tissue of the Eugenics war and in Enterprise THAT SHIT SHOULD STILL BE BANDAGES ON CRUSTED-OVER SCABS Y'ALL
The Vulcans bring this shit up all the time
They are aware what a get out of jail free card it is with humans who are for the most part SUPER EMBARRASSED ABOUT IT but also defensive because Hey We Fixed It, Fuck You
The Enterprise reboot should have first contact with the Alurians and I want it to be FUCKED
Everyone's genetically engineered. Why are you mad about this. What is wrong with humans. You convinced the Vulcans we're the ones who are wrong about this? Fuck youuuuuuu
Like I love that Strange New Worlds had this very ambivalent feeling about genetic engineering of sentient life forms and it would make for amazing storytelling to just have it be this not answerable, painful question that multiple characters have personal stakes and beefs about
Even better, it's arguably something that Archer's time leaves in a BAD STATE for the next generation to fix so, DRAMA
Section Seven: DS9's Massive Polycule, But Canon
The heteronormitivity of Enterprise was arguably happening closer to now than any other trek but BY now heteronormitivity starts to feel like the wrong people won WW3, y'getme?
The whole ship has an ever-growing polycule mass that Archer stays out of because I'm The Captain For God's Sake
Dr. Phlox is encouraging. To the point that Archer asks him to stop it a few times.
T'Pol doesn't need traumatic brain dysfunction to hook up with Trip, she just has enough wild experiences with humans saving the day that she's not even sure what logic is anymore
And it's logical to want a good night's sleep and endorphins, obviously
Not to say she doesn't hook up with Hoshi first, because she totally hooks up with Hoshi first
T'Pol's wing of the ship's polycule goes off like a drama bomb at some point
Bro it's the Risa episode, it's totally the Risa episode
Archer DOES get laid eventually. Shran literally does the slap-slap-kiss thing with him it's great.
It happens early enough that T'Pol LOSES HER SHIT about this because capTAIN are you FRATernIZING with that (AUGH) AnDORIAN
Like the Vulcan equivalent of smashing up the mess hall, IE she grips a fork really really tight for a while
This happens BEFORE the episode where Archer has a duel with Shran, the aftercare is sappy and ridiculous
Phlox has a ton of human paramours, they fawn over his wife endlessly when she visits and they have to come up with a second movie night for Phlox And Crew because the Phlox Polycule consists of everyone who is horribly disruptive at the movies. The invention of Phlox Polycule Movie Night massively reduces the drama levels at movie night and is hailed as having saved T'Pol's entire sanity. And Trip's.
Reed is ace AF and one episode is him writing a letter home about how being one of like 8 ace crew members has been simultaneously a social disaster and also an utterly fascinating study in non-ace psychology
Section Six: Those Poor Vulcan Bastards
A big part of why I adore Strange New Worlds is that Vulcans are handled with the correct amount of dignity which is to say a single shred.
Like the very best, most Peak Enterprise episodes are exactly about the Vulcan struggle with logic and emotion
As I said, whole season of Archer carrying Surak's Katra, like this guy is Archer's own personal Avatar Roku and also we get an episode where Shran is like yeah ok pinkskin I am nnnnOT touching you while HE'S in there ok
And Archer's like That's Fair :C
I'm ambivalent about the Romulan infiltration plotline, feel like it might be better if the Vulcans just got themselves fucked up on their own
Then again there's something viscerally amazing about the bread crumb trail of "the Vulcans kind of act Romulan in this time for some reason" followed by OH GREAT IT'S BECAUSE THE HIGH COUNCIL GOT INFILTRATED
But on the OTHER hand the payoff is kind of blunted by the fact that canonically speaking nobody in the main cast can know this happened because of the events in Balance of Terror (TOS)
The gammut of Vulcan vs Human reaction didn't get explored thoroughly enough, because there's clearly a lot of gradation between your Anti-Federation Terrorists on the one hand, and your Straight Up Monkeyfuckers like Sarek and Patton Oswalt's EXCELLENT Vulcan character in Strange New Worlds. Like this could be whole political intrigue storylines orbiting Vulcan
Archer is at the center of all of this which is another reason it's a good thing to make load-bearing story pillars out of
Section Seven: By All Means, Indulge In Some Space Wonder
Highly underrated feature of Enterprise: unironically being in favor of cool space activities like watching planetary nebula form and so forth
The episode where the crew sort of does the NASA Space Station Crew thing with Earth over subspace was charming as hell, this actually should have been a thing every season
Archer should legit be excited to file reports about that time spacetime folded into a taco and almost killed everyone because "well we're not in danger NOW so now it's just cool science"
Archer is very interested in space science and it's a major part of his character that kinda got left on the table too often
Section Eight: The Original Series Is Your North Star
There is a TON of great stuff in TOS that could be drawn out into more detail with modern sensibilities. Like they did ONE Wild West Planet in Enterprise and TOS had this "parallel planet development" gimmick that I would love to see explained as something along the lines of "yyyyyeah the preservers stole some humans and put them in this region of space so you got like. A lot of space humans who think it's ancient Rome over here"
And you could take this opportunity to do other cultures but actually have people from those cultures do writing and story design
Enterprise seemed very afraid to dip its toes into the goofier stuff that happened in TOS. Bad call. BRING ON APOLLO
TOS had lots of sort of, run-ins with earlier waves of human expansion, lots of chances to do cool things with those and "nobody believes the Botany Bay is real" is just the tip of that iceberg omg
Thread in between the lines of TOS Gorn vs SNW Gorn because I feel like there's a potential win there making the continuity make a bit more sense, like how the Klingons curing a plague with Human Augment DNA and now everyone who got sick has to look like... THAT...
Really a second title for this section could be "And keep Strange New Worlds firmly in view" because Strange New Worlds often is amazing precisely because it understands how close everything that happens in it is to the TOS era.
In short I need seven TNG-length seasons to develop this, $300,000,000 budget now plz
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