stoplookingup: “ “These Are the Voyages” – the Enterprise series finale – WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Apparently everyone involved with Enterprise gets asked that a lot. I know because, in a fit of post-rewatch pique, I went looking. Scott Bakula: “I...

stoplookingup:

“These Are the Voyages” – the Enterprise series finale – WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Apparently everyone involved with Enterprise gets asked that a lot. I know because, in a fit of post-rewatch pique, I went looking.

Scott Bakula: “I have to say that when I first read the script I was off-put by it. I had a long talk with Rick (Berman) and Brannon (Braga) about it and they explained their idea and philosophy to me. I don’t know that I ever… Gosh, the end of anything is always hard to write. It was a little odd, but that was their call.” (x)

Rick Berman: “I would have never done it if I had known how people were going to react. We were informed with not a whole lot of time that this was our last season. We knew that this was going to be the last episode of Star Trek for perhaps quite some time – and here we are, almost six years later. So it was the last episode for quite a length of time. It was a very difficult choice, how to end it. The studio wanted it to be a one-hour episode. We wanted it to be special. We wanted it to be something that would be memorable. This idea, which Brannon (Braga) and I came up with – and I take full responsibility – pissed a lot of people off, and we certainly didn’t mean it to. Our thought was to take this crew and see them through the eyes of a future generation, see them through the eyes of the people who we first got involved in Star Trek with 18 years before, with Picard and Riker and Data, etc., and to see the history of how Archer and his crew went from where we had them to where, eventually, the Federation was formed, in some kind of a magical holographic history lesson. It seemed like a great idea. A lot of people were furious about it. The actors, most of them, were very unhappy. In retrospect it was a bad idea. When it was conceived it was with our heart completely in the right place. We wanted to pay the greatest homage and honor to the characters of Enterprise that we possibly could, but because Jonathan (Frakes) and Marina (Sirtis) were the two people we brought in, and they were the ones looking back, it was perceived as ‘You’re ending our series with a TNG episode.’ I understand how people felt that way. Too many people felt that way for them to be wrong. Brannon and I felt terrible that we’d let a lot of people down. It backfired, but our hearts were definitely in the right place. It just was not accepted in the way we thought it would be.” (x)

Jolene Blalock: "I have certainly been the vocal one. I assumed that the ending would be about our show and not a wrapup of the conglomerate…it was just insulting….There were a lot of feelings [between T’Pol and Trip], but nothing ever happened. Either make it a relationship or don’t, but you can’t walk this line forever….Scott Bakula and I were in the very last scene. I caught eyes with Scott, and it was just a moment I will never forget. And he walked over and he shook my hand before we started shooting that last scene, and I almost lost it….I loved the people that I worked with…I’m very grateful and fortunate that I was able to be part of this incarnation. It’s sad to see it go.“ (x)

Jonathan Frakes: “Do you want to know the truth about that whole Enterprise thing as the show was called? Rick Berman, executive producer of all things Star Trek, called Marina and myself and said, ‘We’d like you to do the last episode of Enterprise’ … They said it would be a Valentine to the fans, but all it ended up doing I think was hurting Scott Bakula’s feelings. He was such a gentleman about it, and I said to Scott, ‘This is weird for me to be on your show and your show is being taken off before it should be taken off,’ and he was such a gentleman about it and said, ‘No, glad you’re here,’ so it was awkward on all accounts, except with working with Marina again, which is always lovely. But I wasn’t crazy about it. And it was so thinly connected, I thought too. Thanks for bringing up such an unpleasant memory.” (x)

Connor Trinneer: If there had been a 5th season, “I think that they would have explored that relationship with T’Pol more. I think there was a lot to harvest in that one and I think you would have seen a lot more of that. There probably would have been more of this evolution of that Vulcan-human relationship and maybe them trying to have children….I was totally satisfied with [the finale]. I know other people weren’t, but I was satisfied with it as an actor because there was a lot to do, a lot going on. They were talking about their feelings about that character and all that. I know that people had their opinions about bringing in The Next Generation people. Hell, I loved working with Jonathan Frakes and I wished I could have done it more. I loved the guy. I didn’t care in regard to how they were going to sew it up. I was really happy with my involvement as a character in it, if that makes sense.” (x)

Some more interesting dirt: “According to the featurettes on the recently released Enterprise Blu-ray sets (via PopMatters and AICN), creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had a very different plan in mind for Enterprise. Berman and Braga wanted the whole first season of Enterprise to be basically the same as the flashback episode “First Flight,” in which we see Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) on Earth, working as a test pilot and trying to get a space mission together. The whole first season would have been about getting the ship and crew assembled, while dealing with the Vulcans. And stuff like the Klingon crash-landing on Earth (in the pilot, “Broken Bow,”) would have happened over the course of the season.Instead, Paramount and UPN insisted that Berman and Braga had to get the Enterprise crew out into space in the first episode, so the series could hew more to the traditional Star Trek format, the producers claim in a new roundtable interview segment on the Blu-rays, plus a featurette called “Uncharted Territory.” Not only that, but it was the studio that insisted the producers had to include the Temporal Cold War, making the show both a prequel and sequel to the other Star Trek series — because the studio suits were nervous about making a pure prequel. (On one Blu-ray feature, Bakula says he constantly gets people asking him what happened to the Temporal Cold War. Braga says he found the Temporal Cold War “strangulating.”) Other horrifying/fascinating details (via AICN): One studio executive pitched the idea of having a different “boy band” board the Enterprise and perform every week. Also, Bakula says he made an angry phone call to Braga over the Riker/Troi-centric series finale, and Braga now regrets that episode. Braga says he sometimes chafed under Berman’s leadership and their relationship has become “complicated” since Enterprise was cancelled. Also, showrunner Manny Cotto had amazing plans for Enterprise season five, including making the Andorian Shran (Jeffrey Combs) into a regular. Braga says, “I always thought season four should have been season one,” a sentiment many fans can probably agree with.” (x)

Me: It seems like, in hindsight, only Trinneer is willing to defend “These Are the Voyages,” which is sort of understandable when you consider that his character was given the emotional climax of the entire series (and to be fair, he played it beautifully – Trip’s desperation to save Archer’s life is really touching). His comments on where the Trip/T’Pol relationship might have gone are almost painful to read, given how rarely such relationships are allowed to develop and deepen in genre shows.  

So why was this finale idea allowed to go forward? I think the clue is in what Frakes says about Berman calling it a “Valentine to the fans.” I suspect that Berman & Braga were disheartened by the shittiness of being prematurely canceled after trying to meet UPN’s unreasonable, contradictory expectations from the start, combined with the harsh reception from a vocal segment of fandom who missed the pollyanaish TNG aesthetic. In the finale, they thought they were giving the fans what they wanted: a TNG/ENT hybrid. Of course, the fans who wanted to see TNG weren’t watching Enterprise, and those who were watching Enterprise did not want to see TNG. (Maybe we should nickname the finale “Elizabeth.” You know, the doomed hybrid?) In that context, unfortunately Trip’s death feels like a kind of final fuck you to naysayers – a way of saying, “You hate Enterprise? Well we’re going to make sure you never get any more of it – we’re killing one of the central characters. Goodbye and good riddance.” I mean, I doubt they were consciously thinking that, but I know that’s what I’d be tempted to do after turning out four seasons of very engaging, entertaining, distinctive Trek, only to be the constant subject of derision by self-appointed “real” Star Trek fans, then prematurely canceled with little warning by a dying network.

reblog / show tags on Apr 18, 2017 with 38 notes
#cast #reference #long post #add it to the queue yeoman
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