TV Rewind: Star Trek: Enterprise’s Origin Story Walked So Strange New Worlds Could Run

Almost sixty years on, the Star Trek franchise is once again having itself a bit of a moment. Though the franchise restarters Discovery and Picard have wrapped, spinoff Strange New Worlds is still rollicking along in its third season (with two more on the way before its five-year mission concludes). And a new series set at Starfleet Academy is currently in production, slated for premiere in 2026. But as we celebrate this embarrassment of Trek riches, we should take a look back at the series that wrapped the franchise’s TV run in the early-to-mid 2000s: Enterprise. 

A prequel that followed the original USS Enterprise on its first exploratory mission into deep space, the series landed at a precarious time in the franchise’s history. It came at the end of a two-decade-long run of Star Trek shows that spanned classic series like The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Enterprise looked to reorient the franchise after the long run of increasingly dense its various series had been telling in shows like Deep Space Nine and Voyager. (Which were great, but hard for new fans to break into.)

Where those shows primarily focused on internal lore and world-building, Enterprise was a soft reboot of sorts, taking the Trek franchise back to its origins (literally) by following humanity’s first baby steps out into the stars. The series was a big swing for the now-defunct UPN, and would run for four seasons from 2001 to 2005, staving off cancellation a couple of times before the network finally pulled the plug.

Enterprise starred Quantum Leap fan favorite Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer, Jolene Blalock as Vulcan science officer T’Pol, and Connor Trinneer asthe  ship’s engineer “Trip” Tucker, alongside an expansive supporting cast of the ship’s main crew. Though Bakula will likely best be remembered for his seminal stint as Sam Beckett, his turn as Archer is also a career-defining role. He brings a likable humanity that you can’t help but root for in his leadership style when faced with the greatest of odds, and even when the show goes through some creative retooling, his performance helps keep it grounded.

Most of the crew was human, and the series was able to tackle the earlier versions of themes we only got to explore several steps down the evolutionary line on The Next Generation and its sequels. This was a version of Star Trek we could see ourselves in, because their present wasn’t all that far away from our own. This was the story of humanity still trying to figure out how to create the better, more aspirational perspective that has come to define the franchise.

The series hit at a sweet spot that Paramount would eventually revisit to great success with Strange New Worlds, telling a story in a world not wildly removed from our own. There’s just something about those early days of the Star Trek franchise. Enterprise made some very particular (and possibly peculiar) decisions along the way, like featuring a—very controversial among fans—theme song with lyrics, showing the crew wearing more casual “off duty” clothes like baseball caps, and Archer bringing his pet dog Porthos along for the journey. It was a version of humanity still trying to prove itself to the wider universe, with every new episode taking Archer and his crew a little further out than humanity had ever been before.