Basically culled from the extras of the Enterprise Blueray there are some interesting facts that come to light, like the sheer depth of UPN mettling and some of the... Odder ideas and frusrations of the writing cast.
Some bits:
I'm not sure I buy this "It's all UPN's fault!" (UPN isn't around to defend itself anymore... How convenient!) and I'm a little doubtful on the idea of an entire season set on Earth... But how much worse could it have been then the season 1 I got right?* Braga and Berman originally pitched that the first season of “Enterprise” would be essentially Earthbound -- and the NX-01 would not leave Earth orbit until the first-season finale. The first season would deal with the building of the ship as well as everything that was in the pilot: Earth’s first encounter with a Klingon, the Vulcan politics, and the gathering of the crew. Studio execs firmly rejected this idea.
* FutureGuy, Ensign Daniels and the Temporal Cold War elements were included in the first season because Paramount execs balked at the idea of making “Enterprise” a pure prequel. The time-travel element allowed “Enterprise” to serve as both a prequel and a sequel to its four predecessor series. Braga says he found the Temporal Cold War elements of the series “strangulating.”
* Braga agrees (perhaps jokingly) that the Temporal Cold War “made no sense.” Scott Bakula says he’s often asked, “What happened to the Temporal Cold War?”
* Braga says he loves Berman but sometimes chafed under his leadership. He says their relationship grew “complicated” once “Enterprise” ended. (Should I ever get the opportunity to interview Braga, my first question will be, “Complicated how?”)
* A not-Braga producer (Berman?) upset Bakula during the pilot shoot when he told Bakula that Star Trek captains can’t bleed. (Which only makes me remember the episode in which the shaman Salish points at Kirk and declares, “Behold a god who bleeds!”)
* Bakula seems to indicate he prefers the series’ third and fourth seasons, which he thinks turned grittier in the shadow of 9/11. He calls those seasons “incredible.”
* Braga says the highly serialized third season was the first season in which he “enjoyed writing every single episode.”
* Braga says fourth-season showrunner Manny Coto had “amazing plans” for season five that included promoting Jeffrey Combs’ Andorian Shran to a series regular.
* Bakula says he found “stupid” the series’ unusually long 26-episode seasons.
* Bakula also thought there should have been a longer break between “Voyager” and “Enterprise,” and Berman apparently agreed – but Paramount was determined to mount the next series quickly with or without Berman.
* Montgomery remembers that “Enterprise” was UPN’s highest rated show at the time it was cancelled. (Looking at UPN’s 2004 primetime grid, which included such forgettable shows as “Kevin Hill” and “Eve,” it’s not hard to understand why.) Bakula believes “Enterprise” would have run seven years had it been syndicated rather than affixed to the UPN grid.
* Braga remembers firing most of the “Enterprise” writing staff between the first and second seasons.
* “Never had I felt more acutely the loss of [longtime writing partner] Ron Moore,” remembers Braga of his early days on “Enterprise.”
* Braga says his long friendship with Moore, which had imploded during the production of “Voyager,” had been mended by the time “Enterprise” went into production, but Moore was busy at the time with other, non-Trek projects (notably “Good Vs. Evil,” “Roswell” and “Battlestar Galactica”).
* Writer Chris Black, who survived the first-season purge, was close to a lot of the writers Braga fired.
* “I think part of the problem, honestly, was being stuck with this fucking standalone-episode shit was really crippling us creatively,” says Braga of “Enterprise’s” early seasons. “Star Trek was primed to do something different. [‘Enterprise’] should have done something different from the beginning.” Braga says the show should have been Earthbound in season one and should have employed serialized storytelling from the get-go. “I blame the studio for pushing us to do more of the same,” admits Braga.
* “I don’t know how you can do a show called ‘Star Trek’ and set it on Earth,” points out writer Sussman, “but the show at the beginning wasn’t called ‘Star Trek’.” True. The show in its first season was just “Enterprise.” It was retroactively retitled “Star Trek: Enterprise” (in the proud and angry tradition of “A New Hope”) long after many people had already seen it under the real title.
* Chris Black claims Rick Berman pitched “Enterprise” as “‘The Right Stuff’ in outer space.” (Because, of course, Phil Kaufman’s 1983 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book followed the lives and loves of Laotian fishermen.)
* Berman says he would always veto a storyline in which a crewman’s legs were blown off because that would not be true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision. (Tell it to Captain Christopher Pike, loudly beeping from his corner of the room.)
* Black says it was frustrating to the writing staff “that we never got to kill anybody.” He says people got killed in “The Right Stuff” and that’s how the sense of danger was conveyed. (I’ll add there were these guys called “Red Shirts” in the original series.)
