Star Trek: Enterprise hits Blu-ray today with the release of Season 1, a set that looks to continue the high-quality that began last year with the Star Trek: The Next Generation HD collections. Filled with audio commentaries, documentaries, and frank retrospective interviews, these sets feature the kind of extra features fans want to see. Beam those pre-packaged EPK interviews into space, baby!

Listen to the Star Trek Podcast: Transporter Room 3

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On the occasion of the release, I had the chance to talk with series star and the original captain of the starship Enterprise, Jonathan Archer himself, Scott Bakula. Read on for the full chat, where we touched on, among many topics, the challenges of launching the fourth spinoff Trek series, the 9/11 parallels the show took on in its third season, the convention experience, and the fact that J.J. Abrams beamed Archer's dog into nonexistence in Star Trek 2009…Yeah, it was. I think it was challenging for a number of reasons. One, they chose to place it 100 before Kirk and Spock, so that meant there were a lot of creative issues that had to be figured out in terms of the world now and the world that existed in 1965 and in terms of what they were able to put on the screen back then. There was a lot of that that made it challenging. I also think it was challenging because we followed so closely on the heels of Voyager, but that was partly dictated by the fact that we were for the first time on a broadcast network on UPN, which existed at the time -- it doesn’t anymore -- as opposed to being in syndication, which is where the other four franchises had really made their mark, and that wasn’t to be our destiny. So I think those were the big challenging issues, and we did everything we could to rise above them.It was, it was very disappointing, and I would agree with that assessment of the rhythm of our show. That’s true I think with a lot of shows, if they have time to stay on the air, that people kind of figure it out a little bit and they’re able to get into it. Again, because of the nature of being on network television and the myriad of changes that occurred, not only at our studio but at the network itself, I look back and feel like we were lucky to get the four seasons, to be quite honest. There was so much going on that had nothing to do with our TV show. Obviously, we would have liked to have had more viewers. Had we had more viewers they wouldn’t have had a choice about keeping us on or not keeping us on. But it was kind of a transitional time for Paramount, a transitional time for UPN/The WB/CBS/Viacom. There was a lot going on, and we happened to be trying to make a show in the middle of it.

Pick up the Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 1 Blu-ray here.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. When the guy that’s running UPN gets fired and replaced, you’re aware of that. You’re aware of Jonathan Dolgen, who’s been the huge Star Trek guy at Paramount, leaving. You’re aware of the head of UPN, who created UPN, Kerry McCluggage, who’s one of the main reasons, he and Gary Hart, why I did the show in the first place -- he’s let go. Then all of the sudden in the middle of it, CBS buys UPN. It just went on and on and on, and I knew everybody and they were friends of mine. I knew Kerry very well, I knew Gary Hart. They were both at Universal when I did Quantum Leap. I’d known Leslie Moonves for many years; he and I had worked together when I was at Warner Bros. So I knew a lot of the players involved. There was a lot going on.Well, there are always things when you look back and say, “Oh, I wish we’d done more with this or that.” But the general idea of who he was when he started and where he was going and the fact that he would eventually create an integral part of the Federation in bringing this intergalactic species together and create some rules in the “Wild West,” so to speak, that’s what got short-circuited the most. Because that was certainly in line had we gone more years, that would have been a big part of the show. Once 9/11 happened and we got more involved in reflecting on what was going on on our planet at the time, the show, I was very happy with where we took that and the whole Xindi experience and marshaling all of that forward. Because we were cut short, we kind of a did a quick, fast ending -- fix [Laughs] -- and got out. But we made our point. You don’t always get to do exactly everything you want to do.Well, I think we were all so consumed by that event, and it wasn’t something that happened to somebody else on our planet, it happened here. You know, Vietnam happened on another continent. So it became something in the writers room that they felt they couldn’t ignore, and it kept coming through in how they were feeling, and that’s natural. That’s how writers write. They’re affected by their lives and their world and what they’re feeling. And that’s the great thing about sci-fi, it’s so removed, because all of the sudden you’re fighting talking whales and insects and things that are so completely disassociated with our reality -- you get that release -- and then it kind of gives you the freedom to tee it up and go for it. I was thrilled with it.