I remember looking to Enterprise (as it was originally called) with great hope but quickly lost interest in the show. I remember thinking it was boring, and just didn’t feel right. I was in my early 20’s when it premiered. My teenage years I was a big fan of Deep Space 9 and when that ended I reluctantly watched Voyager, but did watch it. So for a long time I always ranked Enterprise on the bottom of the Trek totem pole.

Enterprise Original Title Screen

Recently however I decided to rewatch the series, start to finish, on Netflix. Now in my mid 30’s I’m a bit older, and a bit wiser I suppose. I was not prepared for how radically different I would feel about the show this time. I have rewatched all the other Trek series in recent years too so it is not as if I had simply forgotten the other serieses. [Is serieses a word? The plural of series? Spell check seems to think so. Weird.]

I now put the first two seasons of Enterprise as some of the best Trek ever. The return to simpler times, the strong emphasis on exploration over war- it seemed to be truer to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision than DS9 or Voyager. I wondered why I felt so different about the show today. I looked back when Enterprise premiered. September 26, 2001. It made so much sense. Just 15 days after the 9/11 attacks. Living in NYC, 9/11 was close to home, both physically and emotionally. In the weeks, even months following 9/11 this entire country was out for blood. I was working in a formal office and in the copy room a copy of a 5 day “weather forecast” for Kabul hung on the wall showing normal weather for the first few days and a mushroom cloud on the 5th day. And it was completely appropriate for the time. Do that today and you’re going to have to visit with HR. Ultimately I did not want a show about peace- America did not want a show about peace so soon after an act of war.

In my office it said “Kabul” but this was close enough.

The entire first season, if not the 2nd as well was conceived, written, and filmed in a pre-9/11 world, but that day the world changed. In hindsight it was probably a poor decision to premier the show at that time. By the time the show’s writers brought us the war we wanted ratings had already fallen. They officially put Star Trek back into the title in an act of desperation. We also got an entire season dedicated to avenging what can only be described as a terrorist attack against Earth and a mission to prevent an even larger attack- the destruction of Earth itself. But now opinion was already changing on the wars of our own- the real wars. Star Trek Enterprise got one final season to revisit some of the more interesting elements of the Trek universe and tie up some loose ends.

Enterprise best moments were showing the early relations with the Vulcans. The role Humans played in fostering peace between Vulcan and Andoria. Who can hate Andorians with that blue skin and those Snorks like things on their heads? Watching Ferengi try to determine if a beagle was sentient, or possibly, food. T’Pol’s story about the Vulcans who crash landed in 1957 Pennsylvania. In the final season we even get an origin story for Data and a plausible explanation for why TOS era Klingons looked human but by TNG times heads were heavily ridged.

By the time I finished re-watching the series I concluded I had watched 2.5 seasons of excellent Trek, and another 1 and half that were an unfortunate departure from the original mission. If any Trek fans out there have yet to revisit Enterprise I strongly suggest you do, you may be surprised how much you like it… this time.