[This] season will deal with Enterprise being sent on a mission that may last many episodes, but it's not going to be a serialised arc [like DS9]. The stakes are the future of the planet Earth. They are going to be sent on a mission that takes them to a part of space they've never been before, a part of space the Vulcans warn is extremely dangerous. It's kind of our quadrant's Bermuda Triangle.
There are going to be significant changes. There will be changes in a number of our characters. But we are going to see changes as we go into a very ominous section of space, and try to find an alien race that we have reason to believe is going to do everything they can to destroy Earth's population. Our knowledge of all of this will come from elements of what we've been referring to as the Temporal Cold War.
Who are the bad guys? I think it's the Tribbles for sure! The Enterprise encounters a massive Battlestar Galactica size space carrier with millions of tiny Tribble fighters aboard. The fate of Humanity hangs on the edge as the Tribbles unleash their wrath - a super weapon (planet destroyer) designed by Tribble scientists on their homeworld.
The name of the race that attacks in 'The Expanse', the outcome, and the reason for the attack is included.
"Enterprise" co-creator and executive producer Brannon Braga has a very clear view of what he wants for the third season of his "Star Trek" spin-off.
"More danger," he says. "More pace, more high-concept sci-fi, more cutting-edge aliens, and a incredibly involving storyline involving the new mission and taking the show where it's never gone, experimenting."
In the UPN drama's second-season finale, "The Expanse," which aired Wednesday, May 21, an alien race called the Xindi (pronounced ZIN-dee) attacked Earth, cutting a swath from Florida to Venezuela. Apparently, Earth attacks the Xindi homeworld 400 years in the future, so the Xindi decide to change history and strike first.
As a result, the Enterprise suddenly becomes the flagship of a war fleet, which will require an overhaul (including the appearance, for the fist time in Starfleet history, of photon torpedoes) in preparation for a conflict that extends into next season.
The crew also undergoes drastic changes, as they cope with the devastation on Earth, which included a death in the family for Commander Charles "Trip" Tucker (Connor Trinneer).
"At this moment, his personal mission is to kick some ass," Braga says of Trinneer's character. "His sister is killed. He's out for vengeance, baby."
While the finale opened up new challenges for Trip, it also means major changes down the pike for Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and his second-in-command, Vulcan Sub-Commander T'Pol (Jolene Blalock).
"Archer's great," Braga enthuses. "We love him. He's affable, he's lovable, he's terrific, but perhaps he's been a little too indecisive, perhaps he's been a little too naïve. With this new mission of his -- with the fact that he's been scarred, he lost 7 million fellow humans, the fact that he's going to be seeking vengeance -- is going to force him to confront a lot of moral issues and define him as a captain a little bit better."
"We're going to take Trip in a new direction. He's suffered a loss. He's got a new edge to him, maybe tone down the country-bumpkin aspect of Trip a little bit."
"T'Pol, we love. But we want to keep evolving her. She's going to be resigning from the Vulcan High Command and living with humans, maybe trying to experiment a little more with emotion."
The attack on Earth marked a major departure for a "Star Trek" TV series. Since the original "Trek" back in the 1960s, Earth seldom has been seen, and was largely sacrosanct, a pleasant place where humans had solved all major societal problems.
Earth has been threatened, though, in some of the 10 "Trek" feature films. "The only time Earth was ever at stake was in 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,'" Braga says, "and 'Star Trek: First Contact,' and to some degree in 'Star Trek: Nemesis,' but not really. Only twice. There's a reason for it, because you can't really put Earth at stake in a TV show, because where do you go from there?"
"The stakes are so big. The two times it's been done, it was enormously popular, and we were only willing to do it if we could do an entire story arc out of it, and not just wrap it up in one episode."
In addition to improved weaponry, Enterprise takes on some new, battle-trained crew members, and heads into a bizarre region of space called the Delphic Expanse. In this haunted place, people can wind up inside out -- but still alive.
Meanwhile, the crew faces some hard choices and deals with the psychological effects of a sudden and terrifying attack on their home territory by an elusive and mysterious foe.
Now, substitute New York and Washington, D.C., for Earth, and terrorists for the alien Xindi, and see what you get.
The similarity to real-world events may not be entirely intentional, but it's not accidental, either. "There can be no doubt that there are parallels to what's going on," Braga says. "Of course, it's probably seeped into our consciousness. The parallels are striking. We talk about preemptive strikes on this show."
"The first attack on Earth is kind of 'Star Trek's' 9/11, I guess. And we're trying to stop the next one."
"But as it goes on, we don't want to just turn this into a show about war. We want to start digging into a lot of things about, who is this species? Why did they attack us? Why did we attack them, which prompted them to do this preemptive strike? Will we find a peaceful solution for this?"
"Ultimately, this is about finding a better way, so we're not just doing a show where we're blasting aliens out of the sky every week. We want to evolve a storyline that gets very complicated and deals with all the issues surrounding current events."
Just because "Enterprise" was not visibly "on the bubble" during the recent round of network scheduling decisions for the new season, that doesn't mean that Braga and his cohorts are taking anything for granted. This will be especially true this fall, when "Enterprise" faces off against The WB's hugely popular "Smallville."
"We live in fear," Braga admits. "Look, 'Star Trek' has been around for a long time, and the fear that drives us to keep pushing ourselves is we're competing with 650 episodes of 'Star Trek.' We're competing with five TV shows, 10 movies and 35 years."
"It's not as though some higher force has decreed that 'Star Trek' will be on the air, forever. You can't take that for granted. I'll tell you right now, if you don't keep evolving the show, trying new things, and showing that 'Star Trek' is still relevant, 'Star Trek' could go away. So we live in fear all the time, are you kidding?"
Now maybe I am just being daft, but how do you have an arc lasting many episodes without it being 'serialised'? Am I misunderstanding the meaning of 'serialised'?
Any ideas?
The Enterprise has to enter a dangerous region of space called the Delphic Expanse. It has some strange anomalies:
Ships disappear like in the Bermuda Triangle, crewman turn up again but their bodies are turned inside out.
That's the rumour that I've read. It sounds very 'Brannon Braga'- like, so I tend to believe it.
Anyway, neither the Klingons or the Vulcans will go there, but the Enterprise must:
To prevent the threat of attack on Earth.
Big spoiler:
T'Pol is forced to resign from the Vulcan science Academy.
So, they are going to be in this strange region of space for most/all of the season -- think 'Voyager' -- and the stories will be self-contained episodic ones with the theme of meeting and defeating these aliens, but not the kind of serialised war arc we had in the last season of DS9, or that you saw in B5.
The studios do not like those kind of Sci-Fi series, even if the fans do. They like series which someone can watch a single episode, and not have to have seen the episode before in order to understand it. They have the mistaken belief IMHO that this increases their viewers.
This is why they have altered 'Andromeda' for the current season, upset the majority of fans, and some of the cast; and will probably cause it's early demise.
Everyone knows that good stories take time to build-up and develop. You can't do that in 40 minutes + adverts! You need to do it over the course of a season, and if people can't be bothered to watch every episode, that's their own fault!
I completelly agree with that assessment. We all love the detailed storytelling called a "serialised story arc". Short little eps that are over in a blink are mostly boring. And, they're easier to make storyline mistakes in as well as cannon mistakes.
My earlier spoilers were all from the final episode of season 2.
Does anyone know anything more about the Xindi?
I've read that we won't see just one species, but that the Xindi homeworld is populated with a number of different species, many of them insect-like in appearence.
Does that remind anyone else of a planet from another big sci-fi franchise?
Berman and Braga intimate that they have long-term plans for the Xindi arc, saying that it will fit into the overarching STAR TREK history despite the seeming lack of knowledge about it in the previous, future-based series. Says Braga:
"These are things we play with as we develop the Xindi and their role on this Star Trek show. There may be reasons we've never heard of them. You know what I'm saying."
Berman continues, "By the time we're done with this arc, there's going to be a reason why the Delphic Expanse has not been discussed by Capt. Kirk or Capt. Picard."
Regarding the new Xindi and other "newness" in ST:
The energetic exec reemphasized that the new alien Xindi will not be merely humanoid, but exist in many different biological forms. He says this was preferred to trotting out a familiar and established TREK foe for this change of direction.
"Sure, we could have made it the Romulans that attacked Earth," he admits. "But haven't we seen the Romulans for the past 15 years? Do we really just want to keep seeing the Romulans? No. We've got to do new stuff. We've got to keep pushing the boundaries."
Braga says he and Rick Berman have been inspired by the experimentation of shows like 24 and BOOMTOWN, adding that the new direction for ENTERPRISE could lead to groundbreaking storytelling.
Roll up! Roll up!
Watch the Enterprise monkey's take on impossible odds to defeat the highly advanced threat to the galaxy! Bit like the Borg and species 8472? Find out why Jim Kirk is too embarassed to talk about the super race that are/were sat on Earths doorstep Tribbles anyone?
Seriously. I welcome a serious attempt, even by the B3's, to make a genuine serial out of Enterprise, it might stop Archer from ticking off all our neighbours so much they upsticks and move somewhere civilised, like the Delta Quadrant.
The problems is of course: We aren't going to get one, it takes too much planning and skilled writing and I seem to remember hearing it all before?
Weren't the Suliban supposed to make the first series a story arc all three, or was it four, appearances?
And great things were promised in series 2?
Then there is canon to consider. Wasn't Earth supposed to have a bit of a barny with the Klingons about now, or is that being saved for the fourth series, should they survive this one?
The writers need some reason for earth to start building "the fleet" so they can finally get back to canon and mix it up with the Klingons. So, the reason for the fleet? Impending doom. Maybe they finally realized that they messed up when they introduced the Enterprise as a prototype and at the same time, get them mixed up with the Klingons. They should have waited until after they had a few ships. The obvious technology difference means they needed to scramble to get Earth relatively "caught up" with the Klingons - or Earth would have fallen to the Klingon Empire... Thus, the huge leap in technology we saw in the last ep before they embarked toward the Expanse. Now they have comparable technology, and the fleet is under construction. Now we have the grounds for a Klingon conflict and the beginnings of the Federation. It just seems slapped together and unnatural.
I think they're just scrambling to cover up a huge plot problem.
but we already have the backstory for this period of future history.... ...and it doesn't add up...
'Balance of Terror' TOS -- The Earth, not the UFP, (nor even Starfleet) fought the Romulans. But the war was conducted with some ships that aren't equiped with subspace radio (which 'Enterprise' already have as standard), atomic weapons (when 'Enterprise' has none) and the Romulans didn't even have Warp Drive (which is unlikely since the Vulcans have had it for Centuries. And if the races really have a common origin, then they would have needed it to get far enough away to have evolved so differently.)
No Earth man had seen a Romulan during the Romulan Wars. This is highly unlikely with the everyday use of the viewscreen during communications.
'Homefront' DS9 suggested that the Romulan Wars reached Earth.
Some have suggested that we fight the Remans (from ST X: Nemesis) rather than the Romulans during the Romulan War. It's claimed that the Romulans used them as shock-troops during the Dominion Wars. That seems to me to solve all of the continuity problems (except why we never saw Remans again for so long).
Only Rick Berman claimed in an interview that this had never occurred to him -- and I think he was serious!
Gr8scott -- your link claims that everything will be made clear in the end. I'd like to think so, but I don't believe they have any idea where this is going, it's just made up from week to week.
I also heard that. At least he wouldn't break continuity.
They've also talked about having Kirk, or Kirk's grandfather anyway, who would be played by William Shatner.
They've also mentioned Sarek, but he isn't born yet either, and Mark Lenard is dead. Sarek's father, who would be played by Leonard Nimoy, would be cool though.
Hope you guys are OK with me posting Trekweb stuff here...
Regarding what "Regeneration" has done to continuity:
Braga talks about each of last year's episodes in the issue, including the Borg installment "Regeneration."
"Continuity was inherently altered by events in FIRST CONTACT, because the Borg traveled back in time and started interfering," he says. "The second that piece of sphere crash landed in the Arctic, the timeline was altered. Then, at the very end of this episode, we learn that a transmission was sent by this Borg ship to the Delta Quadrant. What you end up with is a scrumptuous little paradox where this could have been the incident that informed the Borg of our existence."
Hey look. I've come full circle. My post count is now 360. I'm so happy.
Regarding Klingon's in future seasons:
He [Braga] says that the rift between Earth and the Klingons will also continue to widen as a result of events in the new season, foreshadowing the war-torn future the two space powers will eventually share.
"This doesn't bode well for humanity's relations with the Klingons. The are not happy. In fact, the prosecutor in 'Judgment' says that we're lucky they didn't hold our planet responsible for Archer's 'crimes.' I always felt that was an ominous hint at larger things to come," Braga says.
Start a huge conflict that makes us, the audience, feel like the entire earth's future is at stake in one way or another. Then, after a relatively short arc, tie up all (relatively) loose ends in one quick ep and everything is back to normal - earth is one big happy family and were off to explore the universe.
I hope we have ramifications that last for many seasons. I hope that solutions DON'T "fix" everything perfectly. As this is the way solutions are in real life.
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