‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ at 25 - The Franchise’s Most Underappreciated Series
“It’s been a long road, getting from there to here…”
In “Broken Bow,” the series premiere that launched Star Trek: Enterprise 25 years ago today, Captain Jonathan Archer, mere days into commanding humanity’s first starship capable of reaching other inhabited worlds, is forced to admit that he and his crew are improvising almost everything and that the mission scope has expanded well beyond what anyone planned for, all while a Vulcan ambassador keeps insisting, not without reason, that humans aren’t actually ready for this.
That admission of unreadiness also turned out to be the most honest thing Star Trek: Enterprise ever said about itself, and it is precisely why the series remains worth revisiting a quarter century after it premiered.
On September 26, 2001, Star Trek: Enterprise (or simply Enterprise, as it was originally known during its first two seasons) debuted as the Star Trek franchise’s fifth prominent television series, just four months after Star Trek: Voyager concluded its seven-season run, and it arrived as the franchise’s first deliberate prequel – a bold structural gamble that would ultimately define the beginning of Star Trek’s narrative chronology for everything that followed. Created by Brannon Braga after his tenure as Voyager’s showrunner for its fifth and sixth seasons and marking the final entry in executive producer Rick Berman’s long stewardship of the franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise is frequently and not unfairly cited as the weakest series Star Trek has produced. But that criticism requires an important qualifier: in a franchise that has never actually produced a genuinely bad show, “weakest” still leaves considerable room for a series worth taking seriously.
Scott Bakula, previously best known to science fiction fans for his leading role on Quantum Leap (1989-1993), gives us an Archer who captains the Enterprise NX-01 into a 22nd century considerably rougher and more recognizable than anything the franchise had previously depicted – no sleek corridors here, but cramped Jefferies tube-like spaces, clumsy decontamination procedures, and a crew visibly still inventing the protocols that would eventually calcify into Starfleet doctrine. That grounded, recognizable sensibility extended even to the opening credits, where the franchise abandoned its tradition of sweeping orchestral fanfare for something unprecedented: an actual vocal theme song, “Where My Heart Will Take Me,” a Rod Stewart cover performed by British tenor Russell Watson. It is the kind of choice that invited easy mockery at the time and still occasionally does, but it fits the series’ governing idea more coherently than critics gave it credit for – a show about humanity’s tentative, unglamorous first steps into the cosmos, scored not by the triumphant certainty of a fully realized Starfleet, but by a single earnest human voice.
This grounding in near-future plausibility was the show’s most interesting formal choice, and “Broken Bow” executes it with a specificity that still holds up: a Klingon courier named Klaang crash-lands in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, gets shot by a startled farmer, and the resulting diplomatic scramble forces Starfleet to decide, essentially overnight, whether humanity is prepared to take responsibility for its first steps into a wider galaxy. Archer assembles his crew in days. Nobody has fully worked out how any of this is supposed to function. That “we’re winging it” energy, rather than reading as a production shortcoming, sells something the franchise had never quite dramatized before: the idea that the Federation was built by people learning on the job rather than emerging fully formed as the essentially flawless legend we would see in the later days of Kirk and Picard.
The human-Vulcan friction that runs through the pilot and much of the early series is similarly well-observed. Ambassador Soval’s condescension toward human ambition, T’Pol’s cool skepticism of her new crewmates, Archer’s barely-restrained resentment at decades of Vulcan oversight – the show gives both sides genuine standing in the argument, which makes the eventual cooperative Federation feel earned through difficult negotiation rather than simply assumed as historical inevitability. The introduction of the Temporal Cold War in that same pilot, with Klaang revealed as an unwitting courier in a much larger conflict involving the genetically modified Suliban and a mysterious future benefactor, layered additional intrigue onto an already fraught first-contact mission.
What “Broken Bow” does particularly well, and what the series took real time to build on, is present its ensemble as a crew genuinely still forming rather than a collection of finished archetypes. Communications officer Hoshi Sato, played by Linda Park, arrives visibly frightened of space travel itself. Tactical officer Malcolm Reed is still working out tactical protocols with his experimental phase pistols. Captain Archer keeps pushing against his own insecurities about the historical weight he’s suddenly carrying. Chief engineer Trip Tucker’s instinctive decision-making clashes frequently with first officer T’Pol’s Vulcan logic; Helmsman Travis Mayweather’s lifetime spent among cargo ships makes him the crew’s most instinctively comfortable frontiersman even as everyone around him improvises. Watching this ensemble in 2026 means watching people who will eventually help write the Federation charter, but who don’t yet know it, which gives the early seasons a charm that more polished Trek casts, arriving already competent, never quite achieved.
The series’ most unique distinction within the franchise, however, is the specific cultural moment it was forced to absorb. Premiering mere weeks after the world had fundamentally changed, Star Trek: Enterprise found itself, in its later seasons, functioning as an allegory for post-9/11 America in ways no Star Trek series before or after was ever asked to be – depicting humanity’s response to an interplanetary terrorist attack and the rising xenophobia that followed it with a directness that felt genuinely urgent rather than merely speculative. Season 3’s decision to commit to a single serialized narrative across the entire season, ultimately resolving the Temporal Cold War storyline that had been central to the series since “Broken Bow,” represented the show’s most significant creative achievement relative to its uneven first two years – the moment Star Trek: Enterprise finally grew its beard, to borrow the franchise’s own shorthand for a show discovering what it’s actually good at. Season 4’s continued commitment to ongoing story arcs built directly on that foundation, even as cancellation loomed.
The series’ reputation suffered one final, considerable blow as it came to a close on May 13, 2005 with “These Are the Voyages…,” a series finale so widely panned that it has become something close to a cautionary tale in franchise television about the dangers of ending one show through the perspective of an entirely different one. That the finale marked the conclusion of the Berman era only sharpened the sense of an ending badly handled. And yet Star Trek: Enterprise’s foundational work – establishing the earliest days of interstellar humanity and dramatizing the difficult diplomacy that preceded the Federation’s founding – proved durable enough that the franchise would eventually make its return to television twelve years later with Star Trek: Discovery, which, as Alex Kurtzman took over stewardship of the franchise from Berman, continued filling the chronological gap leading directly to the original series.
Brannon Braga’s career continued well beyond Star Trek: Enterprise, co-creating FlashForward (2009-2010) and Salem (2014-2017), and later collaborating with Seth MacFarlane on The Orville (2017-2022) – a parody series of Star Trek that, in its own affectionate way, demonstrates just how much of Star Trek: Enterprise’s specific tonal DNA, humanity caught between idealism and improvisation, remained worth returning to.
Star Trek: Enterprise will likely never be ranked among the franchise’s finest achievements, and that ranking is, by most reasonable measures, correct. But 25 years to the day after its premiere, it is still remembered as the defining Star Trek series of the early 2000s, and it also remains, appropriately, where new viewers are still directed to begin their chronological journey through this universe.
Fitting, really, for a show about people who didn’t yet know what they were building.
Star Trek: Enterprise is available for purchase on Blu-ray and streaming on Paramount+.