Enterprise 20th: 10 things you might not know about the series

Star Trek: Enterprise turns 20 today

Today, we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the series premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise. Those of us who are devoted fans have still not gotten over the demise of the show after only four seasons, but those four seasons are precious to us. And we rewatch them often. Some of us have episodes memorized and still return to them again and again.

No matter who your favorite character was or how many hours you’ve spent bingeing this series, there’s always something new to learn, and that’s why today, I’m sharing these ten things you might not know about Enterprise.

1. Admiral Forrest is named after DeForest Kelley, the late actor from Star Trek: The Original Series (1966)  who played Leonard H. McCoy. Commander Williams and Admiral Leonard from the pilot Star Trek: Enterprise: Broken Bow (2001) are named after series stars William Shatner (James T. Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock). [Source: IMDB]
2. The two-hour series premiere, “Broken Bow” took thirty-six days to film and cost twelve million dollars. [Source: The Fifty-Year Mission The Next 25 Years]
3. For its fourth season, Enterprise was moved to the same Friday night “death slot” that the Original Series had just before its cancellation. [Source: IMDB]
4. Alice Krige would have returned as the Borg Queen in season 5. [Source: Screenrant]
5. The backstory and details about the Xindi race were improvised. They were not a fully fleshed out species before season three began, and even the actors helped come up with part of their background like the civil war. [Source: Thegamer.com]
6. Trip’s death was a last minute decision. The explosion was going to happen no matter what, but if the series had been renewed, as Rick Berman was hoping, Trip would have survived. [Source: Thegamer.com]
7. Enterprise ranked 12th in Los Angeles Times ranking of every [which was nineteen at the time the article was written in 2016] Star Trek movie and TV series from first to worst. It came in ahead of seven of the movies including: Generations, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Search for Spock, The Final Frontier, Star Trek Into Darkness, Nemesis, and Insurrection.  [Source: LA Times]
8. Scott Bakula joked that Captain Jonathan Archer’s middle name is Beckett, a reference to his previous television series, Quantum Leap (1989), in which his character was Dr. Sam Beckett. [Source: Analyzing Quantum Leap] In the novel Beneath the Raptor’s Wing, (Michael A. Martin, Simon and Schuster, 2009) Beckett became the unofficial middle name for Jonathan Archer.
9. Though it has been widely reported that the season three Xindi arc was done as a 9/11 metaphor, Brannon Braga denied this. He said they did an attack on Earth [storyline] because it hadn’t been done in a while. [Source: The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years]
10. The Captain’s chair used in the fourth season was originally from the Enterprise-E bridge set in a deleted scene from the ending of Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). [Source: IMDB]

These little facts prove that is so much more we still don’t know about Enterprise, behind-the-scenes tidbits that make the series that much more special to us. Happy Anniversary, Star Trek: Enterprise!