How Star Trek: Enterprise went wrong with T’Pol

Star Trek: Enterprise only ran for four seasons, and there’s been much speculation as to why.

For some, franchise fatigue was the reason Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled after only four seasons. Others blame it on UPN’s failure to adequately promote the show while still others say it was because the show just simply didn’t gel with committed Star Trek fans who were turned off by the concept and execution. Honestly, we’ll never really know why the series got cancelled or why it didn’t connect with the Trek community, although we all have our opinions.

By the time Enterprise aired, fans had already fallen in love with additional Star Trek series beyond The Next Generation. Voyager gave us the first female captain while Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gave us the first African-American captain. Society was progressing, and the series were doing what they could to showcase that progression. But Enterprise, as much as I love the series, actually reverted to some of The Original Series’ mistakes from the 1960s, much like they didn’t know what to do with the female characters aboard the ship.

Star Trek: Enterprise had over thirty years of Star Trek behind it, but it didn’t utilize all of that knowledge

Voyager made Captain Janeway, B’Elanna Torres, and Seven of Nine capable, extremely intelligent women who added to the effectiveness of the running of ship.  Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax and Major Kira on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were equally efficient at their jobs, and while romance was on the side, that wasn’t the main focus for either of them.  Star Trek: Enterprise went in the opposite direction with T’Pol and along with a lot of romance and skin, threw in some problems that didn’t make sense for a Vulcan.

T’Pol (played by Jolene Blalock) was a full-blooded Vulcan, who came aboard the Enterprise to essentially keep an eye on things as the Vulcans still didn’t trust humans at that time. Star Trek: The Original Series had Spock, who was half-Vulcan/half-human, and they made him Captain Kirk’s right hand. Enterprise could have done the same for T’Pol, but, instead, she eschewed logic, got addicted to a drug that caused her to do irreparable harm to her emotional stability (and affected her ability to captain the ship when needed), was forced into a mind-meld that resulted in a brain illness, was forced to marry another Vulcan to save her mother’s reputation, and became more emotional than any other Vulcan.

Star Trek: Enterprise had a wonderful opportunity to mirror the relationship between Spock and Captain Kirk

Spock and Kirk were an incredible team, working almost in tandem to resolve issues and get answers. T’Pol and Captain Archer, on the other hand, were almost constantly at odds, and then there was the simmering sexual tension on Archer’s part. Enterprise could have shown T’Pol as a logical, strong-willed, capable second-in-command, but they chose to use her in ways that just weren’t logical for a Vulcan. And while I can’t say for sure whether that was a big turn-off for Star Trek fans, I know it irked me that the series made a Vulcan so dysfunctional.

Even Blalock herself had a problem with the way her character was written, saying “you might as well clip the ears.” Her struggles might have made better sense if she wasn’t from a logical alien race, but she was…at least, she was supposed to be. But the writers/producers of Enterprise didn’t do her any favors by giving her the scenes she had to play out. Blalock is a good actress, and she played the part well, but there were plenty of other ways Enterprise could have gone rather than make her an emotional, over-wrought Vulcan.