TODAY IN STAR TREK HISTORY: 'Star Trek: Enterprise' Is Cancelled

STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE title card. Image: Paramount.

FEBRUARY 2, 2023 – It’s been a long road getting from there to here. But the road could have been longer (and it was off screen), and there were plans for that to happen. Rather, on February 2, 2005, today in Star Trek history, Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled.

The NX-01 launched on September 26, 2001, with the episode, “Broken Bow” and ran through “These are the Voyages…” on May 13, 2005. Captain Archer and his crew adventured through the Temporal Cold War, the Xindi, the founding of the Federation, and they even crossed over into the Mirror Universe.

Cancellation was already in the air by season two, but after a letter-writing campaign, no doubt among other factors, Paramount asked for some changes, including a title change from Enterprise to Star Trek: Enterprise and a new action-oriented story line, which resulted in the Xindi arc. A major turnover of staff at Paramount was also happening, including the departure of Viacom president Mel Karmazin, whom Scott Bakula described as the huge Star Trek guy at Paramount. The series continued into a fourth season.

Then came the announcement during the filming of “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” that UPN, the network on which Enterprise was broadcast, had cancelled the series. One of Enterprise’s creators, Brannon Braga, attributed the end of the series to Star Trek needing a rest. He said, "I don't see it as a cancellation, I see it as more of a gestation."

Scott Bakula, citing studio and network politics, said that although he thought the show was getting continually better and just hitting its stride, “I never really felt like we had failed as much as we were victims of circumstance.” Connor Trinneer noted the early firing of Paramount Television Chairman Kerry McCluggage (“our real fan”) as well as the limitations of UPN’s coverage saying, “The problem was that for the nights that we were on, usually your Major League Baseball team was also on UPN locally. So, we would get preempted by whatever local sports were happening. There were also entire regions – it didn’t even play in St. Louis, Scott [Bakula’s] hometown. So, you had these pockets of where it wasn’t even on.”

Whatever the combination of reasons, Star Trek: Enterprise would be off the air at the end of season four. While there were a number of story ideas and plans left on the table for season five, the show would at least live on in print, thanks to Pocket Books tie-in novels and other formats, such as comics and short stories. Three episode novelizations and five original novels were published during the run of the series. After it was cancelled, nine more novels were published, ending in August 2017 with Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference, the last of a five-book series by Star Trek tie-in veteran Christopher L. Bennett.

On screen, though, it would be the first time since 1987 that there would be no new Star Trek on television, and it would be another twelve years until our current era of Trek would begin with Star Trek: Discovery, in 2017.