Two months ago, TrekMovie dropped a bombshell on fans: Enterprise star Scott Bakula and show producer Mike Sussman had pitched Paramount a Picard-style show that would focus on Admiral Archer. Paramount skipped out because they feared the show would compete for eyeballs with the upcoming Starfleet Academy series. Now, more details have come to light about the show Paramount will never let us have, and it sounds like the coolest thing to happen to Trek since the premiere of Strange New Worlds.
According to TrekMovie, Bakula and Sussman never gave up and continued refining their pitch, hoping that it might impress the new network leadership after the Paramount/Skydance merger. They now envision their show (tentatively titled Star Trek: United, which is kind of perfect) as an Andor-esque show that focuses on Admiral Archer as the President of the United Federation of Planets. It would feature occasional cameos from legacy Enterprise actors and would provide stories the earlier show never got to flesh out, including the Romulan War and its aftermath.
Justice For Enterprise
All of this sounds amazing to me, someone who didn’t really fall in love with Enterprise until the streaming era. I eventually learned to love this show’s robust prequel setting, one which answered many fan questions (like why the Klingon appearance changed so much) while raising even more (like, how many pies did Section 31 have their grubby hands in?).
Mirror universe T’Pol in season four of Star Trek: Enterprise
In an act of cosmic unfairness, Enterprise was canceled right when it had transformed into must-see TV. Seriously, Season 4 is nothing but big swings that mostly connect.
Why We Need Star Trek: United
Aside from my fanboyism, why do I think Star Trek: United is the kind of show that fans have been waiting decades to see? First, it’s copying from a winning formula: the success of Andor proves how hungry sci-fi fans are for a show that focuses less on breathless battles and more on killer characterization and political thriller storytelling. And if that kind of show was a hit with the Star Wars fandom (whose franchise is built on laser swords and big explosions), how much more resonant would such a series be with Star Trek fans who have been begging for less action and slower, more sophisticated sci-fi stories?
Speaking of Star Trek fans, we’ve been waiting a month’s worth of Pon Farrs to see the Romulan War onscreen, and Enterprise was cut short before it could show this pivotal canonical event. Star Trek: United will not only show us some of this major conflict but also provide answers to why nobody in Kirk’s time seemingly knew what Romulans (a race Earth had a whole war with) actually looked like. Frankly, this would be a much more rewarding approach to prequel storytelling than we’re getting with Strange New Worlds, a mostly-solid show that seems unfortunately fascinated with breaking established canon rather than building on what came before.
The Map To Avoiding Picard’s Failures
Now, one thing fans might worry about is that Star Trek: United would copy the early Picard formula of bringing in legacy characters from Enterprise for occasional cameos but otherwise focusing on new, younger characters. Somewhat infamously, Picard didn’t succeed until the final season transformed the show into a huge reunion for the entire core cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer
Why, then, would Star Trek: United succeed with this approach when the first two seasons of Picard failed? To be perfectly blunt, Picard didn’t fail because of its lack of legacy characters…rather, it failed because the writers had no great stories to tell and eventually settled for just making everyone fight the Borg again (sensors are detecting unusually lazy writing, sir!). Mercifully, Star Trek: United seems to have a solid story from the get-go and is designed to be (sorry, Patrick Stewart) more than just a vanity project for an aging actor trying to return to his glory days.
Qapla’ Scott Bakula!
As a lifelong fan, I sincerely wish Scott Bakula and Mike Sussman success in pitching Star Trek: United to Paramount. After all, this show sounds infinitely more interesting than the tepid franchise origin film Paramount has failed to get off the ground.
Starfleet Academy, the show Paramount is making instead
Unfortunately, the network is currently betting the entire franchise on Starfleet Academy (a spinoff of the most controversial NuTrek show with only two familiar characters). Given that environment, it’s safe to say that United is a perfect show that these out-of-touch executives will never let the fans have.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
