If you’ve read my Three Timeline Theory, you know I spend a lot of time watching and pondering Star Trek. Probably too much. Not only do I run a weekly club, write a lot of trivia, and pride myself on knowing canon well enough to come up with crazy ways to make contiuity mistakes work, but I also know a thing or two about production itself, and I even have a little theory about that.

 Besides the fact that they’re all set in the 24th century, have overlapping timelines, share some of the same characters and a whole lot of writing staff and production crew, the other major thing Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all have in common is that they ran for seven seasons. Both the original series and Enterprise were cut short. There are a number of reasons for this but there’s one very interesting one that isn’t talked about too often. All three of those shows came dangerously close to cancellation due to being in ratings hell. And they were all saved by a bold step by the producers.

TNG became the ratings powerhouse it was the rest of its run because of the popularity it gained during the summer after The Best of Both Worlds Part 1. The hype surrounding the cliffhanger about Picard becoming a Borg, no one knowing whether he would live, die, or whether Patrick Stewart would return created a lot of new viewers– the ratings for the reruns that summer were higher than they had ever been for a new episode, and it transformed into a phenomenon. DS9 wasn’t doing so hot either until Worf was added to the cast. Same thing with Voyager, until Seven of Nine came along.

Every Trekky knows the famous ways in which these shows were saved, but I wonder how many have realized the bizarre coincidence they share. Every one of these events occured during season cliffhangers between the third and fourth seasons! All three of these shows almost didn’t make it past their fourth year, and if these stories and new characters hadn’t been added, they may have been cancelled during that season or wrapped by the end of it.

What makes this especially intriguing to me is what happened to Enterprise. In 2005, the fifth Trek installment was cut short with only four seasons. And four seems to be the magic number. It almost wasn’t even renewed for a fourth, put in that same dangerous situation of the shows before it. It was pushed from its Wednesday night slot at 8:00 back to TV’s pit of prime time despair, Fridays at 9:00. But I’m not sure it’s just that time slot that killed it. There’s every possibility that it would have met the same fate even if it had stayed on Wednesdays, considering that even the bold 26-episode Xindi arc of season 3 hadn’t managed to boost ratings very much. And somewhat like The Best of Both Worlds, it had a surprising cliffhanger, in which Archer seems to be dead, only to be discovered in an alternate history where aliens are helping the Nazis to win WWII.

But these days, somewhat thanks to The Best of Both Worlds, epic cliffhangers are common place and not enough to jolt any series back to life. So the question is, would a Worf or a Seven of Nine saved Enterprise? It’s hard to imagine what character could have been added that would change the show’s fate, considering the problem many Trekkies loyal to the Berman/Braga shows had with it in the first place was its premise. There’s no way to do a prequel to Star Trek without ruining the continuity that came before it, and that’s exactly what Enterprise did. Though it was a highly entertaining show and had a lot of episode worthy of the Star Trek legacy, its continuity issues were too numerous for a lot of Trekkies to ignore. So the only way Enterprise could have survived would be to bring in a very large fanbase of people who didn’t have to be Trekkies to be Enterprise fans, and apparently it didn’t do a good enough job of that.

Season 4 did have a brave new direction, led by its new showrunner Manny Coto, who was on the writing staff during season 3 and wrote many of its best episodes. But unlike the previous season, Enterprise stopped trying to create its own mythos and started concentrating again on the classic mythos of the Trek universe. Coto’s mission seemed to be cleaning up the mess made by the first two seasons and making the show fit better with the rest of canon, especially where it concerned Klingons and Vulcans. And it was a great idea… if there were very many Trekkies still watching the show. Because what it couldn’t do is keep bringing in that new fanbase– now it was actually trying to be Star Trek, while its earlier seaons had tried to somewhat distance themselves from the rest of canon.

Perhaps it was too late to get that old Trek fanbase to join by the fourth season. The ones who didn’t like it in the first place had three years to become very annoyed that there wasn’t another Trek show on the air that went forward instead of backwards. I doubt if they would trust any show set in the 22nd century and with a ship named Enterprise, no matter the story direction.

But the most interesting part of all of this is that, if the show had made it to a fifth season, another regular cast member was planned to be added: Shran, the Andorian. Shran was played by Jeffrey Combs, who has had a long history with Star Trek and has played numerous characters, especially in DS9. His Shran character was very popular with fans, and appeared in about half a dozen episodes. The idea that he might have become part of the regular cast, serving about Archer’s ship, reminds me a lot of what happened on DS9 and Voyager.

And it makes one wonder, if the staff had this revelation at the end of season 3, if Shran had become a regular in the fourth season, just like Worf and Seven of Nine… would it have been enough to save the show? I really don’t know. Shran was popular with fans already familiar with the show, but Worf and the Borg brought in fans from outside of DS9 and Voyager. I don’t know if Jeffrey Combs himself would have been enough to do that. But maybe, just because it was that fated fourth season that saved the other post-TOS shows, it might have helped.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Chances are, you’ve seen the hand-held game 20Q in stores. It’s a neat little device programmed with tons of questions and answers. You think of a person, place, or thing, and it tries to guess what you’re thinking of. These have been around for a few years now and are very popular. I bought one as a present when they first came out and tested it– I was surprised by how accurate it was.

A Trekkie’s dream come true, a Trek-themed 20Q is in development, and you can play it online for free until the producers have decided the AI is ready to build the handheld version. Go to 20Q.net and try it for yourself. I’ve played it a few times, and it’s pretty good, but it has a long way to go. It knows things from all five series and the movies, and not only does it guess based on the way people have previously answered questions, it also lets you put in new terms if you were thinking of something it hadn’t. If you’re a big enough Trekkie to spend time playing it enough, you could have a very large impact on the program.

I’m really happy to see this being developed. We play a similar game in my weekly Trek club called “Is It Bigger Than a Standard Replicator?” I’ve found that Trek has a vast amount of terms that it’s great for this sort of game. According to 20Q.net, it’s one of only four 20Qs being made about other specific lisenced franchises. The others are The Simpsons, Harry Potter, and Disney. I don’t know if they have plans for others, but it’s fantastic that Star Trek got in so quickly. I would have expected Star Wars to get one more quickly, since it’s generally more highly commercialized. I’m also very happy it will include all of Trek canon and not just the original series. I know many Trekkies are only fans of one series or another, but for someone like me who sees Trek as one vast universe, rather than separate series (though TNG will forever be my favorite among them) the game will be far more fun.

I’ll definitely be getting one of these little devices when it comes to stores. I just hope the kinks in the AI are worked out by then so that it can guess Berlinghoff Rasmussen in less than 27 turns.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan