'Enterprise' Blasts Into Its Season Finale
Fri, May 16, 2003 06:29 PM PDT by Kate O'Hare Zap2it, TV News
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - A clip from the Wednesday, May 21, second-season finale of UPN's "Enterprise" was shown to advertisers on Thursday, May 15, during the network's upfront presentation in New York. Also on hand was David Greenwalt, showrunner of "Jake 2.0," the new show set to follow the "Star Trek" spin-off this fall.
"They had an ad for 'Enterprise' that made me never want to miss it," he says. "Somebody just kills a million people on Earth. It looks good. Actually, 'Enterprise' looks really good, and I'm happy to be after it."
The finale, "The Expanse," finds a new alien race, the Xindi (pronounced ZIN-dee) attacking Earth and cutting a swath of destruction from Florida to Venezuela. When "Enterprise" returns next fall, the 22nd-century ship, its captain, Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), and crew find themselves in a frightening new world.
"We thought, 'We've done two years on the show, let's really shake things up, really take some risks,'" says executive producer Brannon Braga. "It turned out to be very inspirational for Rick [Berman, also an executive producer] and I. We ended up coming up with a really cool finale. It's not going to be resolved in one episode, it's going to be resolved in multiple episodes, if not the entire season. It's a big arc."
"We've never tried it, and we thought, 'What the heck?' It did something that everybody wanted to do, which was amp up the danger on the show and redirect it, or, as Rick says, give it a course correction. It will repurpose the crew, redefine them, and give them a seasonal adventure that will test their mettle once and for all and take them into a strange, dangerous place with all of humanity at stake, force them to rise to the occasion."
"In the decade or more I've been here, we've never gone into a season of 'Star Trek' with this kind of feeling, with this, 'Holy cow, we have a direction!' We're not just sitting down and saying, 'What are we going to do this year?' We have a purpose, and it's very exciting. We're just getting back, and we're digging it."
The Xindi, as Braga describes them, are a culture made up of several different intelligent species that all evolved on the same planet. "Some Xindi are giant, insect-like creatures," he says. "Some Xindi are humanoid; some Xindi are reptilian. It's an interesting idea, to me, anyway."
"Sure, we could have made it the Romulans that attacked Earth. But haven't we seen the Romulans for the past 15 years? Do we really just want to keep seeing the Romulans? No. We've got to do new stuff. We've got to keep pushing the boundaries."
"That won't meant hat we won't continue to see familiar species involved in this epic mission, but the main foe, we wanted to be new."
Although he works in one of TV's most venerable franchises, Braga is inspired by what he sees around him. "We're not modeling our show after anyone, but we look at shows like '24,' 'Boomtown,' and you see them breaking convention and getting experimental. That's always something we've enjoyed doing. We've told stories backwards, in circles. We've done a lot of wacky stuff on 'Star Trek.'"
"Whereas 'Enterprise' was a little more grounded in reality the first two years by the nature of its premise, we are now going into a region of space where we're going to start experimenting more."