Posted in: Paramount+, Star Trek, TV | Tagged: star trek, Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise Prod, Scott Bakula Pitch Archer Sequel Series

Star Trek: Enterprise producer Michael Sussman discusses pitching Paramount on a sequel series with Scott Bakula's Jonathan Archer.

There's probably no shortage of pitches in terms of a Star Trek wish list of series, many of them continuations that have piled up at Paramount. Two of the ones we know of, at least publicly, are the Picard showrunner Terry Matalas idea to continue the adventures of Seven, Raffi, and Jack in Star Trek: Legacy that has them exploring new phenomenon in the 24th century under the U.S.S. Enterprise-G continuing the main timeline of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager that would have opened the door for any of those casts to return like the TNG crew did for Picard season three. The other is the ongoing hopes from Strange New Worlds showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to bridge directly into The Original Series once the fifth and final season of SNW wraps. A third intriguing pitch emerged courtesy of Enterprise writer/producer Michael Sussman, who has the ear of star Scott Bakula as the two are developing a sequel series that sees the return of Bakula's Jonathan Archer as President of the Federation at Star Trek Las Vegas: Trek to Vegas convention.

Star Trek: Enterprise Sequel Developed from UPN Series Producer Michael Sussman and Star Scott Bakula

Sussman told TrekMovie.com that the idea of Bakula's return to Star Trek was inspired by Patrick Stewart's when he returned to the franchise in 2021 for Picard, which focused more on the title character on his new adventures than simply a catch-up of the TNG crew, which came in the series' third and final season. The producer, who co-wrote an episode of 12 Monkeys alongside Matalas, recalled joking to Bakula in an email, "How soon are we going to see Star Trek: Archer on Paramount+?" before realizing the ideas were already there during the UPN series' run, and Bakula was intrigued. "He immediately glommed onto it."

The writer referenced the season four episode, "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II," that touched on Archer's future. "It occurred to me that someone on the writing staff, not the art department, needed to write this graphic. Somebody needed to think about this, right? This was going to be a graphic that spelled out Archer's life and career after the series ended." There are discernable gaps in the Star Trek timeline as much as Paramount focused on the pre-The Original Series era. Enterprise was set after the events of the second TNG film First Contact (1996) that saw the seeds of Earth's deep space travel pre-Federation following Cochrane's warp flight. As Enterprise was the final Trek series on network TV, UPN canceled the series after four seasons with the finale "These Are the Voyages…" cobbling together a time jump and cameos from TNG's Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, reprising their roles as Riker and Troi. In the current canon, the only return from the Rick Berman and Brannon Braga-created series was a vocal appearance by Jolene Blalock, who reprised her role as science officer T'Pol, on Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Discovery was set years before TOS, with season three taking it to the 32nd century, with Strange New Worlds taking over the narrative. It's not only the Enterprise to Discovery gap that hasn't closed, but we still never had a proper TV series or film to bridge TOS and TNG eras, just a side adventure of a pre-Enterprise-C adventure of Rachel Garrett in the standalone film Section 31. Meanwhile, it's nice to know Bakula is at least interested in revisiting one of his beloved works since he passed on NBC's Quantum Leap soft reboot that acknowledges his main character but never revisits him properly since he never returned…home. For more, including Sussman on Paramount's initial reaction to the pitch, you can check out the whole report.

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