Movies - TV
The Messy Behind-The-Scenes Origins Of Star Trek’s Temporal Cold War
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
As "Star Trek: Enterprise" is set roughly a century before the original show, co-creator Brannon Braga wanted the 1st Season to focus on humanity preparing to venture into space.
In the book “The Fifty-Year Mission,” Braga said the series would have started with a focus on Earth and limited technology, but Paramount wanted it to be more futuristic.
This disagreement led the show's writers to invent the Temporal Cold War time-travel plot. When it aired, many felt the story was too complicated to follow and not very interesting.
Braga shared, “I'm not putting the blame on the studio, because I don't know if they were right or wrong, but I do know that we didn't really go as 'prequel' as we wanted.”
He added, “The whole Temporal Cold War was put in because they demanded that there be some futuristic thing in it.” Braga didn’t like the plot and felt it was unsatisfying.
Braga revealed that he based the Temporal Cold War on a non-Trek sci-fi epic he had been working on about world powers discovering time travel in 1981 and its messy consequences.
Despite having an eventual connection to the fan-favorite Xindi storyline, the Temporal Cold War was eventually dropped completely in Season 4.