Now that we’re speaking in hindsight, one almost can’t help but watch the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise and ask “Did this show ever have a chance?” Of course, the answer is a resounding yes. As hard as I am on what I can only describe as a vast majority of this series’ stories, even an old cynic like mysef has to admit that there was potential in the premise itself. The idea of exploring the formative years of Starfleet and the Federation was very sound, even exciting. And as has almost always been the case, the casting for Enterprise was nearly perfect. The sets were an interesting backward extrapolation, somewhere between the flat-panel touch-screen future of the 24th century spinoffs, the shiny-button future of classic Star Trek, and the keyboard & pushbutton present of NASA. The thought of a whole new Trek series paying homage to the pioneering spirit of exploration, as opposed to racing toward home at top speed or protecting a space station, was mouth-watering.

Enterprise threatened to fall into many of the same traps as its immediate predecessor, Voyager, which had been the first Trek spinoff to win my open disdain on a frequent basis. This isn’t surprising when one considers that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, who had guided Voyager’s journeys from the fourth season onward (after Braga took over the #2 seat from departed Voyager co-creators Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller), were taking an even more active role in Enterprise, writing a great many of the early scripts themselves. Which would’ve been great if not for the fact that they seemed, more often than not, to be out of ideas.

Broken Bow kicked things off promisingly with a tale of Earth’s first encounter with the Klingons and an interesting introduction to the crew of the starship Enterprise. Even the slimy Suliban were a fascinating new enemy, and surely there was some fascinating reason why no one in any of the “future” Trek series seemed to have heard of them. But…the “temporal cold war”? There was more than enough story with the human-Klingon entanglement. This continuing fascination with interference-from-the-future – which can be traced all the way back to the Berman-written A Matter Of Time in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s fifth year – was already getting tiring after popping up several times on Voyager. Seeing that the “temporal cold war” was going to be a running thread from the pilot onward played a big part in my diminished enthusiasm for Enterprise.

Things improve markedly from there, with some – but not a great many – of the early hour-long episodes demonstrating that Archer and his crew really are going where no one’s gone before, and it’s not a trip down to the corner store. The sad thing is that while that tone carries admirably through the first few shows, it’s undercut by a parade of Berman-era Trek tropes that are just as worn out as time travel: the crew gets possessed by something and behaves out of character (a big mistake, since we barely know who these people are so early in the show), searching for human colonies that have fallen out of contact…the list goes on. But ironically, as well-worn as some of the premises were, it’s hard not to notice that these early shows make better use of the entire ensemble cast than last seasons would. Perhaps most notably is Anthony Montgomery’s Ensign Travis Mayweather, who fell largely by the wayside for much of the rest of the series – I had forgotten just how good Montgomery’s performance was, and how interesting the character was, until I reacquainted myself with some episodes that actually utilized him. Apparently the producers forgot too.

Broken Bow is the first episode of a Star Trek TV series to have an audio commentary, in this case from Rick Berman and Brannon Braga themselves. At times, their banter is informative and actually quite interesting. In other places, such as where they talk about how Hoshi’s communications earpiece is an homage to the one used by “…Uhuru…Uhura? Was it Uhura?” (I kid you not!), it’s not too hard to imagine why certain segments of fandom have come to carry quite a damning opinion of the two show-runners. But in all fairness, neither of them were involved with the original Star Trek. They can remember some details of the later movies starring the original cast, but that’s about it. (On the other hand, to give both sides a fair shake, Uhura wasn’t exactly a minor part of the Trek pantheon either.) Broken Bow and a few other episodes are graced with a Pop-Up Video-style text trivia commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda, and those are generally very informative, if a little bit too obsessed with minutae.

Another first for this set comes in the form of deleted scenes – some episodes have several, some have one or two, and some don’t have any. The scenes are shown in various states of completion, some of them raw soundstage footage with green screens clearly visible, and others fully finished. The featurettes, which lean heavily on archival publicity material from the first season, show how enthusiastic the cast was in the beginning, and how enthusiastic they were to be working with Scott Bakula as well. If you walk away with nothing else from this set’s bonus features, you’ll probably come away with an even better appreciation of Bakula’s talent not only in front of the camera, but in keeping things light but professional on the set. And if you really need an example of levity on the set, one need look no further than another Trek DVD first: a nice chunk of bloopers from the first season. Kudos to the Enterprise cast and crew for letting their hair down enough to let the public see their outtakes – a great deal of these are fall-down funny.

Sadly, not all of the featurettes hold up so well. One in particular, “Star Trek Time Travel,” consists of barely four minutes of interviews with Rick Berman and Brannon Braga discussing the origins of the temporal cold war story arc, which they in turn blame on the studio and UPN (!). That featurette is then stretched painfully thin by several minutes of still photos, and accompanying captions, describing other instances of time travel in Star Trek lore. Not only is the temporal cold war a storyline we could’ve done without, but this featurette is about the least enjoyable from this box set as well.

Enterprise would get a whole lot better. But first, it would get a whole lot worse. Looking back at the first season, one can see hints of both.