[ENT Interviews] TrekMovie: "Romulan War, Col. Green, Borg Queen’s Origin: Writers Reveal Untold ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ Season 5 Stories" | "Brannon Braga, Mike Sussman, Phyllis Strong, André Bormanis, and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens were all on a panel together at Trek Talks 5. "
TREKMOVIE:
"Writer Diana Keng moderated a panel of Enterprise writers to celebrate the show’s 25-year milestone. [...]
Diana asked the group “If you could pitch an episode that could air anywhere in the four seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise today, what would it be, and who would be the central character?” Brannon Braga’s first (and funny) response was “If you’re asking us to come up another one for Enterprise I’m going to kill myself.” Then he elaborated that “there was not a single scrap of an idea that wasn’t used because concepts were like mining for gold, however, he admitted he couldn’t speak for the others. He was right, as they started chiming in, revealing all sorts of fun pitches, starting with Gar and Judy.
Garfield Reeves-Stevens: “One we pitched it to Manny [Coto], and he said, break it down. We put it on cards. We wrote a treatment, and it all had to do with Colonel Green [from TOS’ ‘The Savage Curtain’] coming back. And then the decision was “too close to the Augments. We don’t want to do another one.” But the intriguing thing in that was Colonel Green having survived in some way, is going after the people who had hurt him in the past, and also reached out to the people, the descendants of those who’d helped them. And that Reed is we were going to find out his father or his grandfather was one of the supporters of Colonel Green. So we get into a personal story, and that one was going to be a two-parter, which ended with Trip and Reed on the outside of the Enterprise as it was about to go to warp.”
With budgets getting tight, they got some pushback.
Garfield Reeves-Stevens: “But that one led to ‘We don’t want to do that, we have to save money.’ And Brandon said, ‘You know, we save money if the crew, regular cast members are taken over by some alien. So we don’t have to have guest stars.'”
Judith: “And we did ‘Observer Effect.'”
“Observer Effect” was exactly what Brannon had suggested: a bottle episode with no guest stars, thanks to a storyline in which aliens were using the bodies of the crew, and no visual effects. They kept a small nod to TOS when the aliens are revealed at the end to be Organians, who conveniently wipe the crew’s memories.
The Reeves-Stevenses, who’d already written several successful Star Trek reference books, had another pitch that delved into the franchise’s lore. Although the show already had a Borg episode in season 2 (“Regeneration”), they wanted to dig deeper into the their formation:
Garfield Reeves-Stevens: “And then the one we thought would be really intriguing was to have another Borg show, but bring in the head of Starfleet medical, which would be played by Alice Krige. Yeah, and we would see someone choosing — she, of course, goes on to become the Borg Queen — but we would see what goes through the mind of someone choosing to join the collective.”
When Brannon Braga told them it was “a cool idea that we should’ve done,” Garfield reported that Manny didn’t want them reaching back to other shows too often; it was important for Enterprise to stand on its own. Phyllis Strong echoed this sentiment and talked about why writing for the show was so appealing.
Phyllis Strong: “I was so excited to be going back to a time, 100 years before Kirk and Spock, and to really dive into characters that were flawed, much flawed, and would have arguments and conflict, and that was different from what had come before, since Next Generation.”
But the Reeves-Stevenses had an idea for one more dip into The Original Series well, along with optimism for Enterprise‘s future:
Garfield: “A story we never pitched, but we thought of, and now we’ve seen it’s quite a common thing … We thought for season 7, an ideal episode would be to have one last battle of the Temporal War, and it involves the Enterprise crew going back to the K-7 space station while Kirk’s crew is there and Sisko’s crew is there.”
He’s referring to Deep Space Nine‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” when Sisko and crew went back in time to the USS Enterprise during the events of Star Trek‘s “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
[...]
André Bormanis had another big pitch with a TOS callback:
André Bormanis: “I do remember pitching an idea to Manny that he really liked. It was based on the episode from The Original Series, ‘The Cloud Minders’ — the city Stratos, all the people live lives of leisure on Stratos while the miners work down in the tunnels. And I thought it’d be interesting to see that 100 years earlier, when it’s still being built and before this, you know stratification, you know this growing income inequality, you know, had had taken root. And Manny said that’s really cool, we got to think about that. And he said, That’s a season 5 story.”
[...]"
Laurie Ulster (TrekMovie.com)
Full article (including Romulan War ideas):
Posted Apr 5, 2026, 10:21 AM UTC