SF&F Questions: Did Deep Space Nine rip off Babylon 5?

In our latest SF&F Question we address one of the biggest controversies in the history of science fiction television: did Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rip off its contemporary and "rival"space station show Babylon 5?

The Basics

Deep Space Nine was the second spin-off television series based on Star Trek. It ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes, debuting on 3 January 1993 and concluding on 2 June 1999.

Babylon 5 was an original science fiction television series which ran for five seasons and 110 episodes, along with an additional six TV movies and its own spin-off show which ran for half a season. It debuted on 22 February 1993 with a stand-alone pilot movie. Season 1 proper debuted on 26 January 1994 and the show concluded on 25 November 1998.

Both shows are set on enormous space stations, which the series is named after. Deep Space Nine is set on a space station near the planet Bajor, which is recovering from forty years of military occupation by the ruthless Cardassian Union. The United Federation of Planets and its space exploration wing, Starfleet, are called in to help run the station and advise the Bajorans on the rebuilding of their world.

Babylon 5's space station (which is considerably larger than DS9) is a sort-of United Nations in space, where representatives from five major governments and dozens of smaller ones meet to discuss important interstellar affairs. The impetus to build the station came from a devastating war between the Earth Alliance and Minbari Federation that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and destabilised the galaxy.

The contention, made directly by Babylon 5's creator and executive producer J. Michael Straczynski at the time, was that Deep Space Nine had ripped off Babylon 5's concepts and ideas, from the broad idea of setting the show on a space station to some specific elements such as having a shapeshifting character (the Minbari assassin in B5's pilot was originally an actual shapeshifting alien) and the presence of an interstellar "gateway" near the station (the wormhole in DS9's case, the jump gate in B5's case).

Wait, Babylon 5 started after DS9. How can it have ripped it off?

It's true that DS9 aired its pilot episode, Emissary, six weeks before B5 aired its pilot, The Gathering, and took a lot longer to get its first season proper on air. In fact, DS9 was halfway through its second season before B5 could begin airing its first. However, this does not tell the full story of the two shows' development; Babylon 5 was created, conceived and outlined almost five years before DS9 was commissioned.

J. Michael Straczynski came up with the idea for Babylon 5 in 1986 or 1987; he seeded a mention of the name into Final Stand, one of his episodes for Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, which aired on 4 October 1987. He developed the Babylon 5 series bible around this time and wrote a pilot script (an early but still-recognisable version of The Gathering), plus a full set of 22 episode outlines for a full season of the show. Concept artist Peter Ledger also provided paintings of the titular space station and its crew. This package was shopped around CBS, ABC and HBO in 1988 to no avail.

In early 1989 Straczynski and his prospective production partners, Douglas Netter and John Copeland, received a boost when they met Evan Thompson, the head of a group of local stations called Chris Craft. Syndication - where a show is sold direct to lots of local TV stations rather than one of the big national networks - was experiencing a renaissance thanks to the success of Paramount Television's Star Trek: The Next Generation (which had launched in September 1987) and Chris Craft was interested in lining up a new show for the syndication market. Babylon 5 fit the bill, they felt, and they hoped a new science fiction show would do similar numbers to Star Trek for them.
To this end Thompson took the Babylon 5 project directly to Paramount Television. He presented them with the pilot script, the 22 additional episode outlines, the outline of a serialised five-year story arc and the detailed production notes which suggested that the show could be made for less money than TNG. Paramount sat on the notes for about eight to nine months and the producers he spoke to were enthusiastic about the project, but Paramount's senior management felt that having a second science fiction/space opera show set in a completely different universe would be too confusing and would cannibalise the Star Trek audience. By the end of 1989 they had formally passed on the B5 project and Thompson was given back the notes, scripts and outlines.

Eventually Babylon 5 found a home at Warner Brothers and their new Prime-Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), an alliance of syndicated stations. The show was formerly announced as being in development in the summer of `1991. Two months later, Paramount Television announced that they were developing a spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, called Star Trek: Deep Space IX (later changed to Deep Space Nine after too many people wrote in asking what a "Deep Space Ix" was) that would be set on a large space station. Straczynski was not slow in calling foul and reminding people that Paramount had had the story notes for Babylon 5 for almost a year and could have cribbed whatever notes that'd wanted from them.

Okay, that sounds pretty plausible actually. So what is Paramount's side of the story?

Paramount's side of the story is pretty straightforward: they themselves didn't come up with the basic notion of DS9. Instead it came in with a new executive to the network who did not have prior access to any internal documents related to the 1989 Babylon 5 proposal.

Backtracking a little: despite risible critical notices, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation had done gangbusters for Paramount in terms of ratings and therefore advertising profitability. With the third season of TNG, including its epic Borg cliffhanger episode, The Best of Both Worlds, improving the show's critical and commercial success, they wanted to exploit this by developing more shows in the same setting. However, executive producers Rick Berman and Michael Pillar weren't sure how to approach this and, with TNG being a time-consuming show, they put these ideas on the backburner.

The situation changed in 1991. Brandon Tartikoff, one of the most feted and respected television executives in Hollywood, had departed NBC after fourteen years. During his time at the network he had displayed a canny eye for gauging what would work and what wouldn't, making such far-reaching decisions as renewing Cheers and Seinfeld even after the first few seasons of each show brought in terrible ratings and being rewarded when they both became the biggest shows on television. He was also involved in the creation of The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and The Golden Girls, all of which became immense successes despite Hollywood wisdom being set against them.
Tartikoff was asked to join Paramount Television, which was in the doldrums and needed some firing up. Tartikoff accepted the job and arrived in the post of chairman with one firm idea already in place: a new Star Trek television series. One of his first actions was to summon Berman and Piller to his office (they were terrified that he was going to cancel TNG) and presented them with a concept he'd already developed: if the original Star Trek series and TNG were both "Wagon Train to the stars" - a reference to a 1957-65 Western TV show about pioneers exploring the American West - than he wanted the new show to be "The Rifleman in space", a reference to a 1958-63 TV series focusing on a widowed sheriff trying to keep the peace in a fractious frontier town whilst also raising his young son. The new Star Trek show would therefore not be set on a starship but a starbase, one of the planetary bases frequently visited in both Star Trek series, and the show would deal with the problems of being stationary in possibly hostile surroundings rather than being able to roar off at the end of each week's adventure.

Piller and Berman ran with the idea - possibly a bit more literally than Tartikoff had expected - by proposing that a Starfleet base had been set up on a planet recently under hostile alien occupation, with a newly-widowed Starfleet officer assigned to command the base with his son. The officer's wife had been killed by the Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359 and he was suffering issues related to that event. They decided the occupying aliens would be the Cardassians - introduced in the then-recently-aired TNG episode The Wounded - and created the planet Bajor and its spiritual inhabitants as the planet in question. They also mused on using a stable wormhole (an idea introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and further expanded on in the TNG episode The Price, which had aired in November 1989) as a way of revitalising Bajor's economy and introducing strife with the Cardassians, who'd abandoned the planet before the wormhole was discovered.

However, they ran into problems just a couple of weeks later when costing the show. One of the appeals of doing the project was having regular location filming to make the show feel less claustrophobic than TNG and give it a very different look. The problem is that regular location filming would have meant either almost doubling the budget beyond TNG (at that point already the most expensive TV show on the air) or spending many episodes indoors without going outside, which seemed pointless. They decided that moving the show onto a space station made more sense: starbases were established as also being space stations in the original show and having the show set in space would allow for the exploration and space battles that viewers had come to expect. It also allowed them to have outings to other planets (Bajor or new worlds in the Gamma Quadrant beyond the wormhole) or stay on the station as budgets required. Indeed, the show's first official announcement poster indicated they would be using the already-established Spacedock design from the movie Star Trek III for the space station, but they later decided that using a Cardassian station would be more interesting.

Paramount's defences to the charge of ripping off Babylon 5, therefore, are that 1) the person who came up with the basic idea of DS9 hadn't been working at Paramount previously and arrived with the concept already in place before he'd seen any documents; 2) the B5 documents were all returned to Evan Thompson before 1989 was over and no copies were made (and indeed, it would been legally dubious to do so); 3) the original concept was for a planetary base and was only moved to a space station for budgetary reasons; and 4) that many of the concepts used in DS9, including the wormhole and even the original space station design, predated B5's original genesis by years.

More common sense arguments can also be made: a space opera TV show is going to be either set on a spaceship, a space station or a planet, and with Star Trek already having a starship-set show on the air and with the planet option eliminated by budgetary requirements, a space station was the only setting left.

Right. So what about the shapeshifting alien?

Straczynski's original 1987 The Gathering draft had a shapeshifting alien trying to kill Ambassador Kosh and being defeated. Visual effects limitations would have required this alien to have shifted form with some kind of blurry effect or even off-screen. It should be noted that this alien was only ever intended to appear in the pilot episode.

Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, was pretty much ordered by Paramount to include a shapeshifting alien to cash in on the craze for "morphing". This CG technology had been pioneered by the 1988 movie The Abyss by James Cameron but had exploded in the public consciousness with Cameron's film Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released in July 1991. The T-1000 android's ability to shift shape was accomplished by cutting-edge computer technology and it led to an insane craze for both TV shows and films to use the same software (as well as music videos, such as Michael Jackson's "Black or White"). Paramount wanted a shapeshifting alien as a regular character on DS9 to cash in on this craze, not because an unused TV outline from two years earlier had such a character as a one-off villain.

Okay, that sounds pretty convincing from their perspective. So why is this explanation not more widely known?

J. Michael Straczynski was a pioneer in the use of the Internet for discussing his work and his TV shows: he was sitting on chat groups as early as 1990 talking about the series. Most people in the United States didn't even know what the Internet was until circa 1995 and the Star Trek team were slow to start using the Internet as a means of communicating with fans. As a result, the full story of the creation of Deep Space Nine and Brandon Tartikoff's involvement was not publicly known until the publication of The Deep Space Nine Companion in 2000. Tartikoff himself passed away in 1997 and Michael Piller in 2005, so neither are still with us to comment on the situation. On the other hand, Straczynski was discussing it loudly and publicly from 1991 onwards, so his version of events became dominant in the media.

It should be noted that, many years later, Straczynski also withdrew his suggestion that DS9 ripped off B5, saying that he did not believe Rick Berman nor Michael Piller (whom Straczynski knew) would knowingly rip off another writer's material. He left open the idea that a Paramount executive may have "steered" some discussion with material from his notes, but no evidence for this has ever been produced.

Okay, but did the shows have an impact on one another during production and transmission?

This is clearer. For example, the Cardassians were supposed to have a clandestine intelligence agency known as the "Grey Order", introduced in Season 2 of DS9. One of the production staff pointed out that Babylon 5 had a "Grey Council" (the rulers of the Minbari Federation) and the Cardassian name was changed to "Obsidian Order" to avoid any confusion.

Ron Thornton, the creator of Babylon 5's cutting-edge CGI, also claimed in 1996 that the introduction of the White Star (a warship the B5 crew could use to get around in) was directly inspired by the introduction of the USS Defiant on DS9 a full year earlier, a claim furiously denied by Straczynski who pointed out that the show simply needed a ship bigger than the standard fighters and shuttles to take the fight to the enemy. It should be noted that the relationship between B5's producers and its CGI team at Foundation Imaging was breaking down at this point, so it's unclear if Thornton's comment was meant seriously or in jest (and Ron Thornton passed away in 2016, making it difficult to clarify further).

The acrimony between the two shows resulted in furious flame wars between their respective fandoms on the Internet, becoming notable enough that Straczynski dialled down his criticisms of DS9. This thawing of tensions may have also been down to the fact that Straczynski was good friends with Jeri Taylor, executive producer on Star Trek: Voyager, and wanted to cool things down. To this end he also convinced Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Number One, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi and various Federation computer voices on multiple Star Trek shows) to guest star on Babylon 5 during its third season.

Answer: Deep Space Nine did not rip off Babylon 5, despite the fortuitous timing and some very superficial surface similarities which do not withstand detailed scrutiny. A spin-off from the very successful Next Generation was a natural progression for the franchise and a space station setting was a logical extrapolation once a planetary setting was ruled out. There is also no evidence Paramount made (highly unethical, if not illegal) copies of the B5 notes or passed these onto the DS9 producers, and the charge was later withdrawn by B5's executive producer.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. SF&F Questions and The Cities of Fantasy series are debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read them there one month before being published on the Wertzone.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 4

Earth has survived an attack by the alien Xindi. The crew of the NX-01 Enterprise have been hailed as heroes, but Earth is also in the grip of anti-alien xenophobia, fanned by a terrorist organisation known as Terra Prime. There's also growing tensions between the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites, with Earth caught in the middle...and an unseen enemy manipulating events from behind the scenes.

The fourth and concluding season of Star Trek: Enterprise is the moment when the show finally starts fulfilling its premise. For its first two years the show seemed to too often disregard the potential of its setting in favour of doing too-traditional Star Trek stories, just with less advanced technology. In the third season the show adopted more long-form storytelling that made it more dynamic and interesting, but still had problems with pacing, not to mention telling a story that had nothing to do with the show's reason for existing. This final season finally lines everything up just right to deliver the most consistently excellent season of Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine.

The season is divided up into several multi-episode arcs. The first quickly disposes of the Temporal Cold War, an ill-thought-out plot device that hamstrung the first two seasons of the show. Very quickly the show moves into stories tying together the augments (the genetically-engineered descendants of Khan) into the humanoid-looking Klingons of the original series (a story that really didn't need to be told, but isn't awful) with other stories bringing in the Romulans as masterminds of a plot to thwart the growing relations between the eventual founders of the Federation. Other episodes involve a social revolution on Vulcan (including an appearance by a young T'Pau, a fan-favourite character from the original Star Trek) and, most effectively, a two-parter entirely set in the Mirror Universe. Another multi-part story revolves around the last gasp of fascism on Earth and its final defeat, setting the scene for Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision to come to pass.

The result is a relentlessly enjoyable season of television. It's still not the sharpest-written season of Star Trek, let alone SF in general, and the fact this season aired alongside vastly superior first season of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica probably did it no favours, but removed from that context it stands up pretty well. This Enterprise as it should have been from the start, deftly mixing together original stories with the established history of the Star Trek canon and having fun in the process. The writers and cast are clearly having more fun than they have in previous seasons and that joy finds its way onto the screen.

Of course, there is a big "but" in all of this. There are a few weak episodes this season, and the few stand-alone episodes peppered between the two and three-parters are mostly forgettable. There's also some problems within the longer arcs. The augment story is too long and mostly unnecessary: it tries to explain what happened to genetically engineered humans after Khan, a story already adequately explained on Deep Space Nine, and it laboriously tries to explain why Klingons looked different in the original series, a story, er, already adequately explained on Deep Space Nine. There's also a bafflingly pointless story which tries to mine drama from Trip's decision to leave Enterprise permanently (hint: he doesn't), which is undercut by the fact that no-one cares.

Worse, and most famously, is the season and series finale, These Are the Voyages. This episode is framed as a flashback from Star Trek: The Next Generation with Riker weirdly consulting a holo-programme about Enterprise's final mission to justify some personal decisions. This is an insult to the cast and crew of Enterprise, putting too much focus on TNG characters rather than the show that is actually ending, and feels forced. The episode is ill-conceived, badly-written and lacking in tension and drama, making it easily the weakest Star Trek series finale since Turnabout Intruder (and at least the writers of that episode had the excuse they didn't know it was the finale).

Still, at least it's a single really awful episode in a season featuring some stand-out and, in the form of the In a Mirror, Darkly episodes, a genuine classic two-parter. Overall, the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise (****) is thoroughly enjoyable and shows the potential of this show that went unrealised for so long. The season is available on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and many other parts of the world.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 3

Earth has been attacked by an alien superweapon. Florida and the Caribbean have been left in flames and over seven million people are dead. The alien attackers are traced to a mysterious region of space known as the Delphic Expanse and an alien race known as the Xindi, so Starfleet sends the NX-01 Enterprise to the region to investigate further and stop the Xindi before they can launch a second attack.

According to conventional wisdom, Star Trek: Enterprise gets a lot better with its third season. The show's best writer, Manny Coto, was promoted to producer and given more creative freedom. The entire season also has a strong, ongoing story arc. It's still not full-on serialisation - many episodes are still stand-alone, just with more frequent mentions of the ongoing storyline - but it's closer than Trek has gotten before across a whole year. There's also more attention paid to character growth, such as T'Pol developing an addiction to a chemical and then going through withdrawal, leaving her permanently emotionally damaged, whilst the human crewmembers initially hunger for revenge against the Xindi before learning more about them and how they've been manipulated by another alien race.

It is certainly true that Enterprise's third season is more interesting than the first two. There is more of a sense of tension and drama and the show feels more experimental. Long-term Trek producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, criticised by many fans for presiding over the long-term decline of the franchise, seem to have backed off and given Coto more freedom to innovate. The producers cleverly realised that their storyline, although it had legs, was still insufficient to fill 25 episodes, so were still able to bring in side-stories to expand the texture of the new setting of the Expanse. Although some of these episodes are undeniably filler (Extinction and Rajin are groan-inducingly boring), there seems to be a far higher hit rate than in previous seasons.

The season also gives us Enterprise's first truly classic episode. Twilight riffs on previous episode ideas but also takes a strong influence from the movie Memento, with Archer affected by a neurological problem which prevents him from forming long-term memories. The episode unfolds as an alternate view of what happens if the Enterprise's mission fails and, although we know it won't, the episode is well-written and directed enough that it doesn't matter too much.

Other strong episodes include Proving Ground (even if the arrival of Andorian occasional semi-ally Shran is a little implausible), Strategem and Doctor's Orders (an excellent showcase for John Billingsley's acting). The season also ends with a strong arc starting with Azati Prime, where Enterprise takes incredibly heavy damage and is left crippled for the rest of the season. The crew have to find a way of destroying the Xindi weapon without having their normal resources to call upon, so have to resort to a diplomatic solution. In a post-9/11 world and with the far darker Battlestar Galactica reboot hitting screens at the same time, Enterprise takes a very different approach is still very true to the ethos of Star Trek, and does so reasonably well. The season-ending cliffhanger is less than compelling, however.

The third season of Star Trek: Enterprise (****) is indeed better than the first two and the finest season of Star Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine. It's not perfect and occasionally resorts to tiresome Star Trek standbys, but it entertains and successfully finds a solution to the season-long arc that channels Star Trek at its finest. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 2

The NX-01 Enterprise, Earth's first deep-space exploration vessel, continues to visit new worlds and make first contact with new species. However, Captain Archer's mission is complicated by rising tensions between the Vulcans and Andorians, the ongoing threat of the Suliban and internal dissent within the Klingon Empire which results in a price being placed on his head.

The first season of Star Trek: Enterprise was promising and intermittently fun, but it was also highly variable in quality, pulled its punches a lot and didn't have the courage of its convictions. A Star Trek prequel series featuring life at the rough end of space, humans establishing relations with races like the Tellarites, Vulcans and Andorians and featuring lots of low-tech solutions that Geordi or O'Brien would have fixed in five seconds in later series could be quite exciting. Enterprise doesn't do that, however. It's really just another Star Trek show, slightly bland and playing it safe whilst leaning a lot on Star Trek tropes that were exhausted long before The Next Generation ended, let alone by the time Enterprise was on air a full decade later.

The season actually starts off in an entertaining enough fashion, with T'Pol relating the story of a Vulcan science team stuck on Earth in the 1950s which does some typical but amusing culture clash stuff quite well. A Magnificent Seven-riffing episode has the crew help a team of miners defend themselves from Klingons and a war episode focusing on Andorians and Vulcans fighting over a contested moon is clever for how it shows that human flexibility can be an asset in resolving a situation that the Vulcans can't deal with through logic alone. There's also a solid Klingon trial episode starring J.G. Hertzler as a Klingon attorney and a very good first contact culture clash episode starring the late, great Andreas Katsulas as an alien captain who forms a bromance with Captain Archer over their mutual love of exploration. A late-season episode featuring a flashback to Archer's days as a warp test pilot (riffing on things like The Right Stuff) is also decent. There's a solid sense of character progression throughout the season as well, with T'Pol developing into a more interesting character and Phlox getting some interesting episodes as well.

The weaknesses from Season 1 remain intact, however. Trip gets far too many episodes dedicated to him when he is simply far too bland and uninteresting a character to merit it, Travis gets exactly one episode to do anything of interest in (and doesn't do too great a job) and Hoshi doesn't even get that. To be fair they do drop some of the more frustrating elements from Season 1 - the Temporal Cold War is pretty much forgotten about, apart from two episodes - and they also work on making the Klingons more formidable bad guys at the end of the season, but Enterprise remains firing on half-thrusters for most of the season. For every good episode there is a dull-as-dishwater one, and a couple that are flat-out terrible.

That said, the season finale is surprisingly good. The Suliban reluctantly form an alliance with Enterprise to combat a greater threat in a region of space known as the Delphic Expanse, setting the scene for the much more heavily-serialised third season.

The second season of Star Trek: Enterprise (***½) remains watchable and at times it lives up to the promise of the premise. But all too often it waters down gripping ideas into dull, Star-Trek-by-the-numbers morality plays and sells short its own potential. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 1

AD 2151. Earth has spent a century recovering from a devastating global war and developing new technologies, such as the ability to travel faster than light through Zephram Cochrane's warp drive. The alien Vulcans have taken taken humanity under their wing, seeing in them great potential but also great dangers linked to their rashness. Now Starfleet's first Warp 5-capable starship, the NX-01 Enterprise, is ready for launch under the command of Jonathan Archer. But the Vulcans are still uncertain about their allies and place one of their own on board to monitor events.

Back in 2001 Star Trek was suffering from a bad case of "franchise fatigue". Rick Berman had produced 21 seasons of television, none shorter than 20 episodes, spanning three different series in fourteen years. His feeling was that the franchise needed to be rested to come back stronger, but Paramount were adamant that they wanted to keep the Star Trek gravy train afloat. Wearily, Berman and Voyager producer Brannon Braga agreed to create a new show but only on the condition that they could be more experimental and bold with it.

The result was Enterprise, a prequel series set 115 years before Captain James T. Kirk's original five-year mission, and about 90 years after the time travel events of the movie Star Trek: First Contact. The idea was to strip away all of Star Trek's convenient and "easy" technology - the transporter, photon torpedoes, shields, the universal translator, replicators - and make something much grittier and more "real", with less pure and ideologically-motivated humans and the making of space into a much darker and more threatening place.

It's a nice idea which, intermittently, works. Enterprise's main problem in this first season is that it kind of pulls its punches. Not as much as Voyager did, but still a lot more than it should. Enterprise doesn't have shields, but instead it can "polarise the hull plating". It doesn't have torpedoes but it does have missiles which are almost as good. It does have a transporter, but it's "risky" to use (albeit it works perfectly when the script needs it to and not when it doesn't). The universal translator is an advanced version of Google Translate and about as reliable, but they have a linguistics genius on board who can straighten it out, so that's fine. All of the less-than-scientific facets of the Star Trek universe - artificial gravity and sound in space most notably - remain intact.

Still, Enterprise remains a big improvement over Voyager. The show deliberately hearkens back to the original series's sense of adventure, with Archer as a bold, curious scientific explorer (who's not afraid to get his hands dirty when needed) in Captain Kirk's mould. It's also fun to see what mischief the crew can get up to without the Prime Directive holding them back (even though by the end of the season the need for it becomes clear). Unlike Voyager's crew of dysfunctional, depressed bores, this crew is a bit livelier and funnier, with a generally much higher standard of acting ability (Dominic Keating being the weakest link, and he improves significantly as the season progresses). Scott Bakula, possibly the most likable person on Earth, makes for a great captain, Jolene Blalock overcomes some dubious costuming choices to deliver a smart and nuanced performance (her deadpan sense of humour comes more to the fore in later episodes) and Linda Park is great - if not given enough to do - as linguistics expert Hoshi. Connor Trinneer's engineer (who seems to be a mash-up of Scotty's engineering genius and McCoy's Southern charm) Trip is less interesting but kind of harmless. Anthony Montgomery's Travis probably gets the rawest deal in terms of having anything to do. The strongest performance on the show is given by John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox. Early fears that he might be Neelix Mk. 2 never materialise and he goes on to give a nuanced performance throughout the season (apart from a comedy plotline in which he is woken up early from his annual hibernation, which is irritating).

Enterprise may be better than Voyager at this early showing, but that certainly doesn't make it perfect. Individual episodes vary immensely in quality, with some very strong and entertaining episodes like Dear Doctor and The Andorian Incident having to make up for a lot of typical, semi-Star Trek filler pap. For a first season, Enterprise tests its viewers' patience a lot. Maybe not as much as the first seasons of TNG and Voyager, but there's a still an fair bit of tedium to get through to get to the good moments.

More questionable is the insertion of a storyline in which time-travelling operatives from the far future are engaged in a "temporal cold war" with one another. Having a Star Trek prequel series building naturally to the universe we know is a good idea. Having one in which some guy from the 31st Century shows up and tells Archer that he's special and his actions will lead to the founding of the Federation is a lazy shortcut. The main alien race in this storyline, the Suliban, is also not one of Star Trek's more interesting antagonist races, it has to be said.

But, ultimately, Enterprise ends up being diverting and entertaining. It's also interesting as a historical artifact: shortly after this season began, 9/11 took place and American SF took a turn for the darker and more cynical. That gave us some great TV like the new Battlestar Galactica, but it also may have taken things down too dark a path. Enterprise's overwhelming feeling of optimism, adventure and exploration is, when done well, a refreshing tonic to the grimness that would come after it.

The first season of Star Trek: Enterprise (***½) is watchable, harmless and occasionally very cheesy fun. It's not the franchise at its best, but it's a long way from it at its worst. It does have a lot of potential, but it needs to up its game in future seasons. The season is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

Star Trek at 50: The End of an Era

In May 2001 Rick Berman and Paramount Pictures announced that the fifth live-action Star Trek TV series would be called Enterprise - and just Enterprise with no Star Trek or colon - and would star Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer. It would be a prequel series set a century before the events of even the original series, and would feature a very low-tech version of the Star Trek universe. The show would be set before the Federation is even founded, with Earth and Vulcan in a tenuous (and unequal) alliance and races like the Andorians and Tellarites causing mischief before they can be brought into the fold. The Klingons and Romulans are barely-rumoured threats on the horizon and the very first starship Enterprise is a primitive vessel lacking transporters or shields.

The cast of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Fans rejoiced. It sounded like the bold reinvention the franchise needed, a move away from the near-magical tech of the late 24th Century and a return to a time when even the systems close to Earth could harbour surprises and dangers. But such hopes were, if not dashed, then soon muted. The transporter is pretty much working as intended by the end of the pilot episode. Space battles would refer to "Armour buckling!" rather than "Shields failing!" but otherwise be pretty similar. Trundling around at Warp 5 maximum wasn't too different from trundling around at Warp 9.9. And the stories that were being told were soon becoming predictably Star Trek-by-the-numbers. Even the Borg - somewhat incongruously - soon showed up. Oh, and there's the theme song, which may be the worst piece of music ever used in the franchise.

That said, Enterprise was never quite as terrible as Voyager at its worst. The actors gelled a bit better and Scott Bakula made a strong leading actor. There were some pretty decent episodes in the opening couple of seasons and the show did learn from Deep Space Nine by bringing in multi-episode arcs, long-form storytelling and a recurring sometimes-ally in the shape of Shran, played by DS9 veteran Jeffrey Combs. The ending of Season 2 set in motion a new story arc in which the Enterprise has to enter a remote region of space in search of an alien race which has fired a devastating superweapon at Earth.

Season 3 was dominated by this storyline, and saw an uptick in quality as new writer Manny Coto came on board and made the show his own. At the end of the season he was promoted to showrunner, and spearheaded a fourth season which was driven by short arcs establishing elements of the Star Trek universe to come, as well as making good use of the Mirror Universe. Although some issues remained - the average episode quality was still patchy and some of the explanations for things in the Star Trek universe (like the human-looking Klingons of the original series) were deeply stupid - the show was clearly headed in the right direction, creatively. Reviews improved and there was clearly a fresh energy working behind the scenes.

But these improvements were not translating into good ratings. And whilst Enterprise was getting better, it would be hard to argue that it still looked tired compared to the storming and intense new Battlestar Galactica mini-series, which aired in 2003 ahead of the regular series beginning a year later (with ex-Star Trek writers such as Ronald D. Moore, Michael Taylor, David Weddle and Bradly Thompson on board). There was also fierce competition from the StarGate franchise, with StarGate: SG-1 feeling breezy and fun compared to Enterprise. And of course there was the disastrous box office and critical run of Star Trek: Nemesis in late 2002 and early 2003. If Nemesis hadn't killed the Star Trek franchise, it had certainly brought it to its knees.

The NX-01 experimental Enterprise. Not a Starfleet or Federation starship, which is why it was not counted or mentioned in previous Star Trek shows. Cough.

On 2 February 2005 Paramount announced it had cancelled Star Trek: Enterprise (the title and colon had been reinstated in the third season). Production ended on 8 March 2005 and the show's sets were struck and taken down. It was a historic moment. For the first time since mid-1977 - when Star Trek: Phase II entered pre-production only to be cancelled and replaced by Star Trek: The Motion Picture - there was no standing Star Trek set on the Paramount lot, and no in-production Star Trek project, either film or television. It was a sobering moment, but one that was almost ignored due to the controversy that erupted when Enterprise's final episode aired on 11 May 2005.

These Are the Voyages... was meant to show the impact of Archer's crew and their adventures, showing the founding of the Federation and the birth of the Star Trek universe. It did try to do these things...but in the context of a holodeck recreation created by Commander Riker and Counsellor Troi on the Enterprise-D during the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The last ship we see on Enterprise isn't the trusty little Enterprise NX-01 which gives the show its name, but the Enterprise-D, a ship that had been blown-up on screen eleven years earlier. Critics slated the episode, fans (even TNG fans) criticised the move as being disrespectful and the regular Enterprise actors felt insulted.

It was a low moment in the history of Star Trek. The franchise was effectively dead in the water. No-one was interested in making more Star Trek, the term "franchise fatigue" had become a mantra at Paramount and that seemed to be that.

Well, almost. Eighteen days after Star Trek: Enterprise ceased production, the BBC broadcast the first episode of Doctor Who in sixteen years. Battlestar Galactica had come back from the wilderness after twenty-five years and become successful, winning coveted Peabody and Hugo Awards and plaudits from serious critics. Star Trek wasn't dead forever, it was just resting. It just needed a fresh idea and someone willing to tackle the job of bringing it back...and that wasn't going to take as long as anyone might have thought.

Star Trek at 50: Torpedoing the Box Office

With both Deep Space Nine and Voyager over and a new series in the planning stages, the custodians of the Star Trek franchise turned their attention to a new movie starring the Next Generation crew. They made the decision that they wanted a clean break with how things were done in the past, with a new behind-the-scenes crew to inject some new blood and excitement into the films.

This, it turned out, was not an altogether successful decision.

Released four years after the previous Star Trek film, Nemesis was going up against The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Die Another Day at the box office. In retrospect, moving it might have been a good idea.

To make the tenth Star Trek movie, Rick Berman and Paramount decided to bring on board a new writer and a new director with no previous Star Trek credentials. Berman in particular was aware of how this had worked splendidly well for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when producer/writer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer came on board and saved the franchise from oblivion. His hope was that a similar creative approach could yield similar results.

To write the movie, Paramount called on the services of John Logan. Logan was hot property in Hollywood, having just come off the tremendously well-received Gladiator and Any Given Sunday. His later movies would include the well-received The Aviator, Hugo and Skyfall, so clearly he was a talented screenwriter. He was also a major fan of Star Trek and was a friend of Brent Spiner's, who got him up to speed with the rest of the cast. Logan was keen to explore the Romulans, feeling that for such a classic Star Trek race they'd been grossly overlooked by the franchise, and there was a feeling that they could make both an epic action story and a more personal story about the characters and their fates (Picard's relationship with his young clone and Data's relationship with his android predecessor, B4). All of the pieces were in place for a strong movie. Paramount just needed to choose a good director.

 Tom Hardy was generally praised for his role as Shinzon, and has gone on to become a Hollywood superstar.

For reasons that are still a bit fuzzy, they went with Stuart Baird. Baird was a highly experienced and acclaimed editor who had recently moved into directing, helming the moderately well-received Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal vehicle Executive Decision and the so-so U.S. Marshals. Paramount could have gone with Jonathan Frakes, who had helmed First Contact and Insurrection, but Frakes was finishing up another movie (Clockstoppers) and Paramount chose not to wait, even though it was down to a matter of a couple of weeks on the schedule. It was hoped that Baird would, like Meyer twenty years earlier, bring a fresh and new perspective to the franchise. This was undone by the fact that, unlike Meyer, Baird refused to watch any of the TV episodes, was allegedly derogatory about the franchise to other people and jarred badly with the castmembers, getting LeVar Burton's name repeatedly wrong and making quips about his character being an alien. In more recent years the castmembers have called the director an "idiot". Paramount also insisted that the Voyager character Seven of Nine be inserted into the movie against the writer's wishes, an insistence that only went away when Jeri Ryan herself turned the proposal down, calling it idiotic. Kate Mulgrew was instead hastily written in with a cameo appearance as Admiral Janeway on a viewscreen.

Still, the movie that resulted wasn't too bad, at least if reports of the assembly cut are to be believed. There were impressive action sequences between the Enterprise-E and the Reman battlecruiser Scimitar, some interesting scenes musing on life, death and rebirth and the casting department knocked it out of the park when they turned up a young, hard-hitting and intense British actor named Tom Hardy to play the main villain, Shinzon. The effects team did great work and the script struck a nice balance between action, comedy, drama, tragedy and pathos. Baird's direction ranged from poor to mediocre, but the script and certainly the performances could have turned things around if Paramount hadn't received the cut of the movie and taken a chainsaw to it.

 The space battle between the Enterprise-E and the Scimitar wasn't too bad, but did miss the point from The Wrath of Khan that having two evenly-matched ships is more interesting than some super-vessel we know is going to get beaten anyway (Into Darkness makes this mistake as well).

Star Trek: Nemesis's initial cut was close to three hours long. This was, clearly, far too long for a Star Trek movie and there was scope for some of the scenes to be deleted. But Paramount had devised a - highly questionable - strategy for the film. They were going to launch it directly opposite the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, and use its much shorter running time to pack in more performances and pick up more viewers from people who couldn't get in to see The Two Towers. As a result they hacked Nemesis down to barely 115 minutes, removing numerous scenes of character development or reflection in favour of action, explosions and violence.

This strategy was an unmitigated failure. As it turned out, The Two Towers wasn't the only game in town. There was also the new James Bond movie, Die Another Day, and the second Harry Potter movie, The Chamber of Secrets, to contend with. Released in December 2002, Nemesis simply couldn't stand up to that level of competition and retired from the cinema having taken a catastrophically low worldwide box office of $68 million against a budget of $60 million. With marketing costs factored in, the movie was an abject failure, the first Star Trek movie to actively lose money at the box office. The film's critical reception was also horrible, with the movie getting the worst reviews since at least Generations, if not The Final Frontier.

Wil Wheaton was to make a cameo appearance as Wesley Crusher, but his material was all cut from the final edit of the movie. Fortunately, a few years later Wheaton would reinvent himself as a cult geek figure by appearing on web series The Guild and on sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Fortunately, the film was saved by the DVD release. The movie shifted over 1.1 million DVDs in its week of release, with strong sales for several weeks afterwards. Like most of the Star Trek franchise it developed a very long tail. Thanks to the DVD release, the film was pushed firmly into profitability, but it was far too close for Paramount's comfort.

The film's reception resulted in several things happening. A sequel script, which would have been the last Next Generation movie designed to send off the TNG crew altogether, was cancelled.  All further development of the Star Trek franchise in the cinema was halted. A proposed reboot projected helmed by Rick Berman was politely rejected. Paramount had a new buzzword floating around and that word was "franchise fatigue." Star Trek had reached the point of burn-out and it was time to put it on ice.

Star Trek at 50: Exploring the Final Frontier

In 1993, shortly after the launch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Paramount Studios held a discussion with Rick Berman. Having two Star Trek TV shows on the air at the same time had proved to be unexpectedly successful, so they requested that Berman and his team produce a new series to directly replace Star Trek: The Next Generation when it concluded in the spring of 1994. Despite the prospective rigours of running two productions simultaneously for many years to come, Berman agreed to sit down with his writers and consult on ideas.

The cast of Star Trek: Voyager during its first season, which aired in 1995.

As with Deep Space Nine, Berman brought Michael Piller in on the discussions. Both were keen that the new series should have a female protagonist and involved TNG writer and producer Jeri Taylor in their meetings. Taylor's influence and suggestions became key, and she was officially credited as the co-creator and executive producer of the new series. They also decided that the new show should involve a starship, as a contrast to the station-bound DS9, but wanted something different to TNG. In particular, they were aware of the occasionally-voiced complaint that TNG spent very little time in all-new or unexplored space, "boldly going where no-one had gone before." They hit on the idea of stranding a Federation starship thousands of light-years from Federation territory and having to spend years getting home through uncharted space, with no starbases, friendly ships or allies to call upon.

The producers were concerned, as they had been on DS9, by Gene Roddenberry's maxim that there should be no interpersonal conflict between the Starfleet crewmembers. To overcome the hurdle, they decided that the crew of the new ship would be partly made up of members of the Maquis, a freedom-fighting organisation that had been resisting a peace treaty calling for several Federation colonies to be turned over to the Cardassians. The Maquis were set up during the closing episodes of TNG and throughout DS9's second and third seasons. This sense of conflict was enhanced by the addition of natives from the Delta Quadrant to the crew and the reintroduction of the Vulcans as a regular race, through crewman Tuvok. The producers were also keen to explore the notion of holograms and Starfleet computers being able to create true AI, so added the character of the Doctor, an emergency medical hologram who develops intelligence and apparent sentience as the series progresses.

The new ship was dubbed the USS Voyager and was described as a lot smaller than the Enterprise-D of TNG and less combat-focused than DS9's Defiant, but also a lot faster and more manoeuvrable than either. It was also focused more on exploration and science, a return to Star Trek's core principles.

The USS Voyager was a smaller ship than the Enterprise-D but was also more flexible and a faster design. The ship soon drew derision for its apparently infinite supply of shuttlecraft and for its pristine appearance even after seven years in deep space with no servicing or refitting.

Shooting of the pilot episode began over the summer of 1994, with Genevieve Bujold cast in the role of Captain Nicole Janeway. However, Bujold was unprepared for the intense time schedule of making a weekly television series and dropped out on the second day of shooting. Production moved to other characters whilst the producers scrambled to find another actress. Kate Mulgrew, who had been on their shortlist for the role, was fortunately still available and came on board. She suggested changing the character's name to "Kathryn", to which the producers readily agreed. Most of the rest of the cast were relative newcomers, aside from Robert Picardo, an experienced supporting actor in film, who was cast as the Doctor. Robert Duncan McNeill was initially cast as Nicolas Locarno, who had appeared in the ST:TNG episode The First Duty as a disgraced Starfleet cadet. When it was realised that using Locarno would have meant paying royalties to The First Duty's writer on every episode, he was changed to the near-identical character of Tom Paris, to the initial confusion of many Star Trek fans.

The first two seasons of Voyager dealt with the ship being hurled into the Delta Quadrant, 70,000 light-years from Federation space, and having to negotiate its way through various hostile species, most notably the Kazon. However, fan reaction to the Kazon was negative and it was decided that, as an enemy species, they had not done enough to distinguish themselves from the standard, generic hostile Star Trek alien race. In the third season the Voyager left behind Kazon space and instead approached Borg territory. Although canon had previously established that the Borg were based in the Delta Quadrant, the producers had initially been reluctant to use them for fear of diluting their aura of indestructibility (the same rationale that saw them used only sparingly on TNG and not at all on DS9). With the Kazon a bust and Voyager's critical reception being lukewarm, it was decided that they would be brought on board in force at the end of the third season. The writers were helped by the movie First Contact, which refreshed the Borg with new ideas and concepts (such as the Borg Queen and nano-assimilation) they felt they could explore in greater depth.

Michael Piller departed Star Trek altogether at the end of Voyager's second season, with Jeri Taylor promoted to replace him. The third and fourth seasons, which reintroduced the Borg and a new, even greater threat called Species 8472, were judged successful. The transition from model-based effects to CGI (courtesy of Digital Muse and the ex-Babylon 5 Foundation Imaging team) also allowed for much more ambitious stories and non-humanoid aliens to be realised. Particularly successful, especially from a marketing perspective, was the introduction of a new, recurring Borg character, Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan.

The premature cancellation of the excellent Dark Skies in 1997 allowed Jeri Ryan to join Star Trek: Voyager as rescued Borg drone Seven of Nine. Her arrival sparked a brief creative resurgence in the series, as well as Paramount using her for a renewed marketing drive. Ryan's performance was excellent but the studio's focus on her appearance and sexy outfits was regarded as a lowpoint for the franchise.

However,  the introduction of Seven saw the departure of regular character Kes (Jennifer Lien) and a gradual shift in the writing focus of the series, as more and more episodes switched their attention to Janeway, the Doctor and Seven. The rest of the crew had fewer and fewer storylines. This particularly offended Robert Beltran, playing the role of Commander Chakotay, the nominal first officer and second-in-command of the vessel.

"I just felt let down, ignored and insulted. I think they did a grave disservice to what I thought could have been an interesting character."

Famously, Beltran soon became outspoken about what he felt was being done to the other castmembers at conventions. This was also joined by rumours of a reported on-set coolness between Mulgrew and Ryan, and growing disputes amongst the writers about the future direction of the series. When Deep Space Nine ended in the spring of 1999, Ronald D. Moore joined the writing team of Voyager. He was extremely keen on messing up the dynamics of the show and depicting the Voyager getting more damaged the longer it went without servicing and the crew being forced to make harder moral decisions to keep the ship flying. However, his suggestions were shot down by Brannon Braga, who had taken over as showrunner (under Rick Berman's overall direction) in Season 5. Moore wrote two episodes for Voyager but ultimately only lasted a few weeks before quitting. He later took many of the ideas and plans he had for the show and instead applied them to the superficially similar but ultimately vastly superior Battlestar Galactica reboot which ran from 2003 to 2009.

The cast of Voyager during the seventh and final season, which aired in 2000-01.

A key debate within the fan community was whether Voyager should return to the Alpha Quadrant before the end of the show, with the fate of the Maquis characters and the ramifications of Voyager's actions (particularly its inflicting of several defeats on the Borg) providing a rich seam of new stories to tell. However, Braga and Berman ultimately chose to keep the show in the Delta Quadrant right up to the series finale in 2001, when it abruptly returned home thanks to some time travelling shenanigans. Unlike the triumphant, well-received ends to both TNG and DS9, Voyager ended on something of a damp squib of disappointment and cliche.

As Voyager began drawing to a close, Rick Berman proposed that Star Trek be rested for several years to recover from what he called "franchise fatigue" and for it to return with a radical new concept and idea. Paramount, however, wanted to maintain the momentum of the franchise. They asked Berman and Braga to submit ideas for a new series to pick up immediately after Voyager and, despite fearing the well had run dry, they began drawing up ideas.

Star Trek at 50: Tearing Up the Rulebook

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's two-hour pilot episode, Emissary, premiered on 3 January 1993 to high ratings and a solid critical reception. The creators did everything they could to ensure people would tune in, with some impressive trailers, a guest spot from Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and a much-hyped actual look at the Battle of Wolf 359 from TNG's The Best of Both Worlds. The new show got off to a great start.

 Deep Space Nine opened to strong reviews and critical acclaim, but the first season was later criticised for being a little too dull. Episodes like Duet and, in the second season, the introduction of the Dominion swiftly remedied such complaints.

Over its first two seasons, DS9 concerned itself primarily with the political-religious situation on Bajor, the antagonistic relationship with the Klingons and, with decreasing frequency, dropping in TNG characters like Q, Vash, Lwaxana Troi and the Duras sisters. Although this was often successful - such as Sisko punching out Q, leaving Q feeling that Sisko was less interesting than Picard and never visiting the station again - it occasionally left the writers feeling like an adjunct to TNG. They spent more time moving away from the TNG template by doing things Star Trek had not done previously, like revisiting previous storylines more frequently, developing a large cast of secondary characters and, at the start of Season 2, creating Star Trek's first-ever three-part episode (later on they would also create Star Trek's first - and only - six and nine-part episodes as well).

Paramount were initially very happy with DS9's performance, but also responded to fan complaints that the new show was a little too stationary by ordering a second spin-off from Rick Berman's team, to their surprise (they'd assumed DS9 would be their primary focus once TNG ended in May 1994). Rick Berman and Michael Piller were soon distracted creating the new series, Star Trek: Voyager, and they needed a new team to step up and take command of Deep Space Nine.

In the second season DS9 began downplaying the Bajoran-Cardassian storyline, noting that some fans were not keen on it, and started developing its own set of villains. They didn't want another monstrous foe like the Borg or yet another race obsessed with honour. After casting around for ideas they hit on the notion of an "Anti-Federation", a coalition of disparate races in the Gamma Quadrant who had joined together under the leadership of the persecuted shapeshifters to defend themselves and, over time, had became the despotic, tyrannical power they had originally set out to avoid. The Dominion, as they became known, were slowly teased and unveiled over the course of the second season before making a full impact in the enormously popular second season finale, The Jem'Hadar, where they destroy the Galaxy-class USS Odyssey as a show of might.

The introduction of the USS Defiant, the Federation's first warship, was mildly controversial.

For the third season fresh creative blood came on board, most notably experienced TNG writer Ronald D. Moore. Moore had just got off the boat (metaphorically) from finishing up TNG and co-writing Star Trek: Generations. His first assignment was to give DS9 a powerful new warship that would help defend it from the Dominion, the USS Defiant (aka "the tough little ship"). However, the biggest change as the season progressed was Michael Piller moving over to Star Trek: Voyager and Ira Steven Behr stepping up as showrunner.

Behr was a much more character-focused writer than his Star Trek forebears. When he took over, a series of informal rules were put in place: no holodeck malfunction episodes and as little technobabble as possible. He wanted stories rooted in the characters that weren't afraid to be a bit more morally murky and questionable than Star Trek had been in the past. His team delivered in spades and the cast responded enthusiastically to being given more challenging material, particularly Avery Brooks who was proud that the show was prepared to tackle issues such as racism, discrimination, homelessness and religion.

Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) arguably got more character development in four seasons on DS9 than he did in seven seasons of TNG.

Behr also knew how to play politics. Despite his - by Star Trek standards - radical ideas he maintained the trust and support of Berman and Piller, who eventually left DS9 unmolested to do its thing whilst they focused on Voyager. In fact, Voyager got the lion's share of publicity and marketing as Paramount used it to launch their new TV network, UPN (which later merged with The WB to become The CW), but Deep Space Nine soon developed a knack of stealing its thunder. The arrival of Michael Dorn (Lt. Commander Worf) on DS9 and the development of a season-long arc about renewed hostilities between the Federation and Klingons led to a boost in ratings and critical acclaim. Voyager had a nice, small-scaled 30th Anniversary episode featuring flashbacks starring George Takei as Captain Sulu, but DS9 had a massive, Forrest Gump-style extravaganza that actually inserted DS9 characters into classic scenes from the original series and was absolutely brilliant.

The outbreak of full-scale war between the Federation and Dominion dominated the last two-and-a-half seasons of Deep Space Nine and allowed the show to challenge the ideals of the Federation and the conventions of warfare. Some of this material was controversial with Trek fans but enormously popular with critics and the general audience. Ultimately, DS9 reaffirmed Gene Roddenberry's ideal future for humanity as a worthwhile endeavour, but also stated that maintaining those ideals was going to be incredibly hard. This part of the series also saw Star Trek doing something it never had previously by developing a recurring cast of bad guys - Kai Winn, Gul Dukat, Glinn Damar, Weyoun of the Vorta and the leader of the changelings - and checking in with them as well as the heroes, giving greater depth than is normal to the "enemy".

Deep Space Nine ended in the spring of 1999 with a massive arc spanning nine episodes and wrapping up the storylines of dozens of characters established over seven years. DS9 bears the distinction of being the only Star Trek series to end on such a unanimously-applauded high and leaving the audience wanting more (in comparison, TNG's finale, All Good Things, is excellent but most of its final season was poor). However, there was a feeling that the show had snuck under the radar a little bit too much and its achievements and quality had not been fully appreciated in its own lifetime, not helped by the perceived (but largely illusory) rivalry with Babylon 5, which attracted far more press attention for pretty much just not being Star Trek. Paramount also showed little interest in a DS9 movie after it finished, to the disappointment of fans and the production team.

The cast of DS9 in its final season.

In the seventeen years since DS9 finished, the show has undergone a cultural reappraisal. TV Guide later said that DS9 "is the best acted, written, produced and altogether finest" Star Trek series and it is hard to argue with that. Ronald D. Moore, who worked on three different Star Trek shows, named it his favourite and took many of the writers over from DS9 to work on the rebooted and critically-lauded Battlestar Galactica (2003-09), which was both his development of the ideas from DS9 and his rebuke to the limited vision and ambition of the perenially underachieving Star Trek: Voyager.

Voyager had launchd in January 1995 in a blaze of publicity and ended seven seasons later in 2001, but it is far to say that compared to DS9, it's critical reception was altogether more variable.

Star Trek at 50: Defending the Final Frontier

In 1991 Brandon Tartikoff - a legendary television executive who'd turned around the declining fortunes of NBC in the 1980s - moved to work at Paramount. One of the first things he did was summon Star Trek: The Next Generation executive producer and showrunner Rick Berman into his office. Berman braced himself for possible bad news, but Tartikoff instead told him he was impressed with the performance of TNG and wanted to know what they were doing to build on that success. In particular, with TNG in its fourth season, the show would be ending in a few years and something was needed to take the franchise forward.

Deep Space Nine was built by the Cardassians and meant to be a more dangerous, more alien and less perfect location for stories than a cutting-edge Federation starship.

Rick Berman was immediately stumped for ideas. The Next Generation was about the starship Enterprise exploring final frontiers and seeking out new worlds and civilisations. Wasn't that what Star Trek was? But Tartikoff suggested using the vast universe that the original series and TNG had established to tell a new kind of story, in the same way that in the 1950s Westerns had told different kinds of narratives in the same setting. In particular, if Star Trek was "Wagon Train to the Stars", as Gene Roddenberry had described it, than the new show could be "The Rifleman in Space". The Rifleman had told the story of a man and his son living in a frontier town and had developed storylines on the basis of staying where you were and making a life in one place rather than constantly travelling.

Berman sat down with TNG producer/writer Michael Piller and started brainstorming ideas, but they kept returning to Tartikoff's idea because it was the one that made the most sense. If one setting for a Star Trek story was a starship, than clearly the two obvious alternatives were a space station or a colony planet. The colony idea was briefly developed, but they realised that the amount of location filming required per episode would be ruinous and would also limit the number of stories that could be told. Setting the new Star Trek series on a space station was therefore the only real alternative.

The USS Enterprise-D arrives at space station Deep Space Nine.

Rather than come up with completely new concepts, the producers looked at the races, concepts and ideas developed on The Next Generation for inspiration. The Ferengi, who had originally been developed as antagonists on TNG, had become too comical and two-dimensional to fulfil that role and had been supplanted by the Borg. However, Berman and Piller saw an opportunity to rehabilitate the Ferengi and use them as commentary on the benefits and disadvantages of capitalism, as compared to the moneyless society of the Federation depicted on TNG. They also wanted the new show to stand apart from the original series and decided against using any of the long-established races like the Klingons, Romulans or Vulcans. Instead, the Cardassians were chosen as the primary antagonists. The Cardassians had been developed in the fourth season TNG episode The Wounded and were shown to be a proud, patriotic race who filled a niche between the honour-bound Klingons and the deceptive Romulans. The producers were also intrigued by the Trill, a race of symbionts developed for the fourth season TNG episode The Host. The idea of a symbiont living for centuries and transferring memories and personalities from humanoid host to humanoid host seemed a rich source of stories and drama. In the wake of the success of Terminator 2: Judgement Day and its shapeshifting antagonist, the producers were also keen to use the same technology to include a shapeshifting character. Star Trek had employed shapeshifters in the past but they had always been let down by the technology.

Berman and Piller were also inspired by contemporary events. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of war in the Balkans, with the United Nations helpless to intervene in a partially religiously-motivated conflict, inspired them to place the space station in orbit around a planet which had recently broke free from the control of a larger empire and now faced a rough path to freedom and self-determination. It was decided to make the Cardassians the former empire in charge of the planet and the builders of the space station. This would fulfil something that Piller was keen on, on a move away from the shiny, almost flawless technology of the Federation towards something that was a little rougher around the edges and more alien. The decision to focus on the Cardassians also allowed the producers to do something they'd wanted for a while. They'd been tremendously impressed with the performance of Colm Meaney as Chief O'Brien on TNG, even developing a backstory for him (as a veteran of the long war against Cardassia) and allowing him to get married, but had struggled to find ways to get him involved in the stories enough to justify promoting him to a regular castmember. They decided to transfer him to the new station as its chief engineer. Despite the risks of leaving a successful show to join a brand new one, Meaney jumped at the chance to work more regularly and have a starring role in a series.

The cast of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its first season. The decision to include non-Starfleet, alien characters was meant to help generate conflict and drama without breaking Gene Roddenberry's rules about 24th Century humans being free of the failings of the past.

The series began to come together, but the lead time was enough for the writers to use the fifth season of TNG to start seeding ideas for the new series. Bajor, the planet the new station orbited, was introduced in the episode Ensign Ro. This also introduced the character of Ensign Ro Laren, who would go on to become a recurring character in the fifth and sixth seasons of TNG. The producers were blown away by the performance of Michelle Forbes and offered her a starring role on the new series, but she turned them down in favour of pursuing guest roles on other shows.

Deep Space Nine was formally announced in late 1991. The original title was in fact Deep Space IX, but after several magazines misspelled this as "Deep Space Ix" the producers decided to spell out the number. The announcement of DS9 came just weeks after Warner Brothers had announced its own space station-set TV show, Babylon 5, and this led to brief controversy as that show's creator, J. Michael Straczynski had proposed the series to Paramount in 1989 and wondered if they were copying the idea. However, Straczynski later backed off on this, as he was aware of the professional reputations of Tartikoff, Berman and Piller and also that a space station setting was a very obvious one for an SF show, especially if you are deliberately avoiding a spaceship setting.

Avery Brooks became the first African-American actor to headline an American drama series in twenty-five years when he was cast as Commander Ben Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Casting continued and the producers began a gruelling auditioning process for the new commanding officer of the station, Benjamin Sisko. More than one hundred actors were considered before the producers chose Avery Brooks, best known for his supporting role as Hawk on Spenser: For Hire. According to the producers, the fact that Brooks was African-American was not a major reason for casting him but they were nevertheles gratified that it was Star Trek that became the first TV show since The Mod Squad in 1968 to cast a black actor in a leading role in a drama, rather than a supporting one. Keeping up with Tartikoff's original idea of a man and his son living on the frontier, the producers also decided to give Sisko a son, Jake, and cast Cirroc Lofton to play him. Brooks was keen to ensure that Sisko's relationship with Jake was shown to be responsible and strong (despite natural occasional conflicts) as he felt that too many TV shows depicted the lives of African American men and their fathers as dysfunctional or rooted in crime.

The writers and producers also had to confront a problem that had stymied them on TNG. As per Gene Roddenberry's direction, the characters on TNG were pure and free of conflict. This occasionally made finding dramatic stories extremely difficult. For DS9, the writers decided to have a mix of Starfleet, civilian and non-Federation characters which could allow conflict to be generated without breaking Roddenberry's rule of no conflict between the human characters. The producers were extremely happy with the conflict that was generated between Sisko and his first officer, Bajoran Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), a former freedom fighter/terrorist who is now in a responsible military position. This conflict was rooted in cultural issues and radically different mindsets but later developed into real mutual respect.

In the summer of 1992 production began of the show's two-hour pilot, Emissary. One of TNG's most acclaimed directors, David Carson, was called in to helm the pilot and Paramount gave the production a budget of $12 million just for the first episode, a jaw-dropping amount that set a record that was not beaten until Lost spent $14 million on its pilot twelve years later. Paramount also greenlit the entire first season of twenty episodes before a single frame of footage was shot, a stunning display of confidence in the Star Trek brand.

Now the producers just had to deliver.

Star Trek at 50: The Next Generation on Screen

In 1992 Rick Berman summoned scriptwriters Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, along with executive producer Michael Piller and retired TNG writer Maurice Hurley, to a series of meetings. Initially Braga and Moore thought that TNG was about to be cancelled, so were surprised to be offered the chance to write a Star Trek movie. The directive from Paramount was that the film would see the final appearance of the original series crewmembers and see the transition of the TNG crew to the big screen. Hurley and Piller were also invited to write scripts, but Piller turned down the opportunity because he thought it was calling for too much competition between colleagues. In the event, Hurley's script took too long to write and Paramount instead put Braga and Moore's script into pre-production.

The moment fans had been waiting for.

Paramount handing over control of its biggest and longest-running movie franchise to a bunch of TV writers was remarkable, but it was also a display of confidence in the (mostly) young and inexperienced team who had turned The Next Generation into one of the biggest and most successful TV shows in the world. However, it nearly ended up misfiring. Braga and Moore were among the more prolific writers on the series with multiple scripts to write for the final two seasons, including the two-hour TNG finale, All Good Things. Agreeing to write the seventh movie on top of that proved to be a stretch too far, and the writers later admitted they had spread themselves too thin. Leonard Nimoy had also been approached to direct and appear as Spock, but Nimoy voiced concerns over the script and also about the limited nature of his role. In particular, he pointed out his lines could be given to another character with barely any alteration. Ironically, when he passed, that's exactly what happened when his material was instead split between the characters of Scotty and Chekov. British director David Carson was called on to direct, having hugely impressed Paramount with his TNG episode Yesterday's Enterprise and the pilot episode for Deep Space Nine.

The script was a busy one, using Guinan (played by major Star Trek fan Whoopi Goldberg) and a mysterious energy ribbon known as the Nexus to bridge the two time periods, along with the sole live-action depiction of the Enterprise-B, introducing all of the TNG characters to a more casual cinema audience and killing Kirk. The idea of killing Kirk came up in story development meetings where it was felt that the script lacked a big enough climax. Destroying the Enterprise-D was also a surprising move, but one the producers felt was emotionally correct (putting a capstone on the TNG TV show era) as well as having practical value, freeing up studio space until the next film was produced. To help publicise the film, Paramount decided to make use of the nascent Internet and created one of the first-ever websites designed to publicise a specific feature film (the website for the film StarGate went live almost simultaneously, leading to occasional disputes over which film achieved the distinction first).

Star Trek: Generations was released on 18 November 1994 to fairly indifferent reviews. However, some impressive visual effects, a decent couple of trailers, the mass crossover appeal of The Next Generation and rumours of Kirk's death ensured a strong turn-out. Generations was made on a budget of $33 million, the same as Star Trek V, but at just under $120 million made twice as much at the box office. It was a huge success for Paramount, who greenlit an eighth movie in February 1995.

Rick Berman re-hired Moore and Braga to write the script, taking time away from their new day jobs (Moore was working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine whilst Braga had transferred to the new, second TNG spin-off, Star Trek: Voyager). Brainstorming ideas and aware they would have a larger budget to play with, they decided to combine two notions that had come up early: time travel and the Borg. The Borg had been lightly used on TNG following their defeat in The Best of Both Worlds, with the fear that over-using them would rob them of their unstoppable power. Moore believed that they would make for a fine enemy for a movie. A film would also allow the Borg to be depicted as more powerful and threatening. Their previous appearances had been cut down due to budget issues, with the iconic Battle of Wolf 359 in The Best of Both Worlds happening off-screen. Braga's notion was to have the time travel involving Earth's first contact with the Vulcans, an iconic moment in the history of Star Trek which led to the founding of the Federation. This would also allow the film to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the franchise.

First Contact was deliberately played as a more action-driven story than previous Star Trek movies.

Jonathan Frakes, who had played Commander Riker on The Next Generation, was selected to direct the film. Frakes had directed multiple episodes of TNG, DS9 and Voyager and had won plaudits for his visual style as well as his professional attitude. Frakes won the role after several other directors were rejected for their lack of familiarity with the franchise. Patrick Stewart exercised his considerable influence on the production to give Picard a more action-heavy role in fighting the Borg on the new Enterprise-E.

The movie was originally entitled Star Trek: Resurrection (a title everyone seemed to like), but this was changed to First Contact when 20th Century Fox announced that the fourth Alien movie would have the same title.

Star Trek: First Contact was released on 22 November 1996. The movie grossed $146 million worldwide, an all-time franchise high (not beaten until thirteen years later and the J.J. Abrams movie), against a budget of $45 million (quite modest even by 1996 standards). The critical reception was mostly positive, despite some criticisms of the Earthbound storyline being lacking compared to the space-borne battle between the Borg and the Enterprise crew. One common thread amongst reviews was that First Contact was the first Star Trek movie in a long time that felt like a big event, something more than just a TV episode dragged out to two hours in length.

The ninth Star Trek movie was greenlit a few months later. Paramount were keen to revisit the success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which had been a massive box office success as a more light-hearted, even comedic film built around a central strong SF idea. With Moore and Braga firmly committed to their respective TV series, Rick Berman called upon former TNG executive producer Michael Piller to write the screenplay. Patrick Stewart, who had a managed to get a production credit on the new film, also suggested ideas. He was particularly keen to build on the idea of Picard as an unconventional, older action hero established in First Contact. For the new movie Picard was cast as a moral rebel, who rejects an alliance of convenience between the Federation and the brutal Son'a to protect an exploited, less powerful race. In later drafts Piller ran into some problems finding the through-line of the story, but Ira Steven Behr, the showrunner of DS9, reviewed the script and helped Piller resolve several issues with it. Paramount showered the script with praise, to Piller's unexpected pleasure, and Patrick Stewart also approved of it.

Star Trek: Insurrection was criticised for a lack of ambition.

Jonathan Frakes agreed to return to direct, with Paramount impressed by his work on First Contact. The production team floundered for some time to find a title before settling on Insurrection.

The film was released on 11 December 1998, somewhat bafflingly marketed as the first "Star Trek date movie" for its focus on humour and romance. The film received mixed reviews, which surprised the studio after what they believed was a very strong script. Most of the reviews felt that the producers had made a mistake by moving away from what had worked in First Contact and instead making a glorified TV episode, and not a good one either. Many reviews criticised this lack of ambition (especially after the darker, more action-oriented and even horror-influenced First Contact), although the film certainly was not slated to the same level as The Final Frontier. Much to Paramount's relief, the critical indifference was not reflected in the box office. Against a budget of $58 million, the film took home $112 million worldwide, enough to be judged a reasonable success.

The 1990s were drawing to a close, and with it, Star Trek's golden age. The financial success of the four movies released in the decade was indisputable, but there remained the feeling that Star Trek's true home was on television. When The Next Generation began winding down back at the start of the decade, it was decided that the Trek universe was a big enough place for many different kinds of story...even one where the crew explored the final frontier by standing still.