The latest issue of the online magazine Trekkie Central Magazine features a new interview with producer Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry, the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and here are few excerpts.
TCM: What were your initial thoughts when Enterprise was cancelled?
ER: TO be honest my initial thoughts were I didn't care to much. I gave it a chance, I watched the entire first season and I thought it was good, maybe not great but sort of a good Star Trek with a little bit of a rocky start. It had jumped too far ahead for me, in fact I thought the entire first season should be a build up to discovering the Klingons. So I kinda just wanted a slower more natural progression of this young civilization reaching into the depths of space, it just moved a little bit to fast for me.
I tuned into the second season for just a few episodes and was immediately turned off and I cant particularly remember why at this time but I remember it just didn't interest me, and you know how it is, the minute you miss a season or a number of episodes its hard to tune back in. I'd heard that seasons three and four were much better, thanks to Manny Coto, but I never really gave it another shot and even to this day I haven't given it another shot because I've gotta sit down and watch it all over again from one to four.
So my first thoughts were kind of I don't care but I did care that it was, you know, the end of Star Trek running as a TV series, now truthfully I never thought and I still don't think that its off the air permanently. It had a good run and I figure it needed a hiatus, the audience, the market and the TV waves had been saturated with Star Trek series after Star Trek series and I thought it might be a good idea for it to rest for five, ten or even fifteen years, and to be honest I still feel that way.
I think Star Trek will come back on TV whether its in a year or twenty years, its never going to die, the fans are gonna keep it alive and also CBS and Paramount are always going to see profit
to be made. So one day they well dig it back up and say well ‘hey lets make something out of this'. I do know that Star Trek will come back in one form or another on TV, I just don't know when and I don't know how good it will be (laughs). The last thing I want it to do is to become Star Wars, that doesn't deal with ethics, humanity, the human potential, we don't want science fiction that doesn't have a statement about the positive attributes of humanity as well as learning from our negative ones.
TCM: What did you think of the latest Star Trek Movie?
ER: Well to be honest I thought it was pretty good, umm yeah there are plenty of things that I would do differently, there were plenty of things my father would do differently and there were plenty of things that you out there reading this would do differently, but I thought it was pretty good. In fact I was very impressed that they stayed as true as they did to the Star Trek canon. Now I know there's a lot of naysayers out there that are upset because it went on a different timeline but I have to give them credit for at least doing that, you know they could have gone back and said ‘you know what we're gonna re-write history and were gonna do it our way'. I would have been very disappointed had they done that, but instead they branched off on to a new timeline which allowed all the original fans, the people who like the original stuff like me to still connect and believe in that timeline, that it does still exist but there's also a whole new generation and for those of us with open minds there's a whole other timeline that we can go down, you know I thought it was fairly intelligent and basically very respectful of the current fan world out there. The story was fine but what really made it were the characters, I mean the story was nothing really special it was good guy verses bad guy, planets going to get destroyed, we've kinda seen it before, but again done by JJ. its always unique. Where I have to give credit is to the characters, they did a great job of casting, I mean Spock was Spock, McCoy was McCoy, they all did a fantastic job on that and that really helped I think ease some of the pain, some of the fears and some of the expectations we might have had. It lived up to that expectation by really making sure the characters stayed true to the original series, so I thought they did a great job.
My only issue, my only gripe if you want to call it that is that at the end when Neros ship is being sucked into the wormhole type thing and being destroyed. I was happy Kirk said ‘hey we're willing to offer you assistance if you just as for it', and of course Nero says no I'd rather die. I didn't think it necessary that they fire all the photon torpedoes to "blow them out of the sky" that was a little bit
over kill for me and I know that it came from a vengeful Spock who'd just seen his planet destroyed but the true Roddenberry/Star Trek way is to do what they did, offer assistance but then show remorse for and pity for the loss of life regardless of what its done.
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