Scott Bakula Talks About how He Became Captain Archer

 Star Trek: Enterprise may have been the lowest rated series of the franchise, but it did have some great characters. Scott Bakula talks about his recruitment to the show.

  5 reasons Trip Tucker was the best engineer

I am just going to come out and say it; I loved Star Trek: Enterprise. Whilst it didn’t get the ratings it deserved and the storylines ended up a little mixed, it had a strong cast and the characters developed well as the show continued. The graphics were good and the sets were well constructed, as was T’Pol who was, admittedly, my first love.

We could debate the reasons for the shows failure and eventual cancelation for a very long time; perhaps it came at the wrong time, perhaps the storylines were too much or perhaps it wasn’t ‘Star Trek’ enough. Whatever the case, it still remains one of my favourite shows and if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to give it a try.

The captain, Scott Bakula, had past experience of science fiction roles having starred years before in Quantum Leap. I think he was an excellent choice and he was, like all the other captains, a little bit different. We recently looked at who might be the next Star Trek captain in the upcoming series, and I was interested in how the selection process worked and how Paramount came to the decision to choose Scott Bakula as the new captain. I found an interview from 2103 by Forbes where Scott explained how it all worked:

We talked about a lot of things and I went and pitched them a new sci-fi series that a friend of mine had written. And we went in and talked them, and we were very excited about it, and they were kind of lukewarm, to say the least, in the room. And so we left and they called and they said “We’re not gonna go forward with this.” So I had to call my friend and tell him, “We’re not gonna roll – We’ll go somewhere else and sell this.”

Then they called me and said, “The reason we’re not going forward with this is that we’re doing another Star Trek franchise and we want you to be the Captain.” My first thought was that “I don’t wanna do that, because I don’t want to follow the four Captains ahead of me.” And then they said, “But it’s 100 years before Kirk.” Then I knew in my own mind that I was already hooked.

And then, in terms of preparing I just realized that because I could have inundated myself watching other Captains doing their thing, I just made the decision that I was going to do the opposite and kind of shut the door on all of that, and try and be as creatively fresh with this character of Jonathan Archer and this new franchise as I possibly could. So, I unprepared in a way. I just said, “I’m not even gonna think about it,” even though it’s hard to do what Shatner would be doing here and how he would approach it. I knew I wanted to try and work with some of what I loved about the original series and their relationships on board, and the fact that you knew these people all cared about each other, and I wanted that to be a part of this journey with our show, with Enterprise, as did the writers, as did Rick and Brannon.

Scott Bakula can now be seen on NCIS New Orleans where he battles crime instead or Suliban.