Fanfic / Reimagined Enterprise

The official poster for the reimagining

Reimagined Enterprise is a work posted on AlternateHistory.com by BlackWave, also known as the author of Swarm on the Somme and Great Interstellar War. Essentially it is a Continuity Reboot of Star Trek: Enterprise, seeking to address some of the issues fans had with that show by making significant changes, while still producing something recognizably similar rather than just generically 'a prequel to Star Trek'.

The series is posted in episodic form, but as written prose rather than scripts. It is currently part way through its third season. Most of the episodes are written by BlackWave, but there have been some written by guest writers including Thande, trekchu, William_Dellinger, Cobi Wann, and LordVetinari.

A list of episodes with links to them can be found here.

Has a cast page.

---

Contains examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: When Enterprise is contacted by the mysterious aggressor ships, Lt Rajwal makes a couple of attempts at saying "tlhIngan" before accidentally coining the word "Klingon".
• Arc Welding: This series puts together many different disconnected references and plot points from Star Trek canon into new stories.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Doctor Zora does not understand why the Enterprise crew are so horrified by her kidnapping a good chunk of the population of a primitive planet and doing experiments on them. The Enterprise crew clearly belong to developed species, after all, not like the primitives of Tiburon. She says her expedition has backing from her home-planet, but it is left unclear to what degree they are aware of and would agree with what is happening on Tiburon and so how much this trope applies to the Teloshi in general and not just Doctor Zora 'of Tiburon'.
• Broad Strokes: There are various comparisons that can be made to the canon Star Trek: Enterprise despite almost all the details being different: Captain Hwai's grandfather was involved in the development of the warp five engine, just as Archer's father was; there are characters called Travis Mayweather and T'Pol, though the actual people are quite different; the first episode involves first contact between humans and Klingons; and so on.
• Call-Forward: Constantly.
  • In the very first scene of the very first Episode, events from Star Trek: Voyager are referenced, in that Astronaut Lt. John Mark Kelley from "One Small Step" is referenced by name.
• Canon Fodder: invoked BlackWave likes using the Cryptic Background References from chronologically later Star Trek shows as the basis for stories.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • Incorporates some ideas from the non-canon Star Trek novels, such as "Rihannsu" being the real name of the Romulans and "Romulans" being a human code name for them.
  • A version of the Optimum Movement from Star Trek: Federation appears as antagonists during the Post-Atomic Horror in the flashback in "Remembrance".
• Cargo Cult: In "Ex Machina" the crew encounter a group who formed a Cargo Cult around the Borg after their psychics intercepted a Borg transmission.
• Continuity Reboot: More like Continuity Rewrite.
• Divided States of America: "Remembrance" shows the late twenty-first century USA having fallen into this state as a result of World War III and the Postatomic Horror, even being nicknamed 'the Disunited States'.
• Everyone Went to School Together: In a minor example, McLeod and Satterthwaite's ancestors met once during the Postatomic Horror, although their descendants weren't aware of it until they shared family stories in "Remembrance".
• Failed Future Forecast: The solution this series presents for the Eugenics Wars is that they they did happen, and they were open wars, but that a lot of it was our-universe conflicts and incidents that here had a connection to the Augments (for instance, there was an intervention in Somalia in 1992, but here it was an intervention against the Khanate).
• Fantastic Racism: The Romulans see most other races as backwards and upstart, or, as in the case of humans, barely sentient barbarians.
• Fantastic Slurs: Vulcans are sometimes dubbed 'elves' and Tellarites 'pigs'.
• Fix Fic: Some episodes are devoted to resolving Continuity Snarls from the Star Trek canon, especially the guest episodes written by Thande.
• Future Imperfect: A few minor examples mentioned in passing, though stemming from ignorance of the historical record rather than there not actually being one. For example, at one point Captain Bowman of the Dauntless mixes up Buzz Aldrin with Buzz Lightyear.
• Healing Factor: Mr Abramsom, AKA Flint from TOS.
• Hero of Another Story: Many — UESPA might only begin with two NX-class starships (the second, Columbia, commanded by Captain Erika Hernandez), however "Jole-Gerar" is the story of the third NX-class starship Discovery and the events of her shakedown cruise. Shran is reminiscent of his counterpart in the canonical show, and Earth has other classes of ships. The eponymous episode "Of Another Story" focuses entirely on Captain Paul Stiles of the Daedalus and one of the incidents in which the Daedalus is involved.
• Historical Rap Sheet: The explanation for the Eugenics Wars is that they were several of the real-world wars of the '90s. For example, Khan Noonien Singh's people were the reason the UN sent a military expedition into Somalia in Star Trek's '92.
• Humans Are White: Averted, the cast is considerably diversified relative to the canon Star Trek: Enterprise to more realistically reflect United Earth and address a common fan complaint.
• I Did What I Had to Do: At one point, Doctor Besson is manipulated by Section 31 into releasing a version of the Augment virus onto the Klingon Empire, to throw them into disarray and prevent them from launching a war against the rest of the quadrant. While the virus is ultimately non-lethal, although painful and physically transformative, the decision seems to haunt him for the rest of the series, even though he saw it as the best he could do in a bad situation.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare:
  • Cardassians love George Orwell, used to explain the inconsistencies in stated Cardassian history in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—it was subject to an Internal Retcon—and the use of Orwellian themes in the famous "There are four lights" scene.
  • The Trope Namer is also explored, with the Klingons first discovering Shakespeare on a data disk they accidentally pilfered from the Enterprise while taking prisoners. A season later, we learn the new regime has been distributing Shakespeare's collected works throughout the Empire under the guise of being rediscovered traditional Klingon literature.
• Meaningful Rename: The Hebitian race renames itself the Cardassians after being taken over by the fascist Galor Cardas group.
• Mirror Universe: The one that was the Trope Namer, of course. Each season has one "Mirror Shards" episode set in the Mirror Universe, using similar concepts to the acclaimed "In A Mirror, Darkly" episode from the canon show.
• Myth Arc: The approaching Earth-Romulan War up until the last episode of the second season, where it shifts into the ongoing Earth-Romulan War. Would be a spoiler, except, of course, it was established long before the series that there was an Earth-Romulan War around this time.
• Mythology Gag: All the time. One example is that, in a flashback showing the Eugenics Wars, Khan Noonien Singh's fanatical supporters shout their leader's name as a war cry...so in other words, "KHAAAAAAAAAN!"
• Named After Somebody Famous: Used recursively - many of the Romulan ship names from later Star Trek series turn out to be named after important Romulan political and military figures active at this time.
• Named After Their Planet: The Romulans get this because the name is said to be a human codename derived from an older human arbitrary label for their star on old starmaps which drew upon mythological names. Also with other races there are sometimes attempts to justify this, for example saying that that race has many languages and doesn't have a single common name for its homeworld, so humans just name the world after the race.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Star Trek's use of this trope is explored. The Eugenics Wars had already justified why Bio-Augmentation is off the table, and the reason for cyborgs being a no-no appears to be that there were a few experiments in cybernetics on twenty-first century Earth, but the collapse of the internet as a result of World War III meant the users all died in a Keystone Army fashion.
• Nuclear Option: As per what was mentioned of this era in TOS' 'Balance of Terror', Earth ships tend to come with a large complement of 'atomics'. So this comes up often.
• Parody Names: An exaggerated version of the canon show's Jonathan Archer called Abner Bowman appears as the captain of the USS Dauntless. Abner being a relative and colleague of Jonathan in The Bible and bowman being another word for archer.
• Planet of Hats: Usually there are some attempts to avert or reduce this trope compared to the canon show. To be fair, the prose format makes it somewhat easier to avoid reducing races to a stereotype compared to TV.
• Recursive Canon:
  • One of the early twenty-first century pop songs Audrey Rocia listens to is Faith of the Heart.
  • The crew refer to the works of Larry Niven, yet there are hints that (as in Star Trek: The Animated Series) the Kzinti race exists in this setting, and they were created by Larry Niven. (This paradox is lampshaded at one point).
• Reporting Name: Starfleet calls the Romulan Birds-of-Prey "Vultures".
• Ripped from the Headlines: The real-life planet 55 Cancri e features in 'All That Glitters', not long after its announcement as a diamond planet. In the episode, it turns out to be more than meets the eye...
• Shout-Out: Besides the internal ones to Star Trek itself, there are others.
  • Captain Hwai is a fan of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and compares the pig-like Tellarites to Zhu Bajie from Journey to the West, for instance.
  • One of the ships visibly trapped within the gravitic anomaly in "Becalmed" appears to be a TIE Fighter, and later in the background of an image on Hebitia / Cardassia we see Goa'uld Death Gliders and the TARDIS.
  • Some members of the turtle-like Chelon race from Rigel wear coloured bandanna masks, and get code named after Renaissance painters by Rajwal. In a subversion, none of the painters' names he picks are those of the actual Ninja Turtles.
• Starfish Aliens: The Axanar species here is portrayed as a race of strange quadruped-carapaced-mouthless-centaurs with many eyes.
• Take a Third Option: Many fans disliked the overly TNG-like aesthetic from Star Trek: Enterprise and most fan reimaginings give Enterprise a more TOS-like aesthetic instead. Rather than doing this, BlackWave instead created his own 22nd century aesthetic that's halfway between contemporary spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or Dream Chaser and TOS, logically enough.
• Take That!: A few aimed at the canon show:
  • The rest of the crew can't stand this "Faith of the Heart" song Rocia listens to...
  • In "The Giant's Foot", Mayweather pretends not to know the name Rigel in order to get a rise out of Al-Hamdani, who points out it is one of the most well-known stars in Earth's night sky. This being a reference to how the canon pilot episode "Broken Bow" bizarrely seemed to think Rigel was an alien name that none of the human crew had heard of before.
• Technobabble: Generally averted compared to the rest of Trek; tech-based solutions often have some grounding, such as a laser rifle being reconfigured to sending a light-based morse code signal in 'Starbase 11'.
• Theme Naming: The NX-class ships are named after space shuttles. (This idea was also used in the Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch novels, both noting that for purely coincidental reasons, the two NX-class ships seen in the show itself were called Enterprise and Columbia, just like the first two space shuttles).
  • Although in an interesting bit of recursive canon, the reason that the original Space Shuttle was named "Enterprise" was because Star Trek fans wrote NASA asking for it... and then here the Enterprise is named after a Shuttle named after a fictional ship... that this series is in canon with.
• Wham Episode: Second season finale "Salem-One", which reveals just why Picard once compared that space station to Pearl Harbour...
• Xanatos Gambit: Used by the Subcommander in "Divide and Conquer", who even describes the trope:
  Subcommander: True tactical genius, as I’m sure you know, lies in being able to twist a bad position into accomplishing an alternative goal.

---