Producer and writer Manny Coto, who joined the Star Trek: Enterprise production team during the past year, will become the showrunner for the series' fourth season, actor Dominic Keating has revealed.

Keating told SFX at SFX: The Event that series co-creator and executive producer Brannon Braga will be relinquishing some of his daily duties, as he had said earlier this year that he might do if the series was picked up for a fourth season.

"Brannon and Rick [Berman] have a couple of other projects that they’ve had in development, in their heads at least,” Keating said, admitting that he had heard "that they might be taking something of a sojourn or a sabbatical in some respects on this season." Braga would likely become "the last draft consultant", but Coto would take over the day-to-day running of the show.

Coto wrote five episodes of Enterprise's third season, including the well-received "Similitude", about a clone of Tucker that creates an ethical dilemma for Archer, and "The Council", one of the installments in the season-concluding arc that wrapped up the Xindi storyline. "He turned in four or five of the best scripts we’ve ever had last season," Keating said of Coto, calling "Similitude" an "awesome piece of science fiction."

The BBC spoke to Keating as well while he was in London. The actor confirmed to them his belief that Coto would become the Enterprise show-runner, allowing Braga to "take a back seat and more an overview consultancy on the entire thing, rather than being so heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the show." His successor Coto, said Keating, has "got a good eye for it, and he's certainly a good writer."

Keating also hinted to the BBC that there had been tensions among the people who produce Enterprise and the UPN executives who treat the show "a bit like the poor cousin that came to dinner." Asked whether he expected the series to go a full seven seasons like Deep Space Nine and Voyager, Keating replied, "I would say no...it's an expensive show, and UPN seem to want to try and nix it. There's also a lot of politics involved, because the management who now run our network have no relationship with the studio that makes the show for them, that relationship's gone."

SFX's conversation with Keating is here, while the BBC interview is here.

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