In an interview conducted shortly before UPN announced the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, executive producer Manny Coto said that the season finale would not involve time travel and noted he wanted to get back to Earth after spending time with various alien species. He also dropped a pretty big hint about the possible future of the relationship of Tucker and T'Pol, a subject of much speculation.

"In forming the Federation, in fact we find that the last hurdle isn't going to come from Romulans, it isn't going to come from Klingons, it comes from our own last vestiges of intolerance," he told StarTrek.com, mentioning the charismatic leader from "Demons" who apparently has been studying the tyrannical Colonel Green first seen in the original series' "The Savage Curtain." Coto elaboared that after visiting various planets during the course of the season, Enterprise would return to Earth to find that "humanity is having one last hurdle to overcome in forming the Federation...our own personal demons."

Taking particular pride in the first installments of each of the mini-arcs - "I love 'Borderland,' I love 'The Forge'...and I love 'Babel One' - Coto praised Brent Spiner and Alec Newman in the Augments arc and said that, with the exception of "Daedalus", he has been happy with all the episodes this year. Still he isn't sure he'd call season four "better" than season three. "It goes in a different direction, which I think is more fun," he observed. "But it's been the most fun for me because, creatively, it's really more what I would like to do."

Coto lamented that he did not have time to write an episode set on Stratos, the city from "The Cloud Minders", nor an episode about the creation of the first starbase. "I would have loved to do a Trelane tie in, but that was very much a first contact situation [in TOS]," he noted. "I would have loved to try and tie in Trelane with Q. There's been speculation that Trelane and Q are the same." On the other hand, he greatly enjoyed visiting the mirror universe and bringing back Orion slave girls, some of whom will be seen in the upcoming "Bound."

"The Orions are a major part of this episode, but it's really an episode about Trip and T'Pol," revealed Coto, who said the title has a double meaning: "not only the slaves, but Trip and T'Pol, we find, are also 'bound.'" He declined to say much about the finale, noting only that "It's a very cool story...Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are writing it and if they want to spoil it I'd rather have them spoil it themselves!"

For more details on Coto's tenure and his pleasure in sitting in the captain's chair, see the article at StarTrek.com.

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