Coto Thrilled To Have Free Run of Trek Universe

As the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise gets underway tomorrow night, executive producer Manny Coto and the cast are looking forward to getting back to Star Trek basics.

"I wanted to be able to do stories on eugenic supermen [and] on Vulcan," Coto told Sci Fi Wire. Because the show will feature several mini-arcs this season instead of one yearlong story like the Xindi war, he added, "it gives you the best of both worlds", allowing the development of a season that Coto characterizes as "like a series of mini-24s."

"The [premiere] episode is a two-episode arc, but the other ones are both three-parters, and they really have a kind of great, epic feel," he added, noting that when the DVD sets of Enterprise are released, "It will be fun to watch...from beginning to end."

Surprisingly, Coto dismissed talk of ratings, the bane of Enterprise's past couple of seasons. "We aren't really doing it thinking what the ratings are going to be, frankly," he said. "People will either tune in, or they won't...what we're doing is what would we love to do, as fans and as people who love Star Trek. We're just throwing out ideas as they come up."

Rick Berman, explained Coto, gave the writing staff permission to use concepts from previous Trek series, allowing the writers to bring in the Andorians, the Tellarites and Colonel Green from the original series in an upcoming storyline. "We will weave this together for the beginnings of what we will know as the Federation," he said.

Meanwhile, speaking to the San Francisco Examiner, Coto said that he wanted to write stories that he would want to see as a fan of previous shows. "If I hear that they're doing a Vulcan Reformation, they're bringing the Orions back, Spiner is coming on, they're possibly doing the Shatner thing, they're doing Eugenics Wars characters -- I'm going to tune in," he said. "I'm a fan and this season I'm like a kid in a candy store with the stuff I want to bring back and I'm doing all the episodes I would want to see."

The fourth season of Enterprise begins tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Eastern time on UPN. Sci-Fi Wire's interview with Coto is here, while the Examiner article is here.

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