Fifth Trek Series on Blu-Ray

Season 1 of the fifth Star Trek TV series, Enterprise, came out on Blu-Ray today. The six-disc set holds 25 episodes plus an eight-part documentary, deleted scenes, and cast commentary.

The series’ Captain, actor Scott Bakula, promoted the release in an interview with TV Guide.

TV Guide Magazine: Enterprise was perhaps the most polarizing Star Trek spinoff. Some loved its pre-Kirk early space exploration appeal but other Trekkers complained it wasn’t really Star Trek, because it was before Starfleet and the exploration of lots of alien planets.
Scott Bakula
: [Laughs] It always cracks me up. It reminds me of a letter we got on Quantum Leap from someone who seriously told us, “You’re breaking all the rules of time travel.” The rules were mostly the one set up by Mr. Spielberg in Back to the Future. In a funny way, I think our show, as time goes by, is going to resonate and we’re going to enjoy it more. I hear it all the time. “I didn’t give it a chance when it came out. I’m watching it now and I love it.”

I was intrigued to see “the rules of time travel” attributed to anyone as recent as Steven Spielberg. Do the actors in AI think he invented the laws of robotics, too?

The idea that the future has a preordained character which may be altered or directed by human actions can be found everywhere from Charles Dickens to the Old Testament. The notion that the past and future are places a person might leave the present to visit, and affect events there, frames several 19th Century stories.

Time travel became truly “science fictional” when H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine gave it the trappings of transportation technology. And in sf’s Golden Age authors added a rigorous assessment of the consequences of a traveler’s actions.