Star Trek: Enterprise Lost Five Whole Days Of Filming Thanks To Scott Bakula's Hair
When making "Star Trek: Enterprise," show creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga clearly aimed to skew into the "old-fashioned." They wanted to strip "Star Trek" of a lot of its more familiar high-tech machinery, leaving its characters in a more daring, exploratory position. What would it be like to venture out into the cosmos in an 87-person vessel only capable of warp-5, and not equipped with tractor beams, replicators, shields, phasers, or human-ready transporters? What if the Prime Directive hadn't been written yet, and you were familiar with very few alien species? This was meant to be a "Trek" that leaned into the franchise's more frontiersman-like elements.
Even the characters were bold, simple archetypes. Captain John Archer (Scott Bakula) was a smiling, fresh-faced military man eager to "get out there." He was a Boy Scout, not unlike something one might see in a 1950s Western. One can see Archer's character exemplified in something as simple as his haircut. He sported a simple, uncomplicated part, perhaps cribbed from a '50s elementary school yearbook.
As it so happens, that simple, Boy Scout's haircut was the cause of some minor consternation on the set of "Enterprise." It seems that Bakula wanted his hair to look a very particular way, and the show's hair stylists did what he asked, fashioning him with something a little more militant, resembling the hair of NASA heroes of old. However, Bakula's personal style clashed with the vision of one of the series' executives.
In the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, series director James L. Conway recalled the kerfuffle over Bakula's hairdo, and how a last-minute change tacked five extra days onto the shooting schedule.
Hair clash
Bakula apparently owed a lot to Paramount president Kerry McCluggage, one of the men responsible for creating the TV network UPN (United Paramount Network) and who oversaw the debuts of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "Star Trek: Voyager." The actor was friends with McCluggage, but it seems Bakula and the exec had different visions as to how Captain Archer should look. Conway recalls the issue in the book, saying:
"There's a lot of hair issues on 'Star Trek.' I had to reshoot the first five days of the pilot because of Scott's hair. When we started shooting, Kerry McCluggage — who was a good friend of Scott's and really had a lot to do with Scott getting the show in the first place — was in New York and didn't see dailies until he came back from New York. And he hated Scott's hair. He wanted it one way, Scott wanted it another, and somehow the message didn't get to us. So we had to go back and reshoot all of Scott's close-ups for the first five days and change his hair."
If the pilot of "Enterprise" looks a little odd, the insert shots of a newly-restyled Bakula might be a reason why.
Of course, Bakula eventually got his wish. Later in the series, when events were transposed into the franchise's notoriously evil Mirror Universe (the place where bearded Spock came from), audiences got to see the evil version of Captain Archer. Conway witnessed the actor finally getting what he wanted from the show's stylist:
"And then what was interesting was when I did that second-to-last episode in the Mirror Universe in season four, Scott's hair went back to the way he wanted to wear it for that episode."
Et voilà!