Scott Bakula: We've had a really good start to this year; it's certainly different because there is a greater familiarity with everything. We were really lucky that we all got off to a great start the first season, everybody just kind of pitched in and we are a group that really gets along well. That doesn't always happen on a show.

Bakula: I think that's a big part of it. I think it's a reflection on Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga]. They have obviously been doing this long enough that they can get a sense of the kind of personalities that do well and can survive these long running seasons. I think a lot of it is also just luck, but happily, because you do spend so much time with the cast and the crew, you become a great group, you don't spend a lot of time on the unnecessary things that you can get distracted with on other shoots.

Bakula: Misbehaving, you know. With Enterprise everyone is on the same page, we're all trying to make a great show.

Bakula: You know, I think we were all very nervous at the beginning, just because the nature of prequels is strange. I think the track record for prequels isn't that good for films or for TV shows. It's a tricky subject. When I first got the pilot script and read it, it just felt right to me. It felt right putting it 150 years before Kirk and Spock, so you didn't feel that the next captain coming along would be Kirk. There's a nice distance between us.

Rick and Brannon are so good about paying attention, and so careful about what has gone before. Obviously they've had to mess with it somewhat, but overall they bend over backwards to keep the faith and not disrupt the fans' sense of the overall scheme of the Star Trek world. I think because of that, the fans have been okay, they were not suddenly jarred into thinking this can't be, that's wrong.

There have been a couple of little things that have gotten people excited, edgy kinds of choices in terms of timelines and things, but they haven't violated things and I think the fans appreciate that. The [first appearance of the] Romulans in the episode timeline is a good example [Enterprise, Minefield, and ST:TOS, Balance of Terror], and we're shooting something now where we bump into the Tholians [Future Tense], also from The Original Series [The Tholian Web], but again, we don't see them.

They're smart about it, and I think that this is stuff that the fans love. At the end of the day, they love it. People are loving the Andorians and things that they haven't seen and haven't met since The Original Series—it's fun to see them again.

Bakula: I haven't heard anybody complain about it. Obviously we had to admit that we couldn't go to a 150-year pre-version of the communicator, okay? Because everybody has got flip phones that are the size of a quarter. You can't back up the technology that much. And if we backed it up technologically, we'd be shooting 1950s B-movies again with the ships on strings. The audience is too sophisticated now.

There's been a lot of careful consideration put into every choice that has been made. This ship is based on nuclear submarines that exist today, an extension of what that might be like in the future. What they have done to counteract some of the visual sophistication of the ship—which is certainly more sophisticated visually than what they had at their disposal in the 1960s—is that we are still pushing buttons, the doors aren't opening at our voice commands. We have a lot of computer technology and other wonderful technology, but the ship doesn't work perfectly. It's still a ship that has to be flown, it has to be manoeuvred by hand, and we're not just sitting around talking and having the ship run itself.

So, that was the way to get around some of the technology that we have at our disposal today. In my opinion, I think that they have achieved it brilliantly. There's always going to be somebody that's unhappy but the majority of the response that we have got here, and from around the world, has been very favourable. We've tried to make the ship seem smaller, we've made my ready room and places like that really cramped and smaller than the original ship, and those kind of things are all an homage to Roddenberry and what he created.

Bakula: Well, we are, but I think that adds to the feel. I like the fact that it's small.

Another thing that has really worked well is that we're not into using the transporter the way that The Original Series was. So, we have the shuttlepods and I think that they are tiny, they're small and they get into trouble and I think they are another great devise that has been used to keep us more primitive.

Bakula: I feel that the notion of pioneers out on the frontier, where there are no rules and where they have to solve their own problems and moral dilemmas, gives the show a certain rawness, an edginess that adds to the tension and excitement of it.

I think it adds to the true feeling of exploration that we are trying to achieve. Again, I think it's something that the fans have responded to. We're not just doing the different planet every week, 'ho-hum'; here's a new species kind of show. We're still learning, we're still excited about this experience and we are trying to convey that. We're just not that experienced, you know?

This month we're joined by Scott Bakula, who, as the intrepid Jonathan Archer, captain of the first Starfleet vessel to leave drydock, is taking the first steps in the universe for his Star Trek descendants to follow. In our exclusive interview, he reveals how Season Two of Enterprise is progressing, as well as thoughts on the design of the ship and the setting of the series.

"I think we were all very nervous at the beginning," he says. "I think the track record for prequels isn't that good… [But] when I first got the pilot script and read it, it just felt right to me. It felt right putting it 150 years before Kirk and Spock, so you didn't feel that the next captain coming along would be Kirk. There's a nice distance between us."