Plan To Kill Off Captain Archer Revealed By Star Trek: Enterprise Showrunner

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Summary

Star Trek: Enterprise showrunner Manny Coto planned to kill off and replace Captain Archer but was vetoed by executive producer Rick Berman.
The Mirror Universe two-parter in season 4 of Enterprise saw Mirror Archer's bid for power go awry when he was betrayed by Empress Hoshi Sato.
Replacing Captain Archer with a new character would have risked fan backlash, as seen with the negative reaction to Commander Trip Tucker's death in the series finale.

Star Trek: Enterprise season 4's showrunner revealed his rejected plan to kill off Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and replace him with a new Captain. When the late Manny Coto took over as Enterprise's showrunner from Brannon Braga, the low-rated Star Trek prequel had gotten a stay of execution and UPN granted them a late season 4 pickup order. Coto, a die-hard fan of Star Trek: The Original Series, plotted ways to boost Enterprise, such as utilizing serialized arcs and delving more into fan service, including Enterprise season 4's lauded Mirror Universe two-parter, "In a Mirror, Darkly."
In the Star Trek oral history "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Manny Coto revealed that although Enterprise was "always going to stick with Scott" [Bakula], he had an idea to kill off Captain Jonathan Archer and introduce a new Captain who would upend the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise for dramatic purposes. However, Star Trek executive producer Rick Berman vetoed that plan and stuck with Scott Bakula as Enterprise's leading man. Read the quote below:

We were always going to stick with Scott. I remember at one point we debated actually killing Scott as a way to inject a dramatic situation into the fourth season, where the characters now have to get used to someone brand-new coming on board. This person would have a totally different way of doing things and have a totally different outlook, and so you would have Trip and the rest of the characters kind of butting heads against this individual, whoever he or she might be, but we decided not to. It’s a little like the shift in M*A*S*H. I figured you could do the same thing with this; start off with a character nobody liked, butting heads, and they end up respecting him. That was one where Rick said no. It was a radical change, but I probably would have done it if we had known we were going for seven seasons. We didn’t have to kill Bakula, he would have just been gone part of the season.

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