Not sure where this would go thread-wise but I realized something major about Star Trek Enterprise, that ill-fated show from the beginning of the 2000's.
This week I rewatched Beyond for the first time since I saw it in theaters. Movie is a bit dull, not real keen on the 3 Abrams-Trek movies to begin with but this is definitely the least interesting of the 3. The stuff late in the movie with them digging up the USS Franklin was super interesting, because the Franklin was a Warp 4 ship that was pretty much the immediate predecessor of Jonathan Archer's Warp 5 Enterprise. The last voyage of the Franklin would be a cool thing for a prequel episode in another show, surprised no one ever tackled it. The whole Archer era in Abrams-Trek is still canon with Regular Trek, so something like the Franklin could still show up in a different Trek show.
It's kind of interesting that if Abrams-Trek had caught on and become the new law of the land / focal timeline for Trek, the Archer show would have been the only old Trek show that was actually still canon, but I digress: The big thing I realized here was how closely ENT actually followed the established Trek lore. The bad guy in ST Beyond makes reference to fighting in both the Xindi and Romulan wars back to back, so I went and looked into my Trek chronologies to find out when exactly those things happened. Xindi War is 2153-2154, and happened in Season 3 of ENT. Then, ENT ended in 2155 with Season 4, and was cut short from the planned seven seasons. Romulan War is 2056-2060, with the Federation being established right after that. In the show, things wrapped up in 2155 and then jumped forward five years to the Federation founding for the last episode of season 4.
In other words, Seasons 5-7 of ENT were supposed to be the Romulan War and end with the founding of the Federation (as happened anyway). However I suspect that iff ENT had been a success and gone the full seven seasons, the final episode would have actually been the protagonists at the founding, rather than TNG characters having to step in and run the last episode by watching holodeck clips from the founding (which I always thought was a bit of a slap in the face to the ENT cast).
Given how under-utilized the Romulans were throughout the entire Trek canon, ENT covering the Romulan War could have been fantastic, and given that show a lot more of a reason to exist. They would have needed to retcon a few things that TOS established, like the war being "fought with atomic weapons" and possibly the fact that Starfleet and the Romulans never actually saw what each other looked like during the entire war (something that was an iconic reveal in the TOS episode Balance of Terror, honestly one of the original show's top two or three best episodes).
So yeah...we could have gotten three seasons of the Romulan War leading to the establishment of the Federation if ENT hadn't been so lame that it got cancelled halfway through the planned run. It's a shame because Season 4 of ENT is actually really good, and I think they'd found their footing at last by then. Writing was already on the wall though, and original Trek was officially dead until Abrams-Trek and Nu-Trek. Ending with the Romulan War would have been a great ending to the original canon.
