When it comes to Star Trek, Michael Dorn will obviously be best known for playing Worf, the Klingon Starfleet officer who debuted in The Next Generation and returned for four seasons of Deep Space Nine, all four TNG movies and Picard Season 3. Additionally, though, he also directed three DS9 episodes and one Enterprise episode, the latter being Season 1’s “Two Days and Two Nights.” Dorn was actually supposed to helm more episodes in the Star Trek series that premiered in 2001 and came to a polarizing end in 2005, but he was told a shocking lie involving lead actor Scott Bakula that put the kibosh on that plan.
The Worf actor recalled this strange turn of events while speaking with Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating, who respectively played Trip Tucker and Malcolm Reed on Star Trek: Enterprise, on their podcast The D-Con Chamber. Michael Dorn’s association with Enterprise came about from his participation in Star Trek: Nemesis, the final Next Generation movie. The TNG cast wasn’t originally contracted to do Nemesis, and Dorn “wasn’t very happy” with the script when he read it, particularly because Worf didn’t appear much in it. So that resulted in him making a specific ask during the negotiations to do the movie:
But they said, ‘Well, what do you want?’ And I said I want to direct… And I was supposed to do three episodes of Enterprise. Three or four. And it was my fault, because… They said, ‘Look, we’ll give you one guaranteed and three pay-or-play.’ And I should’ve said, ‘No. Guarantee.’ And so, I did the one, and they paid me off for the other three.
“Two Days and Two Nights,” which saw the crew of the Enterprise (NX-01) taking shore leave on Risa, was Star Trek: Enterprise Season 1’s penultimate episode. So Michael Dorn’s other three episodes would have aired during Season 2, and maybe they would have led to more directing opportunities for him. Instead, the powers-that-be opted for the pay option, and then came the lie he was told about why he couldn’t direct this episodes:
[It was] extremely disappointing, because you kind of go, ‘You mean I was that bad?’ That they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to see him ever again.’ It was just terrible… And then also, my agents called them and said, ‘Look, what the hell is going on?’ And they said, ‘Scott Bakula hated Michael.’ It’s bullshit. So that’s why they didn’t want me.
Scott Bakula, of course, starred in Star Trek: Enterprise as Jonathan Archer, who captained Earth’s first Warp 5-capable ship. Having worked with him for four seasons, Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating quickly picked up that this wasn’t the truth, with the latter saying it was “pretty rude to use Scott’s name” as an excuse for not bringing Michael Dorn back to direct those episodes. To his credit, though, Dorn realized on his own back then that what they told him wasn’t legit. He concluded:
You know what, I had talked to Scott. He was in London at Patrick [Stewart’s] place, and [we] had a lovely time. And I knew it wasn’t true. Scott [and] everybody on that show, the actors, were consummate professionals. There wasn’t ‘stuff’ going on.
I’m glad Michael Dorn and Scott Bakula are on good terms with one another, and that the former never believed that the latter disliked working with him on Star Trek: Enterprise. If Bakula’s Archer spinoff ends up moving forward, maybe he could recruit Dorn to direct an episode, if not several like he wanted to do the first time around. For now, Enterprise, along with almost all of the franchise’s other TV shows and movies, can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription.
