14 Science Fiction Shows That Left Us Hanging (continued)

Jake 2.0 (2003)

Yet another show prematurely cancelled by UPN. Jake 2.0 premiered on September 10th, 2003. There were 16 episodes made, but only 13 of them airs before it was cancelled. As best can be determined, the last three were never aired until the Scifi Channel airs Jake 2.0 reruns on 2006.

Jake Foley (Christopher Gorham) was an average computer technican at the NSA. While investigating a server outage he finds himself in the line of fire as a gunman is shotting up the server room. Jake is injured, and accidently ingests highly experimental nanites into his blood stream. Jake becomes the ultimate computer upgrade, the ultimate merging of man and computer.

The NSA becomes very protective of their new technology, and recruit Jake as a field agent. Jake has superhuman strenghts and abilities; he can control computers with his mind. There is a flame burning for his friend Sarah Carter (Marina Black) whom he attending college with. But Sarah is completely oblivious to Jake. Her interest in him extends to him fixing her computer, and her job as a congressional investigator. She wants to know where NSA's money is going, and Jake is her inside source.

 Dr. Diane Hughes (Keegan Connor Tracy) is Jake's doctor, she is an NSA scientist on Nanotechnology. She develops feelings for Jake, but is way too shy to act on them. Only after the show was cancelled, in episode 14, Jake and Diane share a bit of romance.

During the later episodes, the top NSA directors are overwatching everything with Jake. They are seen in the upper level, snooping in on every detail, and threatening to dispose of Jake. Oddly, it likens to the UPN executives looming over the production. In the last official episode, Lee Majors guest starred as a former NSA double agent. Anytime they bring in Lee Majors or Carl Weathers to a show, it's in trouble.

Admittedly, the storylines were a bit weak and cheesey for this day and age. The special effects were good, and the techno babble was excellent. With some better writing this could make a comback. This would make an excellent feature film.

Dead Like Me (2003)

Georgia (George) Lass (Ellen Muth) is an 18 year old woman who is struck by a toilet seat from the re-entering Space Station Mir. The show is about  a group of grim reapers. Their job is to transition people to the afterlife. They are given a daily assignment, and they are the last to see them alive, and they are the first they see after they are dead. The show was done with nice mix of humor and seriousness. 

Dead Like Me premiered June 27th, 2003 and ran a full 2 seasons (29 episodes). According to tv.com, when the show was unexpectedly cancelled by Showtime, MGM tried to sell the show to another station, but the deal fell through. Good News, though. A revived version is in production with most of the original cast and set to air in 2008.

Star Trek: Enterprise (2001)

Enterprise premiered 26 September 2001 on UPN, and ran a full four seasons. The show is set 100 years before the Enterprise that Captain James Kirk commanded. The whole concept of the Enterprise NX-01 is a change from the original Star Trek universe, it did not exist until the Enterprise-E (NCC-1701E) visited Earth on April 4th, 2063 to stop the Borg (Star Trek First Contact). During Star Trek: The Next Generation, the number of ships named Enterprise was defined as five. They are:
The orignal NCC 1701 of the 1966-1968 original Star Trek series.
NCC-1701A, was introduced at the end of Star Trek IV.
NCC-1701B, was introduced at the beginning of Star Trek: Generations.
NCC-1701C, was introduced in the Star Trek:TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise",
NCC-1701D, was the ship used in the Star Trek:TNG series.
NCC-1701E was not introduced until Star Trek: First Contact.

OK, enough of the history lesson. Like all Star Trek series, it had a following. But it was not your parents Star Trek, and it was not the stuff of TNG. It moved a bit slow for most of us. And it committed the fatal error of stepping outside of Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. They created enemies and wars, and events that never occurred in the Star Trek timeline (i.e the Xindi). They also went from each episode standing on it's own, to a continuing story. I think this alienated even the most hardcore Trekkers.

I also think they purposely wrote some things into the 4th (last) season about their impending cancellation. Captain Archer made a reference to a fellow Captain about how he "lost" something out there in the "expanse" of Xindi space (all of season 3).

In spite of all that, they should have let it run the 7 years it was cast for. Anything is possible in the Star Trek universe.