Travis Mayweather

On Star Trek: Enterprise, Travis Mayweather is a navigator and helm officer on board the Earth starship Enterprise (NX-01). He was born in 2126 aboard the ECS Horizon, a human J-class cargo ship, and later visited many places such as Trillius Prime, Draylax, Vega Colony and both Teneebian moons. He is a "space boomer" meaning he grew up in space on board cargo ships. This also means that he has more experience in space than the captain of the Enterprise, Jonathan Archer. Mayweather is a quiet and enthusiastic young man who is a highly skilled pilot and has some caving experience.

Travis Mayweather has at least one brother, Paul Mayweather, who became the captain of the ECS Horizon after the death of his father in January 2153. His mother, Rianna Mayweather, was the ship's medic and chief engineer. Mayweather returns home to the Horizon circa January 10, 2153 while the Horizon was heading to the Deneva colony. While heading to Deneva Station, the Horizon was attacked by pirates but Travis Mayweather's experience with weapons from Starfleet allowed the Horizon to defend herself against her attackers. In 2154, Travis Mayweather holds the rank of Ensign and is in the command division.

In real life, Travis Mayweather was intended to be a lieutenant, due to his experience in space, but was changed to an ensign because the producers thought that having Mayweather and the older Lieutenant Malcolm Reed at a similar rank wouldn't be believable.

Over the course of the series, Travis has been injured, incapacitated or even "killed" more times than any other character in the primary cast.

In the two-part episode "In a Mirror, Darkly" we learn that the Mirror Universe version of Travis Mayweather is a sergeant in the MACO corps.

Criticism

Fan criticism about the under-use of minor characters on Enterprise started since the first season, but Mayweather has always been regarded as receiving the worst treatment. The criticism is that the executive producers were trying to build up a new "big three" core character set of Archer, T'Pol, and Tucker, to mimic the previously successful Kirk, Spock, and McCoy trio on the Original Series. This was done at the expense of the other four main cast members, and though Phlox received some screentime, soon Reed, Hoshi, and Mayweather received few if any storylines devoted to themselves or even dialoge. Notably, this effort to shift from an ensemble-cast (like on Deep Space Nine) that developed each character to a "big three" mimicing the Original Series had previously been tried on Voyager. Star Trek: Voyager shifted to the "big three" arrangement from its fifth season onwards, centering on Janeway, 7 of 9, and The Doctor. This coincided with a steady drop in the quality of episodes on the series, and has been widely derided as a poor decision. Thus, given the bad precedent established by the late-Voyager years, many were puzzled why another attempt to stiffle the minor cast members was being made again.

When Enterprise began, many critics and the fanbase as a whole repeatedly expressed the fear that "Maywearth would become another Harry Kim". Harry Kim was a main character on Voyager that was so under-used that it became almost proverbial to speak of a secondary cast member on a series that was slighted in favor of the lead character as "another Harry Kim".

However, Mayweather was so underused that he surpassed all of these fears: now, the proverbial expression is to speak of someone as "another underused Mayweather-type character" instead of "another underused Harry Kim-type character".

In four seasons, Mayweather only had two episodes devoted to himself, and he only had significant dialog in a half dozen. It eventually went beyond event the character-development concern: it came to the point that Mayweather had few if any speaking lines in any episode (even including the "Aye, sir" variety of dialogue). Many times, other crew "extras" at other helm stations would receive more lines than he did. Recurring characters like Shran actually got more backstory and characterization then he ever did.

External links

• "Travis Mayweather" at Memory Alpha
• STARTREK.COM: Travis Mayweather