Rick Berman and Brannon Braga talk continuity and show their ignorance about Trek.
(From the 'Chicago Sun-Times'.)
Rick Berman still shakes his head as he recalls how, early in the seven-year run of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," he and his crew had a phaser beam appear to come out of a photon torpedo tube.
Big deal, right?
"We got over 200 letters," Berman said. "I didn't know the difference. I had no idea which was which. Two hundred letters in three days."
So Berman and fellow co-creator/executive producer Brannon Braga have no illusions about what they have going both for and against them as they prepare to launch UPN's 'Enterprise,' which boldly goes where four 'Trek' series and nine feature films have gone before, beginning Sept. 26.
By making this latest 'Trek' TV series a prequel to the original 1966-69 NBC series, set 100 years before the 23rd century adventures of James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and the gang, Berman and Braga know they're just asking for trouble from the hardest of the hard-core 'Trek' fans.
"In the original series, it was established that in 1996, half the human race was killed in the Eugenics Wars," Braga said. "Well, what do you do? Do you pay attention to that, or do you just glide on by? ...We're too busy really to sit down and read all of the Internet mail that comes in on all of this stuff."
"If we did that," Berman said, "we'd have to hire other people to do the television series."
Some contradictions are unavoidable as technology advances in our everyday lives. Berman, for example, notes that computer on Capt. Janeway's desk in 'Star Trek: Voyager,' which ended its seven-year run in May, was bulkier than the one now in his office. Heck, most cell phones today are sleeker than the communicators Capt. Kirk used.
To walk around on the 'Enterprise' sets on the Paramount Studios lot is to see the interior of a starship that, while implicitly primitive compared to TV's first Enterprise, nonetheless looks more substantial, complex and advanced.
Eighty-one working plasma screens dot the bridge alone, replacing the blinking Christmas tree lights of the original. But missiles resembling today's nuclear arsenal have yet to be replaced by photon torpedoes, and shields have yet to supplant hull plating as protection for the ship.
"We're always walking a very thin line in terms of developing things that are less advanced from the time of Capt. Kirk," Berman said. "One of the most fun elements of this series, especially for our fans, is to be able to watch all of the things that they know are coming to 'Star Trek' in their infant stages, to be able to see the development of things like transporters and phasers and tractor beams."
Universal translators don't yet work very well or very consistently in 'Enterprise.' Transporters are used for cargo and have been approved for human use, but no one much feels brave enough to test them out. Close encounters of the third kind with space aliens still scare the bejeezus out of these new space pioneers, as they would scare us today.
"These guys wear baseball caps sometimes, and they wear jeans and sneakers," Berman said., "They're a lot less perfect human beings than your Jean Luc Picards. ... [And] we are taking a few steps in the direction of being a little bit more sexually adventurous with the show."
Jolene Blalock, who plays the feline Vulcan subcommander T'Pol, talks about her character using "the power in feminity," and early indications are that Scott Bakula's Capt. Jonathan Archer will be cut from the same cloth as William Shatner's Kirk.
"Rick was quoted last week as saying [Archer] is healthy and available," said Bakula, the former 'Quantum Leap' star now filming his third hour of 'Enterprise.' "He's kind of a free-spirited guy. He's not afraid to say what he thinks. He's not afraid to buck authority. ... This character is bold and brash and, yes, the closest to Kirk."
The Trekker community of fans, meanwhile, obsesses over details such as whether the Klingons of 'Enterprise' will have the wrinkles first seen in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' or the smooth skin of the original 'Star Trek.'
"I love this question," Berman said. "We're just talking about makeup. The [original] makeup on the Klingons was a rather simple kind of eyebrow mustache-type of deal."
"But if you are a true 'Star Trek' aficionado, you realize that in a number of the movies, starting I think with 'Star Trek II,' which took place really at the same time as Capt. Kirk, they were using makeup very similar to Worf [of 'The Next Generation']. .... We are going to be using the new look. We're not going to the old Klingon look."
Braga nudged Berman. "It was 'Star Trek III,' Rick," he said.
" 'Star Trek III,' " Berman said under his breath.
