Brannon Braga on getting Enterprise started at all.

[Dave]

TREKTODAY - Executive Producer Brannon Braga spoke recently about the difficulties involved in getting Enterprise off the ground.

"Quite frankly, the only real hurdle we had to overcome when trying to get Enterprise off the ground was that some people weren’t totally sold on the idea," Braga told TV Zone Magazine, via the Great Link. "There were a few individuals at the studio who wondered, and perhaps rightly so, 'Shouldn't Star Trek be a show about always moving forward? Shouldn't it be in the 24th century and beyond? Is it the right thing to go backwards? The audience knows what happens already.'

"If you stop and think about it, though, the latter comments doesn't hold water. It's all fiction, and Sci-Fi to boot, which means that anything can happen and at any point in time," he continued.

"As a result of all this it took a while to get the programme going but it was a blessing in disguise. It would have been a real shame had this series premiered while Voyager was still on the air. The show definitely needed its own space, and that's what it got."

Braga acknowledged that the show didn't get it right all of the time. "It wasn't a perfect season - It's important to note that I speak only for myself here. I'm not speaking for Rick Berman or Paramount Pictures," he said. "On a creative level, and I feel this way after every season of a Trek show, there were some disappointing episodes. And nine times out of ten it usually boils down to the fact that every week we have to film a new one. That means we need to have a script ready every seven days. It's non-stop. You don't have any breaks built in. I don't think a lot of people realise this."

"So unfortunately, there were some bad stories and my heart breaks when that happens. But out of 26 episodes, you're bound to have a few duds. Even West Wing has one every now and then."

Much more from Brannon Braga, including his thoughts on the high points of season one, 'Broken Bow' and the Trek phenomenon can be found in TV Zone Special #47, out now in the UK.

 

[skoon]

Well I'm glad they did go ahead with it. I never went on to any of the other shows after Next Generation. & yes there were some duds the second half of S1 & even a few in S2 but I'm likeing them none the less. Next episode to air sound promising, something about an alien ship brought on to Enterprise or something...

 

[Dave]

I wasn't convinced about the 'retro-trek' idea as we called it here, until I began to watch 'Enterprise'. Now I'm glad they did too.

However, I think that they've begun to run out of new stories already. I've noticed that many more episodes appear to be re-hashed from earlier series or other sources. That is probably due more to them not accepting scripts from outside Paramount, and to them running down the stack of ideas Braga and Berman must have built up before the series began. I think that the premise is fine and still has a lot more material to mine from it.

 

[ray gower]

Not withstanding the Temporal Cold War, the retro Trek solution has given us a genuine traditional Star Trek, in TOS mould.

But it stands to reason that relying upon just the two people to guide and oversee the writing of it the original ideas are going to fade quickly. More so when they were responsible for other similar series and it is evident in the first series. So it is understandable that they fall back on similar plots from other shows they have produced. And it shows. I don't think they total of 'Original Trek' story lines in the first series would require all the fingers to count.

But I don't think this is necessarily a serious drawback. Provided they are handled differently and a different twist is applied to each and every one.

I can understand P/Mount not accepting random submissions, they would need to double their workforce to read them all. But perhaps a couple of people to browse the great wealth of fan-fiction available would provide the necessary new ideas and give Braga and Bremen the necessary shot in the creative arm at minimal cost?

I am gritting my teeth for when they run out of time and turn up on the day of filming with an old TNG/Voyager script, the old names Tippexed out and new ones entered as I think they did with Voyager.