Once the producers gauged Bakula’s interest, casting the rest of the crew became the task at hand. As with any new series, some of the job proved difficult, while some of it was surprisingly easy. “Interestingly, Dominic was someone who read for a role on an episodic show a year before,” Berman says. “And I was so impressed with him that—even though it was a year away—I didn’t hire him because I thought he’d be great to save for this show. Also, ironically, he was the first actor who came in on the first day of casting.”
“The other characters took some time,” Braga adds. “But we eventually found the right people. The hardest role to cast was T’Pol. Anytime you’re trying to cast a complex character who’s an intelligent, mysterious, complicated alien and also who happens to be a babe, it is not an easy task. The last time we really had to do this was with Seven of Nine, and it took a lot of time. So the last role we cast was T’Pol. It took a lot of searching to find that actress who was at once striking and yet had an intelligence about her, who also is a good actress. It is a hard combo, for whatever reason.”
Though the search may have been difficult at times, Herman is sure that they have found the perfect crew for Enterprise. “I cannot go on more about this cast,” he says. “They are extraordinary. I’ve never been as pleased with putting together a cast of characters as I have with them. Now that we have shot the two-hour pilot and the first episode and are halfway through the second episode, I’m seeing it in every sense.”
And as filming progresses through the first season, Berman is excited to see how things develop. “We spent a year and a half creating these characters,” he continues. “Then you hire actors to play them. And then, together, these characters are brought to life with both the writing on one side and the actors doing what they do on the other. The characters always—as one season leads to the next—become richer and richer, because there’s more and more backstory to them and the actors begin to feel comfortable and they bring unique things to the characters that we as writers and producers would never dream of that are unique to those specific actors.”
With the universe and cast firmly in place, the next detail was to lay out the basic themes for the storytelling. Braga notes that, while the series is deeply entrenched in the excitement of exploration, it will still have its roots closer to home. “We are going to do stories that have ramifications back on Earth,” he says. “This is the first ship going out there and they represent humanity. So there are going to be more references to Earth. We are going to deal with certain situations that are closer to Earth and have ramifications closer to home.
“In terms of actually flying the ship back to Earth, that remains to be seen. We haven’t decided. I will say that it will not be a frequent thing we’ll do, simply because when you’re traveling at warp five you get pretty far from Earth pretty fast. To turn all the way around, you’re going to have to have a damn good reason. A lot of the pilot takes place on Earth and it’s really a fun place to be, strangely enough, because it’s kind of a fresh setting for us.”
Although the concept for the show took a step back in time, the producers decided to include a bit of a futuristic element as well, adding a shadowed man out of temporal sync with the twenty-second century and a faction of an alien race, known as the Suliban, involved in some mysterious war. Their activities form an intentionally unresolved plotline in the series pilot—part of a story arc the producers hope will continue throughout the life of the series.
“Certain elements came out of discussions that we had with the studio,” Berman explains. “We were very impressed with the idea of creating what I like to call a temporal cold war. There are some people from the distant future—maybe as far as the thirtieth century—who have developed time travel. For reasons that we do not understand, there are some people back in the twenty-second century who are doing the bidding of the people from the future.
“Our new breed of bad guys, the Suliban, we learn from the pilot, have been given a great degree of information regarding genetic engineering in exchange for doing the bidding. Why have they come back to the twenty-second century? What is their purpose? Is there one faction from the future? Are there many? We don’t know and, in an X-Files kind of way, we may not know for years.
“We thought it would be fun,” Braga adds, “since this show is a prequel, if we just made it a little bit of a sequel, too. So you have the temporal cold war going on, where factions in the distant future are waging secret battles on various fronts and in various centuries. And the twenty-second century is one of these fronts. We thought it would be interesting to slowly play out a mystery regarding all of this that somehow involves Archer. We’re going to be doing that, hopefully, over the course of many, many episodes, possibly seasons. We haven’t figured it all out ourselves yet, but we thought that would be a cool idea to layer in.”
As for the mysterious man pulling the strings? The script only describes him as “a humanoid figure ... of indeterminate age.” Braga himself is just as cryptic when asked about the man behind the war. “We have several possibilities,” he admits. “But we have not settled on any of them and we may come up with yet another one. I think we’re going to see how it plays out. ... We have some ideas, but honestly we don’t know for sure. We’ll find out along with Archer.”
Design
“THIS NEW SHOW CANNOT be just another star trek series.
That’s really item number one. It will be a ship show, but with an entirely new, entirely different Enterprise—one which is both retro and cool at the same time, gritty and utilitarian with space-efficient interior and hands-on equipment. A ship which shows the audience a lot more nuts and bolts than other Star Trek series while still having an incredibly futuristic look. In a subtle, very recognizable way, the ship must foreshadow the design of Enterprises to come.
“Chronologically, the drama takes place one hundred years beyond First Contact and one hundred years before Captain Kirk. Warring factions on Earth have made peace, Starfleet exists, and hundreds of spacecraft of various design have been in use for some time, exploring nearby planets.
“This Enterprise is the first spaceship to be filled with the best, to date, Cochrane warp drive—an engine capable of speeds up to warp five. It’s a ship with the power to go faster and farther into space than any previous ship and to be able to explore planets far outside our solar system.”
With those marching orders from Rick Herman, Production Designer Herman Zimmerman began work on what was to become the fifth Star Trek series, Enterprise—and, more specifically, the S.S. Enterprise NX-01. Zimmerman, who served as production designer for two of the Star Trek television incarnations—Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—as well as for the more recent films, was excited to have a chance to take a fresh look at the franchise.
“In designing something,” Zimmerman says, “you need to have someplace to hang your hat, some philosophy to go on. The first thing that I have to do is, certainly, read the script and be cognizant of the demands of that series on scenes and characters. But also to look further down the line without any actual concrete information as to what might be necessary to flesh out more of the ship than what we’re going to see in the first two hours. That’s part of the consideration when I start thinking about it.”
The production design team must anticipate how each room may be used by this new crew in this new time period. Although, chronologically, this may be the first time a Starfleet crew has manned such a ship, Zimmerman explains, “In the case of Star Trek, it’s a special kind of vehicle—no pun intended—for storytelling because it has such a rich history.”
With his script as a blueprint, Zimmerman began his research. “I do a lot of looking at other science-fiction films,” he admits. “While also looking at, particularly in this case, what’s current at NASA. What’s on the drawing boards for new space shuttles and, again in this case, what’s happening in the U.S. military—particularly the Navy, because, as you know, St
ar Trek originated from Roddenberry’s interest in the C. S. Forester series of Horatio Hornblower novels. The new series has similar models for defining the characters in relationship to each other. That’s kind of a Star Trek given by this time.”
With the series taking place only 150 years from today, Zimmerman made the most logical possible extrapolations of the directions in which he believed the technology will evolve. Then he was able to bridge the gap between spacecraft in current reality and the previously developed Star Trek starships of the future. Because, as Zimmerman himself says, “One of our main concerns ... is to remain true to our position, historically, in the Star Trek family.”
EXT. SPACE—ENTERPRISE
Our first full view of the majestic ship as it clears the dock and moves into open space. More rocket-ship than starship, Enterprise is lean and masculine—yet its deflector dish and twin warp nacelles suggest the shape of Starfleet vessels to come.
With those lines, the Enterprise makes its first full appearance in the script for “Broken Bow.” The words on the page, however, fail to convey the full dramatic impact of the ship on the screen. Likewise, they fail to reflect the amount of work it takes to get from the drawing board to the reality.
“The design was originally a different concept entirely than the one with which we ended up,” Zimmerman admits. “Which is often the case. You sometimes spend days, weeks, or whatever period of time it takes before the reality sets in, thinking about what you think is the right design for the exterior of the ship, and then someday somebody along the line says, ‘Well, that doesn’t look very good.’ Or in this case, ‘Gee, it looks like the old Enterprise.’ And you realize that you have to go in a totally different direction.”
Braga expands on the idea behind the original concept. “I had just gotten back from the LA car show, and I had seen the new 2002 Thunderbird. What I really liked about it was that it was the classic Thunderbird design, but modernized. So it was kind of the best of both worlds. It was at once tantalizingly modern and yet very, very familiar at the same time. So we discussed it and we thought, Well, let’s take Kirk’s ship, the original Enterprise, and let’s soup it up and make it more futuristic and bring it into the twenty-first century. And we worked on that for a while, but it ultimately looked just too much like the other ships. It was too familiar. It wasn’t new enough. So we ended up completely abandoning that approach and starting from scratch.”
“In this case,” Zimmerman adds, “we had about a month of sketches and computer-generated images roughly showing shapes of different ships that eventually evolved into a ship that was really cool, but it looked very much like the classic Star Trek Enterprise. Now, that was a really cool ship and the series would have been well served by it. But, I don’t think it represented what Rick and Brannon see as the vision of this new Enterprise. So we went to work again.”
Though the producers wanted the look to be different, they did not want it to be so dramatically different that it seemed out of place. This was still to be a Star Trek series, which naturally required a Star Trek vessel. Zimmerman describes the path that led them to the new design: “We found a ship that was in our archives—a minor vessel that had been used in a battle in one of the features that had been created by ILM. We did not use that ship, but we took ideas from it and from those ideas eventually—and this process took about four months, all week and weekend CGI work by a very talented Lightwave artist, Doug Drexler—we finally came up with a shape that everybody loves. I trust the fans will love it as well as the producers and the cast do.”
“We ended up with a design that is definitely a Star Trek vessel in that it has a saucer section and warp nacelles, but it doesn’t have an engineering section at the bottom,” Braga explains. “It’s more shiny and chromelike on its exterior—more metallic and less kind of a flat gray. ... It’s a little bit more like a cross between a stealth plane, a nuclear sub, and a Starfleet vessel.”
With the design in hand, the next step in the ship’s evolution was to determine the physical aspects of the ship for filming. “The ship as seen on the screen will probably be entirely CGI,” Zimmerman says. “There will be models made, but they won’t be the principal photography models. We have found, since 1987, that the state of the art has changed dramatically. One of the things that model photography does is give you a very realistic bounce of light. One of the drawbacks of model photography is that you have to build a model for everything. If you have to articulate a torpedo launch mechanism on the exterior of the ship, you have to build it. You have to make it work. And you have to do it in a scale that can be photographed. ... With the computer-generated images you can be infinitely more flexible. Everything takes time, but once it’s built you can look at it in twelve different ways and they’ll all be perfect. They’ll all be correctly lit. The moves will all be correct for timing and correct for size and shape. All of that is very useful when you’re doing a new one-hour episode every seven days—which is what an hour TV show schedule ends up being. So the CGI modeling has come, since 1987, to a state of the art that is not only as good as but better than model photography.”
INT. ENTERPRISE—BRIDGE
Far more basic than future starships, this command center lacks the “airport terminal” feel of Enterprises A through E. A central captain’s chair is surrounded by various stations, the floors and walls are mostly steel, with source light coming from myriad glowing panels. No carpets on the floors, no wood paneling on the walls, high-tech gauges, dials.
Zimmerman recalls his basic direction for the most familiar interior set of all Starfleet vessels. “Rick and Brannon particularly liked two pieces of equipment from the classic Star Trek series bridge: Spock’s viewer and Uhura’s communications earpiece. They thought some earlier versions of these objects might be found to be useful. Well, we did indeed do that, but we did not go so far as to use Uhura’s earpiece. It was proven to be an unnecessary device. We did, however, use a modernized, but retro, version of Spock’s viewer, and I think the fans will both identify with it and enjoy the connection.”
“As far as the interior goes,” Berman adds, “we visited a submarine and got the idea of what confined space was like. We tried to make it a little bit more confined but at the same time a hospitable place that the audience would want to come visit every week.”
The rest of the set grew out of that directive. Deeper and slimmer than the familiar bridges of Star Treks past, the design appears more functional than comfortable, but still warm and inviting. Though the ever-present captain’s chair may be the cozy refurbished seat from a Porsche, most of the surrounding chairs are metal mesh and, as Hoshi notes during a particularly rough patch of turbulence, they do not have seat belts to keep the crew strapped in. There are, however, strong metal guardrails encircling the bridge, similar to the one seen in The Original Series, for the crew to clutch on to as they are tossed about.
“It’s more hands-on for the crew,” Zimmerman says. “There are knobs and buttons and switches and levers and things that actually move and do something. In previous series, since the original—because the original did have buttons to push—we put things behind black plastic. We’re now in possession of all LCD screens and plasma screens, which are out. We see the frames. There’s very little that’s built in that’s not accessible.”
A new addition to the bridge is the set that, in previous series, has proven to be one of the largest challenges to the various Star Trek directors. Formerly known as the briefing room, the Enterprise’s situation room is set off in an alcove behind the captain’s chair but still very much a part of the set. In the past, directors have noted the difficulty in creating interesting scenes within a room that is little more than a large table surrounded by chairs. This new design for the situation room places it in the action rather than away from it and opens up the staging possibilities. Though the space is tight, the room does have removable walls to allow for cameras and lighting, as do all the standing sets.
Another feature in all the sets is the addition of what the production crew refers to as “busy boxes,” which Zimmerman describes as “things that can be opened up and worked on during an emergency or even during the routine of getting the ship ready for leaving Spacedock. Leaving so much more for the actors to do.”
One familiar set for Enterprise is the transporter room. However, the transporters of this earlier time have a bit of a twist. “This transporter is not really recommended for biological organisms,” Zimmerman explains. “It’s basically a cargo transporter. So while we are occasionally forced to use the transporter for a live specimen, it’s not recommended. Mostly we use the shuttles to leave the ship.”
This design, too, mixes a little of the familiar with the new. Zimmerman explains, “Again, it’s an homage to the Original Series transporter and it’s a precursor of all the transporters you’ve seen since. It’s got a single pad, but it does have ribs around it that have the same structural pattern that were on the ribs of the transporter on The Original Series. That was one of the things we did as a nod to Matt Jefferies’ designs.”
INT. ENTERPRISE—MAIN ENGINEERING
Unlike the spacious, brightly lit engine rooms of future starships, this is more like the cramped, red-lit nerve center of a nuclear submarine ...
A more dramatic change in the design of the interior can be found in the heart of the ship, engineering. Zimmerman’s directive for the room was that it be a busy place with lots of moving parts. The concept behind the design is that the room is heat-generating and pulsing. The area is more cramped and the core itself is horizontal, rather than vertical, as were warp cores past.
STAR TREK: Enterprise - Broken Bow Page 17