by Diane Carey
Archer was willing to wait it out. Able to breathe normally for the first time in days, he turned and motioned his crew toward the door. “Ladies? Allow me to escort you to a much better place. We’ve done all we can here. Anybody got a silver bullet?”
CHAPTER 18
JONATHAN ARCHER STOOD UP AS THE DOOR CHIME ON HIS ready room jingled. “Come in.”
T’Pol and Tucker came in, oddly side by side and not even spitting. What had gone on here while he was incommunicado?
“I’ve just gotten a response to the message I sent to Admiral Forrest,” he told them. “He enjoyed telling the Vulcan High Command about the Suliban we ran into. It’s not every day he gets to be the one dispensing information.”
T’Pol looked quizzical, but she got the inference. Archer grinned and decided he owed Forrest an apology. The admiral had proven more canny than Archer had given him credit for. They now had a formally logged record of humans and Vulcans working together under duress, with two completely different methods of command—and doing all right together. Starfleet could do worse. It gave them all a platform from which to spring.
“I wanted you both to hear Starfleet’s new orders before I inform the crew.”
“Orders?” Tucker asked.
Archer nodded and looked at T’Pol. “Your people are sending a transport to pick you up.”
She seemed hesitant, but buried it. “I was under the impression that Enterprise would be taking me back to Earth.”
“It would be a little out of our way. Admiral Forrest sees no reason why we shouldn’t keep going.”
Tucker went up on his toes. “Son of a bitch!”
Archer smiled and agreed, “I have a feeling Dr. Phlox won’t mind staying around for a while. He’s developing a fondness for the human endocrine system.”
“I’ll get double watches on the repair work!”
“I think the outer hull’s going to need a little patching up,” Archer said. “Let’s hope that’s the last time somebody takes a shot at us.”
“Let’s hope!”
Oh, well, famous last words. We’ll see.
Tucker, now very happy, spun on a heel and headed for the door. T’Pol started to follow him, but Archer stopped her.
“Would you stick around for a minute?” he asked.
She glanced at Tucker as the door shut between them, but turned again to the captain.
“Ever since I can remember,” he began, “I’ve seen Vulcans as an obstacle, always keeping us from standing on our own two feet.”
“I understand,” she said quietly.
“No, I don’t think you do. If I’m going to pull this off, there are a few things I have to leave behind. Things like preconceptions … holding grudges …” He paused, and tilted his head to soften his meaning. “This mission would’ve failed without your help.”
“I won’t dispute that,” she said.
A retort popped up behind Archer’s tongue, but he bit it off. Maybe she was joking.“I was thinking a Vulcan science officer could come in handy … but if I ask you to stay, it might look like I wasn’t ready to do this on my own.”
She raised her chin in that way she had. “Perhaps you should add pride to your list.”
“Perhaps I should.”
She considered his honesty, then said, “It might be best if I were to contact my superiors and make the request myself. With your permission,” she added decorously.
Finally they understood each other. It felt good to be on the same page.
Archer smiled again. “Permission granted.”
They stood together in companionable unity for a few moments as the ship streaked along at its new high-warp cruising speed.
“Will you join me on the bridge, Sub-Commander?” he asked, and gestured toward the door. “We have some good news for the crew, don’t we?”
“Captain,” she said with a lilt, “I will be honored to assist.”
The other crew members were at their stations as he and T’Pol came out of the ready room. They might have suspected something was going on, but they seemed to be assuming the worst. Reed was straight as a stick. Mayweather was leaning forward on his helm controls, almost sagging. Hoshi’s eyebrows were both up in anticipation. Tucker’s absence bothered Archer a little, but he knew the engineer was larking about belowdecks, doing what he liked to do.
Archer came to a place on the bridge where he could see them all, and they could all see him. T’Pol politely moved a little off to one side and let him have the stage.
“I hope nobody’s in a big hurry to get home,” he began. “Starfleet seems to think we’re ready to begin our mission. Mr. Reed, I understand there is an inhabited planet a few light-years from here?”
“Sensors show a nitrogen-sulfide atmosphere,” Reed said, not exactly confirming or dismissing what Archer had just said.
“Probably not humanoids,” Hoshi clarified.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Archer reminded.“Travis, prepare to break orbit and lay in a course.”
Mayweather looked up at him, beaming. “I’m reading an ion storm on that trajectory, sir … should I go around it?”
Archer smiled at him, at all of them, and turned to look at the swirl of open space, all the oxtails and elephant trunks, nebulae and anomalies out there to be gone through, and he brushed his toe on the deck of the ship that would take them there.
“We can’t be afraid of the wind, Ensign,” he said. “Take us to warp four.”
BEHIND THE SCENES
OF ENTERPRISE
Paul Ruditis
Concept
“Take her out … straight and steady.”
“SOMEBODY ONCE SAID THAT THE TWO THINGS THAT FIRST started the Internet,” explains Rick Berman, co-creator and executive producer of Enterprise, “were pornography and Star Trek.”
Rick Berman isn’t making a joke.
After working for two and a half years developing the idea for the fifth television installment of the entertainment monolith known as Star Trek, he has heard any number of rumors detailing exactly what the series is going to be. From a Starfleet Academy show, to a series about a futuristic special-missions force, to a look at the future from the Klingon point of view, all sorts of ideas have been bandied about the Internet detailing what the fans know the production team is working on.
“Fans discussing the past, present, and future of Star Trek is something that has gone on forever,” Berman admits. “We are conscious of it. We are respectful of it. We have people who are in touch with it and who keep us abreast of what the feelings of the fans are. But we have to eventually do what we think is best. That’s not to say that some of the things that we hear don’t influence us to some degree, but we can’t let the fans create the show.”
No matter what the rumors flying around fandom were, they all seemed to share a basic feeling of which Berman already was well aware.
It was time for a change.
Rick Berman began working on the basic framework of the fifth series long before the U.S.S. Voyager made its way home. “About two and a half years ago, the studio came to me and said they were interested in having me create a new series either to overlap with the last half-year of [Star Trek:] Voyager or to start after Voyager ended. I knew that I was not interested in just doing another twenty-fourth-century series. I felt that after [Star Trek:] The Next Generation and [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine and Voyager, to just slap another seven characters into a new ship and send it out in the same time period with the same technology and the same attitudes—for me, for the writers, and I think also for the fans, we had done enough.
“My interest in developing another Star Trek series was really contingent upon doing something dramatically different. To me, the most logical thing to do was to take the show back a couple of centuries. We had done a wonderful movie in Star Trek: First Contact. In the movie we met Zefram Cochrane in the twenty-first century and we saw Earth in a very distraught state. We knew when we made contact wi
th the Vulcans and we had our first warp flight. We also knew that two hundred years later would be Kirk and Spock and Star Trek. But what happened during those two hundred years? What happened between those years of despair and renewal and the era of near perfection that existed when the original Star Trek series began? So came the thought of placing a show somewhere in between.”
With the time period chosen, a whole new vista for storytelling emerged—one that would allow for ideas that Berman and his team had not been able to explore with the more recent incarnations of Star Trek. “I felt that with Deep Space Nine and Voyager we had captains and crews who were not filled with the charm and fun of doing what they wanted to do. They were, in fact, people who were in uncomfortable positions in places where they really didn’t want to be. Benjamin Sisko was not crazy about being on Deep Space 9. He was a recent widower who was filled with despair, which he got rid of to a large degree, but this was not a man who was an adventurer in the sense of where the series took him. Kathryn Janeway also was a rather severe character who felt responsible for having nearly two hundred people lost in space for seven years.
“I felt it was really important that we got back to the basics and we got back to where we had a crew that were doing exactly what they wanted to do—who were explorers, who had a captain who was an adventurer and who was lighthearted. A little bit of Captain Kirk and a little bit of Chuck Yeager. And to have a group going off where no man has gone before. And also a group that—because they were more accessible, because they were more contemporary—we could relate to in a lot of ways. If you or I were on a spaceship and suddenly we came upon an inhabited planet, it would scare the shit out of us. I’m not saying we wouldn’t be excited. I’m not saying we wouldn’t be filled with awe and amazement. But we’d also be terrified, we’d be nervous. We’d have a whole lot of feelings that people like Jean-Luc Picard never had because this was day-to-day work for him. He took a lot of this stuff for granted. This was all fodder for the creation of what I thought was going to be a wonderful new direction to take the series.
“To see the first humans to truly go out where no one has gone before—this seemed very exciting to me. It seemed exciting to me for the reasons I’ve just said, but also because it would let the fans see all the things that they had come to know as part of Star Trek in their infancy. To see them being developed. To see them not working all that right. Which would mean a lot of fun. It would also make our characters seem closer to the present, which would enable them to be a little bit more contemporary, a little bit more human, a little bit more fun.”
With the time period chosen and the basic outline formed, Berman took the idea to Paramount, hoping for the green light that would allow him to start assembling his team. “The studio was a little resistant at first,” he admits. “There was a question of ‘Why not go further into the future?’ But we have found that further into the future tends to mean suits that are a little bit tighter and consoles that are a little bit sleeker. And basically, we’d done that. We’ve done many episodes where we’ve had to sneak into the future a little bit. It doesn’t bring us that much. By going back, it brought us a great deal. Eventually, when the studio embraced the idea, and Brannon was brought into the process, we began developing the characters and eventually the story and the script.”
Brannon Braga, co-creator and executive producer, recalls the morning Berman called him from his cell phone while heading to the studio and asked him to help develop the new show. At the time, Braga was co-executive producer on Voyager , and he found the concept of going back to the beginning an exciting proposition. Together, the pair started laying out the universe of the twenty-second century.
“What I can tell you is there’s no Federation,” Braga explains. “Starfleet is very young. It’s only been around for a decade or more. There are some vessels flying around, some low-warp ships like cargo vessels. We’ve got a colony on the moon. We’ve got a space station around Mars. We’ve been exploring, but in a very limited way, because we just didn’t have the warp capacity to go very far. We’ve met some other aliens, courtesy of the Vulcans, but we’ve never bolted out on our own. We’ve always been under the Vulcans’ close watch. We haven’t gone that far. So we’re itching to go.
“In terms of how close this Earth is to Roddenberry’s vision, I think it falls somewhere between now and Kirk’s time. Not everything is perfect. I think humanity has gotten its act together to a large degree. I think that war and disease and poverty are pretty much wiped out. But what’s important is that the people aren’t quite there yet. I don’t think these people have fully evolved into the Captain Picards and Rikers.”
The direction of the new series was a dramatic departure from previous series, and the producers knew that the difference had to be reflected in the show’s name. The question became how to keep it linked to the proud Star Trek history while at the same time making it unique. “Since The Next Generation, we’ve had so many Star Trek entities that were called Star Trek ‘colon’ something.” Berman rattles off the list: “Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection—just one after another. Our feeling was to try and make this show dramatically different—which we are trying to do—and that it might be fun not to have a divided title like that. I think if there’s any one word that says Star Trek without actually saying Star Trek it’s the word Enterprise.” And with that, the title was born.
With a concept, theme, and title, the show needed to find its crew. As always, the most integral role is that of the captain. In this case, they created Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), a man in his mid-forties; as the script for “Broken Bow” says, “unlike the captains in centuries to come, he exhibits a sense of wonder and excitement” over his new ship and the chance to explore the stars.
With the captain in place, the senior staff fills in down the line. Chief Engineer Commander Charlie “Trip” Tucker (Connor Trinneer), a Southerner who “enjoys using his ‘country’ persona to disarm people.” Tactical Officer Lieutenant Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating), a “buttoned-up Englishman” with a flair for weaponry. Helmsman Ensign Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), an African-American “space-boomer” who grew up on a cargo vessel. And Com Officer Ensign Hoshi Sato (Linda Park), an exolinguist described as “a spirited young Japanese woman” with a fear of space travel.
Though the crew complement is set at around eighty humans, the pre-Federation ship does have characters from alien races thrown into the mix, as is the custom for all Star Trek series. T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), a “severe yet sensual” Vulcan observer, accompanies the crew on their first mission and later joins on as science officer. And Dr. Phlox (John Billingsly), an “exotic-looking alien with a benevolent smile,” just happens to be the most convenient doctor around when Archer is charged with the task of preparing his crew for departure in three days.
As the audience realized long ago, Star Trek, though set in a science-fiction universe, is first and foremost a show about characters. These seven characters will now be added to the Star Trek family, and the producers can begin to craft their adventures.
“It’s always an ensemble on these shows,” Braga explains. “But we’re not going to concern ourselves, necessarily, with divvying up episodes between characters. The star of this show is the captain and he really will drive the stories, but everyone will be involved. Trip is a major character, and T’Pol is certainly a major character. And the others—it’s hard to predict. For instance, the first episode after the pilot, to our surprise, is a big Hoshi episode. It just so happens that that’s the show we came up with.
“You can’t always predict how it’s going to develop over the course of the season. You’re also not sure which characters are going to pop out. For instance, I think now we’re finding, at least early on, that Trip is really a character that’s popping out and with whom we’re really having a lot of fun. But, by the end of
the season, we could discover that Reed is really jumping off the page. It’s hard to say.”
Typically, the role of the captain has been the most difficult to fill. The right blend of leadership and compassion are essential if the audience is to connect with the person in the big chair. In this case, according to Berman, the choice was easy from the start. Though the actors cast to play the previous captains of the Star Trek series did have followings before being asked on board, Scott Bakula is the most widely known actor to be hired to helm a Star Trek series.
Rick Berman explains the benefits of having Bakula sign on. “As a recognized actor he brings a little validity to the show. It doesn’t hurt to have someone who is recognizable. I’ve yet to find people who don’t find Scott tremendously talented and likable. When his name was brought up to us by the studio, we jumped for it. We were looking for a little Han Solo quality. We were looking for a little boyishness. We were looking for somebody who had a sense of excitement and awe and was his own man, someone who was young and fit, someone who embodied those heroic qualities that haven’t really existed since Captain Kirk. We had a meeting with Scott and just sort of fell in love with him. I cannot think of a single soul I would rather have playing that role.”
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.”