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 with 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 Herman 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.” Herman 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.”

“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, Star 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.

Zimmerman goes on, “We talked of a honeycomb design with multiple push and pull rods, accessible through openable doors. Machine walls cover the bulk of the engine. In other words, you’re not going to see a big roiling mass of energy, you’re going to see the result of that through small windows. You’re going to see a very powerful engine that looks like a very powerful engine.” And the audience will also see the process by which the energy is distributed, through tubes leading out of the core directly to the warp nacelles.

In short, the design for the engine reflects a more simple time. As Zimmerman explains, “It doesn’t look like you can’t understand it or that it wouldn’t break down if all the components weren’t working perfectly. So, it’s a more realistic propulsion system than the fantastic propulsion system.”

Other sets include the armory, loaded with missiles instead of the futuristic photon torpedoes, and the sickbay, which also has a new look.

“I think my favorite set is sickbay,” Braga admits. “Obviously the bridge is very cool, but sickbay, to me, really captures a nice flavor of Enterprise because it’s so different. It looks so believable. It’s kind of white, gleaming, with lots of chrome, and it kind of looks like a real hospital, a real futuristic hospital. I think people will be surprised at the departure we’ve taken there. But it’s well worth it.”

Knowing the look of the main vehicle, the production team could then move on to its shuttlecraft. The Enterprise shuttles will play a more integral role in this series than in series past, because transporter technology is so new. As Zimmerman previously noted, the Enterprise transporter platform is technically approved for biotransport, but shuttlecraft are still the preferred method of getting the crew from one place to another.

“The shuttle design is almost a direct steal from the shuttles that are being built right now,” Zimmerman admits. “The X-33 [Reusable Launch Vehicle] is probably the closest model to the actual shuttlecraft that we are using on Enterprise. We feel that reentry vehicles, right now, are as close to state-of-the-art as they’re going to be in the next hundred years, mainly because we lack the propulsion system that Star Trek has so blithely invented without explaining quite how we acquired all that power. Also, I think that will be a delight to the science-oriented viewer, because it’s familiar.”

The conflicts of designing a series being filmed over thirty years after The Original Series yet taking place almost one hundred years previous to its setting presented a number of problems in the course of the design. At some point in the planning for each set, prop, costume, and even makeup application, a decision needed to be made on where to bridge the gap—whether to make extrapolations based on current technology or on the vision of the future circa 1967. In the end, a combination of periods was achieved, with the emphasis being on a future based on the technology of today.

The most difficult challenge for maintaining design continuity was the props, since some concessions needed to be made along the lines of the more portable equipment. Considering how far technology has come in the last decade alone, what may have appeared futuristic in the sixties does not hold up to today’s technological advancements. According to Berman, the decision on how true to remain to the original needed to be made on a case-by-case basis; as an example, he points out that the computer on his desk is less bulky than the one that sat on Captain Janeway’s desk on Voyager.

One of the most recognized props from The Original Series was the communicator. The wireless handheld device, so ahead of its time for the original audience of Kirk and Spock, is old hat for today’s audience, many of whom have similar devices in their homes, cars, and jacket pockets. Again, Zimmerman was required to bridge the gap between the technology of yesterday’s future with today’s. “They’re quite along the lines of the communicators that we saw in the classic series and the early movies, but, because they are being designed now, they are much cooler and much more interesting pieces of equipment. Their function is pretty much the same. We’re not doing badges—we’re doing flip-open communicators, tricorders, and other diagnostic equipment that is small. It is microminiaturized, but it is not vastly different in its design from the great things that are being done now.”

This quickly became the defining element for all props, Zimmerman admits. “The truth is our props are more capable but less slim and compact than what you can buy today. That’s part of the dramatic necessity, so the actor has something that the audience recognizes instantly and that works. Having said that, they are really interesting props and they will make interesting devices for the telling of a story.”

And it is those stories that the designs will best serve. “There’s a lot of wonder and awe and sense of the first time in all of the concepts for the stories,” Zimmerman explains. “This is no ‘Ho hum, we’re out in space again, we know how to do this. Just sit back and watch us.’ It’s like we’re discovering it for the first time and it’s really very exciting. It’s reinventing the franchise in many, many ways.”

And the designer is just as excited about this new opportunity. “Personally, it’s a kick in the right place to get an opportunity to reinvent a Star Trek venue like this, because one gets set in one’s ways always doing it the same,” he continues. “This is so fresh, such a new approach, such an opportunity to go back to the roots of something that you’ve already done and say, ‘Well, how was it that it came to this point? How would it look if it was two hundred or three hundred years before but still in our future and maintained the continuity that eventually leads into Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E?’ Well, that’s a fun job. Why wouldn’t you like that?”

 

Costume designer Robert Blackman started working on Star Trek in the third season of The Next Generation, and was asked back for the latest installment, ready for his own challenge of reinventing the franchise. To do so, he looked at the series as a whole, focusing first on the evolution of the Starfleet uniform.

“We talked about the Star Trek timeline and where [the series] fit,” says Blackman. “We’ve got original Star Trek, we’ve got the movies, we’ve got The Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager. They all travel in a linear direction. We know where we started, originally, with classic Star Trek, and we know where we ended, at this point, which is DS9. Where those changes for the garments happened were pretty clear. It was then taking that knowledge of how it progressed and working backwards.”

The first question naturally became just how far to back up. Blackman’s challenge was to determine where the uniform design would have been one hundred years before The Original Series. To do this he chose an approach quite like Zimmerman’s approach to the designs for sets and props. Blackman looked to current apparel as his basis for extrapolating a look for the future. “What I chose to do was to back up to now and to do a lot of investigation on, essentially, supersonic jet pilot testing suits, NASA suits, that sort of look, and then play around with those and kind of move forward on them.”

Blackman likens his work to the evolution of clothing in general. “It’s sort of like the tie, which has been around for a hundred and thirty years and I don’t think that people are going to necessarily be tie-less in the next hundred and thirty years. There are aspects that are very familiar to us today that are recognizable aspects. I keep pressing those to really land it closer. We’re all well versed in what we imagine life in the universe will be in four or five hundred years, but what it’s going to be in a hundred years is another thing. So, my gut response to that is to tie it more to now than to then.”

In the case of Star Trek, the Starfleet uniforms have become integral to the look of the series. Blackman explains that the new look is a radical departure from the past. “All of the Starfleet stuff is natural fibers. For the first time ever, there are zippers and pockets. We’ve never had them. From The Original Series on, they were eliminated. Pockets, because the idea was there was no currency. There was nothing. You didn’t need house keys. It was all done electronically. No zippers or buttons because the clothes were imagined to be put on in some sort of way, by forcefield, or whatever the hell you wanted it to be.” In fact, the uniforms have taken on a more casual look beyond the addition of pockets and zippers with accessories of utility caps and away jackets.

“They wear black mock turtlenecks underneath,” Blackman continues. “The uniforms are a darkish blue, brushed twill that is stonewashed. So they look a little bit worn. There is a whole kind of casualness to it. They’re wrinkly. They’re just something that is not as formalized as we have done previously. They still are sort of formfit and sleek in the body. All of our people look heroic in them, which is always the goal. So there’s always those kinds of things that remain constant.”

Among the familiar, however, is the designation of department insignias. “One of the things that we’re resonating from the future are the color bars,” Blackman adds. “The colors are the same, but they had switched after original Star Trek to the movies and then from the movies to The Next Generation.” For this new series, Blackman reverted to the original. “What command was, and what security was, and what science was made a change that we have honored. Command positions are gold now, not red. Science is still blue. Security and engineering are red.” Then he changed the design, making it an accent to the uniform instead of the focal point. In this case, the insignia is simply a thin stripe that goes around the yoke of the uniform.

Environment is also a consideration for the costumes on the series. Since the characters spend most of their time on the ship, the uniforms must contrast with those sets to some degree. While the overall design is an important consideration, Blackman does not allow it to entirely determine his concepts. “I look to see what the designs are, but the colors of the set don’t really influence me in this particular world,” he explains. “My notion is that if you have that much activity in the background then you need to make the thing in the foreground, which is usually the actor, as simple as possible. Hence, these sort of blue matte fabric uniforms. Yeah, they’ve got zippers and so on and so forth, but that does all blend eventually and you’re really just looking at the surface. There are a couple of scenes I saw being shot where they’re standing in front of a lot of moving graphics and you never lose them. You’re never distracted by the graphics. The graphics are brilliant, but they don’t talk.”

Though the Enterprise is an Earth ship with a crew made up almost entirely of humans, two alien characters have been added to the mix in the form of T’Pol, of Vulcan, and Dr. Phlox, of an alien race new to Star Trek. These characters represented two distinctly different challenges for Blackman. In T’Pol he has a character of a race the audience is quite familiar with. The task in this case was to maintain the familiar while reinventing the look more for today’s audience.

Blackman describes his approach to this new character: “Some of it is about broad-based marketing and other parts of it are about getting a character going. That uniform has a sort of form fit. It’s a very beautiful woman. But it has certain things that, over the years, I have distilled out of the original Vulcans. When I say the original Vulcans, I’m talking the return of Spock—the movies’ version rather than anything that happened in The Original Series. Those things are very much based on a kind of Chinese silhouette. They were very metallic and very brocadey and flat at the same time. ... Over the years, I developed a kind of eye that gave you an echo of that. It’s a serpentine thing that starts slightly extended from the shoulder point and then curves in and back out so you get the notion that you’re creating a very wide shoulder as some of those mandarin clothes do, but without actually doing it. So, that is the basis to her.

“The Vulcan civilization is also X amount of years earlier. She’s definitely in earth tones. It’s kind of a gray/brown, very sort of striated piece of fabric. The Vulcans tend to be more coolish in color. I’ve chosen not to do that. I’ve chosen to warm her up. She plays against it. She’s very Vulcan in the script and she’s very Vulcan—and will be, I think—throughout. There’s a hint of Vulcan in the design and it’s got to be a uniform. We’ve never seen the Vulcans in uniform before. So I just went with this other look.”

On the other hand, there is Dr. Phlox, a character from a distinctly new race of what the script refers to only as “an exotic alien species.” As there was no Star Trek history to look to for his specific character, Blackman started with a basis in familiar Earth design and evolved from there. He describes the look as similar to shirts of East Indian design that tend to be longer and hang down over the pants. Blackman goes on, “I’ve taken that design—using that as a kind of gentle shape—to pull him away from the rest of the people. These sort of shirt/smock things. And then just added a few odd details to them so that they are very alien to all of the Starfleet stuff that you see, but they’re not so alien that you don’t forget about it soon, and he just becomes a guy with a really benevolent face.”

Another aspect of the design for the series is the more casual tone of an earlier time in Starfleet. To set this tone, Berman has said, the audience will see the crew out of uniform from time to time. Where the concept of the uniform is important, however, Blackman admits that it is the civilian clothes that can prove the larger challenge. “In any of the timeframes, those have always been the more difficult clothing to do. It’s just hard to figure out what it is. You get to a uniform or something that is really extreme, then it’s easy. You can just make it really extreme. I always sort of hark back to The Fifth Element. You look at that and you go, Okay, there are backless T-shirts with straps across them. But we can’t go that far. It’s not our world. So you’ll see Captain Archer in the first two episodes in essentially T-shirts and jean-cut pants with odd shoes. It is a gentle nod to the future with a fairly strong stance in the present.”

Also making an appearance in the pilot episode is one of the favorite Star Trek races, the Klingons. And with the new setting, an earlier version of this race needed to be defined as well. Of course, makeup applications have come a long way since the sixties. These Klingons will appear more as they do in the later versions of Star Trek—a look that had its inception in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture and grew into the Klingons of modern Star Trek. Though the appearance may be modern, however, the concept of the race will be entirely fresh.

“The Klingons are to a degree ‘proto-Klingons,’ ” Braga explains. “They’re Klingons that come long before the Klingons of Picard’s time. Therefore they can be gnarlier, nastier, more warlike Klingons than ever. They’ll eat the hearts of their victims and sharpen their teeth and so forth.”

This description led Blackman to a very specific look. “It’s very rough furs and leathers and chain-maily,” he explains. “They still have the kind of boots that we’re used to, though nothing is black and gray anymore. It’s all kind of earth tone. They’re pretty dirty. They look pretty ratty, really. But that was the deal, so it’s more primitive than we have seen before.”

Another key element to the show will be the ongoing temporal cold war. The foot soldiers of that war in the twenty-second century are the new race of Star Trek aliens known as the Suliban. “There are two different groups in the same time period,” Blackman explains. “Kind of the good Suliban and the bad Suliban. The bad ones are like chameleons. They are genetically mimetic. They can mimic or become anything they need to. It is not the same as a shapeshifter. Their skin will turn into whatever it needs to turn into. Consequently the bad ones have developed that technique to the point where they can manufacture it. So they have manufactured this as part of their clothing and are then able to change themselves, physically, and their clothing, physically. The good ones haven’t done that, or if they have that capability, they don’t use it. So they appear in things that are definitely futuristic, but don’t relate to their skin.”

With these aliens, Blackman worked closely with makeup designer Michael Westmore, as much of the look of the aliens is mirrored in their clothing. “The characters have a very specific, kind of peculiar, skin, which we were able to copy in a pretty good way,” Blackman explains. “It’s a different color, but when you see them, the skin texture and the texture of the clothing are very reminiscent of one another. They are pretty much very simple jumpsuits with built-in feet. They’re just colored this amazing color and they’re very slight of stature.”

Blackman looks forward to the challenges of the new series, especially because they are new. “I think it would have been more daunting and more difficult if the spin that I had to do was to take what I had done over twelve years and split that hair one more time,” he explains. “That would have been a really difficult thing. The difficulty here was not really coming up with the ultimate look—the appearance of the uniform—it was the process of evolving that. It required quite a few completely rendered prototypes to get us to say, ‘No, no, we don’t want it to be a weird synthetic fabric. No, we want it to have a more now, today, this moment, look.’ So that was the process that was hard. And that’s the process that’s hard every day as regards this series right now. We don’t have much of a frame of reference for it. So, we’re continually reinventing that or inventing that. That becomes the difficulty. But the difficulties kind of get your head in the right place to be able to do it.”