Broken Bow - Diane Carey [65]
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 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