Broken Bow - Diane Carey [66]
“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