Broken Bow - Diane Carey [68]
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