Broken Bow - Diane Carey [69]
“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