Broken Bow - Diane Carey [70]
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