Broken Bow - Diane Carey [76]
Another aspect of the design for the series is the more casual tone of an earlier time in Starfleet. To set this tone, Berman has said, the audience will see the crew out of uniform from time to time. Where the concept of the uniform is important, however, Blackman admits that it is the civilian clothes that can prove the larger challenge. “In any of the timeframes, those have always been the more difficult clothing to do. It’s just hard to figure out what it is. You get to a uniform or something that is really extreme, then it’s easy. You can just make it really extreme. I always sort of hark back to The Fifth Element. You look at that and you go, Okay, there are backless T-shirts with straps across them. But we can’t go that far. It’s not our world. So you’ll see Captain Archer in the first two episodes in essentially T-shirts and jean-cut pants with odd shoes. It is a gentle nod to the future with a fairly strong stance in the present.”
Also making an appearance in the pilot episode is one of the favorite Star Trek races, the Klingons. And with the new setting, an earlier version of this race needed to be defined as well. Of course, makeup applications have come a long way since the sixties. These Klingons will appear more as they do in the later versions of Star Trek—a look that had its inception in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture and grew into the Klingons of modern Star Trek. Though the appearance may be modern, however, the concept of the race will be entirely fresh.
“The Klingons are to a degree ‘proto-Klingons,’ ” Braga explains. “They’re Klingons that come long before the Klingons of Picard’s time. Therefore they can be gnarlier, nastier, more warlike Klingons than ever. They’ll eat the hearts of their victims and sharpen their teeth and so forth.”
This description led Blackman to a very specific look. “It’s very rough furs and leathers and chain-maily,” he explains. “They still have the kind of boots that we’re used to, though nothing is black and gray anymore. It’s all kind of earth tone. They’re pretty dirty. They look pretty ratty, really. But that was the deal, so it’s more primitive than we have seen before.”
Another key element to the show will be the ongoing temporal cold war. The foot soldiers of that war in the twenty-second century are the new race of Star Trek aliens known as the Suliban. “There are two different groups in the same time period,” Blackman explains. “Kind of the good Suliban and the bad Suliban. The bad ones are like chameleons. They are genetically mimetic. They can mimic or become anything they need to. It is not the same as a shapeshifter. Their skin will turn into whatever it needs to turn into. Consequently the bad ones have developed that technique to the point where they can manufacture it. So they have manufactured this as part of their clothing and are then able to change themselves, physically, and their clothing, physically. The good ones haven’t done that, or if they have that capability, they don’t use it. So they appear in things that are definitely futuristic, but don’t relate to their skin.”
With these aliens, Blackman worked closely with makeup designer Michael Westmore, as much of the look of the aliens is mirrored in their clothing. “The characters have a very specific, kind of peculiar, skin, which we were able to copy in a pretty good way,” Blackman explains. “It’s a different color, but when you see them, the skin texture and the texture of the clothing are very reminiscent of one another. They are pretty much very simple jumpsuits with built-in feet. They’re just colored this amazing color and they’re very slight of stature.”
Blackman looks forward to the challenges of the new series, especially because they are new. “I think it would have been more daunting and more difficult if the spin that I had to do was to take what I had done over twelve years and split