Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [230]
KD: And other than in the comics, I don’t know whether there was an approach to that type of character before Chakotay in Star Trek: Voyager.
MJF: When I started writing the book, I didn’t…well, yeah, I guess I did know who the bad guy was going to be, Greyhorse. I wanted him to be different from the doctors we had seen at this point. I guess he had a little bit in common with Bashir in terms of his intellectual superiority, but Bashir had not shown up yet.
KD: The repartee between Greyhorse and Simenon seemed more playful rather than the sometimes antagonistic exchanges between Spock and McCoy. Was that something you were going for?
MJF: Yeah, exactly. I wanted a pair of guys who could snipe at each other and be in conflict and yet not be doing it in a petty way; it grows out of genuine mutual respect and affection. And that’s how they are related to each other.
KD: And Simenon is from a reptilian species called the Gnalish? Tell me what you were thinking along those lines, as that was definitely an alien addition to a Star Trek crew.
MJF: The crews that we have seen on the screen, just because of the exigencies of the production process, had to be pretty humanoid. Now, with CGI, you can get away with a wider range of aliens. But at the time, we hadn’t seen anyone like that on the screen. The closest we had come is the Gorn, and that was very stiff and awkward-looking. But I wanted to do something different. The thought of a sarcastic talking lizard kind of appealed to me.
KD: He is kind of a wise guy.
MJF: Yeah, but he has a heart of gold, of course, that he zealously conceals.
KD: The communications officer is an Aussie, which I thought was great.
MJF: Yeah, you’ll see in all my books that Star Trek is very much an international thing. Even though at least some of our major characters are recognizably American, I wanted to provide a range of international flavor. I try to do it all over the place. I’ve even been criticized for using names that fans say are not Star Trek names.
KD: How do you have a name that is not Star Trek?
MJF: I don’t know. I used some kind of French name once, and someone said, “Well, that’s not a Star Trek name.”
KD: And Picard is…?
MJF: (laughs) Yeah, and Picard is okay, so go figure. But the international flavor is fun, and it’s another way of distinguishing characters, especially when you’re introducing a group all at once. But back to (Tricia) Cadwallader. I wanted her to be attractive and perky and an Aussie.
KD: She was fun in that she reminds me of what could have come of Yeoman Colt from the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.”
MJF: And that was one of the things I thought about with her. Really, the only other crew that we really knew about at the time was Pike’s. Shortly after Reunion, I did a book, StarTrek: Legacy, that had a lot of flashbacks to Pike’s Enterprise. So Colt really was one of the influences on Cadwallader. Not the only one, I guess, but certainly the idea of a young, perky officer.
KD: And she’s definitely one for whom being out in space remains a thrill.
MJF: Yes.
KD: Idun Asmund is one of the two Stargazer crew members who share space in the original cover artwork with Picard. Obviously, she is meant to be the alluring, exotic Starfleet officer in the bunch.
MJF: My idea for her started like this: Worf is a Klingon raised by humans. It didn’t make sense for a Klingon to be on this ship, but I like Klingons and I wanted to have some influence from them, considering that is the other big race in terms of possibilities of people being on a starship. It was too early in the continuity for there to be a Klingon on the Stargazer. So I thought what if we turned it around and had humans raised by Klingons? At first, I got a little static over that. I showed the execution of the concept and it was okayed. But I wanted to turn Worf’s paradigm around. And the fact that they turned out to be twins, well, it just struck me as being