07-19-01 Enterprise Cast, Producers Answer Questions, Part II On Monday, July 16, the cast of the new Star Trek series Enterprise and its two executive producers appeared before reporters at the Television Critics Association's Summer Press Tour on a day devoted to UPN shows. The following is Part II of the transcript from that appearance. See Part I here. Q: I have a two-part question. This is directed towards the cast. Number one, what was your first exposure to "Star Trek," and number two, are you prepared for the fan onslaught that you're going to encounter when the show airs? SCOTT BAKULA: Well, I go back to the Original Series, so I'm an old cat. So that was my big thing, and we used to watch that ad nauseam in college, as I recall. And I already answered the other question, so I'll let you go. JOHN BILLINGSLEY: My first exposure was watching it in my brother's bedroom. He would sit on my head and make me watch it, actually. I like the show, but I was a little bit younger than Scott. I was kind of scared, the few episodes I saw. He wouldn't let me leave. And what was the second part of that question? Q: Are you prepared for the fan onslaught? JOHN BILLINGSLEY: Oh, God knows. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure it will be fine. You know, it beats the alternative of no fan onslaught. JOLENE BLALOCK: I'm an avid original Star Trek fan. I grew up on it. My favorite was Spock, so it's really strange for me. I would sit there with my dad and my brother and just watch the show, watching the relationship between Captain Kirk, Bones, Spock. My favorite relationship was between Bones and Spock because it was this animosity and this love-hate relationship, but overall there was such utter loyalty between all three of them. I love the way they worked together. And as far as being prepared for what's coming, I'm using something that works for me, and that's just called denial. DOMINIC KEATING: And that's not a river in Egypt. I used to watch the original show back home in England. I remember the fried eggs falling off the ceiling on their shoulders. ANTHONY MONTGOMERY: Yes, me too. That's great. DOMINIC KEATING: God, it was scary, man. And I never really watched it after that. When I first moved out to America, I did live on a commune, and the guy there had the controls for the satellite dish. So whatever Victor watched, we used to have to watch. And him and Dervert just watched Next Generation from the minute they woke up to the minute they went to bed. So I used to sort of plug in now and again and watch this Shakespearean actor lording it over a bunch of space people. (Laughter) And we used to think "God, oh, God, Patrick, you could be playing Mistress Quickly at Leatherhead now." (Laughter) As for the onslaught I can't wait. I'm ready. ANTHONY MONTGOMERY: I grew up watching the Original Series. Not a lot of them. Thought it was wonderful and never in my wildest dreams did I think I was going to move to California and be sitting up here talking to you right now. I just came out to do the best job that I could possibly do, and it happened to be on Enterprise. So I'm going to give them everything that I can. And as for the fans, like John said, it's better to have some than to have none. So it's okay. This is the reality that they've grown to love, so I want to give them as much of me in that reality as possible and maintain myself in the meanwhile. LINDA PARK: The first Star Trek was not my first Star Trek. I started with Star Trek: Next Generation, and I loved it. I loved the holodeck. I loved Wesley. He was, like, my first crush, so that kind of kicked it into high gear for me. Later on I started to watch some of the earlier, Captain Kirk episodes, but for me I'll always be a Next Generation fan. That was my first one, so I'm going to stay loyal to that one. And as far as fans go, you know, it's like one of those things. You can try and prepare for it or whatever, but it just gives me a headache thinking about it. So I figure heck, when I have to think about it, I'll think about it, and I'll deal with it then. Until then I'm perfectly happy just being on the show and having lots of fun. CONNOR TRINNEER: Well, I'm older than Linda, so I grew up on the first one. And I was a fan of it where I grew up. My brother who was — still is — really, really smart, had these three or four friends who would watch the show and then walk the perimeter of the playground every day at recess having dialogue about the show, and so I got exposed to some of that fan base really early. So my plan is just to keep moving around, go all over the place. Q: Rick and Brannon, I sensed a certain weariness when talking about the Klingon makeup, and I'm wondering, the fan base being what it is, what are some of the other nitpicky things that tend to come up again and again? BRANNON BRAGA: I can't think of any. You mean the continuity issues that the fans bring up? Q: Yeah, the things that make your day interesting. BRANNON BRAGA: Well, it usually has to do with mistakes we've made in episodes, referring to a room being on a certain deck and accidentally contradicting it later. Those kind of things tend to get irritating because we weren't paying close enough attention so we missed it. But ... we're too busy really to sit down and read all of the Internet mail that comes in about all of the stuff. RICK BERMAN: If we did that, we'd have to hire other people to do the television series. About five years ago we did a feature film called "First Contact," which took place in the 21st century, and it was about an Earth that was in pretty lousy shape. But it was about the first contact with humans and Vulcans and about the first human who managed to achieve warp speed. And we knew that that period, between that guy named Zefram Cochrane and Captain Kirk, there was 200 years where Earth went from this kind of muddy little village in Montana where our film took place to the world of Kirk and Spock. And we have chosen a place kind of halfway in between to sort of create the world of "How did it all begin?" and "What was it like for the people who truly were the first people to go where no man has gone before?" So in terms of being tripped up by fan kind of things, it hasn't really been that much of a problem because we're sort of creating an era that's not yet really been explored. Q: When you move a room from one deck to the other inadvertently, how many e-mails do you get? RICK BERMAN: I remember in the second season of Next Generation we had a phaser beam come out of a photon torpedo port, and we got over 200 letters. And I didn't know the difference. I had no idea which one was which. 200 letters. Q: You mentioned "First Contact." There were rumors of a James Cromwell cameo. RICK BERMAN: That's not a bad rumor. Q: Okay. That's good. You're usually not that forthcoming. (Laughter) Q: One of the great conventions of the '60s series and one of these things you'll have to resolve is, everybody in the universe speaks English. Is there a universal translator at this point in the technology? RICK BERMAN: Part of what's fun for us is, yeah, there are universal translators, but they don't work all that well, and they have a lot of problems and they break a lot. And we have this young lady right over here [Linda Park as Hoshi Sato] who is a brilliant translator who has to step in very often to smooth things over when the translator either doesn't work or works improperly. Q: Mr. Braga and Mr. Berman, can you give us the shorthand for what the world, the Earth, and the universe is like at the time that the series starts? BRANNON BRAGA: You want us to describe the universe? (Laughter) Q: Is it a friendly place? Is it a not-friendly place? BRANNON BRAGA: It's a very terrifying place in that everything is unknown to this crew. Earth is in much better shape than it was in the movie "First Contact," in that poverty, crime, disease, hunger have all been eradicated for the most part, but the Federation has not yet formed. That's a long way off. And Starfleet is very, very young and this crew has met very few alien species since the Vulcans arrived. So really the landscape of the universe is virtually unknown to these people, and they will meet many friendly and also many terrifying aliens. RICK BERMAN: You know, the Picards and even the Kirks of the world, they tended to take meeting alien races for granted. This was their daily work. For these seven, it's a pretty spooky occasion. It's always something that's filled with awe and excitement and a little bit of trepidation and fear because they're really more like any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in a situation where we're about to run into an alien species. It would be a pretty scary thing and certainly not just a day-by-day occurrence the way it would be for a Picard or for a Janeway. Q: Mr. Berman, there have been accounts that the Voyager set was maybe a little bit joyless. Now that that's behind you, did you feel that you really hit the ball with that one in the way you had with the previous ones? And how rejuvenated are you guys getting a brand-new Star Trek series now after coming off that one? RICK BERMAN: Well, I think that it will be a little bit of an overstatement to say that it was a joyless atmosphere on the set of Voyager. I think that with a few minor exceptions, it was a terrific cast and I think we did seven years of some pretty terrific television. One of the things we're excited about this series is after 500 episodes — or more, actually — taking place in the 24th century, moving to another century is very helpful for us. Because Deep Space Nine overlapped with Next Generation, we didn't want that show to take place on a space ship. It took place on a space station. Because Voyager began just as Next Generation was ending, we didn't want to just put another cast of characters on the space ship, so we created an environment where these characters in a sense were lost in space. And for that reason, in a funny way they were heading in the wrong direction; they were trying to get back home rather than going out and exploring. And we knew we wanted to turn the ship around in this next show. We knew we wanted to do a show about people, humans, going out and exploring, but rather than just taking another 24th-century space ship, giving it another name, throwing seven more characters onto it, we decided to go back to a period where it all began, where it was all in its infancy and where people could watch all this stuff develop, and also where our characters could be closer to contemporary characters today and thus, I think, a lot more accessible. These guys wear baseball caps sometimes and they wear jeans and sneakers and they're a lot less kind of perfect human beings than your Jean-Luc Picards. So I think we've found a refreshing new direction to take Star Trek after Voyager. Q: For the cast, are you having trouble with the techno-babble and all the little "Star Trek" moves? CONNOR TRINNEER: Well, sometimes. You don't even know which word it's going to be or which phrase it might be that trips you up for half an hour, but it happens to some of us. DOMINIC KEATING: We're three days behind because of him. He wouldn't know a vented plating from a — CONNOR TRINNEER: — from a vented port. JOHN BILLINGSLEY: We are given a glossary in each script we get that breaks down and gives the appropriate pronunciation of words. Sometimes it's words like "chocolate," though, which is a little insulting, but that's all right. I'm only kidding. That's actually extremely helpful. So you're not plunging for the dictionary all the time. Q: Rick, do you ever sit back and wonder how long this franchise can continue? Seven years from now we'll be looking at a new Star Trek adventure. Do you ever look that far in the future, not only from a creative viewpoint but from the viewpoint of how many viewers out there still have a thirst for this type of entertainment? RICK BERMAN: Well, I think that Star Trek is unique in two important ways. First of all, it's been around for 35 years. It's become part of the American mythos. Everyone knows about Star Trek. You'd be very hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn't know about "Beam me up, Scotty" or warp speed or things like that. I think it's something that's comfortable to people because of its familiarity. And I also think that in a world where there's a lot of science fiction that's quite apocalyptic and negative, Star Trek has always had a hopeful viewpoint of the future. And I think as long as that exists, there's always going to be an interest in it. And obviously we need people who can create good television shows and motion pictures. Q: Scott, this franchise probably more than any other job on television carries with it an almost certainty of a long-term commitment. Can you talk a little bit about the thinking that went into it for you at this stage in your career signing on to something that's almost guaranteed to be five to seven years? SCOTT BAKULA: Well, at this point in my career, one thing I've learned is you never count on anything, so if we get through the first 13 and we're still rolling, I'll be happy... I approached it really as I approach everything. At the end of the day, they put a two-hour script in front of me that I just thought was fantastic and a character that I really wanted to play, and that I thought should it go for a while, there would be room to do a lot of different things with it and there would be a lot of opportunity for this character with the other characters on the ship. So to me it's like a gift that this kind of job exists in this town... It seems all of a good thing. Q: For the producers, there's already been word that LeVar Burton and Roxann Dawson will be directing episodes. Will any other cast members be directing and will there be any carry-over in the writers from the other series as well? RICK BERMAN: The only actor/director right now that we plan on using in the first season is Robbie Duncan McNeill, along with the two that you mentioned, and we do have a few writers from Voyager. Q: Question for the producers. Actually two questions. One, are you back on stages 8, 9, and 16? And also have you had any run-ins with broadcast standards as far as something you'd like to do that you're boldly going a little too far for your network? RICK BERMAN: Go ahead, Brannon. BRANNON BRAGA: No. We're very conscientious about content. We realize it's a show that families watch, so we try to take it easy on blowing up ships with thousands of people, though, quite ironically, that is what we do. But in terms of depicting graphic violence or graphic sensual situations, we're very conscientious. And we're on stages 8, 9, and 18. RICK BERMAN: I would say, though, that we are taking a few steps in the direction of being a little bit more sexually adventurous with the show. There's some pretty sexy stuff that's coming up, and so far nobody's slapped our hands. Q: For the producers, regarding the technology that they will and won't have, we saw the phase pistols, I think they were called, and the transporters being very primitive. Can you address some of the things that fans are familiar with that will or won't be, like the shields and the photon torpedoes? BRANNON BRAGA: Well, we don't have shields. We have something called hull plating. Photon torpedoes don't exist. There's some sort of torpedo that is very much like a high-tech missile. And the list goes on. You know, we do have certain things. We do have a transporter that's just designed for cargo. It's been approved for people, Starfleet has approved it, but nobody wants to use it. They're all nervous about it. RICK BERMAN: There are also a number of things that will be introduced in our first one or two episodes that would be sort of unfair for us to tell you about now because they'll be hopefully surprising when they get introduced in the first two-hour and next couple of episodes after that. Q: Scott, you already touched on this but, for the rest of you, how daunting is the possibility of five, six, seven years of doing a new show? A lot of you are fairly new and this is going to be a long time for you guys. How exciting and daunting is that prospect? ANTHONY MONTGOMERY: It's great, man. Come on. Of course. I mean, I haven't done it as long as Scott, none of us have, so if there's a chance that this is going to go forever, hey, let's ride it forever. RICK BERMAN: They all plan on owning cars by the end of the year. (Laughter) CONNOR TRINNEER: I thought I might never own a home. I was okay with that. That's different now. ANTHONY MONTGOMERY: Yeah, that's changed. Yeah. MODERATOR: We're going to have to stop. We have to get a couple of the cast members back to the set. So thanks so much, everyone, for joining us. from startrek.com.