It's hot, it's sexy, it's kinda funny. Would you believe it's STAR TREK? Hop on board and we'll show you how ENTERPRISE is shaking up the sci-fi universe.
"Before the spark hits the wall, you might want to take a few steps back so you don't get flying debris in your eyes."
That's the friendly advice a reporter gets as he steps onto Stage 18 of L.A.'s Paramount lot, home to UPN's new Star Trek prequel, Enterprise. Several cast members--Scott Bakula (gung-ho Capt. Jonathan Archer), Jolene Blalock (icy Vulcan science officer T'Pol), Dominic Keating (uptight tactical officer Malcolm Reed), and John Billingsley (eccentric Dr. Phlox)--are rehearsing a scene in which they're trapped in a smoky cargo bay, engaged in a futuristic gunfight.
"Okay, so it's spark, spark, and duck behind here," explains director LeVar Burton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame), mimicking the action. The room quiets, the actors take their marks, and . . . inaction!
"I thought we decided that 'stun' doesn't spark," says Bakula. "But we sparked here. So what does 'stun' do?" Given that this is unfamiliar technology to the gang, a discussion about phase-pistol emissions ensues. "Well," Keating finally suggests with furrowed brow, "I think it gets rid of unwanted hair."
And if the last few weeks are any indication, it can also lift a straggling network out of the intergalactic crapper. The Sept. 26 debut of Enterprise--the fifth Star Trek series in 35 years--was a space ace in the hole, beaming up a stellar 12.5 million viewers. How earth-shattering an event was that for UPN? Let's just say there were slightly more uncorked champagne bottles lying around than after the premiere of Homeboys in Outer Space. In fact, you'd have to time-warp back to 1995--for the unveiling of Star Trek: Voyager--to see numbers bubblier than that. "It's a reenergizing of the franchise," proclaims UPN chief Dean Valentine. "The battery power was still there and it was working fine, but this completely turbocharged it."
Even juicier than the ratings, though, is the prospect that Enterprise could actually shape-shift the aging Trek franchise into a more mainstream success (currently, Enterprise is the season's top-rated freshman drama among 18- to 49-year-olds), pulling in the kind of folks who don't own Federation-issue bedsheets. It's far from coincidence that the Trek overlords decided to drop two of the most hallowed words in sci-fi from the show's title. "I didn't want this to be Star Trek: The Next Thing," sums up Enterprise co-creator Rick Berman. "I wasn't going to just create another spaceship and put another crew on it. I couldn't do it. I knew the fans had enough, and I knew that we all had enough. We had to do something dramatically different in as many ways as possible." Just how different? Let us count those ways:
It takes a quantum leap away from Trek geek-ology.
Are you the kind of person who thinks the words Star Trek sound more intimidating than a Limp Bizkit mosh pit? Before you run screaming from the galaxy (or at least this article), there's a guy sitting in the captain's chair who has a few words of encouragement for you. "It's me! There's a familiar face here!" says Bakula, 47, who is personally offering to ease you into the series. "It's like, 'Well, Scott will hold our hand. Come on, it's Noah! Everybody get on the ark and we're going to be fine.'" The Trek producers were certainly quick to jump on Bakula's bandwagon--though they insist the idea of helming the ship with an established TV star (Bakula anchored NBC's 1989-93 time-tripping drama Quantum Leap) was not the motivating factor. "I was looking for somebody who had that kind of Sam Shepard, Right Stuff quality and Han Solo fly-boy quality," Berman explains. "If you take those two images and marry them together, you get something that's pretty damn close to Scott Bakula. And he's got that boyish charm. You'd be hard-pressed to find a woman who didn't find him attractive."
It certainly didn't take long for the cast--which also includes enthusiastic ensign Travis Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), jittery translator Hoshi Sato (Linda Park), and naive engineer Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer)--to warm up to their new leader. "We had three days in which we had to wear these [40-pound-plus] space suits," recounts Billingsley. "On the last shot of the third day, he's got to run, turn around, and fire his pistol. We finish. 'That's a wrap, great, everybody go home.' And Scott says, 'Wait a second--I think I can draw it from my holster a little more smoothly.' And I'm like, 'I'm going to kill you,' but the bigger part of me was like, 'That is the captain.'"
And this new captain promises not to steer you straight into a fearsome black hole of complex Trek mythology. Remember, this show is a prequel, taking place more than a century before Kirk & Co. blasted off. "I keep telling everybody that you don't need to know anything," says Bakula. "Star Trek can be daunting in that it's 35 years and it's the history of this and that. And now we're starting from scratch. You don't need to have this big dictionary to back up everything happening on the screen." (That goes for the actors, too: "Word is there's a [Trek] bible out there," shrugs Trinneer. "I've never seen it.") While the show's scribes are busy inventing history, they're also taking this opportunity to excise some of those famously unwieldy jargon-littered expositions. "We're trying to scale it back by 80 percent," says Enterprise cocreator Brannon Braga, a veteran Trek writer-producer. "What I don't want to do is rely on technobabble to solve a problem. You can't let a plot denouement involve strange terms that no one understands. It's not interesting and it's not satisfying. Hopefully, people will be talking more normally."
So that would explain the sudden emergence of phrases like "son of a bitch" and "knock you on your ass" in the normally hyper-sanitary franchise. "[It makes] the show seem more realistic," says Braga. "Some people were offended by the expletives, though they were very tame by most standards." Die-hard fans were also miffed by Enterprise's opening theme music, "Faith of the Heart," which forgoes a sweeping orchestral score for a schmaltzy pop tune with--gasp!--lyrics. "I wouldn't approve of this soft-rock garbage for a family sitcom 10 years ago," huffed one Trek message board post, "much less for a new 2001 ST series." Well, at least the nitpickiness of the fans hasn't changed.
It's sexier (as in, Is that a photon torpedo in your space pants or are you just happy to see me?).
If you were to compile a list of adjectives to describe recent Star Treks, sexy would get a stiff neck from looking all the way up at gear-heady, socially responsible, and antiseptic. But Enterprise's premiere episode revealed that producers had slipped a few Viagra pills into the ol' warp drive: Witness a scene featuring butterfly-eating identical-twin alien babes (wearing nothing but latex paint!). Stick your eyeballs back in their sockets after a skin-heavy decontamination chamber liaison between Trip and T'Pol. ("I had to shave my chest and all that stuff," admits Trinneer. "Never done that before.") And holy holodeck--why are we seeing the captain unwinding in his quarters...in his underpants? (Maybe it's for the same reason that an Enterprise story idea board hanging in Braga's office contains the term Tri-sexuals.) "We learned from Seven of Nine that Star Trek could use a little sensuality," says Braga, referencing Jeri Ryan's Borg-turned-babe whom Voyager introduced in season 3. "I wouldn't say sex per se. It's not like the crew is going to be off boffing one another. But sensuality? You'd better believe it."
Oh, we're believers. For those of you who've been living in another solar system, Enterprise has scored another Seven of Nine (actually, some say she's even closer to their idea of a perfect 10). Introducing Jolene Blalock, a 26-year-old
model-turned-actress who's already transformed the austere T'Pol into the best-looking Vulcan this space quadrant has ever witnessed. An old-school Trek devotee--"Spock was so cool," she coos--Blalock turned down two requests to try on the pointy ears and bowl-cut wig before finally agreeing to audition. "I thought it was going to be just another Deep Space Nine or Voyager or something along those lines," explains Blalock, whose previous credits include appearances on CSI and JAG. "My agent sat me down, we had a little powwow, and he said, 'You know what? I suggest you read the script.' And I took it home, I got the premise, found out it was a prequel, found out she was a Vulcan, and was sold." The third time was apparently the charm for the producers as well. "She's obviously very beautiful," says Braga, "but she had an otherwordly quality when she came in to read. She seemed kind of...alien. She had very interesting eyes. It was weird. Beautiful, but kind of odd. That's what you look for in an alien."
And--quelle coincidence!--she happens to fit quite nicely into that catsuit. ("What could be more comfortable--it's like long johns," she says. "I'm not going to say leotards, because that would be a fashion faux pas.") She's also not too shabby at executing that whole Vulcan neck pinch thing (which this reporter bravely experienced firsthand). "Jolene's really good--she's not just eye candy," observes Keating. "She's quite aware that she'll probably be the breakout star of the show." She's already one of the most ogled women on the Internet. "I have no control over that," she says. "Physicality is physicality and I can only use it to empower me. I am woman. I can't hide that." Fair enough, Jolene, but are you prepared to fend off that legion of Trekkers whose phasers are already set to hot-and-bothered? "My people made me change my phone number and my address," she says with a nervous laugh.
It's not alien to human nature. (Yes, this time their uniforms even have pockets.)
Before Trek mastermind Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, he issued an edict barring conflict between earthlings in his series. It was a noble move, a precious hope that we could evolve past petty emotions. It was also a
friggin' storytelling nightmare. Without that essential drama, Trek at times became sterile, strained, almost too enlightened. "We were getting ourselves into the cookie-cutter Starfleet-perfect human being format a little too much," says Berman. "I wanted characters who would react in the same way you or I would." Hello ingenious solution: By positioning Enterprise just 150 years in the future, rather than in the 24th century, the Trek producers were able to bypass those restrictions and craft an utterly fallible crew of green (as in inexperienced, not Martian) space pioneers who are both thrilled and chilled by the prospect of meeting alien races. "There's a great romance to the first explorers going out there," says
Bakula. "It's exciting, it's frightening, it's awe-inspiring. It's not 'been there, done that.' It's much more about what's around the corner, that curiosity."
Turns out what's around that corner is refreshingly relatable territory for early-21st-century humanoids. The crew frequently references places like San Francisco and Oklahoma. When Trip disembarks on a strange planet, he brings his camera along to capture any freaky critters. Uniforms are modern-looking NASA jumpsuits as opposed to tight spandex. And the characters themselves are cut from a more familiar cloth, especially Archer. "He's closer to Kirk than the others," notes
Bakula. "He bleeds. He gets hurt, he makes mistakes, and he gets dirty. And he's in there, mixing it up.... The captains on the other ships, they've been there; they've traveled. But it's a new thing for us. The first Klingon we see, I look at his feet because it's like, 'What is that thing growing out of the top of his foot?'"
"We have no space etiquette," adds Keating. "I guess the show is less PC. It's not quite so liberal bleeding heart, you know, walk in peace. We're not going into outer space with a complete Gandhi-loincloth approach. We'll fire first. Just this afternoon [while filming], I fired first. We don't wait to be hit upon. You look at me funny and I'm gonna f--- you up."
Don't worry, these guys exhibit a softer side as well. For example, they've even brought a cuddly beagle named Porthos along for the ride! "I loved that," says
Bakula. "Whatever you think of this Star Trek, it breaks the mold. Throw a dog on there, you couldn't have a more human thing going on.... And he's the cutest dog in the
wor-- I guess you could say in the entire galaxy." He might want to be careful about how much screen time the little pooch gets, however. "When I talked to my folks the night [of the debut]," says
Trinneer, "they said, 'The dog's a hit.' And I said, 'What do you mean, the dog's a hit?'" He shakes his head. "Everybody loves the dog."
It's actually funny...on purpose.
Did you hear the one about the rabbi, the Tribble, and the Klingon? No, you didn't. That's because Trek has traditionally boasted about as many yuks as The Weather Channel. "We're trying to make the show funnier out of the gate," says Braga. "The way we approached humor in the past, we would occasionally do the funny episode. But there was always kind of a visceral feeling that the show was not inherently humorous. It was very serious, a somewhat brooding kind of thing. We wanted to create a show that would have organic humor every single week, humor that didn't feel forced." To that end, keep an eye on Trip, a sarcastic dude from the Florida Keys who's a gifted engineer but a high-level fish-out-of-water when it comes to interspecies relations. "I don't think I would have been cast on Voyager," notes
Trinneer. "I was talking to somebody at the beginning of this series and they said, 'How's it going?' And I said, 'I think the tone's a little different, because if it's not, I'm going to suck.'" Chuckles Berman: "My favorite line--the shuttle craft lands, and as the dog runs out of the craft into the woods, Trip looks up and goes, 'Where no dog has gone before.' And the dog is running right for a tree." Granted, it's not quite
Seinfeld--nor should it try to be--but, c'mon, if you can't laugh at deep-space dog wee-wee, what can you laugh at?
© Entertainment Weekly (Time Inc.)