2004 - July

Starburst Special

Issue # 64

GOOD LIEUTENANT

In his most up-to-the-minute interview, Dominic Keating, Enterprise's Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, talks about the show and its recent rescue from the brink of cancellation. Interview by Ian Spelling.

For a time, perhaps no one on the Star Trek front sweated the fate of Enterprise more than Dominic Keating. As Season One gave way to Season Two he became an inveterate rating watcher. The actor, who plays Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, scanned the trades regularly and had faxes with the overnight ratings shipped directly to him, and he scrutinized every word, every number, searching desperately for any good news, any uptick in Enterprise's scores. Often the news wasn't good. By Season Three things had gotten fairly ugly. Despite a much publicized overhaul Enterprise seemed stuck in neutral; it was holding steady, but a few episodes dipped to new lows. And so, as the weeks turned into months, the Grim Reaper loomed large and the legendary Star Trek franchise flirted with extinction, for UPN - which had already trimmed the third season order from 26 to 24 - looked as likely to cancel Star Trek as it did to renew it. Finally, in May, shortly before the season finale aired, UPN confirmed that it had indeed renewed Enterprise.

And in England, Keating breathed a sigh of relief. "I was in London," Keating explains, "And I heard about it the morning it was announced at the upfronts in New York City. There had been so many rumours on the set. Everybody had a story and everybody had a theory. But we didn't know for sure until the network made their announcement in May. I was very pleased. Towards the last 100 metres of it I think I was not surprised. I think when the 11th hour really came and D-Day approached it just seemed so ridiculous that they would cut their losses at this point in the game. The fourth year is a syndication year and they've invested a lot of money into the show already, and why would they cut now? So I figured that there would be some meetings at the time echelons and they'd resolve whatever differences they had and get on with it."

Still, it couldn't have been fun or easy to drive to Paramount every day, slip on his Starfleet uniform and play space hero knowing full well that he and the rest of the cast and crew were, in a sense, going in the out door. In other words, they were realizing a drastically improved show - and a reader poll in USA Today even named Enterprise the series most deserving of a reprieve - but it didn't seem to make any difference. "Five or Six months ago, at the two-thirds mark of Season Three, there was a point where we were looking at each other, wondering what was happening." Keating acknowledges. "It became kind of foreboding going to work at that time. And then I just thought ' This won't do'. I wanted to enjoy what I was doing, in the moment, even if it was going to be the last season. So I just let go and figures, 'Whatever will be, will be'. It was out of my hands. I really let go."

Truth be told, Season Three of Enterprise was good entertaining stuff. Following up on the Xindi attack on Earth that closed out Season Two, year three was essentially a 24-episode arc devoted to preventing the Xindi from finishing the job. That meant transversing the Delphic Expanse, reluctantly accepting the presence of the MACO soldiers aboard the ship, and dealing with dual threats, the assorted Xindi species and the Sphere-Builders. Along the way, Archer (Scott Bakula) got a backbone, Trip (Connor Trinneer) and T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) got romantic and Malcolm got some juicy action. And it all climaxed with Zero Hour , a wild finale that tied up most of the loose ends that closed with an outlandish last twist involving alien Nazis.

"I liked what we did while we were doing it, but I haven't seen a lot of the episodes this season, to be honest with you," Keating says. "I certainly haven't seen Zero Hour because I've been away.. I've been in England and they're behind quite a bit. But overall I was very pleased with the season. It was a great move to make it an arc. I think that they'll do something like that again in season four, though I'm hearing the arcs will be shorter. But I got given quite a lot to do because of the Xindi arc, because we had the MACO's on the ship. It was a very heavily action-adventure packed season and as the tactical officer I sort of became the action man. I enjoyed a lot of the B-stories I got to do. I got some good episodes.

"Harbinger , I thought, was a terrific episode all-round. I thought that the dynamic they'd set up between me and Major Hayes (Steven Culp) really found its feet as it were, and came to a real dramatic impact. It was a very character-driven episode for Malcolm, and I had a lot of time with the camera just watching his reaction to things around him and internalizing it. And I was happy with my performance. And the big fight scene was pretty special. I'd never done any fighting of that type before. We rehearsed for about four hours the day before and then it took a day and a half to shoot it. think we nailed it. I quite like the episode with the Andorians, with that big Andorian bird. Big Mol we called her. And it was quite nice to see Malcolm properly flirting with a woman. It was a good year for Malcolm. It would have been nice if they threw me one episode that was entirely mine, that was the A-story, but it didn't seem to fit into the arc.

"Overall, I thought they did a nice job of developing the relationships, " Keating adds. "It's always a nice experience, working with Connor, and they got a little bit more into the friendship between Trip and Malcolm. I thought the relationship that Scott and I had as Archer and Malcolm got a good tempo going for it. We had some nice caught moments, where even though we weren't saying alot to each other, there were looks of understanding. The season finale had some good examples of that, actually."

And what about Zero Hour ?

"Alien Nazis!" Keating says with a laugh. "Apparently, it worked. My girlfriend called me and said it was a great episode and that the ending was just a weird twist to cap it all off. And she said I was heroic in it. So that's all I heard. They kept that ending very secret. I never read it because I wasn't going to be in it."

Looking ahead to season four, Keating explains that just as the Xindi arc pressed him into action hero mode, how Reed evolves in season four will depend heavily on the direction the show takes. And no one knows yet where precisely Enterprise is boldly going. "I doff my hat to these guys," Keating says, referring to executive producers Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Manny Coto and the writing staff. "They've got about five weeks to figure out the first three episodes of Season Four. But if I was going to pop into a writers' meeting, it would be very interesting to explore a darker side of Malcolm. He's remained a relatively enigmatic and multi layered amongst the characters on the show, and I think he's got so many possibilities and so much mileage to go into hitherto uncharted territory of his persona.

"I think it could be quite interesting to see some kind of Laurence Harvey-esque tortured side to him. I thought of an idea for a Manchurian Candidate - like episode, but they said they'd done something like that before. But I thought that maybe the Xindi could have gotten hold of him and sent him back to the ship, and to see the battle going on with him would have been interesting to me. Some sort of internal struggle would be interesting to see"," Keating concludes. "I think he's got something there that they could capitalize on."

PUBLICITY DRIVE?

Rick Berman and Brannon Braga will still be in place as executive producers when Star Trek: Enterprise returns for its fourth season, but they'll be devoting a chunk of their time to developing two new shows for Paramount and thus tapping Manny Coto to handle more of the day-to-day production tasks. Keating likes the idea of a fresh voice, a fresh vision taking a crack at Enterprise. "I think Manny is going to step up and I think he's going to engineer a really extraordinary season," Keating says. "I think everything is in place, the crew, the cast. We've really hit our stride. If they show up with the episodes on the paper we're not going to screw up the shooting of them. I have a feeling that we'll go the whole hog. I'll tell you what would be nice: if they just did some publicity. I don't know if I'm speaking out of turn here, but I never hear a radio commercial, I never see a commercial on another station, I don't even see a billboard or a bus advert, nothing. They don't even have it on the building at Paramount right now. So what do they expect for the numbers? You can only go to the well, without telling where the well is, so many times. You've got to show people where the well is. You've got to keep it well-lit. But I'm hopeful the switch to Fridays and the new time will help. We'll certainly keep the core audience and I hope we'll garner enough of a passing or new viewership on Friday nights to give (the network and studio) the extra one or two points they want in order to feel comfortable putting it on."

BREAKING CONVENTIONS

Some actors use their off-seasons to squeeze in a small role in a film or shoot a TV movie, but Keating didn't do that in his time between finishing season three of Enterprise and starting year four. Instead, he travelled extensively and put in appearances at a few Star Trek conventions. "I'm in London now and just got off stage following a convention," Keating said. "It was great fun. People here seem to be loving the show, and it was good to get the reaction in person. My girlfriend gets to town tomorrow morning and then we fly out to Brussels to see my uncle and aunt. Then we're off to Dublin and then on to the east coast to go and visit all of my father's family, who I reconnected with a year ago. Then we get back to London. I was going to come back to L.A., because I thought we were going to start work at the end of June. But they pushed back the start date to July 15. So my girlfriend and her girlfriend had a little trip round Paris, Rome, Venice and Florence planned. So I'm going to tag along with that. And then we'll fly back to L.A., around the fifth of July. I will have been away for over two months. I've been enjoying it, but there comes a certain point where I wouldn't mind my own bed. I know where everything in my house is. And I wouldn't mind getting back to work, either."