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Brannon Braga - Star Trek Writer and Producer

How does real science help Star Trek?
  Explain how real science is in writing Star Trek.

It's very important. We've always fancied ourselves as a science based show. If we do imagine something that's somewhat fantastic, we try to back it up with science.

I think all the writers approach stories in slightly different ways, but the way that I've always tried to approach the show is by coming up with a wacky idea. Let's just say, for instance, that the ship gets caught in a repeating loop of time. It's preposterous, it could never happen in the world that we know. But if you make it sound good, using the term 'causality loop,' and throw some interesting terms in that seem to reinforce the idea and support it, suddenly it becomes a little more scientific.

The problem that this creates, of course, is that you can never do a story and not explain what's going on. Unlike The X Files, if we have a ghost, we have to explain the scientific reason there is a ghost. We have to support everything with just a little bit of science.

It is a bit of a noose. I envy The X Files because they can just tell a weird and interesting story and not really have to explain anything, and leave it a bit of a mystery, at the end. Our show's not a mystery show, it's a show about solving mysteries.

Too much science?
  How has the approach to writing this scientific element changed over the course of the franchise?

When I came aboard The Next Generation, my perception was, at least in terms of my own writing, was that we were too technical. We would go out of our way to explain things, or we would create suspense sequences that relied too heavily on technobabble.

What we've tried to do in recent years is really strip that down. I don't think the audience really cares, they just want to see what happens next.

One of the things we're trying to do on Enterprise, the new show, is virtually eradicate the tech as anything other than a spice. The audience likes to hear things about the view screen and the warp plasma injectors, but they don't want tech as plot, and that's what I think we used to do a little too much.

Was technobabble the easy way out?
  Was it a lazy approach to getting out of a bit of a hole?

Sometimes, yeah. If we couldn't figure out how is the crew going to get out of this particular situation, sometimes we would just use technobabble to get them out and, still do, to some degree.

Another challenge we're facing is, ten years ago, on The Next Generation, we were utilising science based concepts that were relatively new to audiences, particularly in the realm of quantum physics, things like alternative universes and time loops. That's old hat now.

The audience has grown more sophisticated in the past decade. There have been several films made about repeating loops of time now. There have been a couple of films made about alternative realities, including Sliding Doors. So, we're exhausting existing scientific theories and are having to start looking elsewhere, and I don't know where that's going to be, that's what scares me.

We need a whole new branch of science to open up to generate story ideas now. Star Trek's done over six hundred hours of television.

Actors and technobabble
  How is the crew of Enterprise adjusting to the technobabble?

Generally actors hate it. It's not fun to learn, it really doesn't mean anything.

I know the actors on Enterprise are - because everything's new - excited when a console explodes, they get all a quiver. They're really jazzed about saying, 'The warp injectors are off-line.'

It won't be long before they're dreading it, because it's not really acting, it's reporting, so it can rather dull.

There are particular actors who struggled.

Do you like writing science fiction?
  How rewarding is it to write for a science fiction series?

I like science fiction because it allows you to explore ideas that you couldn't normally explore on, say, a police show or a hospital show or something like that.

I like action, and Star Trek certainly allows for a lot of interesting, high concept action. Science fiction's a pretty good genre to work in.

I've always thought of Star Trek as an anthology show. We can do any genre and we have over the years done everything from a Western to Medieval times to time travel to romance, we've done every genre of drama, because science fiction allows you to do that, between the holodeck and time travel you can virtually do anything. So, it's been creatively rewarding.

I also do long to write more contemporary characters, because Star Trek is a period piece that just happens to take place in the future.

With Enterprise, we're trying to get more contemporary, we're placing the show closer to today. So, hopefully, we're going to create characters that are a little bit more loose and more fun to write.

What's so great about the new series?
  The freedom of writing for Enterprise.

The main thing, really, is the context of the time, the way people were back then. They're more or less like you and me. In a situation where we discovered aliens - we would probably freak out and our first impulse would be to run the other way if they shot at us.Everything will be very strange. The crew will not have a lot of the protocols and technology that they need to even do something as simple as visiting an alien ship.

Picard and Janeway would just waltz aboard an alien ship or waltz down to an alien world wearing than spandex suits, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. We're going to have to wear space suits, we're going to have to go through strange decompression chambers to get aboard alien ships. We're going to have to really struggle to make the kinds of discoveries that the other crew makes. Everything will have a slightly different feeling to it.

On the new show, we have a character who's a linguist, because the universal translator only works sporadically. We're immersing ourselves in linguistics now, to try to create new alien languages.

Will Enterprise be funnier?
  Are there more opportunities for humour in this new series?

Oh, definitely. We want this show to be much funnier.They're not quite as buttoned up as the Captain Picard crew. We have a linguist who doesn't like travelling through space, for instance, and is a white knuckle flier. Loves alien languages but really doesn't like going at warp speeds and hates, just like you or I would hate flying, she hates flying. She really doesn't want to be on a spaceship at all. But it's part of her job.

There are a lot of little eccentric, more neurotic character dimensions to this show.

The premise of Enterprise
  What will Enterprise be about?

The new show takes place about a hundred years before Captain Kirk, about ninety years after the events that took place in the movie, First Contact.

It's really about the first crew aboard the first starship, which is called Enterprise. The premiss is really quite simple - no one's ever gone into Deep Space before. T

The Star Fleet is fifteen years old, there's no Federation, the Vulcans have stuck around Earth and have been overseeing humanity since the events in the movie, First Contact. But they've also been kind of withholding information and holding us back, so we're very resentful towards the Vulcans, and they don't think we're ready to go out in space, they think we're rash and impulsive and illogical.

The Vulcans are kind of antagonistic. But, of course, a Vulcan ends up being put on to Enterprise to oversee our progress, much to Captain Archer's dismay. So, the story of this show is really a story of humanity's first steps into the stars, but also it's a story about a deeper understanding forging between humans and Vulcans. It's a little bit about prejudice on that level, we think, it may evolve that way, I don't know at this point.

Not only is this the first crew to go out there, and not only will their reactions be extremely fresh, they've never seen any of these things before, and they have no protocols to deal with and no prime directives, no nothing, these are also humans that have not quite reached the Roddenberry ideal, so they have ways to go just in terms of proving that they're ready and feeling their way, not only through space but through their own morality.

What did you think of Voyager?
  Why do you think it took a while for Voyager to take off?

Well, Voyager started great, the pilot got gigantic ratings, gigantic. And I think the reason that it tapered off was there was, in my opinion, too much Star Trek.

You had Deep Space 9 and Voyager on at the same time, you had two of the same show, and it's like ER and ERII. You're going to split your audience.

I also think that maybe Voyager took a while to find its voice. It promised new, exciting aliens, but, I'll take as much blame for this as anyone, I think we weren't creating aliens that were good enough, we weren't creating situations that were fresh enough, it kind of felt like New Generation.

We hadn't found a way to give Voyager a stamp that said, 'This is different.' Yes, it's a female captain, which I think was a great thing to do, but, in the end, they've got to have really cool stories. And whether she's a man or woman or a chimpanzee, doesn't really matter.

In my opinion, Voyager didn't really ignite till we put the Borg in it, and then that's really when, I think, that people said, 'OK, here's a big, fat exciting action show with the Borg in it, now I see what Voyager can do.' But that's just my opinion.

Seven of Nine: one more strong woman
  Were you worried about too many strong women on Voyager?

I had a midnight idea that we should put a Borg on the show as a character. And Rick Berman said, 'Make it a babe.'

What if it was a striking, amazing looking Borg woman. And thinking back to the popularity of the Borg Queen, we thought, this could be a really cool character.

It certainly never occurred to me that, 'uh-oh, another woman, what's the audience going to think?'. We just did it.

We knew that we wanted this very special dynamic with Janeway, we knew that Janeway kind of needed her Data or her Spock, and we knew that Seven of Nine could be that. It wasn't until later that we realised, that, how female oriented the show was becoming.

If you think about it - the doctor was very effeminate, I mean, he had no genitals, he was a hologram. Tuvak has no emotions, Kim's a young boy. There wasn't a lot of testosterone flying through that show at all. And who is the arch villain of the piece? The Borg Queen. And we had this other character named Seska, it was like all women, all the time. But that's it's Star Trek and I don't think you have to worry that much about gender issues on Star Trek.

Seven of Nine's appeal
  What was great about Seven of Nine?

What was great about Seven of Nine was that she was both innocent and corrupt.

She was a Data or Spock-like character, in that she had the innocence, but she was also deeply corrupt, she was a mass murderer as well.

She was a character who was deeply human but had no moral compass, 'cos she was raised by wolves. So, I think that made her extra interesting.

It was an instant success. We had a backlash initially, when the photographs came out of Jeri Ryan, a lot of people accused [us] of turning Star Trek into Baywatch. But then, I think, once they saw the character developed, and they saw that Jeri Ryan was a terrific actress, they started to look past the Las Vegas-like costume, they saw there was a real character there, and that all went away and she was very successful.

Sympathy for aliens?
  A lot of the aliens are uncomfortable.

It's surprising how elegant Seven of Nine is, given how uncomfortable she was.

She still has neck problems, I'm sure she will for quite some time. That costume was a nightmare for her.

A lot of these alien costumes make it difficult to go to the bathroom. But, you know, they're actors, they're getting paid, that's their problem.

You have no sympathy?

I can go to the bathroom any time I want.

Why is Star Trek so popular?
  What's made Star Trek endure so long?

Working in Star Trek, my number one concern is, is it going to be popular tomorrow? That's why we're always striving so hard to make the show as great.Why has it endured this long? It is the fact that it's good science fiction, and people like science fiction. There's a certain level of quality in the writing and the production values, that you know you'll get with Star Trek.

It depicts a positive vision of the future, which is not very common in science fiction. A lot of science fiction's very apocalyptic and grim, but Star Trek is something that you could share with your kids. People like tuning in to something that's a little reassuring to them. It's a universe that they know and understand and appreciate, so they go back to it.