Braga Discusses The Original Idea Behind ‘Enterprise’
The recent edition of SFX Magazine features a pretty big interview with former Star Trek: Enterprise and Voyager showrunner Brannon Braga, who speaks candidly about what he and Rick Berman hoped to present to viewers when making the short lived series.
When it came to developing Enterprise, both Braga and Berman wanted the series to be a little more darker than it ended up.
“Rick Berman and I had a little bit more of a raw conception of Enterprise than maybe the studio was comfortable with. It was actually set on Earth for a while – the building of the first starship, kind of like JJ’s. We wanted to do the launch of the first starship and take it maybe a little bit more retro, and we initially didn’t have the futuristic temporal cold war aspect of it.
“The studio was a little nervous about the prequel concept and they felt that Star Trek should be going forward, not backward. So we introduced this recurring element of a Star Trek far beyond Kirk’s time, or even Picard’s time, to satisfy their concerns, which I thought was interesting. But initially our concept of Enterprise was really raw and basic and ‘prequelly.’ I’m not saying it would’ve been better but it would’ve been a little bit different. It’s a collaboration – it’s a collaboration – it’s their franchise, it’s their money. We did the best we could to accommodate their notes.”
Braga who has been massively criticized by the fandom also talked a little about Star Trek: Voyager, and specifically how that series finale may have been improved upon if he was able to go back and redo it.
“It was my feeling that Seven Of Nine should have died. If you watch the episode ‘Human Error’ written by Andre Bormanis, it was not only a heart breaking episode in that Seven Of Nine learns, as she begins to explore her human emotions, that she can’t experience them. There’s a Borg chip inside her that will kill her if she tries to do so. First of all, that’s kind of an interesting ‘rape victim’ analogy or whatever you want to call it, about a damaged woman who can’t get past what happened to her, but I also always saw it as a crucial episode that would set up the finale.
“This was a woman who knew she was neither here nor there. She couldn’t go back to the Borg, nor would she want to, but she could never be fully human, so she was doomed. And I wanted to have her sacrifice herself to get her shipmates home.”
The complete version of this interview in which Braga also talks about receiving death threats after killing Captain Kirk in Generations can be read in issue 199 of SFX Magazine, which is out now.
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Comments (4)
Obviously some of us may have been a bit too harsh on Berman and Braga. DS9 was so great because Ira Behr stewarded and excellent team of writers and gave them free reign to really challenge mainstream conceptions about human nature that resonate even more in the post-9/11 world: identity politics; opponents (the Dominion) who aren’t evil, but like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Israel, take defense concerns to such an extreme so as to embark on aggression, ethnic cleansing, and colonization; the exploration of occupation; and the causes of terrorism.
However, the end of TNG and Voyager and Enterprise and the Next Gen films may also have been far worse than DS9 because Paramount restricted things so much in these areas in which it placed so much focus; Paramount didn’t care about DS9, so it could breathe and become the greatest Trek and one of the greatest Sci Fi series of all time.
Now, Paramount has proven its shallowness again by giving Abrams a massive budget and all the power needed to explore the most cliche formula of story-telling in the Trek universe. Without any interest in the political issues facing our world and without even any interest in anything resembling dramatic realism, Abrams is empowered to turn Star Trek into a dumb Star Wars in all its shock and awe superficiality.
Paramount is the real enemy!
Agreeing with Muldfeld here. On the face of what Braga’s saying there, he had the right idea. And when Enterprise was gritty and low-tech, it worked. That was the soul and the promise of the show.
However, the ending of Enterprise was dreadful, and I seem to remember him or Rick Berman championing it as “a love-letter to the fans” or some such nonsense. *That* I’d like explaining before it’s hugs all round.
That was Rick Berman.
I remember that quote, because I transcribed that particular quote from the interview he did for Star Trek Magazine way back then.
I long felt that Enterprise missed the boat by not having a rougher feel.
Instead of feeling post-First COntact, it felt like pre TNG