Former isle designer
helps ‘Enterprise’
get underway
Michael Okuda takes 'Star Trek'
history back to its beginnings"Star Trek: Enterprise": Airs at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on KFVE, repeating 9 p.m. Sundays.
By Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.com"It's been a long road/getting from there to here."Those are the opening lyrics to "Faith of the Heart," pop song-meister Diane Warren's title theme as sung by tenor sensation Russell Watson for "Star Trek: Enterprise," which debuted last Wednesday on UPN."I love the main titles of 'Enterprise,'" said Michael Okuda, longtime scenic art supervisor and technical consultant for the "Star Trek" franchise, from "The Next Generation" series on, a "local boy made good."
He aptly describes the "Enterprise" opening title sequence as "a celebration of the spirit of exploration throughout history.
"We see the ancient Polynesians, who challenged the vast Pacific, to the Wright brothers, to Chuck Yeager's supersonic flight to Neil Armstrong's giant leap on the surface of the moon. And we see the construction of the International Space Station Alpha, which we hope is the beginning of humanity's permanent habitation of space," he said.
Finding time in his busy schedule for a phone/e-mail interview, Okuda and the rest of the production staff must have been relieved when, after the previous "Star Trek" series, "Voyager," wrapped up its six-year "mission," executive producers Rick Berman and Shannon Braga were able to get the Paramount studio to pony up a big budget for yet another trip to the stars.
If the season premiere of "Enterprise" was any indication of future episodes, this will be a series that will appeal to both original and longtime fans of the sci-fi series. The show pulled in 12.5 million viewers last Wednesday, toppling its major-network competition that night and scoring UPN's biggest audience since the debut of "Star Trek: Voyager" in January 1995.
This "Enterprise" is set up to be the prequel to the original "Star Trek" series of 1966-69. It takes place in a time much closer to ours, the year 2161, according to a stardate log dictated by Capt. Jonathan Archer.
As the season opener, "Broken Bow," establishes, the Federation is in its relative infancy, not yet sending its fleet on extended exploratory forays deep into space. The Vulcans have a strained and rather patronizing political relationship with humans, suspected of withholding scientific information, due to our emotional ineptitude, that could have furthered our technological advancement.
The first mission of this early Enterprise is to take an intercepted Klingon courier back to his warrior people, which the Federation is still learning about. But there is intrigue afoot as a newly introduced alien race, the Suliban, may be fomenting what they call "a temporal Cold War" for reasons yet to be revealed.
OK, enough of that. The real questions that we must address are "Will I like this cast of characters?" and "What does this old/new Enterprise look like?"
Scott Bakula makes an appealing return as a lead actor in a TV sci-fi series, building on a résumé that began with "Quantum Leap." His role as Capt. Archer should be one where his character will establish protocol in dealing with both his crew and alien life forms -- and, hopefully, without the womanizing ways of the ship's "future" captain, James Kirk.
Speaking of women, Jolene Blalock as Vulcan science officer and sub-commander T'Pol follows Jeri Ryan's "Voyager" character Seven of Nine as a bombshell playing a logic-driven alien. Blalock, also featured in the latest issue of Maxim magazine, served as a generous bit of eye candy in the premiere.
In a steamy scene, a stripped-down T'Pol and the ship's chief engineer, Charlie Tucker (Connor Trinneer), were rubbing some kind of antibacterial gel on each other in a decontamination bay. There seems to have been some important story exposition going on in their dialogue, but, funny, nobody seems to remember it!
Two other memorable characters from the "Enterprise" premiere are the kindly, good-natured Cardassian medical officer Dr. Phlox (John Billingsley) and the ship's feisty ensign Hoshi Sato (Linda Park, who also plays a linguist, there being no "universal translator" invented yet to instantly translate alien languages into English).
"The cast is a delight to work with," Okuda said. "Scott Bakula brings both professionalism and fun to his part, and many fans already seem to regard (his Archer) as the best starship captain since James Kirk."
Okuda attended a special cast and crew screening on the Paramount studio lot in Los Angeles on Sept. 20, and "my initial reaction was that it was delightful to see the finished product on screen.
"It's one thing to build and design the sets, but through the magic of filmmaking, the actors, photography, editing and music bring it to life, bringing out things you don't see if you just stand on the set."
Okuda said the ship's "archaic" design is deliberate. "Both of the executive producers and the production designer met early on and went to a naval base and visited a nuclear submarine, to get a sense of the technology. My staff and I also watched videos of the International Space Station and space shuttles for the sense of aerospace travel."
The one advantage Okuda has had over the charmingly dated, pseudo-technical design of the original is the sophistication of quickly developing technology he's been able to work into the sci-fi franchise for 14 years now.
"For one thing, we know a great deal more about real spaceships than Matt Jefferies (art director on the original 'Star Trek') knew back in 1966, when 'Star Trek' first aired. Since then we've been to the moon, flown over a hundred space shuttle missions and built a couple of space stations.
"We wanted our 'new' Enterprise to look like it had a grounding in real space hardware, even if that technology is over a century beyond what we have today," he said.
The NX-01 Enterprise has a burnished gray, metallic surface, equipped with "primitive" weaponry, a "bio-transporter" used for loading purposes and not for beaming crew members back and forth from planet surfaces (just yet, anyway), and can reach a ultimate velocity of "only" warp factor 4.5.
While the interior ship sets are made of common plywood, plastics, nails and metal, Okuda said that "the skill of our designers and set construction people is such that, on screen, it really looks like it's made of exotic alloys and advanced composites. At least, I think it does.
"This vessel has early versions of many kinds of familiar 'Star Trek' equipment. Some of it isn't as advanced as what we've seen in the other incarnations of 'Star Trek.' ... The ship has torpedoes, but they're not the amazing photon torpedoes of Kirk's and Picard's ships. Archer's Enterprise has torpedoes that look more like present-day cruise missiles."
Okuda's boss, production designer Herman Zimmerman, wanted the ship's bridge to look like something that might have been the predecessor of the one on Kirk's Enterprise.
"If you look at the overall shape of the bridge, as well as the consoles around (it), you'll see that Herman made a conscious effort to incorporate elements of Jefferies' design. In my own area of work, that of the graphics and controls on the ship, I tried to make the readouts on the computer screens a blending of present-day Macintosh/Windows, with a bit of the colorful 'blinkie' patterns from Kirk's ship."
As the original run of "Star Trek" came at the height of the Vietnam War activity and protests in this country, "Star Trek: Enterprise" has inadvertently debuted during what may be a frighteningly turbulent time for the world (the cast and crew screening fell on the same night President Bush gave his stirring speech to the nation in the halls of Congress).
But Okuda remains optimistic for the resilience of the human spirit.
"I think that 'Enterprise' is a celebration of the human desire to explore and to see what wonders are out there in the universe. Anyone who's seen the Mars Pathfinder photos of the surface of Mars has wondered what's over the next hill.
"'Star Trek' reminds us that if we work together and put our differences aside, we can literally reach the stars. The horrific events of September 11th remind us of how important this is."
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