Beam us back in time, Scotty!

There's a new old captain of the Enterprise

October 12, 2001

By Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, from eonline.com.


From the moment he burst on the scene, making cutting remarks to emissaries from planet Vulcan in the two-hour pilot for UPN's new Enterprise, it was clear Captain Jonathan Archer had more in common with original Star Trek captain James T. Kirk than he had with Kirk's more cerebral successors in the 35-year-old Star Trek dynasty.

Dashing into the dashing role is Scott Bakula, already an icon among sci-fi fans for his beloved time-travel-identity-swapping series, Quantum Leap. Bakula has made leaps of his own since the show concluded in 1993, with parts that couldn't be more diverse. He played the globe-trotting-reporter boyfriend of Murphy Brown, a singing cat in the animated musical Cats Don't Dance and a happily settled gay man in American Beauty, to name a few.

He also turned producer. Bakula plays a Long Island limo driver suddenly called upon to be a father figure to the two daughters of his dying bride in the October 14 Showtime movie What Girls Learn, which his BPI Productions co-produced.

Bakula, who has two young children with actress Chelsea Field and two teenagers from a prior marriage, took time out from alien encounters to talk about his latest transformation.

How do you like your character?
I like that he has flaws and that he's as emotional as he sometimes can be. It makes for a rich character.

As the character unfolds, what are you learning?
Does he have more outbursts, more love affairs?
He's got a little of everything. They keep throwing different things at me. We've been able to do a lot of humor, which is a great element on the show. We've been able to do a lot of physical things--a fight scene, scaling a mountain. It opens it up from being just people inside of a spaceship, flying and talking.

There is a fair amount of humor. Where does that come from?
It's a blend of situational stuff, but it's real--not forced. It's coming from the characters. One of my favorite lines in the pilot is in sick bay, when a Klingon is screaming and yelling in Klingon, and I order Hoshi [the interpreter, played by Linda Park], "Tell him to shut up!"  And instead of doing it in Klingon, she just yells, "Shut up!" It just kind of jumped out at everybody, because it was so funny--and so human. And that came right out of her character.

Is there going to be sexual tension with her, or with T'Pol--the Vulcan subcommander played by Jolene Blalock?
Oh, I don't think at this point there should be any sexual tension between anybody and the captain. In terms of anybody telling me about long-range stuff--I don't think so. We're having sexy moments with alien encounters, much like in the pilot.

Looking at the pilot again after the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was interesting how many lines took on different shadings, heavier meanings, that couldn't have been foreseen--all the dialogue about humans rushing to judgment about different cultures without any real knowledge.
Of course it wasn't foreseen. But that's the [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry world.

How much are you following that world?
Because we're a prequel, a lot of the elements the original Star Trek series haven't evolved yet--the whole Federation of Planets, that's not there yet. We're out there writing our own rules, exploring blindly in many senses. Certainly, there are some elements of the series to consider and the Roddenberry notion, which is a very optimistic view of humanity and what Earth can become.

He had a way of taking some of the issues of the time and putting them through his creative process, and out would come a story that related.
Exactly. We followed that with the genetic engineering we had in our pilot, for example. Very topical, obviously. We've taken that to an entirely different level. And I think the notion that humanity will succeed and survive and that this planet will triumph certainly sounds very comforting right now.

Are you a longtime Trek fan?
I was a fan of the original series.  I really got hooked on the reruns in the '70s, when I was in college.

Those of us who've seen each episode too many times know the shows fall into categories For instance, is it going to be a "big blob out in space"episode or a "getting involved with a planet's politics" episode? Is there really anything truly new to do?
It's a tremendous challenge, but the fabulous idea they had of going earlier than the original Star Trek is the key to its success. They get to infuse everybody creatively with a new gusto about what the show can be.

You've had a run of exceptionally varied roles, though people who know you from Quantum Leap may not know you've done musicals and sitcom work. It leads to your being under appreciated in a way.
It's okay. You want to do as many different things as you can as an actor -- that's the joy of it. For instance, in the last year, getting to do the TV movie Papa's Angels,&in which I played a father in 1930s Depression Appalachia. I played the banjo. Then to do What Girls Learn, set in 1981, and I'm a limo driver on Long Island.

What Girls Learn has elements that are emotionally difficult.
There are: breast cancer, a mom leaving her two daughters behind with a manthat they barely know. That was interesting to me, these three women --a mom and two young daughters--who had lived independently and kind of quixotically, who've had this wild and bizarre and interesting life, and then the mom falls in love. They leave the South, where they've been comfortable and happy, and move to Long Island, and they're the new girls in school, and they're living in the house with this man who proposes to their mother, and not long after, she's diagnosed with cancer.

Pretty heavy.
But there's also so much humor in this piece, because their mom-- and Elizabeth Perkins is wonderful-- is idiosyncratic and comes out of left field with a lot of things. She has this optimism about life she carries through, even to her death, and gives to them.

You're no stranger to merging families and stepparent issues yourself. I remember you saying in 1996, after your marriage had broken up, that you did the midlife thing a little early, and you were hoping in time, everything would straighten up and fly right. Did everything straighten up?
Oh, yeah. I'm so lucky. I'm living with an incredible woman who has embraced my two older children and borne my two younger children and she's just phenomenal. She's allowed me to move on with my life and grow and reach places I never thought I would.

And I'll bet you're happier than ever not to have to leave town to work.
I'm happy not to be flying back and forth between here and Canada on the weekends -- which I've been doing a lot in the last few years.

You've been rushing from assignment to assignment--Life as a House, Ghost of a Chance...
I did Ghost of a Chance about a year and a half ago.

That's the one in which you play an actor who's presumed dead after an accident then tries to land the lead role in a TV movie they're making about his life. It sounds like a hoot. When is it coming out?
We're still trying to find a home for it.

Life as a House--have you worked with Kevin Kline before?
No. From the moment I read the script, I wanted to do it. But I got the job totally by accident. William Russ was injured in a bike accident, and they called me and said, "We have to recast. Would you do it?" They'd already shot some of Russ' scenes. I jumped. I'm such a huge Kevin Kline fan.

So, is there anything to the rumor that William Shatner might pop up in a cameo on your show?
I haven't heard anything about that. But I'm sure rumors will abound.These days with all the technical tricks, we could even have a young Shatneron the show.