Star Trek Monthly (NZ/AUS) | January 2002 ::.::.:..

Great Scott!!

 

When Scott Bakula was announced as the latest captain of the Enterprise, the response from the fans was universally positive. Abbie Bernstein spends some time with the former Quantum Leap star and Enterprise main man, and discovers that Bakula is having a ball on the new Star Trek show.

If patience and gentle good humour are necessary qualities for a starship captain, actor Scott Bakula seems like an ideal candidate for the post. Night has fallen on the lawn outside the Paramount Studios main theatre, where a party for all of the UPN shows has been in full swing since daylight. Bakula, on his feet for hours already talking to waves of reporters about his role as Captain Jonathan Archer on the new series Enterprise, is still the soul of courteous hospitality as he addresses the subject anew.

"What I liked about this character was that he's very emotional," Bakula relates enthusiastically. "He's a military guy and he grew up in the space programme, but he's not stuck in that, he's not afraid to say what's on his mind, he's not afraid to buck authority, he's a bit of a rebel. When I first talked it over with [executive producers/series creators] Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga], they said, 'He's more like Kirk.' I loved what Kirk was, because he was allover the map with his emotions -you know, he bites, he gets hurt, he bleeds, he's a real person, he's not a figurehead. They're making [Archer] a real human being in this obviously great position of strength and power, running the ship. We're taking that energy out into the universe for the first time, so& that's how he approaches the people and situations that he meets."

In 35 years of Star Trek, Bakula is arguably the first leading man in the franchise who comes with his own sizeable, passionate science fiction fan following. Bakula allows that some comparisons can be made between Sam Beckett, the altruistic, identity-jumping character he portrayed for five years in the series Quantum Leap, and Enterprise's Archer.

"l'm sure you can draw that parallel, but it was not intentional on [the Enterprise producers']part, " he states. "[Sam and Archer] are both people who are looking for something. Sam was just way ahead of his time and anxious -he had a great naivete about him and a great love of life and science. [Archer] is more of a hard-boiled, Errol Flynn kind of character. I love it. You're standing there toe-to-toe with some crazy Klingon screaming in your face and spitting at you and yelling in Klingon, and it's like, 'OK, this is cool, this is working,"' he laughs. "It's a blast."

Bakula first encountered Star Trek: The Original Series while it was in reruns during his university days. "l'd eat it up when I went to college, every night." He has trouble citing a single favourite episode. "I loved the crazy one with the guy who had the black-and-white face, Frank Gorshin [Let That Be Your Last Battlefield] -I thought that was kind of classic. There's segments that jump out. Whenever they would think Kirk was dead, they'd bring out his log, and they'd play, 'Now, Spock, I know if you're playing this, I'm not here any more, I'm dead.' I loved it."

There's a rumour that viewers will see Archer figuring out how to do a captain's log for the first time. Asked if this is true, Bakula laughs. "Who's been telling you all this stuff?"

Other potential specifics are closely guarded, but Bakula will reveal this much about the Enterprise two-hour premiere: "I can just tell you that someone ends up on Earth that is not supposed to be there, and we finally insist on taking him back where he belongs." He'll give this much hint as to the stranger's species: "It's a tall guy."

Bakula is more forthcoming on the overall tone of Enterprise. "That's part of the Roddenberry legacy, and Rick is very aware of that and very reverent and respectful of that. So the notion of why we're out there and how we're presenting ourselves to the universe is very much a factor. We're still finding our way out there; we're kind of fumbling around right now. But [Roddenberry's vision] underlies everything, and it underlies my character. He has very high standards and is kind of noble in an old-fashioned way. He has trouble with some of his other crew folks because of that, but he wants to do the right thing. The old Star Treks and the not-so-old ones were invested with this kind of truth that was running allegorically through every episode. But these guys are gonna screw up sometimes. There is no Federation at this point in time, there is no set of rules, there's no place you can go and stand before a council and say, 'He did this,' 'No, he did that' and have it resolved, so it's really the Wild West out there. We're going to bump into people and places and make mistakes.

'I think it's going to be overall a much sexier show than [Star Trek has] been in a while," Bakula continues, "and it's much more physical, I'm going to mix it up a little bit -not a little bit, I've been mixing it up a lot so far!" he laughs. "So there's more action in it." One thing he promises we won't see: "I won't be doing the Kirk flying kick-that's his."

The Enterprise herself sounds like a character who will evolve over the course of the series, as Bakula describes the ship: "[The crew is] having some problems. Certain things aren't working the way they're supposed to be, we didn't have time to test things [before the ship heads into deep space]. It's not a training voyage, it's a voyage that I kind of forced us to take. We're out there and we're hitting switches for the first time to see what happens, so the translators don't work perfectly and the torpedoes aren't perfect -we don't have the kinks out."

As an example, Bakula cites a scene in which Dominic Keating's Lieutenant Reed, the armory officer, explains to Archer how to use the state-of- the-art new weapon, the phase pistol. "So out of that [experimentation with new equipment] comes his line about, 'This is stun and this is kill and don't get it confused.' That's very funny, especially if you know the show, but it's also [Reed's] humour, it tells you about who his character is, it's informative, it's not a joke for the sake of doing a joke."

Bakula says he approaches roles in science fiction/fantasy projects just as he does characters in straight drama or comedy. "For me, it's the same investment." However, he observes that there are some differences: "[Science fiction is] much harder work, but the way I approach it is, make everybody as real as you possibly can. {In genre stories] all you have is your mind. You're not [playing a scene] sitting around the dinner table with your parents and your sister and having a big argument about what it was like to grow up, which you can relate to your own life when you were growing up. [Working with science fiction special effects], you're looking at a window, and they're telling you, 'This is what you're seeing, and then that piece breaks off and falls down there.' So it's much harder."

Dialogue about futuristic devices and names of alien races can likewise be tough: "I always knew that the material was going to be very challenging in terms of the memorisation," Bakula acknowledges, "and I don't know that it'll get easier, because a lot of it is stuff that you don't really relate to, it's technical jargon or whatever, you just have to find a way to memorise with whatever trick you can do it with. It has probably been a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be to just get the words out, and invest them with some kind of truth."

Then there are the special effects. "Whatever power you have as an actor," Bakula observes, "you definitely give a lot of that away to the effects people, and you just have to trust that they'll make you look good."

Today's shoot on Enterprise is a case in point, Bakula relates. "Today [Monday], I was in a flying rig to do this weightlessness thing. Everybody was working on it from Friday, but we didn't have enough time, but it'll be great when it's cut together. It's a huge undertaking to build a space suit that will work in all environments and make it look real and cool and do all the things you need to do, and build it well while we're working. Because you can't build them until you have the actors, and [then the suits are] delivered the day before you start shooting on the smallest set that we have so far, a little pod ship, so it's working out the logistics -where you need an extra little pad that's gonna keep you from getting your shoulders rubbed, whatever. As you go along, you iron that stuff out. They've learned so much from the prior shows, so they know how to put the air conditioning unit [inside the suit] that will keep the front mask from clouding up, so that you're not constantly having to cut and wipe the things down. That's what they learned from the last time they had the EV suits -where to put the batteries, how to do the lights.

"Weightlessness is a multi-faceted effect on Enterprise, Bakula reports: "It can be achieved in a lot of different ways. You can do a lot of this on a rig and they'll just paint the wires out, [as was done] today, but last week, we did a whole thing where we were just moving in a weightless environment with a little gravity and you can bounce, they can mess with the film a little bit, they can do all kinds of stuff."

Certain crucial aspects of working on Enterprise have gone smoothly, Bakula reveals happily. "What's come easy is the cast has fallen very quickly into a great rapport and some interesting relationships, and that's the bonus. We're still figuring it out, but we're not getting hung up on who's doing what, so that's been great. The first day we all showed up in uniform, the cameras were rolling and the lights were going, it was pretty exciting."

While the captain's chair is Archer's, Bakula has discovered that the temptation to sit in it has been universal amongst his co-workers: "I think pretty much everybody has [sat in it], yeah," he laughs. "We joke about it. I come in and Anthony will be sitting in my chair: 'What are you doing?' We're laughing about it. He jumps up. It's a good group, we're having a lot of fun with it."

The realistic-looking bridge set helps ground the actors in their work, Bakula notes. "I love that it's small. I love that it's based on a submarine. The whole idea of the ship is submarine-like. The idea is to make it more welcoming, not sterile and not as formal as the bridges have become in the last couple of series. I think it has a great feel to it. Sometimes I do feel like I'm in a submarine, banging around. But it feels right."

Bakula has worked in a wide variety of settings over his long and varied career. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved to New York in 1976 to embark on the life of a stage actor. In 1988, he was nominated for a Tony Award, Broadway's highest honour, for his performance in the musical Romance-Romance. He won a Golden Globe and four Emmy nominations for Quantum Leap. On the big screen, he starred as supernatural detective Harry D' Amour in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, a late-blooming university American football star in Necessary Roughness and more recently appeared in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. Just before setting forth on Enterprise, Bakula finished working on the telemovie What Girls Learn, which he also executive produced via his BPI Productions.

With all this experience, Bakula obviously has something to contribute to any production but, contrary to gossip, he did not request creative control on Enterprise. " All I asked for was an opportunity to have input," Bakula explains, "without any kind of final veto power or anything like that. I'm not interested in that, but I've done my own producing and my own creative work in the last 10 years and I feel I have some value in that area in terms of my character and in terms of stories at times, what feels right and what doesn't feel right. Rick is very accessible and very amenable to input from everybody. So we have a very easy relationship and there are no contractual things, other than the normal creative stuff."

Some of Bakula's input has already been incorporated into the episodes. "Stuff that's in my ready room, " Bakula reveals, "which ends up being back story, in my quarters - a couple of things have already showed up," he laughs. "We talked about storylines down the road. I don't really want to get specific. More than anything, we're just talking about the feel of what this is going to be and what's going to separate it from what's been before and, being that these guys are going out for the first time, that it's not casual. It's exciting and it's scary, much like an X-Files episode or Alien. It's not just another day at the office. Imagine what it would be to really be going out for the first time and not having a clue what you're going to run into, and creating that kind of an atmosphere. [The producers are] very much on the same page with that."

On Enterprise, the possibility exists for Bakula to direct episodes, just as he did in the final season of Quantum Leap. "The door's open," Bakula says. "Rick's great about that. You know, not all producers in this town are, but he is. My feeling is, right now, I just want to do everything I can to get the show off to a great start and worry about that somewhere down the line."

Keeping Archer vital over the course of what may be a seven-year run will be a challenge, but Bakula's experience has prepared him for the task. On a television series, at least the scripts are different every week, as opposed to performing the same text every night on stage. "I would say it's probably harder to sustain a long stage run," Bakula comments. " An eight-show-a-week schedule, depending on what kind of show you're doing, to keep it fresh and to keep it new for yourself and alive is probably the hardest thing- and I love it!"

Bakula says he looks forward to being part of a Star Trek series that will appeal to old fans while being easily comprehensible to newcomers. "People who know the lore, they'll get the inside joke, some of the stuff will be like inside information, but new [viewers will] see everything kind of through our eyes for the first time.

"We're at the beginning," he says finally. "I'm excited about the new people that are going to come in and join the voyage, because I know some people, like my parents -'Well, we never really watched it.' 'It's OK. Go out and rent First Contact, so you'll be up to speed -the Vulcans landed, revealed who they are, and then you're good to go.' I think that's exciting."