Star Trek Monthly | April 2002 ::.::.:..

Archer's Aim

(New Zealand/Australian Edition) - April 2002

 

As with each previous incarnation of Star Trek, exploration and discovery are the driving motivations for the crew of the Enterprise NX-01, and it's Scott Bakula's job as Captain Jonathan Archer to lead the Enterprise regulars on their mission.  So, with a good number of episodes under his belt - and as the show makes its UK debut on Sky One - Ian Spelling finds out how Bakula, his co-stars and all of their characters are settleing into their roles on Enterprise.

Enterprise executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga thought of Scott Bakula and only Scott Bakula when formulating the role of Captain Jonathan Archer. "I'm not sure they ever told me that," Bakula sys with a laugh. "I knew that the higher-ups at Paramount thought about me for the role and had conveyed that, but it may have come from Rick and Brannon first. Either way, I am terribly flattered by it.

"And I was flattered by it when i got the script.  That's when I was really taken by the project. I just got off the phone with Rick.  He said, "I've finished cutting the fifth hour and we've got five great episodes in a row, right of the bat." He said they were fantastic, so that's even better news. You want to pull people in from the beginning, so you try to make sure your first shows are great. And Rick was really excited about them.

"I think we're off to a pretty good start too," Bakula continues, referring to the two-hour opener Broken Bow and subsequent instalments Fight or Flight, Strange New World, Unexpected and The Andorian Incident. "I think we're off to a good start in terms of relationships between the people in the crew. There's some tension, obviously, with T'Pol [Jolene Blalock].  There are some problems there. There's also a sense, among the other characters, of camaraderie. There's a lightheartedness that feels good to me. And, I think, I hope, there's a great sense of adventure.

"In terms of Archer, he's gathering a sense, to a certain degree, of what this journey will be like. He's finding out the strengths and weaknesses of his crew and his ship. I think he is really trying to be flexible and, because there are no rules out there, as open-minded as he can be in terms of their encounters and their experiences.  At the same time he's maintaining a kind of edge and a certain kind of humour that seem to be working nicely together. I'm hoping they're working together".

Bakula feels that his character is under no illusions about what his command entails. "Archer understands the role of captain very clearly," the actor says.& "I don't think that he's trying to be friends with the crew. I think every captain or every leader leads in his or her own way, and Archer is still discovering how that will work for him.  These are very different circumstances that taking a submarine down beneath the waters for five months.

"So I think his flexibility and improvisation skills are going to come into play in dealing with this crew, in deep space, for an extended period of time.  First and foremost, he's going to take care of his ship and do what's necessary. If he offends people or steps on toes, then he will. But he is definitely interested in his crew. He's friendly with them and I think he'll eventually grow very close to them. He is not a Queeg or anything like that."

Queeg he's not, but Archer is a lot like Kirk (William Shatner) and Enterprise itself is a lot like Star Trek: The Original Series. Bakula, who fondly remembers the show that started it all, agrees that Enterprise is "in the same vein" as ST:TOS.

"I think that's what's going to make Enterprise stand out in the light where the last three incarnations have gone," he states. "They were a little more on the technical end. What we're hoping to capture is a sense of reality. I hate the word reality because it is so abused right now, with all the so-called reality shows. But in 150 years, if we were able to achieve this technology, what would it be like? How would we deal with it? How would we respond?

"We've got an episode in which we are literally sending answering letters from home. It' just wonderful moment that, to my knowledge, hasn't been done on Star Trek. If this world were as we we've said it is free of war and famine and disease - this ship is going out into space would be the monumental news event for the planet.  So what's going on and how we're behaving and what's happening is certainly front-page news around the world.  And trying to convey that sense of importance, but also a feeling of free-spiritedness and a freewheeling adventure, is key. The tie to Earth is what I think will make Enterprise different, in a good way, I hope.  We're not just out there, totally cut off.

Although it's true that Berman and Braga created Archer, Bakula reports that the writer-producers have been kind enough to let him take ownership of the character. In fact, the actor explains, that process started with the pilot.

"They came down to me early on, after they saw the first couple of of dailies, and they said it was so great to see this guy come to life," Bakula recalls. "That's the great partnership between writers and actors. They've got great words on the page and the words can get interpreted many different ways by many different actors. Rick and Brannon seem to be happy with what I'm doing and I feel good about what I'm doing.

"Of course, the goal is to kind of give yourself somewhere to go for an extended period of time. The luxury of this series is that if it all goes well we'll be around for a while, possibly for several years. You don't want to get yourself boxed into any character that is going to run out of steam. Early on, every word, every line, is open to interpretation. We're just now starting to build and develop Archer's relationships with the other crewmembers.  Some of it, right now may be too subtle for the viewer to pick up or understand, but for me, it's the little pieces that I'm laying in. I'm trying to plot out this little map that I can employ and use to let the character grow.

"I'm most excited about what's going to happen to Archer in terms of his experiences," Bakula reveals.
"I'm most excited in to let him be this sponge who's going out there to soak everything he can. He'll try everything and just go with whole experience. I love the fact that he's a real human being. He's going to make mistakes.  He's going to fall over himself. He's going to have great moments and he is going to have bad moments. It's all just started and I'm excited to see what Rick and Brannon will dream up for him.

Enterprise, for those familiar with Bakula's work, is far from his first genre credit. He starred for several seasons on the SF cult series Quantum Leap, in which he played time and body jumper Sam Beckett, and his subsequent SF and fantasy credits include I-Man, Infiltrator, the Invaders and Netforce mini-series, as well as the supernatural feature, Lord of Illusions, which co-starred past and future Star Trek guests star Famke Janssen, Vincent Schiavelli, Joel Swetow and Wayne Grace. None of them better prepared Bakula for Enterprise than Quantum Leap.

"It was certainly helpful in understanding what the fan base can be and the kind of loyalty and devotion they have, as well as ways in which they study the show and the minutiae they're concerned with. In terms of developing the show, I have a sense of what doing Quantum Leap of what that involves. I was on Quantum Leap for a good, long time, so I have a sense of what that might feel like, even though I'm older and my life is different than it was then. I'm choosing to approach this series differently and coordinating my whole life accordingly.

"So I think that Quantum Leap prepared me for Star Trek in many ways. I have a long-standing relationship with a lot of members of the press. I understand the needs of that. I understand, as I said about fans that take a show that they love very seriously. When I did Quantum Leap, at the beginning I didn't really understand the ramifications of the whole thing. I'm going to into Enterprise with a better understanding of how it all works, so Quantum Leap helped me in many ways.

Bakula's numerous other non-genre credits include guest stints on Designing Women and Matlock, a recurring role on Murphy Brown, such feature films as Sibling Rivalry, Necessary Roughness, Color of Night, American Beauty, Luminarias (with Star Trek:Voyager star Robert Beltran) and the recent release Life as a House, and not to mention such TV movies as In the Shadow of a Killer, In the Name of the People, A Girl Thing and What Girls Learn, the last which Bakula produced.

Bakula also top lined several series other than Quantum Leap, among them Gung Ho, Eisenhower& Lutz, and Mr and Mrs Smith. Interestingly, more than five years had passed between the demise of Mr and Mrs Smith in 1996 and the 26 September 2001 US debut of Enterprise.

"It's actually been nice to do another series," Bakula says, bringing the conversation to a close. "It had been a while since I'd one. This is the first time I've been a regular on a series where I've had this big ensemble cast around me. The exception would be Murphy Brown, but I wasn't a regular on the show and I wasn't there from the start. Mr and Mrs Smith was predominantly Maria Bello and I. Quantum Leap was Dean [Stockwell] and I. So it's been nice to share the load on Enterprise with six other people. The hours haven't been that horrendous. I get a day off every now and then. So, knock on wood, it has been an enjoyable experience so far."