Stars Talk 'Enterprise' Philosophy

According to the cast and crew of Enterprise, the show's strongest aspect is that it will feel more real than any of the other Trek series.

"If you or I were placed on a starship right now, we would be thrilled to death," co-creator and executive producer Brannon Braga told StarTrek.com. "I think either of us would do it. But we might be pretty nervous travelling at high warp speeds, or we might totally flip out if we went on an alien ship and discovered that the crew was dead hanging on meat hooks. Meeting Klingons for the first time would probably disturb us greatly and you'd probably vomit from the smell."

And that's exactly what Braga and his co-creator Rick Berman are going for with Enterprise. "It's these kind of fun, kind of naturalistic human reactions that we want to play," he said. "Well, at the same time, tell those kind of great Star Trek stories that we've been telling for years. But with fresh characters like this, it's going to put a different spin on everything. And that's kind of the essence of the show at the moment."

This 'new spin' caught the imagination of John Billingsley, who plays Dr. Phlox. "What appeals to me about the show is the idea that this precedes all the other Star Treks and consequently it takes place in an era when no rules existed governing our relationships with other species - we don't know how we're supposed to establish first contact, there's no Prime Directive, the technology is in many instances flawed, or doesn't exist," he said. "And I think one of the things that I always thought, as much as I liked Star Trek, was sort of missing from the later shows, was that everyone sort of had their jobs down, everyone knew exactly where to lay their hands on the right piece of equipment at the right time."

The actor hoped that Enterprise will show that humans certainly aren't perfect. "I hope this show gets back to some of the messiness of the Original Series and has some of the excitement that I think is really implicit in a show in which people are making up the rules, making mistakes. I think so much of what is exciting about the indomitable spirit that this show is supposed to represent is that when you screw up you have to get up and dust yourself off and try again - that's what makes it exciting for us - that's where we're able to connect on a human level. And I think this show wants to be more in that territory than some of the other Star Treks."

With everyone eagerly expressing their affinity for the Original Series, Jolene Blalock (T'Pol) explained why she fell in love with the show. "I grew up on the original Star Trek," she said. "I loved it. I mean, from Captain Kirk to Spock, to Bones - those three. Especially the relationship between Bones and Spock, it's always 'you green-blooded fool!' It just was amazing. And yet, between the three of them, there was always such utter loyalty, which you don't find in life. You say, it's a fortunate life if you can count your friends on one hand - well there were three friends and just with utter loyalty to each other. It's amazing, and yet, Bones and Spock had this love-hate relationship."

It was left to Connor Trinneer (Charles 'Trip' Tucker) to sum up why viewers should tune into Enterprise. "You got guns, you got aliens, you got a really fast ship, and you don't know where you're going to go from day to day," he said. "They're always trying to get home on Voyager - we're not trying to get home. We're just out there seeing what we can find - it's a constant mystery. everybody knows about Star Trek. I think everyone knows about it, and everybody knows about the first one, and if you tell somebody that this is a prequel to the first one, that alone will get a lot of people to just go 'what's going on?' And then if we're doing our job, which I hope and think that we are - come on, let's go for a ride!"

The full interviews with Braga, Billingsley, Blalock and Trinneer, in which the cast members also talked about their characters, can be found here at StarTrek.com.

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