Massive 'Enterprise' Coverage Round-Up

Press interest in the latest Star Trek series is at a high level following this week's Television Critics Association Press Tour.

At the event, he cast, along with series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, were interviewed by a variety of newspaper and online reporters. Tours of the new Enterprise were also offered to a great number of reporters Below is a round-up of the most interesting articles that appeared over the past few days:

• Scott Bakula (Jonathan Archer) told the Sci Fi Wire he wants to be more involved in Enterprise production in the future.

  When asked about writing and directing episodes, the actor was positive. "Possibly," he said. "Rick [Berman] is wonderful that way. Not all executive producers in this town are. My last [producer, Quantum Leap's Donald P. Bellisario] was that way. But Rick has been very forthcoming."

  "He knows that I direct. But I really want to get my feet firmly on the ground here and devote all my attention to this first season and getting a solid start. I really want the show to be great and not worry about anything else right now."

  You can find the original interview here at SciFi Wire.

• "I'll be doing the very first Vulcan neck pinch, the very first Vulcan mind meld," Jolene Blalock (T'Pol) told Los Angeles Channel 13 in a news segment that aired yesterday.

  "I grew up on the original Star Trek; watching Captain Kirk, Spock, Bones," she said. Her sentiments about Trek were echoed by Bakula. "I loved the original Star Trek series, we watched it in college all the time. It's really cool for me to precede that," she said.

  Scott Bakula was also excited about the crew's new uniforms. "Because it's the first, they've kind of been able to go back and re-invent a lot of things. The uniforms are different than anything anybody's had before. We have pockets, we have things like that that they've never had before."

  Thanks go out to TJ Pridonoff for this!

• Rick Berman is well aware of the problems that will arise with Enterprise being set in the past of the future.

  "That's a problem right now that we have," he told the Detroit News. "The computer that sat on Captain Janeway's desk was bulkier than the one that sits on my desk now. There are cellular phones that are far more compact than the communicators that Captain Kirk used."

  Co-creator Brannon Braga was also concerned about continuity with the other series. "In the Original Series it was established that in 1996 half the human race was killed in the Eugenics War," he said. "Well, what do you do? Do you pay attention to that, or do you just glide on by? So you take it on a case-by-case basis."

  More from Berman and Braga can be found in the original article at Detroit News.

• In one of the first opinion pieces to focus on Enterprise, Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News asserted that: "I have seen the future of the Star Trek franchise, and it looks a bit like the inside of a submarine."

  "Dozens of us oohed and aahed over the 81 plasma screens on the Enterprise's claustrophobic bridge, crawled all over the 'armory' - they're still using missiles in the mid-22nd century - and examined the complicated-looking buttons and dials and switches, many of them salvaged from sound-mixing equipment, that will be dedicated to deep space exploration."

  Though the columnist was impressed with her tour of the set, she could not forget her disappointment with the pieces of actual footage she saw. "Am I allowed to say that it was way cool? That I sat in the captain's chair for a heady moment and felt about 11? That it almost made me forget that the few clips UPN screened for us contained some embarrassingly clunky dialogue between ship captain Jonathan Archer and his Vulcan sub commander T'Pol?"

  For the original article, in which Gray talks more about her experience, follow this link to the Philadelphia News.

• The Toronto Star also took a tour around the Enterprise sets this week, and revealed an interesting piece of trivia about the Captain's chair.

  "As always, the fun is in the details, the stuff you don't see on your TV. Like the re-fitted studio mixing boards dressed to look like spacey control panels, the tiny tin-type customized appliance labels affixed to absolutely everything, that the captain's chair on this particular Enterprise is a reclaimed driver's seat from a 20th-century Porsche."

  The tour was conducted by Berndt DeMann a member of the series design team. "This is the best job in the world," he told guests, "We're very proud."

  The full article can be found by following this link.

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