Bormanis On Enterprise Science

Enterprise story editor Andre Bormanis recently explained the way science fits into the series.

"We certainly want to tell stories that use interesting ideas from science as springboards," Bormanis told Star Trek Monthly (via Scifi Pulse). "But we don’t want to 'tech' up dialogue.

"In the episode 'Breaking the Ice' we had Reed and Mayweather down on the surface of another comet, and we tried to represent that as accurately as possible," he explained. "But we didn't spend time talking about composition of the ice or what they’d have to do to get core samples - they just went down and did it."

The writer first got involved with the Star Trek franchise as a science consultant on Deep Space Nine. He talked about what his job involved at that time. "We had a DS9 episode which featured a comet that the Bajorans believed to be part of a prophecy. The two writers called me up and asked, 'How big are these things? How fast can they go? Can they just orbit the sun? What are they made out of? What do they look like out in space?' I wrote a couple of pages of a 'comet primer' for them and that helped them during the first draft."

Now as a story editor, Bormanis concentrates less on technology and more on the story behind an episode. His first script for Enterprise was 'Silent Enemy'. "This was the first chance we really got to see Reed on a more personal level," said Bormanis. "It's his birthday, and the Captain wants to prepare a special meal for him, but we have a heck of a time trying to find out what his favourite food is! We talk to his parents, his sister, his best friend, and we discover that Malcolm is kind of a mystery, that people don’t know him. We play these two sides off, of the enigma of alien attackers and the enigma of Malcolm Reed, and it works on both character level and an action level as well."

More from Andre Bormanis can be found in the current issue of Star Trek Monthly, out now in the UK. Alternatively, extracts are available online here at Scifi Pulse.

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