Braga: Darker Enterprise And Different Voyager Finale
2 min readBrannon Braga and Rick Berman had a different Star Trek: Enterprise in mind than what actually ended up airing, plus Braga says that if he could redo the Star Trek: Voyager finale, he would make a surprising change.
Had Berman and Braga had their way, fans would have seen some Earth-bound shows for Enterprise, especially in the beginning. “Rick Berman and I had a little bit more of a raw conception of Enterprise than maybe the studio was comfortable with,” explained Braga. “It was actually set on Earth for a while – the building of the first starship, kind of like J.J.’s. We wanted to do the launch of the first starship and take it maybe a little bit more retro, and we initially didn’t have the futuristic temporal cold war aspect of it.”
But their plans had to change when it became apparent that their bosses weren’t on board with this version of Enterprise. “The studio was a little nervous about the prequel concept and they felt that Star Trek should be going forward, not backward,” said Braga. “So we introduced this recurring element of a Star Trek far beyond Kirk’s time, or even Picard’s time, to satisfy their concerns, which I thought was interesting. But initially our concept of Enterprise was really raw and basic and ‘prequelly.’ I’m not saying it would’ve been better but it would’ve been a little bit different. It’s a collaboration; it’s a collaboration, it’s their franchise, it’s their money. We did the best we could to accommodate their notes.”
When it comes to Star Trek: Voyager, Braga can now say that he would do something different if he had the chance to redo the Voyager finale. “It was my feeling that Seven Of Nine should have died,” he said. “If you watch the episode Human Error, written by Andre Bormanis, it was not only a heart-breaking episode in that Seven Of Nine learns, as she begins to explore her human emotions, that she can’t experience them. There’s a Borg chip inside her that will kill her if she tries to do so. First of all, that’s kind of an interesting ‘rape victim’ analogy or whatever you want to call it, about a damaged woman who can’t get past what happened to her, but I also always saw it as a crucial episode that would set up the finale.
“This was a woman who knew she was neither here nor there. She couldn’t go back to the Borg, nor would she want to, but she could never be fully human, so she was doomed. And I wanted to have her sacrifice herself to get her shipmates home.”
The full interview can be found in issue #199 of SFX Magazine.
About The Author
