Braga Responds To Fan Criticism

Enterprise co-creator Brannon Braga has been criticised for not watching the Original Series, but according to the producer, he's now very familiar with the show that started it all.

"Yeah, I've taken a lashing from the fans," he told Larry Nemecek at the Star Trek Communicator (via TrekWeb). "But just for the record, here's how that started. I think there was a period about eight years ago when I made some stupid comments, in one or two interviews, about never having seen an episode of the Original Series - which was true."

Initially, Braga was advised against watching the Original Series, in order to provide a new perspective on the franchise. "When I first started here," he said, "when Gene Roddenberry was still alive, he said to me, 'Don't watch the original series. If you haven't seen it, don't watch.' And I said why? And he said, 'Because you will bring something fresh to the table.' He was very adamant that TNG not be the Original Series, and not re-do anything. So I was, like, 'Fine.'"

However, the writer has been doing some catching up over the last few years, and used his new-found knowledge when creating Enterprise. "It became a novelty: I was a Star Trek writer not familiar with the Original Series - which I thought was a novelty, but the fans too offense at that," he recalled. "Well, of course, now - eight years later - I have seen most of them, and I've always had a great affection for it, and I know it very, very well. And I know what people like about it. So when it came to certain details of this show [...] there were lots of Original Series details that came from me. So, the fans are going to have to ease up a little now!"

Braga revealed that he and co-creator Rick Berman had always envisioned a 'back to basics' setting for Series V. "Initially we started talking about [a setting of] the great Starfleet pioneers, traipsing around in the mud building starships, which started us talking about what it meant to get a ship in the air," he said. "It really began as a much more rustic concept. And then over the course of two years, we came to a lot of realizations. We realized that it had to be a ship show - it could not be an Earth-bound show. Deep Space Nine was a station-bound show, and Voyager was a ship show about going back to Earth. We thought it was time to do a show about going out there again."

But will the crew of the Enterprise NX-01 meet up with one of Trek's most famous races, the Romulans? "Well, we very much want to do Romulans," he said. "But the problem with Romulans is in the original series it's established that no humans or even Vulcans had seen Romulans. So for Archer to see Romulans would be a breach of continuity, so we're gonna have to figure that one out."

The full interview with Braga can be found in the upcoming special Enterprise edition of the Star Trek Communicator. TrekWeb has a preview available here, which also features comments from Berman, Scott Bakula (Jonathan Archer) and production designer Herman Zimmerman.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!