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Posted: 18:49:42 on July 23 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: Enterprise | stenterprise.com

In new interviews with UK publication Star Trek Monthly (courtesy of Sci-Fi Pulse), new ENTERPRISE writer and co-producer John Shiban talks about joining the series and his first script, "Minefield." Shiban says he's finally finished watching every episode of ENTERPRISE and is excited to work in the TREK universe.

"I won’t say there weren’t a couple of moments in our first two weeks - when Brannan Braga would say, ‘if this were X-Files, yes, we would kill this person…'," Shiban told the mag before going on to liken ENTERPRISE to his former series. "In the ‘X Files’, as dark as the world is, there is always hope…. Because that emotion is still there in ‘Enterprise’, I think as a writer I’m going to be tapping into a lot of the same places, and especially because we (the audience) know the optimistic future--Archer and T’pol don’t. In ‘Fight or Flight’, there wasn’t a lot of optimism. Space is a scary place, there are creepy aliens and we don’t know if we’re going to succeed. That was the heart of that story."

Shiban says ENTERPRISE is different from Roddenberry's previous TREK series, but this only creates a greater opportunity to take characters in new directions.

"As much as I love the ‘Star Trek’ franchise and the Gene Roddenberry future, this is kind of a different animal, because it’s much more like the Mercury astronauts going out there. For me as a writer, it’s exciting to go in places where the characters don’t know what’s happening."

He also comments on his first script, the Archer/Reed Romulan episode "Minefield."

"In my first episode, we’re playing up the Archer and Reed dynamic. We don’t know a lot about Reed, which makes him a very interesting character. We know what his favourite food is, and we know a little bit about his relationship with his parents. He and Archer don’t have a friendship that Archer and Trip have. We’ve got a situation in mind where they’re forced together, so what do they learn about each other, and how do they work well together, how don’t they?”

In the same issue, executive producer Rick Berman talks more about the Jolene Blalock vehicle "Carbon Creek."

"[First contact between Humans and Vulcans] happened in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania and it was in the year 1957. It took place with the great - grandmother of T'pol and three other Vulcans who crash - landed on Earth days or weeks after the launch of Sputnik in 1957."

He also goes on to explain why the STAR TREK open script submission policy has been indefinitely suspended.

"There are a lot of legal issues involved. It's a policy that exists on very few television shows. It's something that Michael Piller began a number of years ago and it became very burdensome for us. People had to be hired to sift through hundreds of scripts. Legal documents had to be sent back and forth. It was a huge job and it became very expensive. The people that were running the writing staffs over the years found that it was by and large not worth it in the long run."

For more of Shiban's remarks visit this page and find more of Berman's, in which he also discusses casting Tom Hardy as the villain in STAR TREK: NEMESIS, here.

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