Enterprise: Broken Bow

by Diane Carey

  Other sets include the armory, loaded with missiles instead of the futuristic photon torpedoes, and the sickbay, which also has a new look.

  “I think my favorite set is sickbay,” Braga admits. “Obviously the bridge is very cool, but sickbay, to me, really captures a nice flavor of Enterprise because it’s so different. It looks so believable. It’s kind of white, gleaming, with lots of chrome, and it kind of looks like a real hospital, a real futuristic hospital. I think people will be surprised at the departure we’ve taken there. But it’s well worth it.”

  Knowing the look of the main vehicle, the production team could then move on to its shuttlecraft. The Enterprise shuttles will play a more integral role in this series than in series past, because transporter technology is so new. As Zimmerman previously noted, the Enterprise transporter platform is technically approved for biotransport, but shuttlecraft are still the preferred method of getting the crew from one place to another.

  “The shuttle design is almost a direct steal from the shuttles that are being built right now,” Zimmerman admits. “The X-33 [Reusable Launch Vehicle] is probably the closest model to the actual shuttlecraft that we are using on Enterprise. We feel that reentry vehicles, right now, are as close to state-of-the-art as they’re going to be in the next hundred years, mainly because we lack the propulsion system that Star Trek has so blithely invented without explaining quite how we acquired all that power. Also, I think that will be a delight to the science-oriented viewer, because it’s familiar.”

  The conflicts of designing a series being filmed over thirty years after The Original Series yet taking place almost one hundred years previous to its setting presented a number of problems in the course of the design. At some point in the planning for each set, prop, costume, and even makeup application, a decision needed to be made on where to bridge the gap—whether to make extrapolations based on current technology or on the vision of the future circa 1967. In the end, a combination of periods was achieved, with the emphasis being on a future based on the technology of today.

  The most difficult challenge for maintaining design continuity was the props, since some concessions needed to be made along the lines of the more portable equipment. Considering how far technology has come in the last decade alone, what may have appeared futuristic in the sixties does not hold up to today’s technological advancements. According to Berman, the decision on how true to remain to the original needed to be made on a case-by-case basis; as an example, he points out that the computer on his desk is less bulky than the one that sat on Captain Janeway’s desk on Voyager.

  One of the most recognized props from The Original Series was the communicator. The wireless handheld device, so ahead of its time for the original audience of Kirk and Spock, is old hat for today’s audience, many of whom have similar devices in their homes, cars, and jacket pockets. Again, Zimmerman was required to bridge the gap between the technology of yesterday’s future with today’s. “They’re quite along the lines of the communicators that we saw in the classic series and the early movies, but, because they are being designed now, they are much cooler and much more interesting pieces of equipment. Their function is pretty much the same. We’re not doing badges—we’re doing flip-open communicators, tricorders, and other diagnostic equipment that is small. It is microminiaturized, but it is not vastly different in its design from the great things that are being done now.”

  This quickly became the defining element for all props, Zimmerman admits. “The truth is our props are more capable but less slim and compact than what you can buy today. That’s part of the dramatic necessity, so the actor has something that the audience recognizes instantly and that works. Having said that, they are really interesting props and they will make interesting devices for the telling of a story?”

  And it is those stories that the designs will best serve. “There’s a lot of wonder and awe and sense of the first time in all of the concepts for the stories,” Zimmerman explains. “This is no ‘Ho hum, we’re out in space again, we know how to do this. Just sit back and watch us.’ It’s like we’re discovering it for the first time and it’s really very exciting. It’s reinventing the franchise in many, many ways.”

  And the designer is just as excited about this new opportunity. “Personally, it’s a kick in the right place to get an opportunity to reinvent a Star Trek venue like this, because one gets set in one’s ways always doing it the same,” he continues. “This is so fresh, such a new approach, such an opportunity to go back to the roots of something that you’ve already done and say, ‘Well, how was it that it came to this point? How would it look if it was two hundred or three hundred years before but still in our future and maintained the continuity that eventually leads into Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E?’ Well, that’s a fun job. Why wouldn’t you like that?”

  Costume designer Robert Blackman started working on Star Trek in the third season of The Next Generation, and was asked back for the latest installment, ready for his own challenge of reinventing the franchise. To do so, he looked at the series as a whole, focusing first on the evolution of the Starfleet uniform.

  “We talked about the Star Trek timeline and where [the series] fit,” says Blackman. “We’ve got original Star Trek,we’ve got the movies, we’ve got The Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager. They all travel in a linear direction. We know where we started, originally, with classic Star Trek, and we know where we ended, at this point, which is DS9. Where those changes for the garments happened were pretty clear. It was then taking that knowledge of how it progressed and working backwards.”

  The first question naturally became just how far to back up. Blackman’s challenge was to determine where the uniform design would have been one hundred years before The Original Series. To do this he chose an approach quite like Zimmerman’s approach to the designs for sets and props. Blackman looked to current apparel as his basis for extrapolating a look for the future. “What I chose to do was to back up to now and to do a lot of investigation on, essentially, supersonic jet pilot testing suits, NASA suits, that sort of look, and then play around with those and kind of move forward on them.”

  Blackman likens his work to the evolution of clothing in general. “It’s sort of like the tie, which has been around for a hundred and thirty years and I don’t think that people are going to necessarily be tie-less in the next hundred and thirty years. There are aspects that are very familiar to us today that are recognizable aspects. I keep pressing those to really land it closer. We’re all well versed in what we imagine life in the universe will be in four or five hundred years, but what it’s going to be in a hundred years is another thing. So, my gut response to that is to tie it more to now than to then.”

  In the case of Star Trek, the Starfleet uniforms have become integral to the look of the series. Blackman explains that the new look is a radical departure from the past. “All of the Starfleet stuff is natural fibers. For the first time ever, there are zipper? and pockets. We’ve never had them. From The Original Series on, they were eliminated. Pockets, because the idea was there was no currency. There was nothing. You didn’t need house keys. It was all done electronically. No zippers or buttons because the clothes were imagined to be put on in some sort of way, by forcefield, or whatever the hell you wanted it to be.” In fact, the uniforms have taken on a more casual look beyond the addition of pockets and zippers with accessories of utility caps and away jackets.

  “They wear black mock turtlenecks underneath,” Blackman continues. “The uniforms are a darkish blue, brushed twill that is stonewashed. So they look a little bit worn. There is a whole kind of casualness to it. They’re wrinkly. They’re just something that is not as formalized as we have done previously. They still are sort of formfit and sleek in the body. All of our people look heroic in them, which is always the goal. So there’s always those kinds of things that remain constant.”

  Among the familiar, however, is the designation of department insignias. “One of the things
that we’re resonating from the future are the color bars,” Blackman adds. “The colors are the same, but they had switched after original Star Trek to the movies and then from the movies to The Next Generation.” For this new series, Blackman reverted to the original. “What command was, and what security was, and what science was made a change that we have honored. Command positions are gold now, not red. Science is still blue. Security and engineering are red.” Then he changed the design, making it an accent to the uniform instead of the focal point. In this case, the insignia is simply a thin stripe that goes around the yoke of the uniform.

  Environment is also a consideration for the costumes on the series. Since the characters spend most of their time on the ship, the uniforms must contrast with those sets to some degree. While the overall design is an important consideration, Blackman does not allow it to entirely determine his concepts. “I look to see what the designs are, but the colors of the set don’t really influence me in this particular world,” he explains. “My notion is that if you have that much activity in the background then you need to make the thing in the foreground, which is usually the actor, as simple as possible. Hence, these sort of blue matte fabric uniforms. Yeah, they’ve got zippers and so on and so forth, but that does all blend eventually and you’re really just looking at the surface. There are a couple of scenes I saw being shot where they’re standing in front of a lot of moving graphics and you never lose them. You’re never distracted by the graphics. The graphics are brilliant, but they don’t talk.”

  Though the Enterprise is an Earth ship with a crew made up almost entirely of humans, two alien characters have been added to the mix in the form of T’Pol, of Vulcan, and Dr. Phlox, of an alien race new to Star Trek. These characters represented two distinctly different challenges for Blackman. In T’Pol he has a character of a race the audience is quite familiar with. The task in this case was to maintain the familiar while reinventing the look more for today’s audience.

  Blackman describes his approach to this new character: “Some of it is about broad-based marketing and other parts of it are about getting a character going. That uniform has a sort of form fit. It’s a very beautiful woman. But it has certain things that, over the years, I have distilled out of the original Vulcans. When I say the original Vulcans, I’m talking the return of Spock—the movies’version rather than anything that happened in The Original Series. Those things are very much based on a kind of Chinese silhouette. They were very metallic and very brocadey and flat at the same time… . Over the years, I developed a kind of eye that gave you an echo of that. It’s a serpentine thing that starts slightly extended from the shoulder point and then curves in and back out so you get the notion that you’re creating a very wide shoulder as some of those mandarin clothes do, but without actually doing it. So, that is the basis to her.

  “The Vulcan civilization is also X amount of years earlier. She’s definitely in earth tones. It’s kind of a gray/brown, very sort of striated piece of fabric. The Vulcans tend to be more coolish in color. I’ve chosen not to do that. I’ve chosen to warm her up. She plays against it. She’s very Vulcan in the script and she’s very Vulcan— and will be, I think—throughout. There’s a hint of Vulcan in the design and it’s got to be a uniform. We’ve never seen the Vulcans in uniform before. So I just went with this other look.”

  On the other hand, there is Dr. Phlox, a character from a distinctly new race of what the script refers to only as “an exotic alien species.” As there was no Star Trek history to look to for his specific character, Blackman started with a basis in familiar Earth design and evolved from there. He describes the look as similar to shirts of East Indian design that tend to be longer and hang down over the pants. Blackman goes on, “I’ve taken that design—using that as a kind of gentle shape—to pull him away from the rest of the people. These sort of shirt/smock things. And then just added a few odd details to them so that they are very alien to all of the Starfleet stuff that you see, but they’re not so alien that you don’t forget about it soon, and he just becomes a guy with a really benevolent face.”

  Another aspect of the design for the series is the more casual tone of an earlier time in Starfleet. To set this tone, Berman has said, the audience will see the crew out of uniform from time to time. Where the concept of the uniform is important, however, Blackman admits that it is the civilian clothes that can prove the larger challenge. “In any of the timeframes, those have always been the more difficult clothing to do. It’s just hard to figure out what it is. You get to a uniform or something that is really extreme, then it’s easy. You can just make it really extreme. I always sort of hark back to The Fifth Element. You look at that and you go, Okay, there are backless T-shirts with straps across them. But we can’t go that far. It’s not our world. So you’ll see Captain Archer in the first two episodes in essentially T-shirts and jean-cut pants with odd shoes. It is a gentle nod to the future with a fairly strong stance in the present.”

  Also making an appearance in the pilot episode is one of the favorite Star Trek races, the Klingons. And with the new setting, an earlier version of this race needed to be defined as well. Of course, makeup applications have come a long way since the sixties. These Klingons will appear more as they do in the later versions of Star Trek—a look that had its inception in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture and grew into the Klingons of modern Star Trek. Though the appearance may be modern, however, the concept of the race will be entirely fresh.

  “The Klingons are to a degree ‘proto-Klingons,’ ” Braga explains. “They’re Klingons that come long before the Klingons of Picard’s time. Therefore they can be gnarlier, nastier, more warlike Klingons than ever. They’ll eat the hearts of their victims and sharpen their teeth and so forth.”

  This description led Blackman to a very specific look. “It’s very rough furs and leathers and chain-maily,” he explains. “They still have the kind of boots that we’re used to, though nothing is black and gray anymore. It’s all kind of earth tone. They’re pretty dirty. They look pretty ratty, really. But that was the deal, so it’s more primitive than we have seen before.”

  Another key element to the show will be the ongoing temporal cold war. The foot soldiers of that war in the twenty-second century are the new race of Star Trek aliens known as the Suliban. “There are two different groups in the same time period,” Blackman explains. “Kind of the good Suliban and the bad Suliban. The bad ones are like chameleons. They are genetically mimetic. They can mimic or become anything they need to. It is not the same as a shapeshifter. Their skin will turn into whatever it needs to turn into. Consequently the bad ones have developed that technique to the point where they can manufacture it. So they have manufactured this as part of their clothing and are then able to change themselves, physically, and their clothing, physically. The good ones haven’t done that, or if they have that capability, they don’t use it. So they appear in things that are definitely futuristic, but don’t relate to their skin.”

  With these aliens, Blackman worked closely with makeup designer Michael Westmore, as much of the look of the aliens is mirrored in their clothing. “The characters have a very specific, kind of peculiar, skin, which we were able to copy in a pretty good way,” Blackman explains. “It’s a different color, but when you see them, the skin texture and the texture of the clothing are very reminiscent of one another. They are pretty much very simple jumpsuits with built-in feet. They’re just colored this amazing color and they’re very slight of stature.”

  Blackman looks forward to the challenges of the new series, especially because they are new. “I think it would have been more daunting and more difficult if the spin that I had to do was to take what I had done over twelve years and split that hair one more time,” he explains. “That would have been a really difficult thing. The difficulty here was not really coming up with the ultimate look—the appearance of the uniform—it was the process of evolving that. It required quite a few completely rendered prototypes
to get us to say, ‘No, no, we don’t want it to be a weird synthetic fabric. No, we want it to have a more now, today, this moment, look.’ So that was the process that was hard. And that’s the process that’s hard every day as regards this series right now. We don’t have much of a frame of reference for it. So, we’re continually reinventing that or inventing that. That becomes the difficulty. But the difficulties kind of get your head in the right place to be able to do it.”