Dreamwatch #86 | January 2002 ::.::.:..

Bakula to the Future

Dreamwatch #86, January 2002

Scott Bakula reveals to Ian Spelling that, as the first captain of the Enterprise, he is looking forward to a long voyage where several captains have gone before.

Looking back on his very first day of work on Enterprise, on his first time sitting in Captain Jonathan Archer's chair, Scott Bakula doesn't wax overly sentimental. It was, says the actor who is leading the latest Star Trek show, Enterprise, just another scene, one of many he'll play as Captain Archer in the coming days and years. Images of captains past, of Shatner and Stewart, Brooks and Mulgrew, did not flicker through his mind.

"A lot of people are asking me what it was like to sit in that chair," notes Bakula. "It seemed like it was a bigger deal to everybody else around me, to the crew and other people. It seemed like people were waiting around to see when I'd sit down in the chair and what I was going to be like as I did it. I was certainly aware of some kind of moment when we all assumed the position, so to speak. Now that we've done it, in retrospect, the chair is an inanimate object and it's what you bring to it that gives it life and gives it that exciting magic. "The goal for me is to make that something special, to give it that magic. There's been some tremendous work that preceded me in the captains' chairs and there's a lot to live up to. At the same time, this particular chair on this particular bridge has no history yet. That was just the chair they stuck on the bridge set. My thinking was, 'It won't have any history until we start making it.'"


Archer on target
Bakula may be playing the first captain of the starship Enterprise, but he is only the latest in a long line of distinguished actors who have taken up the challenge of Star Trek. He marks out his captain as being different from recent versions, more like William Shatner's Kirk than any other, within the opening moments of the pilot episode Broken Bow. As baseball cap-sporting, dog-owning Captain Archer, Bakula will lead the crew of the Enterprise NX-01, a crew that includes Jolene Blalock as the Vulcan T'Pol, Connor Trineer as Chief Engineer Charles Tucker III, Anthony Montgomery as Ensign Travis Mayweather, Linda Park as Ensign Hoshi, John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox and Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed. The group unites for its first mission in the show's two-hour pilot, Broken Bow, which finds everyone brought together to deal with Klingons, a genetically enhanced alien species called the Suliban and a mysterious threat from the future. Of course, it's all brand new for the Enterprisers, as the series unfolds in the 22nd century, before the days of Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy), before the formation of the Federation, and back in a time when starships resembled futuristic submarines, beaming anything other than non-organic materials was tricky and the rules of outer space travel were yet to be written. "He's an emotional guy, Archer, so his baby, his love is the ship, being in space," explains Bakula, who was always the first choice of executive producers/writers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, but who negotiated long and hard before signing on for the show. "Anyone who shares that feeling, he will transfer affection to them and trust them and let them help him care for his baby. He will welcome the participation of those people. Anybody who is in his way, whether they're on the ship with him or off the ship, he'll have a lot of trouble with. So he's a very protective guy. I think sometimes being protective like that can make you a closed off kind of a character: 'I can only do things one way and this is the way.' But the nature of this piece is such that we don't know everything and we're not familiar enough with everything to have that attitude. That requires everyone to be cooperative and experimental. In a sense he's learning about these people around him as he's learning about the ship. He's learning what his crew does best, what their best attributes are as people. "As any good captain would do, he's looking for the strengths and the weaknesses in his crew. He'll connect to all of them in interesting and different ways. So far he is probably closest to Tripp, Charles 'Tripp' Tucker, his engineer. They've had a past relationship. He's also had a past relationship with Hoshi, his communications officer. They have a past that's evident in the pilot. He tends to be comfortable with the two of them, and certainly the most comfortable with Tripp. The biggest friction comes from his science officer, T'Pol, who is a Vulcan. There's a lot of friction there and it will be ongoing friction. " The chemistry [among the cast] seems to be great. So far so good. You just never know how any of this stuff will ever work out. The entire cast is very excited to be here, very enthusiastic. There's just a great energy that's being applied in the right direction. It's easy to start off on something like this and just be running with your head cut off. The start-up of a show-with all the pressures, the newness of the people and the surroundings, and all the press you've got to do can be very taxing. But everyone seems to have his or her head on pretty good and seems to be applying themselves to the work, which is the foremost thing. At the end of the day, everything else aside, we have to deliver on the screen, and everyone seems to realise that. So there's a great camaraderie that's already developed. We're all laughing a lot and having a really good time, and I think that's carrying over to the work. "

Leaping Into Trek
At the time of this conversation, that history was in its infancy. Bakula and company were only on to shooting the second post-pilot episode. The actor reports that it's way too early to discuss what kinds of shows -in terms of tone, in terms of standalones versus multi-episode arcs - are in the offing. "I don't know what will happen for the long run, but the first episode we shot [entitled Fight or Flight] is a perfect extension of the pilot. It makes total character sense. We're dealing with being out in space, but not having everything running at full capacity and not understanding everything we're doing and seeing. There's humour and drama that comes out of that. For instance, we'll have trouble targeting torpedoes. The ship was never taken out on that kind of a test run before. That kind of flavour is there. There isn't necessarily a planet around every comer. What do they do when there's not? And the script after that [Strange New World] continues the feeling of us being the new kids on the block and finding our way around. We don't know all the rules of the universe because there's no booklet to check into. So we're making do as best we can. That gives the show a good, realistic, grounded feeling. Everybody wants to experience space exploration and it's not quite as easy as we'd all been led to believe."

Bakula arrived on the Enterprise set very much a veteran actor. Known as a likable guy who tends to excel at playing likable characters, his credits range from such series as Gung Ho to Eisenhower & Lutz, Quantum Leap to Murphy Brown and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, to the mini-series versions of The Invaders and Tom Clancy's NetForce, to films including Necessary Roughness, Color of Night, Mi Familia/My Family, Lord of Illusions, American Beauty and Lurninarias (with Voyager's Robert Beltran). Though he won critical kudos for his performance as Kevin Spacey's gay neighbour in the Oscar-winning American Beauty, Bakula remains most beloved for Quantum Leap. Bakula received four Emmy Award nominations and won a Golden Globe for Best Actor during his five-year stint as Dr. Sam Beckett, a man who leapt from body to body, in the process altering the histories of people, events and eras. "I think it's just the simplicity of the message that's behind the popularity of Quantum Leap," says the actor, who, during Quantum Leap's run encountered such past and future Trek actors as Marc Alaimo,Terry Farrell, Robert Duncan McNeill, Neal McDonough and Richard Herd (among a good many others),and was directed by Trek veterans Rob Bowman and Michael Vejar. "I still believe that people love the notion of leaping in and leaping out that the show had. That was such a great hook. What's he going to be next week? Where's he going to be? Who's he going to help and how?' [Producer] Don Bellisario came up with a great hook. It was about real people.
And we did some good work. At the end of the day, that's another reason why it's still around. The work speaks for itself. A great majority of the episodes are really quite wonderful and are certainly something to be proud of. I think viewers just respond to good stuff." In October, he'll share the screen with Elizabeth Perkins and Tamara Hope in What Girls Learn, a telemovie that he co-executive produced. And later on in the autumn, Bakula will be seen in the Irwin Winkler-directed big screen drama Life as a House, co-starring with Kevin Kline, Jena Malone, Kristin Scott Thomas and Hayden Christensen, who will step into the star-making role of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones. It's not lost on Bakula that Enterprise could be the longest-running gig of his career; after all, in the often-uncertain world of entertainment, a Star Trek series is about as close to a sure thing as there is. "There's no other opportunity out there like Star Trek as an actor," Bakula acknowledges. "It's kind of overwhelming, this whole franchise. There's never been anything like it and I dare say there will never be anything else like it. When you are an actor on a Star Trek show you do kind of think that, you'll be around for several years. I don't find that daunting. I'm kind of excited about it. I like television, like the speed of it, like the challenge of it, like the feeling of doing a day's; work. I like the creativity of this genre. And on Enterprise I've got six other cast members to share the time and the workload with, and that's been very reassuring in terms of my personal life, so far as the time I'll have to be at work and to lead a life. So it doesn't seem that daunting to me at this point. We should probably talk about those aspects of it every year to see how I'm feeling, but right now it's been very refreshing for me. I've already had a few days off and I've actually been at a little bit of loss as to what to do with them." Bakula catches himself and laughs. "Not that I'm sitting at home crying about it," he adds. "I'm filling the time."


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"Won't it be great when we can finally do what they do on Star Trek?" 

"I think we live in a world that's becoming more and more about creativity and imagination," says Scott Bakula, who first traversed the genre cosmos in Quantum Leap and now beams into the Star Trek universe as Captain Jonathan Archer, lead character on UPN's new Trek adventure, Enterprise. "SF has been long at the forefront of that, since way back when the world was concerned with much more practical matters and the world was dealing in a much more concrete fashion with the bottom line. Now, with the internet and computers and all the things that are going on technologically, the people who are who are still creating and imagining what else we can do are the ones who constantly amaze me We're still coming up with great things on this planet and I think SF feeds that in a wonderful way. "Star Trek put out there a long time ago the notion that we are not alone and it's cemented that in our minds. The thought has always been: Won't it be great when we can finally do what they do on Star Trek? Won't it be great when we can finally transport ourselves and stop with all this mass transit stuff? Won't it be great when we clean up the planet and do all the things in the Roddenberry dream? I still believe - and I think so many who are still caught up in the Star Trek lore believe these kinds of things will be possible, will be achieved at some point."