hen Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda launches in syndication the week of Oct. 2, Captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) will skipper the sentient starship, but co-executive producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe will be at the controls. Wolfe, a five-year veteran of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine writing staff, will run the new series and act as its head writer.
Wolfe wrote more than 30 episodes of the Emmy Award-winning DS9 and ran the writing staff during the series' final two seasons. No stranger to SF TV, he got his start writing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and also penned the ABC television movie Futuresport.
When Tribune Entertainment and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's widow, Andromeda executive producer Majel Roddenberry, were developing a new show based on Gene's ideas, they naturally turned to Wolfe to help them out. Recently Wolfe took a few minutes to discuss the upcoming series with Science Fiction Weekly.
Tell us about the show.
Wolfe: The show itself is basically about Kevin Sorbo's character, Captain Dylan Hunt, the last surviving ... captain of the last surviving ship of a great civilization. He is attempting to reestablish an overarching civilization on what is basically a Balkanized chaotic universe. ... The Systems Commonwealth was the great civilization. ... And the High Guard was the military arm of the civilization, to which Hunt is loyal even after bad things happen to him.
The Andromeda Ascendant is his ship. It's a fully sentient artificial intelligence. The ship is basically her principal body, although she has multiple bodies that she inhabits simultaneously. So in addition to the ship, there are all these invisible nanites that she controls: little mini-bots that run around and fix her body. There are Metropolis-y looking androids that function inside the ship. She has one human-looking ... body. And she can control them all simultaneously. She can divvy up her personality between parts. She can have conversations with herself. She can play chess against herself and not [know] who's going to win [laughs].
Captain Hunt and the Andromeda get caught in a black hole vortex, and are awakened 300 years later by a crew of space pirates?
Wolfe: Essentially. Hunt sort of recruits a new crew from a group of salvage-freighter smuggler-type guys, led by Beka Valentine, who becomes his sort of de facto new first officer. She's played by Lisa Ryder, who was on Forever Knight.
How much of the show actually comes from Gene Roddenberry and how much of it is new?
Wolfe: It definitely has its origins in Gene's work. I was given a stack of Gene's unproduced stuff. Some of it was scripts for other concepts. [There were] a lot of little paragraphs, brainstorming-type material, philosophical stuff that he'd written. Just a ton of material.
I went through it with the mandate to develop a starship-based show based on a lot of this unproduced material. The basic concept of a man coming from the past to save the future and our sentient starship--basically, the character of Dylan Hunt and the Andromeda Ascendant--came out of Gene's work very much directly.
But he didn't write any scripts for this, or even a fully-fleshed proposal, as he did, for example, with Earth: Final Conflict. So, [it's more Gene] than Deep Space Nine or [Star Trek:] Voyager, where he didn't have any [input]. ... He created the universe, but not the characters or the situations, for Voyager and Deep Space Nine. In this, he did not generate the universe, largely, but he did create the principal characters and situation. And then I developed a lot of the sort of peripheral stuff.
Where did the title come from?
Wolfe: The title was neither one of ours [laughs]. He had a title, I had a title, Tribune had a title. And they basically really liked their title. ... He had a couple of different ones. ... Starship was one of the ones he did have. There were a couple of others in addition to that. I don't think Tribune owned the rights to the title Starship. ... My title was Phoenix Rising, and they liked the title Andromeda, which they had developed.
They had developed two premises already off this material. One was based on a planet. One was based on a starship. I did the starship one. But the other one was called Andromeda. They liked the title Andromeda. ... So they just changed the name of the ship.
What is Majel Roddenberry's role in the show?
Wolfe: Basically supervisorial. She obviously reviewed all the material, made sure it felt right and that it would be something that would properly have Gene's name on it. That's her main role on the show, to oversee it and ... [protect the] Roddenberry imprimatur.
People are going to ask, how does Andromeda compare with Star Trek?
Wolfe: I think it obviously definitely has Gene's philosophy, his philosophical elements that are similar to Star Trek, in that the basic theme is: If we work hard and work together, we can create a better world. In a very simplified way, that's sort of the Roddenberry philosophy and that's definitely part of the show.
It is a starship-based show, where we will go to exciting and new interesting places every week. So there are definitely elements in common, especially with the sort of classic Star Trek. And the main character is the captain of the ship. Those are the similarities, and they're obvious similarities. There's no escaping that, and that's fine. That's good.
The differences, of course, are that the characters are very, very different. The situation is very, very different. It's not about preserving an existing civilization, or even about going places where no one has ever been before. That's not something we do. It's about trying to unite a fragmented world, and trying very much to build something or rebuild something. So it is a bit of a different take on The Next Generation or the original series. ... If you wanted to compare it with Star Wars, it's different from that, too. There's no oppressive evil empire to overthrow. It's its own show.
An analogy would be the period after the fall of the Roman Empire, where the barbarians have overrun Europe?
Wolfe: In a way, yeah, I think that's a very strong analogy. The Roman Empire had its strengths and weaknesses. I think the Commonwealth was a much more benevolent state than the Roman Empire, which was not an empire I'm particularly fond of. But it certainly was better than chaos, and there certainly was a sentiment that the Roman Empire was something that was worth putting back together, even up to 800 or 900 years after it had fallen apart.
What point are you at in the production of the series?
Wolfe: We're shooting episode 10 or 11 right now. We're preparing some early episodes for press screenings. We're writing 15, 16, 17 and 18 right now out of 22. ... We started early. We started in May, partially to give us time to get things in shape. It's a genre show. It's a science-fiction show. It's a spaceship-based show. There are an infinite number of complications. ... There are a lot of opticals that have to be laid in ... and a huge amount of post-production: sound, score ... creating the kind of environment we want.
It seems that the show contains the potential for dramatic conflict, like DS9.
Wolfe: Certainly, most of the people who are working with Dylan are not signatories to his particular ethos, at least at first. And they certainly didn't go to the same school as him, and they weren't raised the same way, and they have very different agendas, though they've all sort of signed on board his ship. ... It doesn't mean they've abandoned the agendas they brought with them. ... There's definitely conflict.
Do you have warp drive?
Wolfe: No.
Transporters?
Wolfe: No.
Replicators?
Wolfe: No.
Phasers?
Wolfe: Not really, no. We definitely have nothing like replicators. If we want a new part of the ship, we machine it in the machine shop. We want food, we get it out of the ship's stores. There's an auto-chef; there's robots that will take care of that for you. But it's food. ... There's no transporters. We work out the basics of teleportation in one episode in certain specific circumstances, but it's hard, and doesn't always work. ... If we want to go down to a planet, we get in a ship and land.
We don't have phasers. We have force-lances. They're quite different. They're much more versatile, sort of an all-purpose tool. They can be used as a hand-to-hand combat weapon, as a flashlight, as a welding torch, as a taser, as a gun that fires bullets, plasma, whatever the heck we want. ... They're the signature weapon of the High Guard.
Sort of a Swiss Army lightsaber?
Wolfe: Yeah, sort of.
We do not have warp drive, which I never quite understood except as a way to go very, very fast. We can't go any faster than about 30 to 40 percent of the speed of light in space.
The slipstream, which is a way to get from point A to point B without actually going from point A to point B, is a way of transportation through which the time it takes to go from one place to another has no actual relation to their physical geography. So you can get from out here to Alpha Centauri, if you're a really, really good pilot, in about 30 seconds. You can get from out here to Alpha Centauri, if you're a really, really bad pilot, in about 30 months, or you might not make it there at all. It's entirely based on the skill of the pilot, more than on the physical distances between the places that you're going. But slipstream allows you to transit inconceivable distances very, very fast.
Slipstream does not allow you to send subspace messages from point A to point B very, very fast. If you want to send a message very fast, you put it into a courier ship with a human pilot ... who delivers the message.
Radio messages and sensor data are limited by the speed of light. The effective use of weaponry is limited by the speed of light. ... Our fastest weapons travel very close to the speed of light. They're lasers. But they dissipate fairly fast, and you need to be fairly close to use them.
Is there a principal nemesis in the series?
Wolfe: There may very well be. But ... [laughs] we may even see them, but they won't necessarily be identified as the "principal nemesis of the series." There's bad guys out there, lots of bad guys out there. There's a lot of people out there with different agenda who may not necessarily be bad guys. ...
A whole menagerie of aliens, budget permitting, will parade themselves across your television screen. ... Mostly they'll be humanoid because of obvious budgetary constraints. It also really helps when you're having a character to have a face. A lot of our aliens are not aliens at all; they're genetically engineered humans who have been modified to live in different environments. So that helps. ... I'd love to do more complicated aliens, but we can't afford it.
What are you bringing to this show in the way of lessons from having worked on DS9?
Wolfe: As far as lessons are concerned, it's almost like there are too many to count. Five years is a long time, and it's hard to say specifically everything that I learned in that experience. But I'm bringing everything I've learned to bear. As far as how to run a writing staff, I've learned a lot from [DS9 executive producer] Ira [Behr]. ... I learned a lot from [executive producer] Michael Piller too about that.
I think they are both very disciplined in the way they run a writing staff. ... It was a very well-oiled, well-tuned way to go about doing this business. Assembling a team and making sure that everyone is one the same page. I learned a lot from them.
Deep Space Nine was one of the best writing staffs around, frankly, I think. ... It's a measure of how well written and how well staffed that show was, when you look around and see where everyone from that show has ended up. We're all first or second, high-level writers on different shows all over town. That's a nice thing to see.
What will you do differently on this show compared with DS9?
Wolfe: Different characters in different situations require a different approach. I think we're a little lighter in tone than Deep Space Nine, probably, it's safe to say, although not wildly lighter. We're not a sitcom, and we're not trying to be. We're maybe a little closer in tone to the original series, if you want to pick a Star Trek. ... I have the Great Escape poster on my wall, because that was the template for tone that I held out to the staff at a very early point in the development of the show. ... It's a tone of good, old-fashioned adventure, without going totally into the Robin Hood thing.
Are you worried about the spate of SF television debuting this fall?
Wolfe: People know we're coming out, so the science fiction fans will be there. On the downside, they'll dissect our every decision, and they're a tough audience. I'm hopeful that we can give them something they'll enjoy watching.
