In this exclusive Dispatch from Andromeda, Don Lipper speaks with Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda co-executive producer and head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe about writing, pushing the actors and the graphical language he's using on the show.

SPACE.com: Now that you’re looking at the dailies, has that affected the writing?

Robert Hewitt Wolfe: Oh sure, we adjust all sorts of little things.

SPACE.com: Such as?

RHW: Well you see how certain relationships are playing, and you want to play them up some more, you adjust them if they’re playing a little differently than you thought.

There are certain things that we are able to do a lot better than we thought. We’re doing a really nice job of telling the story through a lot of the internal graphics and displays on the command center of the ship for example. So we can do more of that. We can write to that now.

Our cast has been terrific, so we can, with confidence, give them more difficult material. I gave a hideously, evilly difficult speech to Gordon Michael Woolvett (who plays Harper) for this episode that we just wrapped last week, and it’s just tough, it was hard, but I gave it to him knowing he could pull it off cause I’d seen what he could do, and he pulled it off beautifully.

SPACE.com: What was so tough about it?

RHW: It was long. It was like a page long and fast and kind of frenetic and there was tech in it and comedy and it was a pain in the ass, man.

And I know writing it that it’s gonna be really tough to do, but I have a lot of confidence, we’re all developing a tremendous sense of confidence in our cast. And that means that we can throw them a couple of curve balls every once in a while and know that they’ll have a good chance of pulling it off.

SPACE.com: Was that for "Harper 2.0"?

RHW: No, for "Angel Dark, Demon Bright".

SPACE.com: With Star Trek, you always had to have somebody relaying the tech exposition?

RHW: Yeah.

SPACE.com: And you’re saying that you can do more with the graphics, which Star Trek really didn’t do?

RHW: We can do more with the graphics. We also happen to have on this show a very, very funny actor playing the engineer, so we can put a lot of comedy into that stuff. So it doesn’t play as dry as it would without a little humor and a little fun and some personality. Gordon brings a lot of personality to those scenes and they don’t play like tech scenes. Which is great. We don’t do a lot of them anyway, but sometimes, there’s no avoiding it.

SPACE.com: On Star Trek you had specifically obscure graphics. Are you trying to get away from those Okudagrams? [The nickname given to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s computer interface created by Scenic Arts Supervisor Michael Okuda.]

RHW: Well, we definitely have taken a more specific approach to our graphics. Now none of our graphics are in English, so the words aren’t really telling you anything. But the pictures do tell quite a lot of the story in a lot of situations.

SPACE.com: So this would allow actors to respond emotionally to the situation, rather than having to relate it technically?

RHW: Whenever possible, yeah. You still need to do a certain amount. You can’t just say nothing as far as tech is concerned, you need to get some of it out there. But we’re trying to do as little as possible and to keep as much of the scene about the characters as possible.

SPACE.com: Are there any tricks that you’ve learned aside from the use of graphics?

RHW: I learned a lot of tricks when I was Deep Space Nine about how much you need to say. One of the things is that, as E.R. shows, it’s not really important for the audience to follow every single word of the tech -- in some ways less is more and they just wanna know that these people know what the hell they’re talking about. And then the important stuff, you talk about.

Here’s how a heart works, this is why it’s important that the aorta keep pumping. But as far as gimme a ringer with D-5 lactate or whatever the hell they say. That’s Emergency!, I think. I don’t know what that means but I know that Randolph Mantooth knew what it meant.

SPACE.com: Right. Is part of the exposition educating the audience because you need to say "these are Klingons, they are bad people and they have disrupters and we have deflectors," and then as the series goes on there’ll be less and less?

RHW: One of our first episodes is, "here’s how space combat works in our universe," and we sort of lay it out there. And we needed to do that. But it’s not like we sit down and stop the movie and say, "that person out there shooting us is bad, and they have this technology and we have that technology and this is why their technology is giving our technology problems." We just play the scenes and sprinkle in the exposition a little bit.