Andromeda is
only the latest television series to come out of the notebooks of Star
Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991. Robert Hewitt Wolfe
describes to SPACE.com how he came to the program, and what it's
like to collaborate across decades.
More
about the technology of Andromeda
More
about the basic look and feel of Andromeda
SPACE.com: Could you
go back and describe the call you got about this series?
Robert Hewitt Wolfe:
Tribune already had an agreement in place with the Roddenberry estate and
with Kevin [Sorbo] to do a show based on some of the Roddenberry material
with Kevin as the star. There was enough material for them to do two different
shows. They said to me "look, we’ve got all these elements, why don’t you
look at this stuff and tell us what you’d do. There are premises that lend
themselves to doing stuff on a planet and there are premises that lend
themselves for a starship. We want you to work on a premise for a starship."
Which was fine because I
did a space station show for all those years [Deep Space Nine],
I never did a starship show. That was exciting. I’d already thought of
what I’d do if I was going to create my own science fiction show and I
was pleased to see that some of Gene’s material meshed nicely with what
I was doodling around with. It was pretty easy to see a path that would
lead to some place fun.
So I immediately spun out
what I was thinking about in reaction to this material. Tribune really
liked the idea of where I was coming from and they said: "Go!" They readied
the two shows and mine was a better marriage for what Kevin wanted to do.
He chose it and mine got fast-tracked while the other one is still out
there looking for a home.
SC: Does this other
show have a title?
RHW: It’s a little
weird because it was originally titled Andromeda. My concept was
originally titled Phoenix Rising. Tribune really liked the title,
so they decided to call my show Andromeda. That was easy to do,
it just meant changing the name of the ship.
SC: Did you get a
sense when you were reading Roddenberry’s notes, that since he had been
a number of years out of Star Trek and you had been a number of
years out of DS9, that you were both in the space of deconstructing
Star Trek? Did you feel any kind of kinship that your ideas were
meshing so easily?
RHW: It was interesting
how easily our ideas did mesh. I think that may be because we were coming
from a similar place. I don’t like the word deconstruction mostly because
I have associations with that from college English classes. I think that
deconstructing Star Trek has been happening for a very long time.
Deconstructing science fiction has been going on for a long time too. There’s
no point of deconstructing something unless you’re going to build something
back together.
Tribune asked, "is there
anything you don’t want to do? Like some people don’t want to do robots,
some people don’t want to do aliens, they don’t want to do this or that."
And my feeling was, I want to do all of them. There have been shows that
stripped science fiction of robots, faster than light travel, aliens or
starships. And my feeling was, do it all. Now that we’ve stripped it down
and gotten rid of the clichés, let’s do all of the stuff and do
it without the clichés. Let’s put it back together in a fun and
new and interesting way.
There are times when I say
unashamedly this is a space opera. And why not do a fun adventure show
in space? I don’t see anything wrong with doing a good old-fashioned adventure.
Do it with new sensibilities, but go for it. Let’s have fun. Let’s have
robots, let’s have artificial intelligence, let’s have space aliens, let’s
have starships, let’s have starship battles, let’s do the whole thing and
have a good time.
What do you think?
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