DS9 Stories/News: No, don’t you understand? We’ve made him a god

Site: http://www.chaseclub.com/NEWS32.HTM

A Weekend With The Stars
By Doug Wilson
Posted at August 27, 2002

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Lolita talked quite a bit about behind-the-scenes activities, such as the decision to ‘kill’ Captain Sisko, which was made by the entire writing staff as a whole. She also says much of DS9′s story arcs where planned out from the very beginning, and not just made up as they went along, as Ira Steven Behr knew exactly what he wanted when he came aboard.

One attendee was anxious to hear Avery’s opinion on Sisko’s ‘death’. “Ah, but see, he’s not dead,” he replied. When he received the script for ‘What You Leave Behind,’ he was quite upset about Sisko’s ‘death’ because “the brown character never makes it to the end.” So, he went to see Ira Steven Behr, and Ira looked at him, shook his head and replied, “No, don’t you understand? We’ve made him a god.” Though he liked that Sisko wasn’t dead, he would have preferred him to stay human because of Jake and Kasidy’s pregnancy. “Every parent wants to be there to watch their child, to force their child to brush their teeth,” he said.

DS9 Stories/News: That’s What He Said, Ira Steven Behr & Gul Dukat

“The problem I find with a lot of writers, including myself, is that once you get involved with a character you start to get to know him and you humanise him,” Behr told Star Trek The Magazine, 2002.

“Michael Piller did the rewrite of ‘Defiant’ where he had Dukat talk about his children; My reaction was, ‘Uh oh, we’ve crossed the line.’ I realised that he was going to lose all credibility as a villain; we were going to shower him with our usual writerish empathy. [...] I really responded against that. Here was the guy who had been in charge of Bajor, and right away we were looking for excuses for him.”

Behr himself had little sympathy for the character. “I had certainly done my bit in making Dukat a kind of swashbuckling villain, but I always thought the Cardassians were horrific; I think anyone who doesn’t is obviously confused. They did a horrible thing, and I have little sympathy for that,” he said.

He was also pleased with the way DS9 resolved the character. “I think he got what he deserved, let me put it like that,” Behr explained. “I can’t say I feel sorry for him, I really don’t. He and Wynn were two characters I just could not sympathise with. Though we tried in all fairness to give them their points of view and give them their attitudes, they were very deluded, and they did horrible things.”

DS9 Stories/News: Hewitt: Creating The World Of Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe shared memories of his time on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine including setting up long term storylines, actor influence on storylines and lack of interference by the studio.

The writers of Deep Space Nine had more freedom than they found on some shows due to that lack of studio interference. “On Deep Space Nine, we got virtually no studio notes ever,” said Wolfe. “They largely just let us do what we wanted. Things went very smoothly.”

One thing that the writers realized rather quickly was that having the characters on a stationary space station as opposed to being on a traveling starship freed up the writers to create more serialized stories. “We very rapidly realized that being on a space station meant not ending stories every week,” said Wolfe. “If you’re on a starship, you leave the planet where the adventure is happening every week, and therefore…there isn’t a narrative pull towards revisiting those stories or it’s rarer. On our show, we never left, and the people we were dealing with didn’t either a lot of the time, so very quickly…we built towards more serialized storytelling. I think it’s something that was just a natural outgrowth of the premise.”

Some story elements had a longer lead time, and began their build up early in the series. According to Wolfe, these included the Bajoran religion and politics and the Dominion, which was set up beginning in the second season.

Other story elements developed as a result of the actors themselves, including the Odo-Kira romance. Odo’s scenes were played with “this admiration and longing for her that we picked up on very quickly,” said Wolfe, “and [we] thought, ‘Well, OK, that’s a great relationship too…we’ll run with that.’”

More can be heard on the podcast, located here, including Wolfe’s thoughts on working with Michael Piller and Ira Steven Behr, for which characters the writers most enjoyed writing, how Nog went from Ferengi son to Federation cadet and Wolfe’s most recent work, Alphas.

DS9 Stories/News: That’s What He Said, Ira Steven Behr (2)

Cont.

Yesterday, in part one of our exclusive interview, Ira Steven Behr discussed his experiences working as a writer-producer on both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Today, in the second half of the conversation, Behr speaks in more detail about DS9, looks back at his post-Trek efforts and gives us a glimpse at his latest project, the Syfy series Alphas, which will premiere on July 11.

Let’s get into DS9’s Dominion War arc. To some people, that was the best, boldest decision you could have made and, to others, it was the worst choice possible. What made you pull the trigger on the Dominion War and how surprised were you that you were even able to push that through?

Behr: Well, we had talked about it for years, the thought of, “If only we could be more serialized.” Look, we were drunk on wine and women. No. I felt the end coming. Obviously, we all did. We knew it’d be seven years and out. It was just, “Look, what do we want to do? Whatever it is, we should do it now.” Someone asked me on the last day of shooting why I was hanging around so long and I think the line I said was, “I have the rest of my life not to be here. So while I’m here, I’m going to stay until the end.” So it was the same thing. “What do we want to do?” One of the things we wanted to do was experiment with serialization and with the kind of space-opera war that spoke to a lot of the mythologies the show had built up. I thought we could do it. I knew we could do it. And then it became horse trading. I don’t even remember how many episodes we did, but I know we wanted more. Rick (Berman) and I went back and forth. Nothing terrible. No fights or anything like that. But we horse traded a bit and we came up with whatever it was.

If we forced you to sit down and watch three episodes of DS9, which three would you pick and why?

Behr: I only have 170-something to choose from, right? One of them would probably be “Duet,” I think. But I can’t pick three. It just doesn’t pay. On another day I might pick different episodes. Would it be ones I wrote or ones I didn’t write? There are so many episodes I’m proud of.

Who was DS9’s best guest star? Who were you the most thrilled to land?

Behr: I was very psyched when Frank Langella came on (as Minister Jaro). He didn’t want to put his name on the show. He said he wasn’t doing it because he liked Star Trek, but for his nieces or his nephews; you know, that excuse. But at the time I was psyched that we got Frank Langella to do three episodes. We had Jeff Combs and Andy Robinson and Marc Alaimo, that whole band of brothers. We had Wally Shawn, though in seven years I only saw him once. I had many conversations with Wally, but only once did I talk to him when he didn’t have a Ferengi head on.

DS9 had some very funky episode titles. Which one struck you as the funkiest?

Behr: Well, the one I make fun of most and, in fact, here at Alphas I’ve already referenced it five different times, was ‘Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night.” Hans (Beimler) came up with the title and he was so proud of it. We were coming up with all these pretentious, heavy-sounding titles. Robert (Hewitt Wolfe) and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago and we were laughing our heads off because he was so proud of Hans, because… “Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night.” What wrongs could be darker than death? Or night? So that was probably my favorite title because it proved a point. A useless point; but it proved a point.

Once and for all, describe your relationship with Rick Berman.

Behr: Why does anyone care?

People care, in part because there were so many rumors…

Behr: If I saw Rick Berman on the street today I would hug him. We ran into each other during the writers’ strike and we hugged. Did we agree all the time? No. Could we talk about that? Sure, we could, but what’s the point? Given the fact that we were part of this monolithic franchise, DS9 pushed the envelope as far as we could at that time in that situation. Could we have gone farther? Sure. Would the fans have gone with us? Not all of them, clearly. On a day-to-day basis I would say over the course of seven years we had a pretty good working relationship. We disagreed on lots of small and large things, but he went in there with me to fight for Avery Brooks, to shave his head and keep the goat. We walked across the lot together to the executive offices. We were jazzed and we had this disk of how he looked, and we were a team to do that. We got there and they immediately gave up, which was funny after three years. We were all set to go in with guns blazing and they said, “OK.” So it was a little anticlimactic, but we were a team at that moment. It’s one of the things that profoundly confuses me about the whole Star Trek (experience), is my relationship with Rick Berman, why people care or what that even means, what my relationship was.

Some people love DS9 and consider it the best Trek show and other people refuse to even acknowledge it as Trek. Do those extreme reactions tell you that you did your job properly?

Behr: Not particularly. I’ll tell you this: no one, I don’t care what the hell the show is, whether it’s Alphas, DS9, Fame, whatever it is, no one judges my work or the work I’m involved with harder than I do or with a sterner rating system than I do. So, what other people think… all I cared about at the end of the day was, “Did I think we were doing the best job we could do?” Then the fans could be fans, like I’m a fan with other things. They make their decisions and that’s fine, too. But how do I feel about the show? Do I feel good or not?

Last question about Trek. Would you ever want to do more DS9 or is it better to leave everything where it ended with the finale?

Behr: If that ever became a reality – which I have a hard time imagining – there is a big part of me that would love to go back to that world and those characters. I miss a lot of those characters. I miss the people, too, but I miss those characters. So, would I say no? I don’t think I’d say no.

You wrote and produced several shows after DS9 and before Alphas, including Dark Angel, The Twilight Zone, The 4400 and Crash. We’re sure each one stands out in its own way to you. Take us through your experiences on those shows.

Behr: I stuck around for four seasons on The 4400, which is the show I was really happy with in a lot of ways, and I think we did a lot of really interesting things on that show and had some really interesting actors to do them with. It was the show that halfway its run the network changed a bit and became the “blue skies” network. I was told over and over again we were the dark, apocalyptic show on the blue skies network. So that was a little unfortunate, I think, in terms of the longevity of the show. But I really enjoyed that and have a lot of good memories of it and think we did some really good episodes. I did a season on Crash. If I ever wrote a book, that would have to be two chapters. I couldn’t fit it all into one chapter. Some crazy, crazy things went down doing that show, but I got to work with Dennis Hopper on really, the last thing he ever did as an actor, I believe. That was pretty fascinating, not always fun, but fascinating. We had Eric Roberts and Dennis Hopper, so you know that’s an interesting story.

The show that should still be running, but unfortunately was totally on the wrong network, was The Twilight Zone reboot. It should never have been on UPN. It was another one of those clusterf—ks of a network trying to deal with a show they didn’t really want and were trying to turn into something else. Just the fact that we did 42 episodes in one season, every four days a new episode, every four days a production meeting, a pre-production meeting, casting… it was insane. Some of them came out really nicely and some of them did not come out so nicely, and for some of the strangest and most bizarre reasons, and casting choices that we were forced to make. But, as an experience, as a working experience, which is really, “Are you having fun in the writers’ room?” – beyond the writers’ room there be dragons – if you can get that kind of camaraderie and that sense of “We’re in the foxholes and we’re going to do this job even if they try to kill us while we do it,” then it doesn’t matter whether the show lasts or it doesn’t last. The experience is a good one. And that show, everyone was just pitching in and just trying to survive the season. At the end, almost everyone would have come back. At one point, they were even talking about trying to do it for another season. What interested me was that, in spite of it all, people were willing to do it again. To me, that’s success.

Your latest project is Alphas. You’ve got an interesting mix of acting veterans (David Strathairn and Malik Yoba) and relative newcomers (Warren Christie, Azita Ghanizada, Laura Mennell and Ryan Cartwright). What are you shooting for with the show?

Behr: It’s about ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. I think what we have that gives us our little niche in that well hoed field is the fact that we have an interesting array of main characters. We have some real characters, humor and people who really have no business doing the jobs that they have. That kind of gives this a very naturalistic feel, and there’s a sense that even though we’re dealing with science fiction and people with abilities, it’s pretty accessible. It’s the world that we know, with this overlay. So you still have to put a quarter in the meter when you park your car. People at the office are still picking at your food when you don’t want them to. I’d say it’s an accessible version of the superhero show.

You came onto Alphas after the pilot was shot. How did that ultimately affect your job and the post-pilot episodes?

Behr: Well, the pilot was a long time in development. (Creator and co-producer) Zak Penn can talk to that. I mean, it was years in development, in fact. When I watched the pilot, I thought, “OK, it’s really well made. The acting, I like.” But I could tell that, compared to the script, there were places in the pilot where you could see there could be more character development. There were more things bubbling under the surface that were just not there. The plot was good and interesting and exciting, but I just thought, “OK, they want this to be a character-driven show, and there’s plenty of room to do that.” If the show was perfect and I felt, “Oh yeah, yeah, I really dug it and I’m going to watch it and it’s all good,” there’d be no reason for me to feel the urge to go on it. But I said, “OK, I see what they’re aiming at and I think I can give them that.”

What kinds of stories will we see moving forward?

Behr: You’re going to see, hopefully, a variety of episodes because, you know me, I don’t like doing the same thing week in and week out. So you’re going to have some mythology shows. We’re doing one kind of semi-hardcore – accent on semi – procedural. We’re doing one non-Alphas-driven show, where the case has nothing to do with finding or interacting with another Alpha, but is a chance for Bill (Yoba) and Gary (Cartwright) to kind of partner up. So I’d call that a lighter episode. Of course, this is a series that talks about brain chemistry and how the brain affects how we exist in the world, but we’ll have an episode that deals with faith. What is faith and religious belief? What does it mean to be touched by God? Is that a religious experience or just your pineal gland firing like wild? So it’s a mixture of episodes, which is what keeps me interested in working on a show.

If the show clicks, how ready are you to stick around for a couple of years?

Behr: There’s always that possibility. I certainly don’t intend for this to be a one and out, but we’re well in the thick of it right now. We are dead-smack in the middle of it. So just get me through one season at a time.

DS9 Stories/News: That’s What He Said, Ira Steven Behr (1)

Ira Steven Behr spent eight years in the Star Trek universe, working as a writer-producer for one season of The Next Generation and, later, all seven seasons of Deep Space Nine. To this day, he remains a lightning rod of praise and criticism for DS9. Over time, Behr emerged as that series’ show runner, introducing extended arcs, particularly the Dominion War storyline, that enthralled or alienated Trek fans pretty much in equal measure. Following DS9, Behr went on to a long and productive career that’s seen him write and produce such television series as Dark Angel, The Twilight Zone, Dr. Vegas, The 4400, Crash and Syfy’s upcoming show, Alphas, which stars David Strathairn, Malik Yoba, Azita Ghanizada, Warren Christie, Ryan Cartwright and Laura Mennell and will premiere on July 11. StarTrek.com recently caught up with Behr for an extensive and exclusive interview in which he recounted his time and work on TNG and DS9, talked about his post-Trek career and provided a preview of Alphas. Below is part one of our interview, and be on the lookout tomorrow for part two.

When you think back on the Star Trek period of your life and career, what springs to mind?

Behr: I’d be insane and completely and utterly neurotic at the very least if I said anything other than that it was an amazing eight years. To be a part of that, to be doing 26 episodes a season, having two or three weeks off and then starting again… It was a good experience. I’m still friends with a lot of people I worked with on Star Trek. About 20 minutes ago Jeff Combs called me from Hawaii about getting together. I’m working here on Alphas with Robert Wolfe. At the end of last season, Ron Moore and I went to a Dodgers game. I had Bradley Thompson and David Weddle in for a couple of weeks on Alphas while they were between gigs. Plus, people still ask me about Star Trek. You’re lucky if you can make any kind of mark on the pop culture, on the mass culture. So, being a part of that, I have no complaints.

Let’s revisit some ground that you’ve discussed in the past, but that may be new to people just now discovering DS9. You left TNG after one year, the third season. So, what happened that season, and why did you leave?

Behr: I just felt that, at that time, even though I know the third season is kind of recognized as the season that TNG found its legs and that the franchise started to move forward again, being there was not a hell of a lot of fun. Even though we’ve now lived long enough that when I tell people I worked with Gene Roddenberry — I mean actually sat in his office and talked about stuff – they look at me like, “Wow! Wow.” Gene’s been dead for two decades now. So, yeah, there’s the wow factor, but there were just too many rules and regulations. I called TNG, perhaps unfairly, the Connecticut of Star Trek, and I still kind of feel that way. Maybe if I’d come on in the fourth season or stayed through the fourth season, things would have gotten better, but creatively I just felt trapped. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time with Ron and Rene (Echevarria) and the gang, and (Hans) Beimler and (Richard) Manning. There were a lot of great moments and some of the shows were really well done, but I was not a happy camper for that year. And I never, ever, ever looked back and said, “Wow, I should have stayed” or “Wow, I wish I would have stayed.” I did it. It was good. I ran into Jonathan Frakes at a Coffee Bean about a month ago. It was fantastic to see him. We sat down and we talked. Whenever I see anyone from the show it’s always a good feeling, but I had to go.

Some people, then, were surprised when you returned to Star Trek for DS9. Take us through that. How difficult was it to get you back on board?

Behr: You’d have to ask Michael (Piller, DS9’s co-creator and co-executive producer, who passed away in 2005) how difficult it was to get me back, and that’s going to be a little difficult. Michael and I were close. Leaving was not even a blip on our friendship. I went back in the fourth season, between feature rewrites, and did an episode of TNG in the fourth season when Michael called me up and asked me to do him a favor. But put it this way, it took a couple of seasons of baseball, of going to games together, of Michael saying to me, “We’re doing a new thing… Would you ever consider…” And then it became, “You said at the other game you might consider… Now we have a bible, but we haven’t written a script yet. Would you read the bible and tell me what you think?” So I read the bible and we were at another game, and he said, “Well, now you’ve read the bible and here were are and tell me…” What he said, if I remember correctly, is that “The show was going to be somewhat grittier or darker, with humor, and will represent your point of view a lot more than TNG had.”

Now, how he knew this or how he even knew my point of view, I could never figure out because our points of view often were very different. Then I said, “Look, if I came on I’d want O’Brien and Amoros (whose name eventually became Bashir) to become best buddies even though they’re totally different characters and don’t get along at first. I’d like to really to explore a friendship on Star Trek that doesn’t have to do with the fact that he’s Number One or he’s a Vulcan and they’re both on the bridge all the time and there’s a chain of command. It’s just a friendship.” Michael looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I don’t see why not.” It was so simple. “I don’t see why not. Sure.” Then I talked to my sister, who was a Star Trek fan going way back, and she said to me, “Come on, go give it another shot. You were so disappointed leaving Star Trek. It left such a bad taste in your mouth. Why don’t you see if this time it’ll be different. You trust Mike, and he’s telling you all these things. So why not?”

What worked best about DS9 and, a decade-plus of objectivity later, what didn’t work as well as you’d hoped?

Behr: What worked? The thing that worked best for me was that it told a story over seven years. There was a beginning, there was a middle and there was an ending. You can’t tell a good story without characters, and you’ve got to think that the characters were a big part of that. And I’m not just talking about the leads; I’m talking about that wonderful group of actors who we had as recurring characters, all of whom I loved to bits as people and as actors. So, without getting all blah-blah-blah about it, I’d say that’s what I think worked, or that’s what I’m proudest of. I don’t even know if that answers your question.

We just want your angle on it, your thoughts. There’s no wrong answer. And what didn’t work the way you intended?

Behr: Obviously the simple thing, the one that a bunch of fans are waiting to hear me say, if they’re waiting to hear me say anything, is that once we realized that Armin (Shimerman) wasn’t really connecting to a lot of the humor we were trying to do, we should have probably cut back on some of the attempts at doing humorous episodes, or at least gotten directors who were more comfortable with comedy. It’s so weird. One of the things that Rick (Berman) and I agreed on all the time was Rick would read these comedic episodes and he’d say, “This is great. This is so funny. It’s so funny on the page, but they’re not going to play it, are they?” Not everyone, but some people just weren’t quite going to go there. I’d say, “Yeah, probably you’re right.” But every now and then we’d get a show like “Little Green Men” or “The Magnificent Ferengi,” which I thought did work. So every now and then you’d see a glimmer of hope, but we probably should have admitted defeat. It’s just I thought the Ferengi were really cool characters and gave us a totally different feeling. We had so many f—king heroes. It was nice to have people who were like us, scared and looking out for themselves.