Very human guy. He's very emotional, very much more in the vain of Kirk, which is again, when they were pitching this idea to me that's what they were talking about for the captain. Very heart on his sleeve, flies in the face of authority and everything else. I think he's going to be a lot of fun. The challenge is to give him enough dimension and enough place to go so that if we're lucky enough to be around for a few years, then I'll have things to keep discovering and keep finding with him. I think he's evolving nicely.

How does the captain feel about being the first to really go out and explore outer space?

This character is a Starfleet brat, he grew up in the system. His life-long dream has been to captain, pilot a ship like this. The fact that he gets to be the first one is a great stroke of fortune for him. So he is fulfilling a dream. Now whether that permeates the entire show, that each character is, or whatever ? But being the first group of humans to really go out into space with an idea of peaceful exploration.

What is the purpose of the maiden voyage?

Without giving away too much, in the pilot we're given an opportunity to finally go out into space to return someone who ended up on Earth, who wasn't supposed to be there. So the notion is that we're just heading out to do this one mission. How that evolves and how we end up staying out there ? it has much more of a temporary feel to it. There is not a big five-year plan, or seven-year mission that we start out with. Again, the whole thing is a much more improvised feel. So we don't know. We don't come back at the end of each hour, back to Earth, but we may. I don't think that there's anything that will keep us from coming back to Earth if needed.

What do the fans have to look forward to this season?

I think that's the great excitement about this new series, is that because we're the first people going out at this warp level ? so we can really travel and really go places quickly ? it's the Wild West. We're the pioneers. It's the right stuff. It's all those things that I think can make it really exciting. So instead of "Oh, another week, another planet, another species? we're dealing with a ship that doesn't work a hundred percent all the time. We're discovering what it's like to be bored in space. We're discovering what it's like to be afraid, to have things not be what we had anticipated them to be. There's a reality about the series, I think, that again, it's going to grab the fans because it's only 150 years from today. We can almost in our minds get our heads around that, what 150 years is going to be like, now, as opposed to 300 years from now, or 400 years from now. So the idea of tying that to more today, you know, the suits and everything, they're just a little bit more of today, makes it seem like a possibility. And with that possibility, you do the next logical avenue, which is "Well, what would that really be like? What if I really was the first captain, and we were out there for the first time [and] didn't know what was going to be around the next corner.?

What's going to make the fans come back every week?

Just like you would tune in to watch any series, you're tuning in every week to see the relationships and how they evolve. We have that happening already on this show. And hopefully, it's just on a spaceship ? it's not an ER room, or it's not in a law office, it's in a space ship. But the things that are happening around us in the world are obviously big and dramatic and exciting. But at the core of it, it's "how do these human being exist together on a day-to-day basis, and what makes each of them tick.? And hopefully they've created some interesting characters ? I believe that they have, but that people want to come see.