Simon & Schuster took the first steps into the realm of Star Trek audio dramas last month with Star Trek: Picard — No Man’s Land, the audio adventure set between the television series’ first and second seasons.
Starring Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd as their Trek characters, Seven of Nine and Raffi Muskier, the story from Picard co-creator Kirsten Beyer and longtime Trek comics writer Mike Johnson sees the pair on a mission into Romulan territory — while also navigating the start of a romantic relationship.
We had the opportunity to speak to the writers behind this exciting new project, as Beyer and Johnson talk about the origination of the story idea, writing for the real actors who portray Seven and Raffi, and hopes for future Star Trek audio dramas.
(And in case you missed it, be sure to check out our review of No Man’s Land too!)
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
TREKCORE: Why did you choose to focus No Man’s Land on Seven and Raffi specifically?
KIRSTEN BEYER: Well, out of all of Picard’s interesting characters, I wanted to give more time to Seven of Nine in particular. That had to do with my past love affair with Star Trek: Voyager, but also this Picard-era version of Seven who was so different from the character that we knew from the Voyager days.
Then Raffi as well, who is such a deep and complex woman. It felt like, between the Seven/Raffi dynamic and the Fenris Rangers part of everything, it just felt like we had maximum opportunity to dig into some of these things without impacting or worrying too much — at least, initially — about what the impact would be on Picard Season 2.
TREKCORE: I knew as soon as I heard a “Unimatrix Zero” reference that I was listening to a Kirsten Beyer production!
BEYER: Guilty as charged!
TREKCORE: How does writing an audio drama differ from your previous experience of writing for television, novels, and comics?
MIKE JOHNSON: The essential components of it are pretty much the same as when Kirsten and I were writing the comics together, which is that you sit down and you start figuring out the story together.
For me, at least it was familiar going in because I knew and loved working with Kirsten so that was certainly created a level of comfort with the project. Then the more I worked on it, the more you realize you are getting a crash course in writing for audio, where you realize, “Oh, that thing that I usually just do kneejerk flexibly when I’m writing for comics, I can’t do in audio.”
You can’t really write “someone walks across the room” because you just hear a few footsteps, where even if you hear the footsteps, you don’t know where they’re going. And you don’t want the character saying, “I am now crossing the room!”
It’s just getting the hang of how to convey things just through sound, which was so cool. That was just the best part about it was learning that vocabulary and what we could do and figuring out how music and sound effects can work. Yes, so the essential writing process wasn’t that different, but obviously, the tools in our toolbox were totally different.
BEYER: I think we were thinking about that from the beginning, even as we were starting to break the story. We would come up with ideas and then go, “Wait, how can we do that just with sound, and not visually?”
We knew we wanted to have cool action set pieces in there, but we really had to dig in to figure out how that gets conveyed clearly to the listener when you can’t see what’s going on and you can’t have your dialogue just be completely expository.
TREKCORE: Did you sample a few audio dramas to get a sense of the medium?
JOHNSON: I listened to a few of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas.
BEYER: Me too! Frankly, I think I was a little daunted because those didn’t seem to be nearly as lengthy as this was planned to be. Simon & Schuster said from the beginning that they wanted a 90-minute production — or longer — so we also had to factor that in as well.
TREKCORE: What’s is the process like of then recruiting the actors to participate in the audio drama, since getting Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd to sign on seems like a pretty critical requirement?
BEYER: We did the outline so that Simon & Schuster was convinced that we had a story that they were excited about telling, and then they approach the actors before we wrote the script. I suppose if the actors had not been interested, it might have all died there, but lucky for us, they were.
JOHNSON: They knew that Kirsten was going to be writing it with me, which created a level of trust as well. I think if it was just me alone or someone they didn’t know, it would’ve been maybe more of an ask to get Jeri and Michelle to say yes, but I know how much they trust and love Kirsten.
It felt very much like part of the production of the show. We were filling in a gap between the two seasons with a necessary story.
TREKCORE: As the audio drama is coming together, how much of the actors’ performances is guided by you as the writers — and how much of that comes organically through the recording process?
BEYER: There is a director who worked with the actors during the recording sessions. We were there for most of those, especially earliest and the longest ones. We were there primarily for clarification purposes. Christina Zarafonitis, our director, was brilliant and also incredibly generous. It was a true collaboration.
She would often check-in to see if what we were hearing was what we thought we were going to hear. For the most part, she really did lead the actors through to find both the clarity and the performances that were going to make sense to her.
I don’t think we provided more in terms of directions or clarifications on the page than there would be in any given screenplay or teleplay. Every now and again, you’re shaping a thing in a certain way and you want to make sure you’re being exactly clear about it, but with these two actors, they have such a rich history with these characters that you’re already hoping to meet them where they are — and where you know them to be — so that’s not super necessary.
JOHNSON: I think we had a pretty solid handle on the plot at that point. We really dove into it to make sure it was as airtight as possible. The coolest thing about the process is watching the actors, they just turn it on. It’s incredible. It’s star power and they were such pros about going through the script and taking a few hours to put together a performance.
It was just incredible to watch — or to listen to, I should say. They are the heart and soul of the project and they just brought it in the process.
TREKCORE: No Man’s Land also features the voice talents of Lower Decks star Fred Tatasciore. What did you think when you found out that he was also going to be part of this audio drama?
BEYER: Well, I don’t want to take anything away from the hiring of Fred, because he is a wonderful and very in-demand voiceover actor, but Fred and I were in the same class of 13 people at UCLA getting our master’s in acting like 20-something years ago.
Freddy was in my wedding; Freddy is my daughter’s godfather. Freddy is somebody who I know and love very, very dearly and who I have always been in awe of as a performer. When this came along, it was literally the first thing that I had ever written where I was like, “Oh, oh, oh God. Oh, Freddy!”
I was delighted that he was able to join us on this, but he was not a stranger to me.
TREKCORE: And who better to voice a duplicitous Romulan warlord?!
BEYER: We were very conscious as well of wanting him to play against the type. As we were working with him, we were like, “Freddy, just give us you.” There is so much about him that is so deep and rich and complex, and he didn’t really need to color it too much with all of the things you do with stock villains or monsters, which he does a lot of.
TREKCORE: Mike, what was experience like for you to not just to tell a great story about these characters, but then be able to listen to the actors themselves perform it in a Star Trek production?
JOHNSON: It’s fantastic. A dream come true! I’m so lucky to have Kirsten as a mentor and a partner in this. We talked about how when she came to comics, I taught her the ropes on how to a format a comic script and how comics flow and all that.
I’d written a couple of episodes of Transformers ten years ago, but otherwise, this was my first whack at writing Star Trek for performers. It was great to have Kirsten there to show me the nuances of a particular line or something where you’re really thinking about how would the person say this, as opposed to in comics, you’re really writing for the reader and the reading eye and the reading mind, as opposed to writing for someone to you perform it.
Just figuring out that difference was great and getting a comfort level with it. It’s fantastic. It’s great.
TREKCORE: Kirsten, how much of the Seven-Raffi relationship story concept was meant to bridge the storytelling gap between Picard’s first and second seasons?
BEYER: We wanted to go super deep into the dynamics of this relationship, to take both characters from the end of Season 1 — where it was almost just the beginning of an idea of a thing– to what we were going to see in Season 2.
Thankfully, the writing for Season 2 was being completed while we were writing this, and because I was in the writers’ room I was able to keep modulating things because the arc of that relationship is a very, very fine thing. We needed to track that through a story that keeps it moving forward, and have it land in the exact right place.
That was the bulk of our effort in terms of this story. It was all going to live or die based on that relationship, and the dynamics between them; that is what has to sustain a listener’s attention. It was awfully subtle at times.
TREKCORE: Now we’ve got No Man’s Land, hopefully, it does well enough that Simon & Schuster’s will be interested in more….
BEYER: Let’s do 20 of them!
TREKCORE: Yes, right! Now you’ve had this experience, what do you think the potential for this medium is?
JOHNSON: I think the future is bright. I think No Man’s Land is proof of concept from the reception that we’ve gotten. Obviously, it comes down to how successful the sales numbers are, but I think the warm reception we’ve received shows that there’s absolutely room for them.
I think there’s been a breaking down of the walls between different media. This was something that Alex Kurtzman spoke about with Kristen and me a few years ago — on the comic side — how to break down the walls, so that a film wouldn’t be more important than a TV series, and TV wouldn’t be more important than the print world.
Seeing Michelle and Jeri do this audiobook shows that the actors want to be able to tell stories in all kinds of different media. They’re not pressuring us about like, “Oh, we have to be on film or something.” I think companies should realize that audiences will consume stories across all kinds of media.
Look at the explosion of audiobooks and podcasting. I think there’s something very deep inside us that responds to hearing stories, that goes back to the oral tradition. We told stories and continued stories and passed them down long before we wrote them. We passed them down through the oral tradition.
I think this is all a long-winded way of saying, I hope we do a lot more. I think there’s room for them. There are a lot of great Star Trek writers out there who I think would be great for this.
BEYER: I also think that these various formats each activate different parts of the audience’s brain in a really good way. As exciting as the various series in films are, there’s always going to be a story in a universe this large, that they simply don’t have time to tell, and it’s story for which there is definitely an audience.
That’s why we have so many books and comics. Now with the audio dramas, I think that there’s absolutely no limit to what we can do in all of these various formats. It’s just a matter of the time and the resources and having folks who are committed to going deep into these things.
Look, I’ve been doing tie-ins for 20 years now, and at no point in that process has anybody ever been thinking, “Let’s just hurry up and get it out there.” All of the novelists that I have worked with, certainly with Mike, there is such a deep respect for our audiences and such a desire to connect with them with really, really excellent stories that we’re just busting our asses always whatever story we’re telling — and whatever form we’re telling it in — to give our audiences the best experience possible.
TREKCORE: If you could go back in time and write an audio drama starring a pair from the Original Series cast — to be recorded and released while TOS was in production — what’s your pitch?
BEYER: Wow! What’s tricky about that question is that by its nature, TOS is so episodic. As we look back at three years of the show, and from the vantage point of beyond the movies, we can see evolution of character — but they weren’t planning arcs and relationships.
For a story like this, you have to have that character movement in order for it to make sense, to try to do. What I would be looking for are simply character dynamics that we didn’t get to see a whole lot of, like Spock and Chapel, or Spock and Uhura, or even Kirk and Uhura.
JOHNSON: I would do Bones and anybody! I just love Bones so much that if I can get DeForest Kelley, that would be grand. Then like a Sulu-Chekov two-hander, I think would be really fun. Following them a day in the life together on the bridge and going to work and maybe something happens to the ship and they have to team up and save the day. That’d be fun.
TREKCORE: I will keep my fingers firmly crossed that we get more audio dramas to join No Man’s Land and Spock vs. Q on my shelf!
JOHNSON: I want to change my answer. I want to do Spock Vs Q, Part III!
Star Trek: Picard — No Man’s Land is available for download and on CD now.
An eBook edition is planned, TrekCore has learned, but at this time neither a release date nor any other details have been announced. We’ll bring you more information when available.