I thought it'd be very interesting to have a multigenerational story and some back and forth through the timeline. I was also very interested in the notions of how we would really establish, what would happen if we went out into space, how would we set up colony worlds, how would we mine the asteroids; what would that entail, and what would that be like? And then there’s the whole issue of how things change between people over these generations. That also interested me.
I knew I wanted a lot of diversity, so, I've got African-American actors – many different ethnicities among the actors I'm working with. Additionally we’ve got a lot of different ages [in the cast], so people from their 20s to people in their 50s and 60s. I wanted it to also be a mixture of sort of things that you've seen in science fiction – aliens, and androids, and so forth. But with that, you say, well, what haven't I seen in those areas? 'Cause you don't just want to be doing Data [from Star Trek: The Next Generation] again. What's going to make this fresh? What's going to make this relevant to what we're living through now?
And you’ve also involved the actors in helping to craft your Space Command universe…
Yes. Once I started writing the script and sending those scenes to my actors, they got very, very excited. Sometimes fans would ask me questions and get me thinking as well. Someone asked [for example], “are there religions out in space?” So I created the character that Ethan Philips plays as Jewish. He's a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, and they settle on New Jerusalem. Their colony was starving; a relief ship [to rescue them] didn't come, and they couldn't eat the food on that world. So they had to merge their genetic makeup with the predator on that planet – sort of a tiger. It allowed them to survive, but as a result they could never be human again, not fully. But he's Jewish; he’s Jewish but he doesn't look human anymore. He looks very different.
And another character, Eustis Sekander, Robert Picardo's part, is Muslim, but it isn't the defining part of his nature. I met a young actress who speaks Serbo-Croatian, and I knew that Mira Furlan also speaks Serbo-Croatian; she's from that part of the world. I thought it'd be great fun if they played mother and daughter. When they're having scenes together in space, they speak Serbo-Croatian but when they're speaking to everyone else, they're using English. So mainly I'm just writing things to interest and entertain myself and I trust that the audience will like it, too.
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