Michael Sussman

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Writer Mike Sussman

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At T'Pol's Science Station on the Defiant (2005)

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... as a soon-to-be dead Defiant crewman

Michael David Sussman (born 22 June 1967; age 56), often credited as Mike Sussman, is a writer and producer of many Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise episodes.

Biography

Sussman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but spent most of his youth in the Gulf Coast resort town of Sarasota, Florida. By 1975, at the age of eight, Sussman was already a huge Trekkie and had begun writing fan fiction stories set within the Star Trek universe. As a teenager in the early 1980s, he petitioned his local UHF station to resume airing syndicated episodes of the original Star Trek series.

After studying film and screenwriting at Florida State University, Sussman began his television career as a newscast producer for Sarasota's ABC affiliate, WWSB-TV. While there, he produced the station's eleven o'clock news, as well as their 1992 Presidential Election coverage. Soon after relocating to Los Angeles he began writing for KCAL-TV's Emmy Award-winning Prime 9 News.

Sussman made his first professional sale to the Star Trek franchise in 1995 when he wrote the story for the acclaimed Star Trek: Voyager episode "Meld". He contributed three more episodes as a freelance writer before joining the writing staff as a story editor for Voyager's seventh and final season in 2000. When Voyager wrapped the following year, Sussman was hired as a writer and Executive Story Editor on Enterprise, and was eventually promoted to Co-Producer. During that show's third season, Sussman was promoted to Producer, a position he held until the series was canceled in 2005.

Perhaps Sussman's most popular episodes of Enterprise were "In a Mirror, Darkly" and "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", the first Star Trek episodes to take place entirely in the mirror universe. Sussman showed his affection and knowledge of the original Star Trek series by tying these episodes in with the TOS episodes "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Tholian Web". Sussman even made a cameo appearance in Part II, as a dead crewman aboard the USS Defiant.

Despite the success of "In a Mirror, Darkly," the cancellation of Enterprise ended the chances of seeing Sussman's story continue in future canon episodes. However, he has followed up his "Mirror, Darkly" episodes by writing the story for Age of the Empress, the first novel in the Pocket Books compilation, Glass Empires.

After Enterprise, Sussman was hired as a writer and Supervising Producer on Brannon Braga's short-lived CBS alien-invasion drama series, Threshold. Among the regular actors on this series was Star Trek: The Next Generation star Brent Spiner. Sussman wrote two of the episodes of this series, "Pulse" (episode six) and "Vigilante" (episode twelve, guest-starring Jacqueline Kim) before the series was pulled from the CBS schedule.

Sussman is currently a writer and producer on Sam Raimi's Legend of the Seeker, the upcoming syndicated series from Disney-ABC Domestic Television and ABC Studios and based on Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth series of novels.

Writing credits

• VOY:
  • "Meld"
  • "The Swarm"
  • "The Haunting of Deck Twelve"
  • "Unimatrix Zero"
  • "Unimatrix Zero, Part II"
  • "Shattered"
  • "Repentance"
  • "Body and Soul" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Prophecy" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Author, Author" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Renaissance Man" (with Phyllis Strong)
• ENT:
  • "Strange New World" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Civilization" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Shadows of P'Jem" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Fusion" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Detained" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Dead Stop" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "The Catwalk" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Future Tense" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Regeneration" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Bounty" (with Phyllis Strong)
  • "Anomaly"
  • "Twilight"
  • "Stratagem"
  • "Hatchery"
  • "E²"
  • "Home"
  • "The Augments"
  • "Kir'Shara"
  • "Affliction"
  • "Babel One"
  • "In a Mirror, Darkly"
  • "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II"
• Threshold:
  • "Pulse"
  • "Vigilante"

Appearances

• ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" as a dead Defiant crewman

Producer credits

• ENT:
  • Co-producer (season 2 and episodes 3.1-3.10)
  • Producer (episodes 3.11-4.22)

Other credits

• VOY:
  • Story editor 2000-2001

• ENT:
  • Executive story editor (episodes 1.03-1.26)

Minutiae

ENT: "Twilight"," written by Sussman, was broadcast on 8 April 2005 as the "#1 Fan Favorite Episode" of the series, chosen in a Viewer's Choice poll at UPN.com.

The readers of Star Trek Magazine chose Sussman's "In a Mirror, Darkly" as the best episode of Enterprise in their 40th anniversary reader poll, published in January 2006.

He was credited as a writer on both the 600th live action episode of Star Trek VOY: "Author, Author", as well as the 700th episode of the franchise, ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly".

See also

• Mike Sussman's Memory Alpha User Page

External Links

• MikeSussman.net - official site
• Mike Sussman at Wikipedia
• Template:IMDb-link