A Brief Guide to Star Trek (32 page)

Mulgrew was a late replacement for French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold as Captain Nicole Janeway, who’d dropped out of the series after just two days’ filming. The public reason for her departure was that the actress was more used to the slower pace of moviemaking than the more hectic production process of weekly episodic television. Other suggested reasons were that Bujold disliked her character and the producers may
have been dissatisfied by her early performance. In
TV Guide
in October 1994, Berman simply described Bujold as ‘not a good fit’ for
Star Trek
.

The rest of the cast was largely made up of unknowns, most of whom had appeared in many episodic TV guest spots over the years. Robert Beltran played Chakotay and Tim Russ was Vulcan security officer Tuvok. Russ had previously screen-tested for the role of Geordi La Forge on
The Next Generation
and played minor background roles on
The Next Generation
,
Deep Space Nine
and the movie
Star Trek Generations
. He was something of a knowledgeable
Star Trek
fan, who came to the series well aware of Vulcan lore. Robert Duncan McNeill played the rebellious Tom Paris, and would go on to direct episodes of the series as well as follow-on
Star Trek
show
Enterprise
. Roxann Dawson was Torres, and she followed McNeill’s example by moving into directing
Voyager
and
Enterprise
episodes. The young and inexperienced Operations Officer Harry Kim was played by Garrett Wang, while Ethan Phillips portrayed the ship’s cook and morale officer Neelix, disguised under heavy alien make-up. Jennifer Lien played the alien Kes during the first four seasons, while Robert Picardo filled the Spock/Data role as the holographic ship’s doctor who would explore issues of humanity. A later addition to the cast was Jeri Ryan, playing a freed Borg drone dubbed Seven of Nine who joined the
Voyager
crew and became a key character, also fulfilling some of the Spock/Data function in commenting on humanity.

The jumping-off point for the location of the series was ‘Q-Who?’,
The Next Generation
episode that had been used to set up the arrival of the Borg. Malevolent God-like being Q had caused the
Enterprise
to be propelled into unknown space and face an encounter with the Borg in an attempt to warn humanity of the dangers ‘out there’. When creating
Voyager
, Michael Piller noted, ‘We remembered the episodes, many episodes, where Q would show up and throw one of our ships or one of our people off to a strange part of the universe. And we’d have to figure out why we were there, how we were going to get back, and ultimately
– by the end of an episode – we’d get back home. We started to talk about what would happen if we didn’t get home. That appealed to us a great deal . . . You have to understand that Rick, Jeri and I had no interest in simply putting a bunch of people on another ship and sending them out to explore the universe. We wanted to bring something new to the Roddenberry universe. The fans would have been the first people to criticize us if we had not brought something new to it. But everything new was a challenge in the early stages of development of
Voyager
.’

One of the early promises of
Voyager
was that due to being located in an unknown area of space, it would escape all the familiar trappings of
Star Trek
beyond the ship and crew. There would be no Federation, no Starfleet, no Klingons, Romulans or Borg. New alien species and menaces would need to be created. Co-creator Jeri Taylor noted, ‘[It’s] a new universe. We have to come up with new aliens, we have to come up with new situations. We knew we were taking some risks. We decided, in a very calculated way, to cut our ties with everything that was familiar. This is a dangerous thing to do. All that wonderful array of villains that the audience has come to love and hate at the same time will no longer be there.’

Although setting out with these radical intentions, the production team clearly found them very challenging to achieve in practice. As the series progressed, more familiar
Star Trek
elements gradually found their way into
Voyager
: the crew itself included a (half-) Klingon and a Vulcan to start with, and Romulans had appeared by the series’ sixth episode. By the series’ end seven years later, the Cardassians and the Ferengi had appeared in the supposedly unknown and unexplored Delta Quadrant, while the show itself had come to rely very heavily on repeated reappearances by the Borg (and liberated Borg crewmember Seven of Nine).

Another failing of the series was an unwillingness to seriously tackle questions of resources. The ship is essentially lost at sea, with no way of replenishing supplies or infrastructure, despite the presence of the seemingly magical replicator device – even
that must get its raw matter and energy from somewhere. The episode ‘The Cloud’ paid lip service to this with the crew issued ‘replicator rations’, but it was never central to the series. The holodeck seemed to be in almost constant use, with no indication of where it was powered from and whether this was a good use of resources, given the wider situation. Across the series, there should have been a gradually worsening situation shipboard for the crew of
Voyager
, with the search for resources being part of the drive of the series (something both the revamped
Battlestar Galactica
– under
Star Trek
’s Ron Moore – and
Stargate Universe
would tackle head-on).
Voyager
addressed the concept in the radical season four two-part episode ‘Year of Hell’ (originally planned as a season-long story arc, but nixed by Paramount). By focusing on selected days across a period of a full year, the story explored the impact on
Voyager
of a conflict with a Krenim military scientist who uses time as a weapon. Although the use of the traditional reset button at the end restores everything to normal, the year in which
Voyager
and the crew struggle to survive provides an example of how the series might have tackled the question of dwindling resources in a more realistic and dramatic manner.

Captain Janeway insisted from the moment the ship was lost in space that the crew would adhere to Starfleet rules and discipline, despite their circumstances. In the series finale, a time-travelling older Janeway would criticise her younger self for making this choice, but it was the only one the show could make if it was to remain recognisably
Star Trek
. A glimpse of what
Voyager
could have been if it had taken a harder-edge look at the ‘reality’ of the ship’s situation was seen in the two-part
‘
Equinox
’
. The fifth season finale saw
Voyager
encounter another lost Federation ship, the USS
Equinox
, captained by Rudolph Ransom (John Savage). Half the crew of the
Equinox
are dead and the ship is seriously damaged. Discipline and Starfleet protocol has broken down, with the remaining crew simply focused on their own survival. As a result they have set aside the ethical questions around using a nucleogenic life form as fuel for the ship in their efforts to return
home. Resolving the story in the sixth season opener, ‘Equinox Part II’, Ransom and Janeway must cooperate to save the ships’ respective crews from the wrath of the aliens. In the process, Ransom is sacrificed and his ship destroyed, but many of his remaining crew are saved by transferring to
Voyager
. With another push of the reset button, the surviving (presumably traumatised)
Equinox
crew are assimilated into the
Voyager
crew, closing down another potential line of rewarding storylines.

Failing to learn from
Deep Space Nine
,
Babylon 5
or the on -going narratives of
The X-Files
,
Voyager
regularly employed this plot reset button. Usually by the end of each episode the status quo would be re-established, no matter what had happened. Characters rarely evolved and changed from the opening episode onwards, with the significant exceptions of Seven of Nine and the holographic Doctor, whose whole purpose was to grow and change, to become more human. Very few consequences flowed through the stories from episode to episode.
Voyager
was a return to the 1960s storytelling of the original
Star Trek
, where each episode was more or less self-contained and although the surrounding universe grew through the accumulation of stories (just as it had done in the 1960s), the serialised storytelling and significant character development of
Deep Space Nine
was deliberately avoided, much to the show’s detriment.

Another problem with
Voyager
was the way it locked itself into telling clichéd
Star Trek
stories – sometimes the same ones over and over again. As the fourth iteration of a franchise stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s,
Voyager
suffered by sticking too closely to the traditional
Star Trek
formula that
Deep Space Nine
had done so much to shatter. The show didn’t boast the sense of wonder that had powered
Star Trek
and
The Next Generation
. Despite Janeway being a scientist–captain, there seemed a distinct lack of curiosity about the unexplored space through which their ship was travelling. The overriding desire of most of the crew was simply to return home to Earth as soon as possible.

Some of the actors involved – specifically Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran, the more senior members of the cast – later
complained about the inconsistent writing of their characters, while writer–producer Michael Piller had departed the series by the end of the second year, disappointed that the show was not living up to its potential. Jeri Taylor followed at the end of the fifth year, leaving Brannon Braga – a writer obsessed with time warps, spatial anomalies and gimmicky ‘sci-fi’ plots – as the driving force for the series’ final two years.

Part of the series’ difficulties may have come about due to the forced nature of its initial creation.
Voyager
did not grow organically, it was created in response to a request (or a demand) from Paramount to producer Rick Berman for another
Star Trek
show – any
Star Trek
show. For the studio, it was about creating product to fill airtime and sell advertising (with the addition of guaranteed significant home video revenues by the mid-1990s). The creative team were working within that restriction, rather than coming up with something that had been driven by their need to express themselves and tell new
Star Trek
stories. More than any other series,
Voyager
was just another manufactured instalment in what was now clearly an ongoing franchise, and was recognisably the product of a long-running – perhaps even tired and worn-out – concept.

One particular second season episode of
Voyager
was notorious both among fans and the production team for being, in the words of teleplay writer Brannon Braga, ‘a royal, steaming stinker’. In ‘Threshold’, Tom Paris investigates whether it is possible to break the warp ten starship speed limit in an attempt to get back home to Earth quicker. As a result, he and Janeway are mutated into lizard-like life forms that then breed.

The idea for the episode came from a good intention: what if one of Roddenberry’s long-ago imposed limits was changed, even if just for one episode? Jeri Taylor noted: ‘Gene made the determination at the beginning of
The Next Generation
that warp ten would be the limit, and at that point you would occupy all portions of the universe simultaneously – which always seemed like a wonderfully provocative notion. Then the question is “What happens if you do go [to] Warp Ten, how does that
affect you?” We came up with this idea of evolution and thought that it would be far more interesting and less expected that instead of it being the large-brained, glowing person, it would be full circle, back to our origins in the water. [We’re] not saying that we have become less than we are, because those creatures may experience consciousness on such an advanced plane that we couldn’t conceive of it. It just seemed more interesting.’

The explanation of those bizarre final images in the episode was apparently lost in the rewriting process, according to Braga. The result was a confused and confusing script that baffled series star Robert Duncan McNeill. ‘When you try to tell the story – [Paris] breaks Warp Ten, starts shedding skin, kidnaps the captain and then he becomes one with the universe, [he and Janeway] are salamanders, and have a baby – it sounds ridiculous.’

Brannon Braga said of his much-derided work on ‘Threshold’: ‘It’s very much a classic
Star Trek
story, but in the rewrite process I took out the explanation, the idea behind the ending, that we evolve into these little lizards because maybe evolution is not always progressive. Maybe it’s a cycle where we revert to something more rudimentary. That whole conversation was taken out for various reasons. That was a disaster because without it the episode doesn’t even have a point . . . none of [the evolutionary theorising] came across. All we were left with were some lizard things crawling around in the mud. It was not my shining moment.’

‘Threshold’ was symptomatic of many of the problems with
Voyager
’s storytelling in attempting both to recapture the 1960s glory of the original
Star Trek
and, in some ways, continue
Deep Space Nine
’s self-declared mission of breaking Roddenberry’s taboos. The result was that the show was neither innovative nor progressive (in terms of
Star Trek
), nor was it simply a nostalgic replay of the adventures of Captain Kirk (something that would be attempted, with some success, in franchise prequel series
Star Trek: Enterprise
).