A Brief Guide to Star Trek (34 page)

Alongside that main story, several other characters have varying degrees of closure with the birth of a daughter for Paris and Torres, and a late-blossoming romance for Seven of Nine and Chakotay, while Tuvok continues to suffer from a degenerative brain disease. In the aborted future shown at the beginning of the episode, Harry Kim is in command of his own starship, the USS
Rhode Island
, while the holographic Doctor has finally chosen a name for himself: Joe. In an echo of
The Next Generation
, the series ends with the same line delivered by the same character that closed the pilot episode, ‘Caretaker’. Captain Janeway says: ‘Set a course . . . for home.’

Actor Robert Beltran was an outspoken critic of the way
Voyager
ended, and was clear where – in his view – the responsibility for the relative creative failure of the show lay. ‘Frankly, I don’t think [the writers] really cared what happened at the end.
Voyager
has been the ugly stepchild of the
Star Trek
family, and that’s the way we’ve been treated. From mid-season onwards I kept waiting for them to start making a move towards wrapping up some of these story arcs, but they didn’t. [This] was meant to be about nine people on the ship, trying to get through some really extraordinary circumstances. Frankly, I’m not sure what it ended up being about. [They] had a whole year to prepare, but they waited until the final two episodes to fix things. To me, that’s just a symptom of their uncaring cavalier attitude towards the show.’

Although it has its followers and fans – as do all the individual incarnations of
Star Trek
, even the once-derided
The Animated Series
–
Voyager
is largely regarded as a creative failure. Ratings-wise, the show did all right and managed to support an entire network for seven years.

So what went wrong?
Voyager
quickly abandoned so much that had been set up in ‘Caretaker’. The rebel Maquis faction was
quickly assimilated into the crew, while the vast, unexplored region of the Delta Quadrant managed to feature many friends and foes from
Star Trek
’s collective past. Beltran was probably right to complain about the poor development of his character. Despite his rebel origins and ethnic difference, Chakotay became – in the long run – simply another Starfleet officer. In Gene Roddenberry’s utopian take on the future, that was probably the right outcome, but it doesn’t make for great drama when a potentially long-running series almost immediately neuters one of its more rebellious characters. A similar fate befell Tom Paris and even half-Klingon B’Elanna Torres. Unfortunately,
Voyager
’s characters were more inconsistent than those of previous
Star Trek
shows, prone to suddenly developing specialist interests just when the theme of a particular episode needed it, never to mention them again. Harry Kim was a bland character with little to do, who became increasingly annoying and irrelevant as the series progressed (like
South Park
’s Kenny, he was repeatedly killed off, but kept coming back).

None of this character underdevelopment was helped by the arrival of Seven of Nine, who came to dominate the later seasons of the show at the expense of some of the regulars who’d been around much longer. The arrival of the Borg, following the smash success of
First Contact
on the big screen, can have been no surprise, but the fact that they and Seven of Nine came to dominate the show’s final three years and were instrumental in the series finale can have been part of no one’s original plan for the show.

When episodes were not Borg-focused, they often replayed various concepts from other
Star Trek
series. Many
Voyager
characters seemed concerned with extending their lives or in seeking a form of immortality, such as recurring villains the Vidiians. Suffering from the genetically disruptive ‘phage’, the Vidiians were like biological Borg, stealing organs from other species to ensure their own survival and prolong their lives. Of course, the Borg themselves were a species who had artificially extended the lives of their individual members in the service of the overall collective.

Ron Moore quit the show after the fifth season, and was clear on why it had failed: ‘It’s not about anything. It is a very content-free show, not really speaking to the audience. It’s very superficial, there’s not really very much underneath the surface. The show doesn’t have a point of view, it doesn’t have anything to say really. It simply is just wandering around the galaxy and doesn’t even really believe in its own premise, which is to me its greatest flaw.’

Rick Berman admitted that
Voyager
may have suffered due to a glut of
Star Trek
‘product’ in the mid-1990s. He told startrek. com in an in-depth interview covering his eighteen years at the helm of
Star Trek
: ‘[
Voyager
] allowed us to do some new stuff, which was important. We were all aware that these things could get stale. We didn’t want to do
The Next Generation
again. We were also writing and producing
Generations
and then, two years later,
First Contact
. So we were doing movies with
The Next Generation
crew, we had
Deep Space Nine
in its last three or four years, and all of a sudden we were asked to do another show, which was
Voyager
. It was a very, very busy time and it was imperative for everybody to try to keep things from getting stale and repetitive, but it got more and more difficult.’

Was there simply too much
Star Trek
in the 1990s? Certainly,
Voyager
was the first time that the fans and the storytellers involved in the various shows began to think that the
Star Trek
franchise had played out. After all, there’d been four TV series, from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as eight successful big screen movies. The ideas and creative juices among the long-serving
Star Trek
storytellers were running dry. Yet, as
Voyager
drew to a close, Paramount was insisting that there be yet another return to the
Star Trek
well. There would be a new
Star Trek
show for the twenty-first century, and this time it really would go where no
Star Trek
show had gone before – back in time to the years before even Kirk and Spock.
Enterprise
would depict mankind’s faltering first steps on his epic star trek . . .

‘I think my eighteen years of
Star Trek
had some great highs and some definite lows. It was not a big concern of mine, if we screwed up, if things fell between the cracks [on
Enterprise
]. It was unfortunate, but we did our best. I can’t imagine that there won’t be a new series on television.’
Rick Berman

The fifth and to date final live-action
Star Trek
TV series was the first to dump the
Star Trek
name, initially at least.
Enterprise
would rely on the viewers’ recognition of the classic starship’s name. Rick Berman, co-creator of
Enterprise
, noted: ‘We’ve had so many
Star Trek
entities that were called “
Star Trek
-colon-something”. Our feeling was, in trying to make this show dramatically different, that it might be fun not to have a divided main title. If there’s one word that says
Star Trek
without actually saying
Star Trek
, it’s
Enterprise
.’

The title sequence and theme tune were also radical departures from
Star Trek
tradition. Rather than the usual trip through space,
Enterprise
opened with a montage of historical flights, craft and aviation pioneers, leading up to the iconic first spacecraft to bear the title. A
Star Trek
theme tune featured vocals for the first time, from opera singer Russell Watson. The chosen song, ‘Faith of the Heart’ by Diane Warren, had been used previously (in a performance by Rod Stewart) in the Robin Williams movie
Patch Adams
.

This radical iconoclasm was deliberate on the part of
Star
Trek
’s long-serving producers, who were keen to differentiate
Enterprise
from all the
Star Trek
shows and movies that had come before – especially
Voyager
, a show widely regarded as a failure. This
Star Trek
would ‘belong’ to Berman and Brannon Braga, completely free of any of Gene Roddenberry’s forty-year-old trappings. Even though the pair had the opportunity of putting their unimpeded stamp on a new
Star Trek
show, Berman was not initially enthused by the idea. ‘You could take too many trips to the well, you could squeeze too many eggs out of the golden goose, but [it was] made very clear to me that if I did not do this they would ask someone else to.’

From the beginning, the new show failed to connect with the majority of fans and more casual viewers alike, rapidly losing almost half of the first episode’s 12.5 million audience. ‘
Enterprise
was embraced, but by a smaller audience’, admitted Berman, talking to startrek.com. ‘Whoever came up with the term “franchise fatigue” was right, there was definitely some of that. There was just too much going on at the same time. By then,
Deep Space Nine
had ended,
Voyager
was still on the air, a third
The Next Generation
movie was coming out, and there was definitely a feeling that maybe we were pushing it. It was the fourth
Star Trek
series in a decade. The prequel idea was good – going back and learning something about what went on for the very first people who were stepping out into space . . . it seemed to us to be a great idea.’

When the time came to create a fifth live-action
Star Trek
series, all those involved were certainly aware that it would not be possible simply to dish up more of the same formula that had gone out under the
Star Trek
banner for twenty years. Since the debut of
The Next Generation
,
Star Trek
had grown ever more dense. This complexity of the fictional universe was a key attraction for many of the series’ die-hard fans, who were deeply involved with it, but it was equally off-putting for the large, more casual viewing audience who felt it might now be difficult to understand
Star Trek
after twenty years of previously accumulated storytelling. Each subsequent series following
The Next Generation
had played to diminishing returns, with ratings
falling and cultural impact lessened. It was never likely that either
Deep Space Nine
or
Voyager
would follow the first two
Star Trek
series to the big screen. Many people knew the characters of
Star Trek
and
The Next Generation
– often through the clichéd perception of their catchphrases – but few had the same knowledge of, or affection for, Sisko or Janeway and their respective crews and antagonists. Arguably, it was only the frequent appearances of the Borg on
Voyager
that had kept the show afloat for its final three years, rather than any intrinsic liking for the characters among viewers.

It was clear that any new
Star Trek
show would have to be radically different, yet would have to still retain those core elements that made it the
Star Trek
of popular perception. Neither a series featuring the adventures of Captain Sulu or the repeatedly suggested Starfleet Academy idea were deemed to have the potential popular impact required. To avoid entanglements with the rich, deep and detailed twenty-fourth century back-story, Berman and Braga decided to go back to basics, to recreate what had made the original 1960s
Star Trek
such a long-lasting cultural phenomenon. They would go one step further than simply having a starship crew in space, as
Voyager
had done. Their idea was to build a similar mix of characters as seen on the original
Enterprise
, but move the time scale further back, pre-Kirk and nearer to contemporary Earth. A show set in the near future – about 150 years from now – would be more accessible to a wider audience than the technobabble-driven tales of the twenty-fourth century. It could show the events that led to Kirk and crew embarking on their five-year mission. What came before: how did humanity progress from the strife-riven twenty-first century to the creation of Starfleet and membership of the United Federation of Planets?

Using a scene from the conclusion of the movie
First Contact
as their jumping-off point, Berman and Braga set out to explore what happened after the Vulcans made contact with humanity. This key event would launch mankind on a larger voyage, one that would take the crews of the first starships out into the
depths of space where Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Janeway would eventually follow.

Radical and different were the key words for
Enterprise
. Berman considered setting the entire first season of a hoped-for seven-year run on Earth. The drama would take place in and around the first space dockyard where humanity’s first ever warp-capable starship was being constructed. The main characters would include those involved in the creation and construction of the ship, as well as those in training to become the crew of the first ever ship named
Enterprise
. Eventually it was felt this approach was too far removed from what might be expected from a show within the
Star Trek
universe, so the series would start with the ship already operational, crewed and beginning to explore the universe, following Vulcan contact.

Perhaps the makers of
Enterprise
were too slavish in their attempt to recreate what had worked on the original 1960s
Star Trek
, especially when it came to the central characters. Captain Archer was certainly no Kirk, but he filled the leadership and man-of-action role in a way that no other
Star Trek
captain had since the 1960s. Casting
Quantum Leap
’s Scott Bakula in the role, following in the footsteps of Shatner, Stewart, Brooks and Mulgrew, seemed to owe as much to studio politics as to artistic choices. ‘Bakula had a good relationship with Kerry McCluggage, who was running the studio at that point’, admitted Berman, ‘and he was the first big name that seemed to be interested. He was an actor who I’d enjoyed [and] we thought [we were] putting together something that was fresh and unique and with some wonderful new actors.’