Star Trek: Voyager's pilot took inspiration from little Mayfly - and the Crips and Bloods.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 Hello my friends, Sean Ferry here for Trek Culture and welcome to our video.
00:04 Just before we get started, I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who has
00:08 liked, who has shared and who has subscribed.
00:10 That helps us grow as a channel and it helps us continue to bring you lists like this.
00:15 So with that, I am Sean and welcome to 10 Behind the Scenes Secrets About Caretaker.
00:23 Number 10, recasting Janeway.
00:25 Now it's pretty well known at this stage that Genevieve Bujold was originally cast
00:30 to play Janeway.
00:32 Now she came in and she filmed for about a couple of days on Caretaker until she quite
00:37 abruptly said "Nah" and just walked out.
00:41 That was it.
00:42 She was done.
00:43 The explanation was that she just was not happy with the way it was being filmed, the
00:47 pace of production and things like that.
00:50 Now Garrett Wang actually expanded on this a little bit on a podcast in 2019 because
00:56 he was among the first to be cast in Caretaker and one of the few who actually shared scenes
01:02 with Bujold's Janeway.
01:04 He recalled that she would come to set, she would film the scenes and she would leave
01:07 and there was very little interaction with other actors on set.
01:11 So that he went up to her at one point and said kind of "Hello, how are you?
01:15 What's going on?"
01:16 And she just sort of opened up that she had been promised all sorts of things but mostly
01:24 that she would be playing a captain first and a woman second.
01:28 However, when she got there, hair and makeup just spent so much time trying to get her
01:33 to look a certain way, experiment with the hairdo, this and that, that it began to waste,
01:38 in her opinion, valuable filming time.
01:42 That then meant they were looking at extremely long days and she had two very young children
01:46 at the time and she was concerned that she was just going to miss them growing up if
01:50 she stayed with the show.
01:51 So she made the unilateral decision to just go "No, that's not what I signed up for, that's
01:57 not why I'm here" and she left.
02:00 Now thankfully Kate Mulgrew stepped into the breach fairly quickly and we got the Janeway
02:05 that we know and love today.
02:06 Number nine, redesigned Voyager.
02:09 When Voyager was going into production, executive producer Jerry Taylor wrote that she wanted
02:14 something smaller and sleeker than the Enterprise D. Now Star Trek The Next Generation had only
02:20 really just gone off the air in 1994.
02:24 The production for Voyager started, it could have began in 1993 and of course Generations
02:29 would come out in 1994, 1995 depending on what territories you're in.
02:33 So that meant that the Galaxy class ship would be fresh in people's minds and she wanted
02:37 the Intrepid class ship to look very, very different.
02:40 Rick Sternbeck was given the job of designing the new hero ship.
02:44 Now he had worked on the Next Generation and DS9 before, he was in fact the one who designed
02:48 the Runabout for example, but it was his predecessor Andy Probert who had designed the Enterprise
02:54 D. So this was his first big shot at a hero ship.
02:57 Taking the brief of smaller and sleeker but also taking inspiration from his own Runabout,
03:02 he designed a ship that had sweeping down nacelles that sort of aimed backwards as well
03:08 and also then a much more arrowhead saucer section for want of a better description.
03:14 This ship would be able to separate and the landing gear was there from the beginning
03:18 because it was always designed to be able to land on a planet.
03:22 This got as far as after some changes went on, they got rid of the pylons for example
03:27 that had looked a little bit too close to the Runabout.
03:29 Well a studio model was built of this version of the ship.
03:34 Jerry Taylor looked at it and went "actually can we go a little bit curvier?"
03:39 And so Sternbeck took the brief and again reworked it.
03:43 Now was able to go "well look Voyager's not going to separate saucer sections" was
03:47 able to integrate the primary and secondary hulls a little bit closer together, shortened
03:51 the nacelles which had been not quite discovery long but certainly had been longer and gave
03:58 us the Voyager that we all know and love.
04:00 Number 8.
04:01 It was the result of a cheap lunch or two.
04:03 Michael Piller, Rick Berman and Jerry Taylor all came together to write what would become
04:09 Caretaker and Voyager as a whole.
04:11 Brandon Braga who would of course go on to play a huge role in Star Trek Voyager missed
04:15 out on these sessions because he had the audacity to go on holiday.
04:19 The cheek!
04:20 The absolute cheek!
04:21 Michael Piller recalled that what they would do is they would get together over lunch four
04:26 days a week between July and September of 1993.
04:31 Over the course of these lunches which would last about two and three hours and were in
04:35 Michael Piller's description very cheap.
04:38 They broke what would become the story of Caretaker.
04:41 They were able to kind of build the characters together that way so that by the time September
04:46 '93 came around they had what looked like the beginnings of what would become Caretaker.
04:53 Number 7.
04:54 It was inspired in part by Q.
04:57 One of the main selling points of Star Trek Voyager was that it was going to be away from
05:03 the rest of Star Trek and an important way to get that to happen came from the episode
05:11 Q Who.
05:12 If you recall in Q Who Q flings the Enterprise D thousands of light years away from Federation
05:19 Space.
05:20 Now it's not quite as far because data says it would take about two years to get back
05:24 to Federation Space.
05:26 Now while they're there of course they encounter the Borg it's a fantastic episode go and watch
05:29 it if you haven't seen it it's amazing.
05:31 Crucially in Q Who Q sends them back home again at the end which then begs the question
05:37 what happens if he didn't?
05:40 That effectively was the nugget that led to the creation of Star Trek Voyager.
05:45 You know what happens if they're sent so far away that they're cut off from everything
05:49 and they can't get back really really quickly?
05:53 It introduced just a whole bunch of challenges that would become again part of the crux of
05:58 Voyager.
05:59 What happens if you can't just send a message to Starfleet?
06:02 What happens if Starfleet don't know if you're alive or dead?
06:05 What happens?
06:06 What happens?
06:07 What happens?
06:08 That is how the birth of Star Trek Voyager took place.
06:12 Number six the mistakes of Emissary led to Caretaker.
06:17 Emissary directly influenced Caretaker but not quite in the way that say Q Who influenced
06:25 the events of Caretaker.
06:27 It was more the style that became very very important particularly in Michael Piller's
06:32 mind because he recalled that Emissary tonally went away from Next Generation.
06:39 It was a more ethereal particularly in the parts with the prophets a more contemplative
06:43 pilot.
06:45 It was about it was heavy on character and story.
06:49 It's not that they didn't want to do character and story with Caretaker but absolutely Piller
06:54 said we're just going to dial up the action adventure element here and that's exactly
06:59 what they did.
07:00 Now a good example would be look at the cold opens of both Emissary and Caretaker.
07:05 Okay and you might be thinking well hang on Emissary opens with the Battle of Warp 359
07:10 that's about as action-packed as you can get.
07:13 Is it?
07:14 Well we get that fantastic scene of the Saratoga engaging the cube and being roundly destroyed
07:20 and then it gets quiet and it cuts and then we get it's short but a little scene of
07:26 Sisko talking to Jake on the holodeck and we get that nice quiet reveal with the theme
07:32 tune of the station of Deep Space Nine.
07:35 Okay now let's look at Star Trek Voyager the cold open here.
07:39 So again we open up with a little bit of action.
07:41 We have the Valjean being hunted by Gullivec and the Cardassian ship.
07:45 Now we're firing torpedoes, we're firing phasers, we have the usual you know consoles
07:49 made of rocks exploding all around us.
07:52 We end up in the Badlands.
07:53 Both ships take a beating.
07:55 The Cardassian ship is hit by one of those plasma storms in an effect that would be used
07:59 again and again and again.
08:01 Then you have the Valjean.
08:03 They see that the big massive displacement wave is coming up behind them and slam.
08:07 There is no lull.
08:09 There is no kind of breath here.
08:11 It was just let's go, let's go, let's go.
08:14 And that continues more or less throughout Caretaker.
08:17 Of course there are quiet moments but in much more so than Emissary we have a lot more action
08:22 adventure in Caretaker than we do in the opening of Deep Space Nine.
08:26 Number five.
08:27 Michael Piller lost an argument and the Maquis gained Starfleet uniforms.
08:32 In Caretaker the Maquis are of course an entirely separate crew that have been infiltrated by
08:36 Tuvok and are then forced to work alongside the Starfleet officers as the episode goes
08:41 on.
08:42 Michael Piller was very, very set on having the Maquis remain Maquis for the duration
08:49 of Voyager.
08:51 Rick Berman was dead set against this.
08:54 As Ronald D. Moore recounted, this was an argument Michael Piller lost.
08:59 Rick Berman had Star Trek Deep Space Nine in his mind during the writing of this episode.
09:05 And what I mean by that is that he was very convinced that the perceived failing ratings
09:11 of DS9 meant that he did not want Voyager to be very reliant on the style of DS9.
09:18 He wanted it to go back to next generation, have that more kind of optimistic view of
09:23 the future.
09:25 And in fairness, pretty much that's what they did.
09:29 And therefore, at the end of Caretaker you have one crew and they are all Starfleet crew
09:35 in Starfleet uniforms.
09:38 That was Rick Berman going, "I am not sitting down to commit to one, two, three, however
09:42 many seasons of two crews on the one ship.
09:46 That's too much diversity and it's too much conflict."
09:50 Now the ghost of Roddenberry was very much in his ear at this point.
09:56 Rick Berman himself did say that yes, once we didn't have to do those roles anymore,
10:00 things did get a little bit easier.
10:01 But definitely you can see that in Caretaker specifically, there was absolute nope.
10:07 We are not having a ship full of people who are at each other's throats the whole time.
10:12 Number four, Nick Locarno.
10:14 Robert Duncan McNeil had of course already appeared in Star Trek in the next generation.
10:19 He appears in the episode The First Duty, which is an absolutely fabulous episode, as
10:23 Cadet Nick Locarno.
10:25 He's the ringleader of the group that effectively served as the template for what Red Squad
10:31 would become.
10:32 They do the culvert starburst, Wesley gets pulled up in it, and Nick Locarno is kicked
10:36 out of Starfleet Academy.
10:38 Robert Duncan McNeil then gets invited to audition for this new part.
10:43 Now he doesn't know this, but it's initially called Nick Locarno.
10:45 Jerry Tatar said, "We're going to get a Nick Locarno type character."
10:50 So they just used his name throughout.
10:52 We've all said across the way, "Oh, it was legal issues, legal issues, legal issues."
10:55 To be fair, that is a massive part of why Nick Locarno became Tom Paris.
11:00 But they did do a name change, but they didn't change anything else, because Robert Duncan
11:04 McNeil himself said that when he got the script, he was like, "This is Nick."
11:10 He didn't realize that he was auditioning for a new series.
11:14 He thought they were bringing the character of Nick Locarno back into what he thought
11:18 was the then approaching Star Trek The Next Generation movie, Generations.
11:22 He knew that was coming, so he thought, "Oh, okay.
11:24 Weird that they're going to bring Locarno back for that, but all right, grand."
11:28 He then of course discovered that no, that was not the plan.
11:31 It was for Star Trek Voyager.
11:33 Locarno and Tom Paris are the same character.
11:37 There's a couple of things that have changed, that have kind of had to change along the
11:41 way, but from the beginning, it wasn't an accident how similar these two characters
11:47 were.
11:48 Number three, Crips and Bloods.
11:50 The poor old Kazon have been referred to in many circles, including my own, as discount
11:58 knockoff Klingons.
11:59 I'm not going to lie, I don't feel particularly guilty for that statement, because they never
12:03 really got a chance to become anything more than thugs.
12:08 That's all they really ... Basically, they are thugs.
12:10 There you go.
12:11 Enjoy your new villain.
12:13 That is one of the reasons they were written out of the show relatively early.
12:17 In Caretaker, they serve as roving gangs in space, and they took inspiration from the
12:25 Crips in America.
12:27 In the earliest notes, it was literally written in, "And the Crips will do this, and the Crips
12:30 will do that."
12:31 The Crips were formed in 1969, and they are one big organization, but they are also comprised
12:38 of lots and lots of subsets, which is, that's basically what the Kazon are.
12:42 They are sects.
12:44 In Caretaker, we get the Kazon Ogla, and of course, we know we would go on to see the
12:47 Kazon Nistrum.
12:49 They would become the bigger group, if you like.
12:52 Now, in real life, these street gangs, they engaged in drug dealing, they engaged in murders,
12:58 they engaged in all sorts of violence, and this is replicated, in a way, in Caretaker.
13:04 We don't see drug dealing going on, but we do certainly see acts of violence, and of
13:08 course, the oppression of the Okampa as well.
13:12 Once Voyager, effectively, stands up to them, and only really wins because of superior technology,
13:19 they say, "Yeah, our buddies are gonna come after you."
13:22 And that was, again, directly inspired by how a lot of this would happen in real life.
13:29 Number two, Suspiria was a get-out-of-jail-free card, inspired by the Fugitive.
13:34 Suspiria was the Caretaker's mate.
13:36 Now, we wouldn't get the name Suspiria for a few episodes.
13:39 We just hear that there's another one out there.
13:41 So, the female Caretaker, if you like.
13:44 Now, at the end of Caretaker, the Caretaker dies.
13:50 With him goes the technology to send Voyager home.
13:53 That, of course, is what strands them in the Delta Quadrant, Janeway's decision to destroy
13:57 the array.
13:59 However, Rick Berman recalled that Paramount were like, "This is a great idea, this is
14:04 a great idea.
14:05 You need to give us an out."
14:07 It was the nerves of having this Lost in Space-style show going on that couldn't cross over with
14:14 Deep Space Nine, and it couldn't cross over with the Star Trek movies, because it was
14:18 so physically far away from them.
14:21 So, Berman looked to the old series and its recent movie adaptation, The Fugitive, as
14:26 a way of solving this problem.
14:28 He looked at the character of the one-armed man.
14:31 Well, basically, there's something else out there.
14:32 Now, we might not see it, and we might not know where it is.
14:35 Put us out there.
14:36 Don't worry.
14:37 It's out there.
14:38 It's out there.
14:39 I mean, it took four seasons for the one-armed man to really become a character in The Fugitive,
14:43 and it took two seasons for Suspiria to become a character in Star Trek Voyager.
14:47 By the time that happened, Paramount were a bit like, "Yeah, listen, we're okay now.
14:52 You can continue doing what you're doing."
14:54 But in the beginning, that entire inclusion of the female caretaker was purely so that
14:59 they could do a hard reset, if they had to, if it looked like the audience just was not
15:05 reacting well to the idea of a Starfleet ship out in the back pocket of the arsehole of
15:12 nowhere.
15:13 Number one, it was heartless, and no one cared about Neelix from the beginning.
15:19 Michael Piller recalled that caretaker, by the time it was finished and put on air, was
15:23 very good.
15:24 There was a lot of action going on, so it was quite an enjoyable romp.
15:29 But what it didn't have was heart.
15:32 He recalled that Tom Paris gets an arc in Caretaker.
15:37 He goes from "I'm the bad boy in the penal colony" to basically, "Yeah, he's actually
15:41 a good guy, pilot of Voyager by the end of it."
15:44 There is an arc there, but in Piller's view, that was it.
15:49 All of the other characters, it wasn't so much that they were ill-defined, but it's
15:53 rather than the action depending on them, they depended on the action.
16:00 This, he felt, was a frustrating element of Caretaker, because it let down the story overall.
16:07 They were able to jig a few things around to give people slight character moments that
16:12 really helped them along the way.
16:14 But the one character that Piller felt just did not come out of Caretaker well was Neelix.
16:22 He thought, "We have a problem here."
16:24 Because if you think about Caretaker, his first scene is in the junkyard, and it's
16:30 a bit like, "Okay, grand, this could go any which way, and how many different person in
16:35 junkyard's character have we seen?"
16:37 So there's nothing really stand out about it.
16:39 And by the end of the episode, he is standing on the bridge with Kes, ready to join the
16:43 crew.
16:44 Not an awful lot really between that.
16:47 You have the scene in the bath, which is funny, sure.
16:50 And then you have him betraying the Starfleet crew once he gets to Ocampa and gets Kes.
16:56 Caretaker Neelix is not a massively likeable character.
17:00 Now as time went on, it's flip a coin.
17:04 He's become Marmite in that respect.
17:06 Now Ethan Phillips, by all accounts, is like the nicest man who has ever worked on Star
17:10 Trek, which is a massive shame that poor O'Neelix is hated by a large portion of the fanbase.
17:16 But particularly behind the scenes, in Caretaker, the one character that they all felt just
17:22 didn't work was poor old Neelix.