A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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 . . .

Chapter 11

Yesterday’s Enterprise:
Enterprise

‘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