A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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
).
    Voyager
did get some things almost right, though. Its third year on air coincided with
Star Trek
’s thirtieth anniversary, allowing both that show and
Deep Space Nine
to celebrate withspecial episodes.
Deep Space Nine
produced the innovative ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’, an imaginative sequel to the original
Star Trek
fan favourite ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’. Incorporating much footage from that 1960s episode featuring the original
Star Trek
cast, the episode cleverly worked several of the
Deep Space Nine
characters into the background of the ori ginal adventure as they pursued an independent adventure of their own. Television technology had progressed far enough that through a combination of video effects, clever shooting and the use of doubles and specially built sets, the integration of the
Deep Space Nine
crew with that of the original
Enterprise
is almost seamless.
    One major member of the original cast was missing from ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’, so could not be featured in
Deep Space Nine
’s ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’. George Takei was off shooting a role in the movie
The Green Berets
alongside John Wayne when the episode went before the cameras at Desilu Studios in the 1960s. Little could Takei have known the kind of afterlife that particular episode would enjoy with fans and casual viewers alike. As part of
Voyager
’s contribution to
Star Trek
’s thirtieth anniversary, it was decided to make up for this by building an entire episode around the further adventures of Takei’s Sulu, thus also answering a growing clamour among some
Star Trek
fans to see Sulu with his own command.
    The resulting third season episode was cheekily entitled ‘Flashback’, and took the shape of a flashback story experienced by Vulcan Tuvok of his time serving aboard the USS
Excelsior
alongside Captain Sulu. The episode also tied in closely with the events of the last original cast movie
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
. Rather than use another time travel plot to have the
Voyager
characters involved with original series characters as
Deep Space Nine
was doing, the writers drew upon an already existing idea for a story that would explore problems with Tuvok’s failing memory. Brannon Braga recalled the team wanted to ‘to do a time travel story without doing time travel, by doing a [mind-] meld. Tuvok’s old enough that we can go wayback, to Sulu’s ship and events that happened in
Star Trek VI
. That was what we combined.’
    Having lobbied for a return to the series in some form, and helped foment the fan calls for the same, Takei was only too happy to play Sulu once more. ‘I thought it was a very imaginative idea to bring a connection between Sulu and Tuvok. It turns out that he was on the bridge of