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