Star Trek: Voyager's pilot took inspiration from little Mayfly - and the Crips and Bloods.
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00:00Hello my friends, Sean Ferry here for Trek Culture, and welcome to our video.
00:04Just before we get started, I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who has liked,
00:08who has shared, and who has subscribed. That helps us grow as a channel,
00:11and it helps us continue to bring you lists like this. So with that, I am Sean, and welcome
00:18to 10 behind-the-scenes secrets about Caretaker. Number 10, recasting Janeway.
00:26Now, it's pretty well known at this stage that Genevieve Bujold was originally cast to play
00:31Janeway. Now, she came in and she filmed for about a couple of days on Caretaker until she
00:37quite abruptly said, nah, and just walked out. That was it. She was done. The explanation was
00:44that she just was not happy with the way it was being filmed, the pace of production,
00:49and things like that. Now, Garrett Wang actually expanded on this a little bit on a podcast in
00:542019, because he was among the first to be cast in Caretaker, and one of the few who actually
01:01shared scenes with Bujold's Janeway. He recalled that she would come to set, she would film the
01:06scenes, and she would leave, and there was very little interaction with other actors on set.
01:11So that he went up to her at one point and said, kind of, hello, how are you? What's going on?
01:16And she just sort of opened up that she had been promised all sorts of things, but mostly
01:24that she would be playing a captain first and a woman second. However, when she got there,
01:30hair and makeup just spent so much time trying to get her look a certain way, experiment with
01:35the hairdo, this and that, that it began to waste, in her opinion, valuable filming time.
01:42That then meant they were looking at extremely long days, and she had two very young children
01:46at the time, and she was concerned that she was just going to miss them growing up if she stayed
01:50with the show. So she made the unilateral decision to just go, no, that's not what I signed up for,
01:57that's not why I'm here, and she left. Now, thankfully, Kate Mulgrew stepped into the
02:03breach fairly quickly, and we got the Janeway that we know and love today.
02:06Number nine, redesigned Voyager. When Voyager was going into production, executive producer
02:12Geri Taylor wrote that she wanted something smaller and sleeker than the Enterprise-D.
02:19Now, Star Trek The Next Generation had only really just gone off the air in 1994. The production for
02:25Voyager started, it sort of began in 1993, and of course, Generations would come out in 1994,
02:311995, depending on what territories you're in. So that meant that the Galaxy-class ship would be
02:35fresh in people's minds, and she wanted the Intrepid-class ship to look very, very different.
02:40Rick Sternbach was given the job of designing the new hero ship. Now, he had worked on The
02:45Next Generation and DS9 before, he was in fact the one who designed the Runabout, for example,
02:50but it was his predecessor, Andy Probert, who had designed the Enterprise-D, so this was his first
02:55big shot at a hero ship. Taking the brief of smaller and sleeker, but also taking inspiration
03:00from his own Runabout, he designed a ship that had sweeping down nacelles that sort of aimed
03:07backwards as well, and also then a much more arrowhead saucer section, for want of a better
03:13description. This ship would be able to separate, and the landing gear was there from the beginning
03:19because it was always designed to be able to land on a planet. This got as far as, after some
03:25some changes went on, they got rid of the pylons, for example, that had looked a little bit too
03:28close to the Runabout. Well, a studio model was built of this version of the ship. Jerry Taylor
03:35looked at it and went, actually, can we go a little bit curvier? And so, Sternbach took the
03:41brief and again reworked it, now was able to go, well look, Voyager's not going to separate saucer
03:47sections, was able to integrate the primary and secondary hulls a little bit closer together,
03:51shortened the nacelles, which had been not quite discovery long, but certainly had been longer,
03:56and gave us the Voyager that we all know and love. Number eight, it was the result of a cheap lunch
04:03or two. Michael Piller, Rick Berman, and Jerry Taylor all came together to write what would become
04:09Caretaker and Voyager as a whole. Brandon Braga, who would of course go on to play a huge role in
04:14Star Trek Voyager, missed out on these sessions because he had the audacity to go on holiday.
04:20The cheek! The absolute cheek! Michael Piller recalled that what they would do is they would
04:24get together over lunch, four days a week, between July and September of 1993. Over the course of
04:31these lunches, which would last about two and three hours and were, in Michael Piller's description,
04:37very cheap, they broke what would become the story of Caretaker. They were able to kind of
04:43build the characters together that way, so that by the time September 93 came around, they had
04:49what looked like the beginnings of what would become Caretaker. Number seven, it was inspired
04:55in part by Q. One of the main selling points of Star Trek Voyager was that it was going to be
05:03away from the rest of Star Trek, and an important way to get that to happen came from the episode
05:11Q-Who. If you recall, in Q-Who, Q flings the Enterprise-D thousands of light years away from
05:18Federation space. Now, it's not quite as far because data says it would take about two years
05:24to get back to Federation space. Now, while they're there, of course, they encounter the Borg. It's a
05:28fantastic episode. Go and watch it if you haven't seen it. It's amazing. Crucially, in Q-Who, Q sends
05:34them back home again at the end, which then begs the question, what happens if he didn't? That
05:40effectively was the nugget that led to the creation of Star Trek Voyager. You know, what happens if
05:46they're sent so far away that they're cut off from everything and they can't get back really,
05:52really quickly? It introduced just a whole bunch of challenges that would become, again, part of
05:58the crux of Voyager. What happens if you can't just send a message to Starfleet? What happens
06:02if Starfleet don't know if you're alive or dead? What happens, what happens, what happens? That
06:08is how the birth of Star Trek Voyager took place. Number six, the mistakes of Emissary
06:15led to Caretaker. Emissary directly influenced Caretaker, but not quite in the way that, say,
06:23Q-Who influenced the events of Caretaker. It was more the style that became very, very important,
06:31particularly in Michael Piller's mind, because he recalled that Emissary tonally went away
06:38from Next Generation. It was a more ethereal, particularly in the parts with the prophets,
06:42a more contemplative pilot. It was about, it was heavy on character and story. It's not that they
06:49didn't want to do character and story with Caretaker, but absolutely Piller said, we're
06:55just going to dial up the action-adventure element here, and that's exactly what they did.
07:00Now, a good example would be, look at the cold opens of both Emissary and Caretaker, okay?
07:06And you might be thinking, well, hang on, Emissary opens with a battle of warp 359. That's
07:10about as action-packed as you can get, is it? So we do get that fantastic scene of the Saratoga
07:16engaging the cube and being roundly destroyed, and then it gets quiet and it cuts, and then we get,
07:24it's short, but a little scene of Sisko talking to Jake on the holodeck, and we get that nice,
07:30quiet reveal with the theme tune of the station of Deep Space Nine.
07:35Okay, now let's look at Star Trek Voyager, the cold open here. So again, we open up with a little
07:40bit of action. We have the Valjean being hunted by Gullivec and the Cardassian ship. Now, we're
07:46firing torpedoes, we're firing phasers, we have the usual, you know, consoles made of rocks
07:50exploding all around us. We end up in the Badlands. Both ships take a beating. The Cardassian ship
07:56is hit by one of those plasma storms in an effect that would be used again and again and again.
08:01Then you have the Valjean. They see that the big massive displacement wave is coming up behind
08:06them and slam! There is no lull, there is no kind of breath here. It was just let's go, let's go,
08:13let's go. And that continues more or less throughout Caretaker. Of course, there are
08:19quiet moments, but in much more so than Emissary, we have a lot more action adventure in Caretaker
08:24than we do in the opening of Deep Space Nine. Number five. Michael Piller lost an argument and
08:29the Maquis gained Starfleet uniforms. In Caretaker, the Maquis are, of course, an entirely separate
08:35crew that have been infiltrated by Tuvok and are then forced to work alongside the Starfleet
08:40officers as the episode goes on. Michael Piller was very, very set on having the Maquis remain
08:48for the duration of Voyager. Rick Berman was dead set against this. As Ronald D. Moore recounted,
08:56this was an argument Michael Piller lost. Rick Berman had Star Trek Deep Space Nine in his mind
09:03during the writing of this episode, and what I mean by that is that he was very convinced that
09:09the perceived failing ratings of DS9 meant that he did not want Voyager to be very reliant
09:17on the style of DS9. He wanted it to go back to next generation, have that more kind of
09:22optimistic view of the future, and in fairness, pretty much that's what they did. And therefore,
09:30the end of Caretaker, you have one crew and they are all Starfleet crew in Starfleet uniforms.
09:38That was Rick Berman going, I am not sitting down to commit to one, two, three, however many seasons
09:43of two crews on the one ship. That's too much diversity and it's too much conflict. Now, the
09:51ghost of Roddenberry was very much in his ear at this point. Rick Berman himself did say that,
09:57yes, once we didn't have to do those roles anymore, things did get a little bit easier,
10:01but definitely you can see that in Caretaker specifically, there was absolute nope. We are
10:08not having a ship full of people who are at each other's throats the whole time.
10:12Number four, Nick Locarno. Robert Duncan McNeil had of course already appeared in Star Trek in
10:18The Next Generation. He appears in the episode The First Duty, which is an absolutely fabulous
10:23episode, as cadet Nick Locarno. He's the ringleader of the group that effectively served as the
10:30template for what Red Squad would become. They do the culvert starburst, Wesley gets pulled up in it
10:35and Nick Locarno is kicked out of Starfleet Academy. Robert Duncan McNeil then gets invited
10:40to audition for this new part. Now, he doesn't know this, but it's initially called Nick Locarno.
10:46Jerry Taylor said, we're going to get a Nick Locarno type character. So they just used his
10:51name throughout. We've all said across the way, oh, it was legal issues, legal issues, legal issues.
10:55And to be fair, that is a massive part of why Nick Locarno became Tom Paris. But they did do a name
11:01change, but they didn't change anything else because Robert Duncan McNeil himself said that
11:05when he got the script, he was like, this is Nick. He didn't realize that he was auditioning for a
11:13new series. He thought they were bringing the character of Nick Locarno back into what he
11:18thought was the then approaching Star Trek The Next Generation movie, Generations. He knew that
11:22was coming. So he thought, oh, OK, weird that they're going to bring Locarno back for that,
11:26but all right, grand. He then, of course, discovered that no, that was not the plan.
11:31It was for Star Trek Voyager. Locarno and Tom Paris are the same character. And there's a
11:38couple of things that have changed. They've kind of had to change along the way. But from the
11:43beginning, there wasn't, it wasn't an accident how similar these two characters were. Number three,
11:49Crips and Bloods. The poor old Kazon have been referred to in many circles, including my own,
11:56as discount knockoff Klingons. And I'm not going to lie, I don't feel particularly guilty for that
12:02statement because they never really got a chance to become anything more than thugs. That's all
12:08they really, basically, they are thugs. There you go. Enjoy your new villain. And that is one of the
12:14reasons they were written out of the show relatively early. But in Caretaker, they serve
12:20as roving gangs in space and they took inspiration from the Crips in America. In the earliest notes,
12:28there was literally written in and the Crips will do this and the Crips will do that. The Crips were
12:31formed in 1969 and they are one big organization, but they are also comprised of lots and lots of
12:39subsets, which is, that's basically what the Kazon are. They are sects. In Caretaker, we get the
12:45Kazon Ogla and, of course, we know we would go on to see the Kazon Nistrum. They would become the
12:50bigger group, if you like. Now, in real life, these street gangs, they engaged in drug dealing, they
12:57engage in murders, they engage in all sorts of violence, and this is replicated in a way in
13:04Caretaker. Now, we don't see drug dealing going on, but we do certainly see acts of violence
13:08and, of course, the oppression of the Ocampa as well. Once Voyager effectively stands up to them
13:14and only really wins because of superior technology, they say, yeah, our buddies are going to come after
13:22you, and that was, again, directly inspired by how a lot of this would happen in real life. Number two,
13:30Suspiria was a get-out-of-jail-free card inspired by the Fugitive. Suspiria was the Caretaker's
13:36mate. Now, we wouldn't get the name Suspiria for a few episodes. We just hear that there's another
13:41one out there, so the female Caretaker, if you like. Now, at the end of Caretaker, the Caretaker
13:49dies. With him goes the technology to send Voyager home. That, of course, is what strands them in the
13:55Delta Quadrant, Janeway's decision to destroy the Array. However, Rick Berman recalled that Paramount
14:03were like, this is a great idea, this is a great idea, you need to give us an out. It was the nerves
14:08of having this Lost in Space style show going on that couldn't cross over with Deep Space Nine,
14:15and it couldn't cross over with the Star Trek movies because it was so physically far away from
14:20them. So, Berman looked to the old series and its recent movie adaptation, The Fugitive, as a way of
14:27solving this problem. He looked at the character of the One-Armed Man. Well, basically, there's
14:32something else out there. Now, we might not see it, and we might not know where it is, but it's
14:36out there, don't worry, it's out there, it's out there. I mean, it took four seasons for the One-Armed
14:40Man to really become a character in The Fugitive, and it took two seasons for Suspiria to become a
14:45character in Star Trek Voyager. And by the time that happened, Paramount were a bit like, yeah,
14:50listen, you're okay now, you can continue doing what you're doing. But in the beginning, that
14:55entire inclusion of the female Caretaker was purely so that they could do a hard reset, if they had to,
15:03if it looked like the audience just was not reacting well to the idea of a Starfleet ship
15:09out in the back pocket of the arsehole of nowhere. Number one, it was heartless, and no one cared
15:17about Neelix from the beginning. Michael Piller recalled that Caretaker, by the time it was
15:22finished and put on air, was very good, there was a lot of action going on, so it was quite an
15:27enjoyable romp, but what it didn't have was heart. He recalled that Tom Paris gets an arc in
15:36Caretaker, you know, he goes from, I'm the bad boy in the penal colony, to basically, yeah, he's
15:41actually a good guy, pilot of Voyager by the end of it. There is an arc there, but in Piller's view,
15:48that was it. All of the other characters, it wasn't so much that they were ill-defined,
15:53but it's rather than the action depending on them, they depended on the action. This,
16:01he felt, was a frustrating element of Caretaker, because it let down the story overall. Now, they
16:07were able to jig a few things around to give people slight character moments that really
16:13helped them along the way, but the one character that Piller felt just did not come out of Caretaker
16:20well was Neelix. He thought, we have a problem here, because if you think about Caretaker,
16:26his first scene is, you know, he's in the junkyard, and it's a bit like, okay, grand,
16:31this could go any which way, and how many different person in Junkyard's character have
16:36we seen? So there's nothing really stand out about it. And by the end of the episode, he is standing
16:41on the bridge with Kes, ready to join the crew, but not an awful lot really between that. You
16:47have the scene in the bath, which is funny, sure, and then you have him betraying the Starfleet crew
16:54once he gets to Ocampa and gets Kes. Caretaker Neelix is not a massively likable character.
17:00Now, as time went on, it's flip a coin. He's become Marmite in that respect. Now, Ethan Phillips,
17:07by all accounts, is like the nicest man who has ever worked on Star Trek, which is a massive shame
17:12that poor old Neelix is hated by a large portion of the fanbase. But particularly, behind the scenes,
17:18in Caretaker, the one character that they all felt just didn't work was poor old Neelix.