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Garrett Wang interview

Wang: Where do I begin when it comes to answering what I thought were the missed opportunities on Voyager? I think it would be best if we go back to the beginning. When casting ended on Voyager, all the actors were invited by executive producer Rick Berman to attend a congratulatory luncheon. It was during this lunch that Berman informed us that he expected all actors portraying human roles to follow his decree. He told us that we were to underplay our human characters. He wanted our line delivery to be as military -- and subsequently devoid of emotion -- as possible, since this, in his opinion, was the only way to make the aliens look real.

My first thought was, “That's not right! What the heck was Berman talking about? Was he pulling our legs? The human characters shouldn't be forced to muffle their emotions. We were human, not androids!” But, being the newbie in Hollywood, I did not make any objections... yet. During the entire first year filming Voyager, actors were required to re-shoot certain scenes because of excessive emotion. I personally had to re-shoot only a couple of scenes, since I learned my lesson early that crossing the writer/producers was an unwise decision. Kate Mulgrew held the record for the most re-shoots, numbering in the double digits.

Seriously, what an absolute hack. Wang suggests that Berman might have been afraid of AMERICA but I think he's just a super-stodgy old shit who wanted everything as bland as possible.

Very good interview. I honestly wish we could've taken Voyager's 7th Season and used that cast and crew from the very beginning (if you'll note, a lack of Nelix). We could've had quite a different show.

The only possible reason for why Berman did this lies in the various death and bomb threats that were sent to the Voyager production offices at Paramount Studios over the decision to have a woman in command of a starship.

Wait, what? Wow. Was there any similar backlash for casting Avery Brooks as Commander/Captain Sisko in DS9?

They just put DS9 on Netflix a week or so ago and my productivity in that time-frame has dropped to shit. The show has held up extremely well. Whereas the "magic meeting room" scenes could shift a lot of character lines around with little effect, it's the characters on DS9 that carry the show. Not just the heros, but I find myself annoyed (rather than bored like with Voyager) when enough thought doesn't go into the villians (such as the trio of evil "just because" Romulans from Visionary). Yet antagonists like Gul Dukat and Vedek Winn are constantly portrayed as more human than the heros of Voyager.

Sometimes I even find the focus on the characters over the plot maddening. Armageddon Game focuses on the budding friendship of O'Brien and Bashir while completely ignoring a foreign governments attempted murder of 4 Federation officers (well, 3 with Miles), one of which was also a joined Trill, which are pretty rare. The episode is never mentioned again (although considering they made the mistake of keeping Ben Sisko alive, I assume he wiped out both races himself and didn't even think the act worth noting in a report).

Personally, I don't know where this all went wrong. I see Berman's name at the end of every DS9 episode. Did he just lose his shit at some point? Was DS9 not as well received as I remember it? I know many fans felt it moved away from what the series "belief" were (or whatever), but I remember it being pretty popular with general sci-fi fans and even people who would normally shy away from Star Trek. Rose-colored glasses I guess.

TheFeniX wrote: Personally, I don't know where this all went wrong. I see Berman's name at the end of every DS9 episode. Did he just lose his shit at some point? Was DS9 not as well received as I remember it? I know many fans felt it moved away from what the series "belief" were (or whatever), but I remember it being pretty popular with general sci-fi fans and even people who would normally shy away from Star Trek. Rose-colored glasses I guess.

Berman took a much less substantial role in DS9's production once Voyager kicked into gear. Since the later was the flagship show of the new UPN channel its understandable, Voyager was more visible to the studio execs. Ira Steven Behr handled DS9's production for the most part, and brought over some of the stronger TNG writers like Ron Moore. A good example of Berman's detachment from DS9 was the Dominion War. They basically forced the Dominion War on Rick Berman, assuring him it would only last a few episodes, then stretching it for two seasons.

Berman was in charge of Deep Space Nine, but did not have influence on day to day events. So while Berman had control over the budget and could dictate long term projects, every day to day was run by Ira Steven Behr, and later Michael Piller and Ronald Moore. Whats funny is eventually the producers and writers figured out how to ignore Berman. Get Berman's permission to start a project, and then just not stop when Berman told them to.

Alyeska wrote:Berman was in charge of Deep Space Nine, but did not have influence on day to day events. So while Berman had control over the budget and could dictate long term projects, every day to day was run by Ira Steven Behr, and later Michael Piller and Ronald Moore. Whats funny is eventually the producers and writers figured out how to ignore Berman. Get Berman's permission to start a project, and then just not stop when Berman told them to.

Really? Could you give me a link or something on this, because I want to read the behind the scenes dirt on the production of DS9. Especially since it seems the show makers had to be all sub rosa about what they wanted to do.

Alyeska wrote:Berman was in charge of Deep Space Nine, but did not have influence on day to day events. So while Berman had control over the budget and could dictate long term projects, every day to day was run by Ira Steven Behr, and later Michael Piller and Ronald Moore. Whats funny is eventually the producers and writers figured out how to ignore Berman. Get Berman's permission to start a project, and then just not stop when Berman told them to.

That ultimately worked out in DS9's favor, especially with the Dominion War.

Dominion War Background wrote:Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore were the writers most involved with the creation and development of the Dominion War. Rick Berman wanted the war to be over within three or four episodes at the most. Behr and Moore knew the series would never be able to wrap up the war in that many episodes. Berman also criticized the "depressing" and "violent" stories. Moore later said "It's a fuckin' war! What do you mean it's too violent?!"

If you watch Chuck's videos on the 30th anniversary specials and how they stack up, he compares the writing styles. All the writers of DS9 were excited and wanted to participate in writing the story, whereas the Voyager writers were just looking to make a paycheck. Rick Berman had more direct control over the Voyager writers. Berman makes a good producer if he stays the hell away from the actual day-to-day work.

FaxModem1 wrote:

Alyeska wrote:Berman was in charge of Deep Space Nine, but did not have influence on day to day events. So while Berman had control over the budget and could dictate long term projects, every day to day was run by Ira Steven Behr, and later Michael Piller and Ronald Moore. Whats funny is eventually the producers and writers figured out how to ignore Berman. Get Berman's permission to start a project, and then just not stop when Berman told them to.

Really? Could you give me a link or something on this, because I want to read the behind the scenes dirt on the production of DS9. Especially since it seems the show makers had to be all sub rosa about what they wanted to do.

There was a long-ass 20 page interview someone did with Ronald Moore when nBSG was pretty big. Moore talked a lot about Trek. He talked about his favorite writing partner, Braga. How Moore and Braga wrote a lot of good TNG scripts. It was Moore and Braga who wrote "All Good Things". Moore also talked about DS9. How Berman laid down specific laws and told the crew to work around them. Berman said that the Dominion War had to be wrapped up in 4 episodes. Everyone knew that once the war started it would be impossible to conclude it that way. But they realized that with Berman green lighting the war, they can just let it run its course regardless of what Berman wanted. And of course Berman was thrilled by how the war went and tried taking credit for it.

Oh yeah. Berman wanted the Defiant destroyed in "First Contact". The DS9 crew had the plead with Berman to let it survive. Ira Steven Behr was pissed that the Defiant was intended to be destroyed in 30 seconds of screen time in the first 15 minutes of the movie and totally fuck over DS9. The Defiant really was going to ram the Borg Ship. The DS9 staff saved that "tough little ship".

I can actually appreciate Berman wanting the Dominion War arc tied up as quickly as possible. In hindsight, I think many of the DS9 writers were full of shit. They felt that the war couldn't be wrapped up after just half a dozen episodes, so instead what did they do? Put in comedy episodes like 'Worf and Jadzia get married' or 'lol lets have a ferengi episode or a Vic Fontaine episode'.

I think you're being a bit too harsh on Berman. You don't want the bridge crew of a federation starship to be unprofessional, overly emotional fools who break down at the slightest touch of trouble.

That said; them acting all like robots in a robotic monotone is equally stupid. Save the emotivating and scene chewing for when something really big happens; like you're on duty while the Captain is on the planet with an away team; and the planet's surface suddenly starts to have a tidal wave of fiery death sweeping across the terminator.

"What the hell is that?!?!?!"

GET THEM UP NOW!!!

Stofsk wrote:I can actually appreciate Berman wanting the Dominion War arc tied up as quickly as possible. In hindsight, I think many of the DS9 writers were full of shit. They felt that the war couldn't be wrapped up after just half a dozen episodes, so instead what did they do? Put in comedy episodes like 'Worf and Jadzia get married' or 'lol lets have a ferengi episode or a Vic Fontaine episode'.

Those episodes (Sisko plays Vulcans at Baseball!) stink of Berman interference - i.e. necessary evils to placate Berman.

Nah. Hey I don't want to stick up for Berman but he wasn't the one who wrote those episodes; the DS9 staff writers did.

If Berman said something like 'hay guise can you make an episode that's a little bit lighter in tone than the grimdark WAAARGH stuff you got goin' on that'll be great' it still doesn't leave the DS9 staff writers off the hook for bringing in scripts that stunk. For example, that baseball episode? That was written by Ronald Moore.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Maybe it was the cast's fault. "We wanna play baseball!"

Also, shooting it would've been dirt cheap.

RE: who's at fault. Maybe... the writers??

It may have been cheap to film, I don't know. I think it might be classed as a location shoot, which would mean hiring the grounds for however long it would take to shoot all the baseball scenes.

MKSheppard wrote:I think you're being a bit too harsh on Berman. You don't want the bridge crew of a federation starship to be unprofessional, overly emotional fools who break down at the slightest touch of trouble.

Torres was the only character I remember really being able to show overt emotion on a consistent basis and she was a psychotic bundle of violence who was the poster-child for "unprofessional." And they made her Chief Engineer to placate the Maquis, but only after Janeway was able to yank her leash hard enough. I actually thought this was going to be a recurring theme on the show: Federation and Maquis making compromises to keep the ship functioning, rather than Janeway just laying down the "I am the law" dialog and roll credits.

The problem was writing not only a bunch of federation officers stuck in a place that doesn't give a shit about their ideals, but also a group of 50 or so Maquis crew members that "knew" federation ideals were bullshit. So, why aren't there more compromises? Why aren't the Maquis stiring up shit all the time? Every episode I can remember that actually focused on any kind of internal conflict was either the person was evil (Seska) so wrong by default or the situation is contrived to prove Janeway right.

I've always liked the Dominion War story-arc in DS9 (we just ended last night with "The Die is Cast," so shit's about to get real), but I'll admit it didn't actually add much to the show. If anything, having a centralized villain in DS9 hurt the ambiguity. Before that, we had antagonists everywhere, but few that we could call villains. Hell, the show plays out more like a murder mystery. But with the War, the show shifted away from "exactly who are the bad guys?" to "How is the Dominion going to wreck our shit this week?"

Contrasted to Voyager which, in my opinion, needed a strong central villain to keep the show going. The Kazon missed that by a long shot. The Vidians were too under-used. However, I found the show enjoyable once the Borg entered the scene (even with their depowerment). This would have been a good way to show the squabbles between the Maquis and Federation as petty, but by the time the Borg came about, they had missed this chance.

I think what would have helped Voyager a lot more isn't actually the presence of a strong central villain but rather have their situation and circumstances be the 'antagonist'.

Stuff like 'oh shit we're about to enter a battle, we better be careful with our photon torpedoes we can't replace them when they're gone'. Or 'how many shuttles do we have left?' etc.

Really that was the biggest problem with Voyager; they get into a scrap, stuff blows up and the ship takes damage; by next week the ship is spotless, sometimes even by the end of the episode. It should have been more like how in BSG the Galactica started showing signs of damage as the show went on that just couldn't be repaired without a drydock. Voyager should have really pushed that whole 'how are we going to survive and get resupplied/repaired this week?' motif. Why would you have holodeck episodes for example? When power consumption was such a huge issue early on, they completely disregarded it and said 'ok lets have a holodeck episode now'. Why would Voyager even have a holodeck? Why would the Maquis agree to wear starfleet uniforms?

One of the most important images of Star Trek III was the damaged Enterprise limping home with damage still evident on her hull. The large burns crudely patched over. You could tell she'd taken a beating, and that was just from one fight. If the Enterprise couldn't fix herself back to normal on a trip home, what hope does Voyager have? Now sure, there are these things called worker bees that are assigned to starships to handle repairs and missions that require a deft touch without spacesuits, but you still have to patch holes blown in your ship, replace damaged components, and not all of it is going to be lying around nice and handy. How easy is it to build a ship-grade phaser emitter? What about obtaining anti-matter?

When the navy deploys an aircraft carrier, they can only outfit her for a few months at a time before she has to be resupplied. That includes not only basic provisions such as food, but also fuel and spare parts. Now sure, aircraft must be maintained every so many flight hours, but Voyager's shuttles require maintenance too. How come we never see Torres banging her head against a wall trying to figure out how she's going to keep up with the shuttle maintenance? And let's not forget Tom's Delta Flyer. Working the bugs out of that thing must have been a royal bitch.

Honestly? The second Nelix started wasting resources he should've been thrown off the ship. We never saw rationing of provisions like you'd expect. Even if they found an M-class planet every few months or so, they'd need to stop for a week or so just to stock up on materials, if the planet even had edible flora and fauna. An example would be L-Glucose, a type of glucose that is rarely found on earth because we use D-Glucose, or dextrose. If the Voyager crew stumbled on a planet that only produced L-Glucose, no matter how much they ate, they'd starve from a lack of nutrients.

We never see how anti-matter is produced on a starship, but given that we see the Voyager crew become concerned when their anti-matter suddenly appears to be draining (VOY: Deadlock), it leads us to speculate that either they can generate their own anti-matter but at a rate slower than they can consume it, since they still need to store anti-matter rather than produce it on demand, or that they must try and produce it via other means. The deflector dish on starships is supposedly charged with antiprotons (TNG: First Contact) so they can obviously produce some anti-matter, but whether it's the antideuterium they use to fuel the warp engines is unknown. And hydrogen can easily be accumulated from gas giants if you need to top off the tank.

So some of their problems can be mediated by what's already on-board, but they still need crucial elements and materials that would've made the show much better to show them searching for and trying to obtain.

Alyeska wrote:
There was a long-ass 20 page interview someone did with Ronald Moore when nBSG was pretty big. Moore talked a lot about Trek. He talked about his favorite writing partner, Braga. How Moore and Braga wrote a lot of good TNG scripts. It was Moore and Braga who wrote "All Good Things". Moore also talked about DS9. How Berman laid down specific laws and told the crew to work around them. Berman said that the Dominion War had to be wrapped up in 4 episodes. Everyone knew that once the war started it would be impossible to conclude it that way. But they realized that with Berman green lighting the war, they can just let it run its course regardless of what Berman wanted. And of course Berman was thrilled by how the war went and tried taking credit for it..

I thought it was before BSG even aired (or we are thinking of two different interviews) but Ron Moore also recalled how he disliked the experience of writing for Voyager. After DS9 wrapped he moved over to Voyager, and the experience was a lot different from DS9 one specific item I remember was that when writing "Barge of the Dead" he was asking the writing staff for insights into Torres' character and if he was keeping true to the character, and the attitude of the responses he got was "who cares?" The same passion the DS9 writers had just wasn't there on Voyager - and so he didn't stick around Voyager too long.

Vympel wrote:Maybe it was the cast's fault. "We wanna play baseball!"

Also, shooting it would've been dirt cheap.

This. Bottle episodes are a common tactic in series; they let you save your budget for the big space battles, new sets, or hiring an expensive but well-known actor for an important guest spot. For the baseball episode, they probably spent the most money on that holodeck effect that removed, then added back in, the crowd.

After reading Wang's interview...you know, every time I think Berman's stupidity can't surprise me anymore, something like this comes up.

Destructionator XIII wrote:Don't get too attached to real world difficulties though: this is Star Trek, and they have things like replicators already established, and these ships are built for multi-year voyages in the first place.

I'd be ok with battles doing nasty things to them, but I wouldn't get too worked up over food or even spare parts.

Intrepid's don't have the same level of endurance as a GCS though, Voyager had food issues early in the series, plus the new tech (bio-neural gel-packs) aren't replaceable on-ship unlike isolinear chips.

Destructionator XIII wrote:Don't get too attached to real world difficulties though: this is Star Trek, and they have things like replicators already established, and these ships are built for multi-year voyages in the first place.

I'd be ok with battles doing nasty things to them, but I wouldn't get too worked up over food or even spare parts.

I would. There's certainly no evidence that antimatter fuel would be something they could easily produce on board. For that matter, hydrogen scooped from space or gas giants won't contain much of the heavy isotopes they generally use in their impulse engines. Replicators are good at producing small, common objects, but there are plenty of engine parts and special materials that the Enterprise had to get from space stations or tote around from planet to planet (which wouldn't be necessary if they were easily replicated).

Having to deal with Delta Quadrant civilizations for resources without compromising Federation principles could have played a much larger role in Voyager's plot department, but the "isolate ship, low on resources" aspect of the show pretty much disappeared after the first season (much like the Starfleet/Maquis tension did).

Stofsk wrote:I think what would have helped Voyager a lot more isn't actually the presence of a strong central villain but rather have their situation and circumstances be the 'antagonist'.

In a perfect world, I would agree with you, but the writers of Voyager (or more likely the producers reigning in the the actors, writers, and directors) couldn't pull it off with any sense of severity. What should have been the premise of the show, a crew fighting against time and their own ship wanting to break down in a hostile quadrant, was always portrayed to be one technobabble solution away from fixing or just completely ignored after their discovery of a fix leads to the "actual" plot.

Working with what they had, Voyager got it right when they had good external villains. The Kazon were a fucking joke (which may explain why they dropped the idea of a central villain), but the Vidians always seemed dangerous and only held back by their disease (and writer's fiat). Same for Kurtwood Smith and his Time Ship. I felt Voyager finally hit a stride, meaning I could ignore the lackluster character development and magic repairing ship, when the borg became the central villain. It's just my opinion, but even with all the bullshit from the producing staff, Voyager would have done much better with a central antagonist(s), maybe in the form of Voyager constantly crossing into new alien territory and dealing with a new possibly hostile species over the course of a few episodes, rather than the "alien of the week" we got for numerous seasons. Even if they hit the reset button at the end of every episode, you would still have that feeling of foreboding as you wait another week to find out how alien X will fuck with Voyager. On that note, recurring characters always get me pumped. Seeing "as Gul Dukat" at the beginning of an episode makes my day.... at least until the last season.... ugh.

I'm ranting, so bear with me, but focusing the show around the situation and/or ship can make the viewer see the situation seem hopeless, which isn't what I think they were going for more than the "Federation ideals will stomp anything... because!" Neo-BSG went this direction and that show was fucking bleak. And DS9 did it better than Voyager anyway. They even had the excuse of fusing 3 different design philosophies into one station, and 3 season into the show: they're wrecking a Klingnon fleet because Sisko knows there's no situation that can't be fixed by just mounting shit-loads of weapons onto whatever happens to be laying around.

But Voyager... the ship always seemed like it was one brick of moldy cheese away from killing them all. I think I would have disliked the show even more had they made that the primary focus.

I think everyone's wrong. There was a central antagonist to the show from beginning to end: Rick Berman XD

Baffalo wrote:I think everyone's wrong. There was a central antagonist to the show from beginning to end: Rick Berman XD

Agreed. No one else came as close to menacing the Federation as he. Who else could force them to do retarded plots and potentially be destroyed by even more retarded enemies? He's like Q in his abilities. Except not funny at all.