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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. Just before we get
00:04started I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who has liked, who has shared and who
00:09has subscribed. That helps us grow as a channel and it helps us continue to bring you lists like
00:14this. So with that I am Sean and welcome to 10 behind the scenes secrets about Caretaker.
00:23Number 10, recasting Janeway. Now it's pretty well known at this stage that Genevieve Bourjol
00:29was originally cast to play Janeway. Now she came in and she filmed for about a couple of days on
00:36Caretaker until she quite abruptly said nah and just walked out. That was it. She was done. The
00:43explanation was that she just was not happy with the way it was being filmed. The pair opened up
00:49that she had been promised all sorts of things but mostly that she would be playing a captain first
00:56and a woman second. However when she got there hair and makeup just spent so much time trying to get
01:03to get her to look a certain way, experiment with the hairdo, this and that, that it began to waste
01:08in her opinion valuable filming time. That then meant they were looking at extremely long days and she had
01:15two very young children at the time and she was concerned that she was just going to miss them
01:19growing up as she stayed with the show. So she made the unorailer decision to just go
01:24no. That's not what I signed up for. That's not why I'm here and she left. Now thankfully Kate Mulgrew
01:32stepped into the breach fairly quickly and we got the Janeway that we know and love today.
01:37Number 9, redesigned Voyager. When Voyager was going into production, executive producer Jerry Taylor
01:43wrote that she wanted something smaller and sleeker than the Enterprise D. Now Star Trek The Next
01:50Generation had only really just gone off the air in 1994. The production for Voyager started,
01:56it could have began in 1993 and of course generations would come out in 1994, 1995 depending on what
02:02territories you're in. So that meant that the galaxy class ship would be fresh in people's minds and she
02:07wanted the intrepid class ship to look very very different. Rick Sternbach was given the job of
02:12designing the new hero ship. Now he had worked on The Next Generation and DS9 before. He was in fact
02:18the one who designed the runabout for example but it was his predecessor Andy Probert who had designed
02:23the Enterprise D. So this was his first big shot at a hero ship. Taking the brief of smaller and sleeker
02:29but also taking inspiration from his own runabout, he designed a ship that had sweeping down nacelles that
02:36sort of aimed backwards as well and also then a much more arrowhead saucer section for want of a better
02:43description. This ship would be able to separate and the landing gear was there from the beginning
02:49because it was always designed to be able to land on a planet. This got as far as after some some
02:55changes went on. They got rid of the pylons for example that had looked a little bit too close to the
02:59runabout. Well a studio model was built of this version of the ship. Jerry Taylor looked at it and
03:05went actually can we go a little bit curvier? And so Sternbach took the brief and again reworked it.
03:13Now was able to go well look Voyager's not going to separate saucer sections. Was able to integrate
03:18the primary and secondary hulls a little bit closer together. Shortened the nacelles which had been
03:23not quite discovery long but certainly had been longer and gave us the Voyager that we all know
03:29and love. Number eight. It was the result of a cheap lunch or two. Michael Piller, Rick Berman and Jerry
03:36Taylor all came together to write what would become Caretaker and Voyager as a whole. Brandon Braga who
03:42would of course go on to play a huge role in Star Trek Voyager missed out on these sessions because he had
03:47the audacity to go on holiday. The cheek! The absolute cheek! Michael Piller recalled that what
03:53they would do is they would get together over lunch four days a week between July and September of 1993.
04:01Over the course of these lunches which would last about two and three hours and were in Michael Piller's
04:06description very cheap they broke what would become the story of Caretaker. They were able to kind of
04:13build the characters together that way so that by the time September 93 came around they had what looked
04:19like the beginnings of what would become Caretaker. Number seven. It was inspired in part by Q.
04:28One of the main selling points of Star Trek Voyager was that it was going to be away from the rest of
04:35Star Trek and an important way to get that to happen came from the episode Q Who. If you recall in Q Who, Q flings
04:45the Enterprise D thousands of light years away from Federation space. Now it's not quite as far because
04:51data says it would take about two years to get back to Federation space. Now while they're there of
04:57course they encounter the Borg it's a fantastic episode go and watch it if you haven't seen it it's
05:00amazing. Crucially in Q Who, Q sends them back home again at the end which then begs the question
05:08what happens if he didn't? That effectively was the nugget that led to the creation of Star Trek
05:14Voyager. You know what happens if they're sent so far away that they're cut off from everything and
05:20they can't get back really really quickly. It introduced just a whole bunch of challenges that
05:26would become again part of the crux of Voyager. What happens if you can't just send a message to
05:31Starfleet? What happens if Starfleet don't know if you're alive or dead? What happens how the birth of
05:37Star Trek Voyager took place? Number six. The mistakes of Emissary led to Caretaker. Emissary directly
05:46influenced Caretaker but it was more the style that became very very important particularly in
05:53Michael Piller's mind because he recalled that Emissary tonally went away from Next Generation.
06:00It was a more ethereal, particularly in the parts with the Prophets, a more contemplative pilot. It was
06:07about it was heavy on character and story. It's not that they didn't want to do character and story
06:12with Caretaker but absolutely Piller said we're just going to dial up the action adventure element
06:19here and that's exactly what they did. Now a good example would be look at the cold
06:23opens of both Emissary and Caretaker okay and you might be thinking well hang on Emissary opens with
06:29the Battle of Wolf 359. That's about as action-packed as you can get, is it? So we do get that fantastic
06:36scene of the Saratoga engaging the cube and being roundly destroyed and then it gets quiet and it cuts
06:44and then we get it's short but a little scene of Cisco talking to Jake on the holodeck and we get that
06:50nice quiet reveal with the theme tune of the station of Deep Space Nine. Okay now let's look at Star Trek
06:57Voyager, the cold open here. So again we open up with a little bit of action, we have the Valjean being
07:03hunted by Gullivec and the Cardassian ship. Now we're firing torpedoes, we're firing phasers, we have the
07:09usual you know consoles made of rocks exploding all around us. We end up in the Badlands, both ships take a
07:15beating, the Cardassian ship is hit by one of those plasma storms in an effect that would be used again
07:21and again and again. Then you have the Valjean, they see that the big massive displacement wave is coming
07:27up behind them and slam! There is no lull, there is no kind of breath here, it was just let's go, let's go,
07:34let's go and that continues more or less throughout Caretaker. Of course there are quiet moments but
07:41in much more so than Emissary we have a lot more action adventure in Caretaker than we do in the
07:46opening of Deep Space Nine. Number five, Michael Pillar lost an argument and the Maquis gained
07:51Starfleet uniforms. In Caretaker the Maquis are of course an entirely separate crew that have been
07:56infiltrated by Tuvok and are then forced to work alongside the Starfleet officers as the episode goes
08:02on. Michael Pillar was very very set on having the Maquis remain Maquis for the duration of Voyager.
08:12Rick Berman was dead set against this. As Ronald D. Moore recounted, this was an argument Michael
08:19Pillar lost. Rick Berman had Star Trek Deep Space Nine in his mind during the writing of this episode
08:26and what I mean by that is that he was very convinced that the perceived failing ratings of
08:33DS9 meant that he did not want Voyager to be very reliant on the style of DS9. He wanted it to go back
08:41to next generation, have that more kind of optimistic view of the future and in fairness pretty much that's
08:48what they did and therefore at the end of Caretaker you have one crew and they are all Starfleet
08:56crew in Starfleet uniforms. That was Rick Berman going I am not sitting down to commit to one two
09:03three however many seasons of two crews on the one ship. That's too much diversity and it's too much
09:11conflict. Now the ghost of Roddenberry was very much in his ear at this point. Rick Berman himself
09:18did say that yes once we didn't have to do those roles anymore things did get a little bit easier
09:22but definitely you can see that in Caretaker specifically there was absolute nope we are
09:29not having a ship full of people who are at each other's throats the whole time. Number four Nick
09:35Locarno. Robert Duncan McNeil had of course already appeared in Star Trek in The Next Generation.
09:40He appears in the episode The First Duty which is an absolutely fabulous episode as Cadet Nick Locarno.
09:46He's the ringleader of the group that effectively served as the template for what Red Squad would
09:52become. They do the Cold War Starburst, Wesley gets pulled up in it and Nick Locarno is kicked out of
09:58Starfleet Academy. Robert Duncan McNeil then gets invited to audition for this new part. Now he doesn't
10:05know this but it's initially called Nick Locarno. Jerry Taylor said we're gonna get a Nick Locarno
10:10type character. So they just used his name throughout. We've all said across the way oh it was legal issues,
10:15legal issues, legal issues, legal issues and to be fair that is a massive part of why Nick Locarno
10:20became Tom Paris. But they did do a name change but they didn't change anything else because Robert
10:25Duncan McNeil himself said that when he got the script he was like this is Nick. He didn't realize
10:33that he was auditioning for a new series. He thought they were bringing the character of Nick Locarno back
10:38into what he thought was the then approaching Star Trek The Next Generation movie generations. He knew that
10:44was coming so he thought oh okay weird that they're going to bring Locarno back for that but all right
10:48grand. He then of course discovered that no that was not the plan it was for Star Trek Voyager.
10:55Locarno and Tom Paris are the same character and there's a couple of things that have changed
11:01they've kind of had to change along the way but from the beginning there wasn't it wasn't an accident
11:06how similar these two characters were. Number three. Crypts and Bloods. The poor Al Kazon have
11:13been referred to in many circles including my own as discount knockoff Klingons and I'm not gonna lie
11:22I don't feel particularly guilty for that statement because they never really got a chance to become
11:26anything more than thugs. That's all they really basically they are thugs there you go enjoy your new
11:33villain and that is one of the reasons they were written out of the show relatively early but in
11:39Caretaker they serve as roving gangs in space and they took inspiration from the Crips in America. In
11:48the earliest notes there was literally written in and the Crips will do this and the Crips will do that.
11:52The Crips were formed in 1969 and they are one big organization but they are also comprised of lots
12:00and lots of subsets which is that's basically what the Kazon are they are sects. In Caretaker we get
12:06the Kazon Oglen of course we know we would go on to see the Kazon Nistrum they would become the bigger
12:12group if you like. Now in real life these street gangs they engaged in drug dealing they engage in
12:19murders they engage in all sorts of violence and this is replicated in a way in Caretaker. Now we don't see
12:26drug dealing going on but we do certainly see acts of violence and of course the oppression of the
12:31Ocampa as well. Once Voyager effectively stands up to them and only really wins because of superior
12:38technology they say yeah our buddies are going to come after you and that was again directly inspired
12:47by how a lot of this would happen in real life. Number two Suspiria was a get out of jail free card
12:54inspired by the fugitive. Suspiria was the caretaker's mate. Now we wouldn't get the name
12:59Suspiria for a few episodes we just hear that there's another one out there so the female caretaker
13:04if you like. Now at the end of Caretaker the caretaker dies. With him goes the technology to
13:13send Voyager home. That of course is what strands them in the Delta Quadrant Janeway's decision to
13:18destroy the array. However Rick Berman recalled that Paramount were like this is a great idea this is
13:26a great idea you need to give us an out. It was the nerves of having this lost in space style show
13:32going on that couldn't cross over with Deep Space Nine and it couldn't cross over with the Star Trek
13:38movies because it was so physically far away from them. So Berman looked to the old series and its
13:45recent movie adaptation The Fugitive as a way of solving this problem. He looked at the character
13:50of the one-armed man. Well basically there's something else out there. Now we might not see it
13:55and we might not know where it is but it's out there don't worry it's out there it's out there.
13:59I mean it took four seasons for the one-armed man to really become a character in The Fugitive
14:04and it took two seasons for Suspiria to become a character in Star Trek Voyager. By the time that
14:09happened Paramount were a bit like yeah listen we're okay now you can continue doing what you're doing.
14:15But in the beginning that entire inclusion of the female Caretaker was purely so that they could do
14:21a hard reset if they had to if it looked like the audience just was not reacting well to the idea of
14:29a Starfleet ship out in the back pocket of the arsehole of nowhere. Number one it was heartless and no one
14:38cared about Neelix from the beginning. Michael Piller recalled that Caretaker by the time it was finished and
14:43put on air was it was very good there was a lot of action going on so it was quite an enjoyable
14:49romp but what it didn't have was heart. He recalled that Tom Paris gets an arc in Caretaker you know
14:58he goes from I'm the bad boy in the penal colony to basically yeah he's actually a good guy pilot of
15:04Voyager by the end of it. There is an arc there but in Piller's view that was it. All of the other
15:11characters it wasn't so much that they were ill-defined but it's rather than the action
15:17depending on them they depended on the action. This he felt was a frustrating element of Caretaker
15:26because it let down the story overall. Now they were able to jig a few things around to give people
15:31slight character moments that really helped them along the way but the one character that Piller felt
15:38just did not come out of Caretaker well was Neelix. He thought we have a problem here because if you
15:46think about Caretaker his first scene is you know he's in the junkyard and it's a bit like okay grand
15:52this could go any which way and how many different person in Junkyard's character have we seen so
15:58there's nothing really stand out about it. And by the end of the episode he is standing on the bridge with
16:03Kes ready to join the crew but not an awful lot really between that. You have the scene in the bath
16:09which is funny sure and then you have him betraying the Starfleet crew once he gets to Ocomba and gets
16:17Kes. Caretaker Neelix is not a massively likable character. Now as time went on it's flip a coin.
16:25He's become Marmite in that respect. Now Ethan Phillips by all accounts is like the nicest man who has ever
16:31worked on Star Trek which is a massive shame that poor O'Neelix is hated by a large portion of the
16:36fan base. But particularly behind the scenes in Caretaker the one character that they all felt
16:43just didn't work was poor O'Neelix.
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