Stardate 0008:28 - Trekkies in the White House?

By: Michelle Erica Green
Date: Monday, August 28, 2000

It's common knowledge that Chelsea Clinton is a Star Trek fan, but last week U.S. citizens learned that Vice President Al Gore may be as well. At the Democratic National Convention, where he accepted the Democratic party's nomination for president, Gore's college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, admitted that while they were at Harvard they watched the original series. 'I lived with him for four years, and what did we do? We shot pool, and we watched Star Trek when maybe we should've been studying for exams,' said Jones, who stars in the current film Space Cowboys.

The convention was also attended by Kate Mulgrew, who has herself been a fan of Hillary Clinton since she met the first lady at a White House dinner for women in science during Star Trek: Voyager's first season. Mulgrew told talk show host Craig Kilborn that she and her husband, Cleveland politician Tim Hagan, support the Democratic ticket and have many ties to the Kennedy family.

Whoopi Goldberg, Star Trek: The Next Generations's Guinan, also attended the convention, where she hosted a dinner in honor of current Democratic president Bill Clinton. The event took place at Paramount, where more than 10,000 invited guests, delegates and employees partied with the politicians. According to startrek.com, Voyager stars Robert Duncan McNeill, Tim Russ and Garrett Wang were all in attendance. The 'California Welcome Party' hosted by Governor Gray Davis was set on the Paramount back lot where exterior scenes for such planet-based episodes as 'A Piece of the Action' (Classic Star Trek), 'Past Tense' (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and '11:59' (Voyager) all filmed.

Trek News: Inside Man

In addition to convention news, startrek.com has also updated information about the upcoming episode 'Inside Man,' where readers learned this week that this episode will bring back Dwight Schultz (Barclay), Marina Sirtis (Troi), Richard Herd (Admiral Paris) and Richard McGonagle (Commander Harkins), all of whom appeared in last season's 'Pathfinder.' The episode, which will reportedly air sixth of the installments this season, focuses on a Starfleet officer sent to Voyager via the datastream that allowed the Doctor to travel to the Alpha Quadrant in 'Life Line.'

TrekToday reported on a Richard Arnold convention appearance that 'Inside Man' is the episode with a subplot in which the Holodoc goes inside Seven of Nine's cortical implant--though at one time that storyline was reported to be the A-plot of an episode called 'Body and Soul.' Since it was previously rumored to be a Maquis episode, the cast list for 'Inside Man' raises the question of whether friendly Starfleet officers are trying to spy on Voyager's long-lost crew.


Paramount has released three promotional trailers for Voyager's seventh season, all of which can be viewed at www.vidiot.com if your local stations aren't playing them. The one generating the most word-of-mouth has been labeled 'Hero Generic' and features the ominous voice-over, 'Some legends live forever. Some heroes die young. But all great adventures must come to an end.' Among the images are Torres shouting, 'Captain, you'll be killed!' and of Ensign Kim falling into the vacuum of space from 'Deadlock.'

The shorter trailer called 'Home Generic' features each of the characters saying the name of his or her home planet, while a voice-over intones, 'They come from different planets. They long for the same thing: to find their way home.' This seems a little odd considering that Neelix is moving further and further away from his home, the Doctor was 'born' on Voyager and Seven of Nine lived most of her life in space. But 'home' and 'Earth' have been equated for most of the series' run, even though the Maquis crewmembers might not be welcome there--and might not wish to stay.

A final trailer focuses solely on Seven of Nine, showing the ex-Borg declaring, 'I have long since accepted what the Borg did to me. What I will not accept is defeat. I am confident we will discover a way home. Failure is not an option.'

Though most of the speculation on the 'Some heroes die young' line centers around Janeway and Chakotay, since Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran have made it clear they would neither be surprised nor displeased should their characters die, it might be far more dramatic and far more gutsy for Seven of Nine to give her life to save her adoptive ship. Janeway's pledged to go down with the ship from the start, so her sacrifice won't seem particularly noble for a Starfleet captain. Chakotay's death might singlehandedly redeem the Maquis crewmembers, but would seem a tragic waste of a man who put aside his own cause for another and never got back to his real values.

For Seven to sacrifice herself would provide both the ultimate proof of her humanity and the ultimate tragedy at its loss. We've seen her save the ship lots of times at little personal cost. Watching her make the ultimate sacrifice for the crew would be more interesting and more moving than watching any of the other senior officers do the same, because we'd expect it of most of them. And since no one ever has to remain dead on Star Trek, especially not someone with Borg nanoprobes and a connection to the Collective mind, it wouldn't even have to be permanent.

There's my sacrifice fantasy for Voyager. We've seen Seven act heroically, but she's not really a hero because it's all so easy for someone with her super-human strength and knowledge, plus the captain pulling for her. Since she's been the focus of the series for the past four years, it would make sense that the final arc center on her as much as Janeway. Mulgrew wants Janeway to die for her crew, but Janeway's already given many years of her life for her crew; her death would look like defeat. What better way to make Seven human than to show that she's willing to die for her captain and her friends?

Trek Books: The Deep Space Nine Companion

First came Allan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium, which contained short summaries, photos and a few production notes on each episode of the original series. Then came Larry Nemecek's Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, which contained longer summaries, more photos and more detailed production notes on each episode, plus some good essays on each season. Now Terry J. Erdmann's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion has arrived, over 700 pages long, the size of the previous two books put together.

This big, expensive ($27.95 US), heavy paperback is worth every cent and then some. Its only drawback is how nostalgic it can make a reader for the series. This is an account of a show created by people who cared passionately about it--the actors, writers and producers are all quoted at length on what they liked and hated, what worked and what didn't. Sometimes what a show does wrong can be as important as what it does right. In this volume, we hear about the script arguments and post-production disasters, the actors' annoyances at some of the writers' choices, the writers' frustrations with different drafts of scripts. We see how they changed things, fixed things and finally adopted the motto 'Make it a virtue!' for problems they couldn't solve.

By the final arc of Deep Space Nine, the production team found a way to make almost everything a virtue, even seemingly irreconcilable plot holes. This is partly because the staff members worked themselves ragged, but it's also because they seem genuinely to have liked one another and to have loved the show. The arguments to which the reader is made privy just emphasize the extent to which the writers and actors had internalized these characters: they believed in them. Now it's clear why the series seemed so real and immediate even in the midst of an overblown war story that was far removed from the optimistic, expansive spirit of the original Star Trek.

Erdmann doesn't just summarize the episodes, which isn't as necessary because the Deep Space Nine Companion CD-ROM contains both summaries and full scripts. Instead Erdmann picks up on small acting and directing decisions, drawing connections between events in the early seasons and incidents late in the show's run. In many cases the links were serendipitous, as the writers point out, laughing at how much they were able to rationalize with hindsight. Still, one gets the impression that great care went into the planning of the show as a whole. Despite imperfect plotting of Bajoran and Cardassian history, despite character quirks thrown in just to jazz up slow stories, the writers never lost sight of who the people were and why they mattered.

Superficially, the book looks great. Unlike the previous companions, it contains design sketches and storyboards, and while many of the photos are small, there are more for each episode. Though unfortunately there's no index of characters, there's an appendix of episodes by production number, air date and page in the volume, which is extremely helpful when looking up favorites. Though the notes don't pay all that much attention to the science behind the science fiction, they're chock full of trivia about the Paramount lot, the complex special effects, the inside jokes, the lives of the production team and the connections among all the people who worked together on the series--actors, directors, writers, producers, advisors, technicians, stunt coordinators, musicians--you name it.

It's nice to know that the producers realized which episodes were classics as they were making them--in the wake of the first season's 'Duet,' for instance, they fretted that they couldn't achieve the same level of dialogue. There's surprising frankness about which guest stars didn't quite work, which parts needed to be recast, and which scripts received complete overhauls by members of the staff. There's also surprising frankness about which ideas just didn't work. Of big-name guest Richard Kiley, executive producer Ira Behr says, 'I felt that we only got one side of the character. We got his bigness, but we didn't get his soul, this bitterness and boldness we tried to give him.' Of the episode 'Meridian,' which Erdmann says makes the entire crew cringe when its name is mentioned, Ron Moore says, 'I don't think anyone likes the show.'

We also learn when Nana Visitor's stand-in's lovely legs doubled for the actress' own, of Visitor's frustration with how easily Kira let Kai Winn off at the end of 'The Reckoning, of Marc Alaimo's ongoing campaign to redeem Dukat, to make him a hero, to give him a romantic connection with Kira. We discover that Rene Auberjonois thought he had better chemistry with Dey Young's Arissa in 'A Simple Investigation' than with anyone else, even though that pairing was unpopular with many fans. There is an account of the letter campaign by the Friends of Vedek Bareil after the popular character was killed off, a decision which the writers admit was impulsive. There's a fabulous chapter on the making of the very difficult original series cross-over episode 'Trials and Tribble-ations.'

Visitor comes across as the most involved of the performers, but maybe that's because she had more conflicts than anyone else. She struggled with the fact that Kira did not kill her mother after learning that the woman had been a collaborator; she became almost violent over Dukat's wooing of Kira; she fought for her costumes; she fought for more connection between Kira and Keiko during the pregnancy storyline; she resisted the idea of Kira and Odo as lovers and then insisted that if the writers were going to do it, they needed to do it right, so that some of the emotional scenes in the final arc were her ideas. 'I've always felt that I have to open my mouth and pick my fights,' she says, and reading this book, one can't help but love her for it.

In fact it's hard not to admire everyone on the team, even while they're arguing for things any given reader may really dislike. Some fans found the inclusion of Worf intrusive to the series, but for the writers, it provided a chance to reinvigorate other characters, even if it didn't provide the hoped-for ratings boost. Moore and Behr both show awareness of fan reactions and fan desires, and though they thwarted them on occasion, it was usually because they wanted to approach things from new angles or shake things up for later, not (as one often senses on Voyager) merely because they wanted to foil viewer hopes and expectations.

Take, for instance, the episode 'Rejoined,' in which Dax fell in love with an ex-spouse--not only a Trill taboo, but a big deal for many viewers because in their current incarnations, the two protagonists were both female. The writers claim they didn't set out to write a gay episode, and in fact the story break concerned a male ex-spouse; executive producer Michael Piller had suggested the taboo against rejoining early in the series as a means of preventing a joined Trill elite. Ron Moore suggested making the ex another woman to complicate what was meant to be merely a tragic love story, and the execs approved the story after some concerns about how far the writers meant to go. In relating some of the homophobic phone calls they received afterwards, the writers admit that some came from their own family members.

Comparing the production team depicted in The Deep Space Nine Companion to the harried, overworked group in Stephen Poe's A Vision of the Future: Star Trek Voyager, one can't help but wish the passion of Behr, Moore, Echevarria, Beimler, Wolfe and the rest had remained with the franchise. Ironically, while that earlier book promised to gloss over conflicts and personality clashes, it is those very problems that make The Deep Space Nine Companion so interesting and so delightful. No matter the issue, the team seems always to have made it work for the show they all loved.

Trek People

*Tim Russ

Tim Russ and Howard Stern finally went head-to-head last week in their Battle of the Bands, but the news was unfortunately not good for the actor who plays Tuvok. Stern and his band The Losers played a practice session of Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' early in the week, receiving praise from partisan listeners. Technical glitches marred the competition, with The Losers having to start over at one point due to an annoying buzzing sound.

Judges Steve Stauff of Interscope records, Tom Calderon of MTV and Jason Flom of Atlantic Records' Lava label chose Stern's band over Russ' performance of 'Money Talks' from his new CD. Though TrekNation report that Russ sounded pretty good, Flom said he had to choose the Losers as Russ looked like he belonged in 'a wedding band in the Truman era.' Stauff and Calderon chose The Losers apparently because their costumes were preferable.

Russ challenged Stern to a rematch with different judges, and suggested that Stern should appear on Voyager.

*Patrick Stewart

Several sites this week reported on an article from the Times in which Patrick Stewart said he was 'bored and frustrated' in the last two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 'I found the longer the series went on, the fewer I wanted to watch,' said the former Royal Shakespeare Company star, currently enjoying popularity in The X-Men.

Perhaps Mulgrew and Beltran are merely suffering from the inevitable ennui of starring on a long-running series. However, Stewart did not criticize the writing or creative direction of the show. Though he believed the series' quality remained 'pretty consistent,' Stewart said that he felt his own work was 'not especially interesting.'

*John Savage

Another former Trek captain--albeit a brief one--has signed on to the new Fox series Dark Angel, produced by James Cameron. TrekToday reports that John Savage, who played Captain Ransom in Voyager's two-parter 'Equinox,' will be playing a character named Lydecker. Former Deep Space Nine writer Rene Echevarria is staff writer on Dark Angel. With Ron Moore on Roswell and Robert Hewitt Wolfe on Andromeda, Voyager could be in for some tough competition from the former DS9ers.