Stardate 0009.04: Felix Culpa Season

By: Michelle Erica Green
Date: Monday, September 04, 2000

Warning! Spoilers ahead!

This week my Source Who Is Often Though Not Always Right said he'd heard intimations of some of the rumors I reported a few weeks ago from the Voyager's Delights web page, which I had dismissed as outrageous. I still find them hard to believe. The spoilers suggest that Voyager's homecoming will come at Q's hands, and that the ship will end up back at the Caretaker's array. It's not impossible that the writers would settle on a predictable device to get home with a typical twist ending. It's just disappointing to think that they might, considering that these were eventualities dozens of people guessed back in the first season.

More importantly, both my source and the Voyager's Delights page (which apparently got the rumor from a British TV station) believe Tom Paris will be the character to die during Voyager's traumatic homecoming. If true, this is shocking news for several reasons. The main one is that Robert Duncan McNeill seems to be universally well-liked by cast, crew and fans of the show. Why on earth would they kill off a character played by an actor everyone wants to keep around? Maybe they plan to have him play Tom Paris' thus-far-unrevealed identical twin brother back home, but everyone hates that sort of device on soap operas and I can't imagine it would work on Trek.

Or maybe the writers are just running out of ideas for Paris, now that they have him pretty much reformed, turned into a model officer and this season a husband and father as well. I admit that there's a certain appeal to a tragic arc in which former criminal Paris would give his life to save his family, his shipmates and all the knowledge Voyager has accumulated for the Federation--not to mention the suffering it would give his father, the much-resented Admiral Paris, and the instant case it would make for the pardoning of all the former Maquis criminals turned valued Starfleet officers.

But the problem with this scenario goes beyond some potentially enjoyable dramatic angst. It would make me start to wonder whether Trek has a problem with intact nuclear families, considering that Sisko died under similarly tragic circumstances with a pregnant wife, and that we've seen dozens of characters come from what they perceived to be broken families (Riker, LaForge, Data, Worf, David Marcus, Sisko, Kira, et al). I'm not thrilled about Paris and Torres having a baby within mere months after getting married, but for heaven's sake, at least he should get to stay around to enjoy fatherhood.


The report on Voyager's Delights suggests that Paris dies in a timeline altered by Q to save Earth after Voyager returns home just in time to witness its destruction, so who knows how it might play out...or whether any of this is true. My Source Who Is Often But Not Always Right has heard nothing about an alternate timeline being created, so who knows.

Another rumor that just won't die claims Samantha Wildman will be killed off, so that Seven can 'adopt' Naomi and become more human herself as she helps the girl cope with her grief. This entire concept is too repugnant to spend any time contemplating, so we'll just have to see if it happens and if it could possibly be even worse than it sounds. I do have a horrible feeling that if she's murdered, Samantha will also be the character brought back from the dead by the Kobali, the species from last season's 'Ashes to Ashes' that animate dead bodies. Biller did say those aliens would return, and it's just the sort of cheap nastiness Voyager has gone for in the past.

The Paris-Torres baby is apparently not just a rumor, for TrekWeb (which has a Source Who Is Almost Always Right) posted a spoiler for an episode called 'Inner Child' in which B'Elanna considers altering her unborn child's genetic makeup to avoid passing on her Klingon genes. Braga and Biller previously suggested that we would see an episode featuring an old Klingon ship with anti-Starfleet Klingons aboard, so one wonders what might have happened to turn the Torres of 'Barge of the Dead' back into the Torres of 'Faces.'

TrekWeb suggests that 'Inner Child' will bring the ethical dilemma of genetic alteration to the fore, but those socially relevant episodes work best when they stay close to the characters' personal stories. Thus Torres' dilemma in 'Nothing Human,' when she wished to die rather than be treated by a Cardassian doctor, made a powerful argument for patients' rights, and her encounter with holocaust victims in 'Remember' worked superbly as a challenge to revisionist historians. But her abruptly-developed and abruptly-cured mental illness in 'Extreme Risk' made both the character and the condition look silly.

It's hard to imagine Torres making any sort of argument in favor of a racially pure human child. No matter how much trouble her Klingon half has caused her in the past, she realized in 'Faces' that it's also the source of her strength, and it was one of the things that drew Paris to her. I hope we actually learn something about B'Elanna's background, rather than getting some generic cliches about Klingon temperament as reason for her wanting to alter her child's genes. I'm also curious how 24th-century paternal rights will be presented, since in an era of artificial wombs, the notion that pregnancy is solely a woman's issue must have evolved.

In other spoilers, the official Star Trek site's synopsis of 'Inside Man' says that we'll see two Barclays: one who appears on Voyager with a sure-fire though dangerous plan for getting home, another back at Starfleet who has no idea what his double is up to. Has Reg gone nuts--again--or is it part of a broader conspiracy? Well, it won't affect the series' ultimate conclusion. Ethan Phillips confirmed at a German convention last weekend that Voyager will come home before the final episode, so that the writers have a few hours to explore how the Alpha Quadrant is changed by the ship's return.

Trek News: UPN Gets a Reprieve

The Hollywood Reporter, which was sounding UPN's death knell a few short weeks ago, now believes the network to be secure for at least another season. Though it was widely believed that Chris-Craft's stations would drop their affiliation with UPN after Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. acquired them, The Hollywood Reporter now suggests that News Corp. will keep UPN programming rather than scramble to put together a new slate of shows by January, when the affiliation agreements expire.

The Wall Street Journal explained that UPN must notify its affiliates by Oct. 15 if the network plans to shut down in January, but dismantling the network would leave nearly twenty major-market stations owned by Viacom without network affiliation or programming. Since it is in the best interests of both News Corp. and Viacom for UPN to remain viable, Murdoch is expected to try to buy part-ownership of the network. Though Viacom forced previous co-owner Chris-Craft to sell its stake earlier this year, the corporation may have no choice but to accept a partnership with Chris-Craft's new owner, who also controls the Fox network.

Some industry analysts point out that UPN and Fox compete for the same young viewing demographic, though the situation is increasingly complicated because the studios owned by the parent companies produce shows for other networks, and increasingly, single corporations own both major networks and minor broadcast and cable outlets. Warner Bros. produces shows for other networks as well, although The WB targets the same young audience. Since the FCC seemed open to allowing Viacom to control both CBS and UPN, the regulators may also permit Murdoch to control a larger proportion of media in major markets as well.

UPN hasn't exactly been producing consistent Emmy-caliber material--even Voyager lost in all Emmy Award categories for which it was nominated this year, with The X-Files beating it out in two technical categories where Trek has dominated. Yet Viacom has already invested more than seven million dollars in advertising for its fall season, and last week officially unveiled the Extreme Football League, known as the XFL. This joint production of the WWF and NBC will air night games on UPN starting next February. With team names like the Hitmen, the XFL promises the same tasteful sportsmanship we've all come to expect from the WWF.

Trek Books: Star Trek New Frontier: Excalibur

The last old New Frontier book, Dark Allies, ends with the words, '...five minutes before the Excalibur blew up...,' which is getting to be pretty typical of the sort of cliffhanger Pocket Books has been foisting upon poor Trek readers (though at least in this case it isn't the end of the universe, as in Deep Space Nine Millennium: The War of the Prophets). Fans of Captain Mackenzie Calhoun have had months to agonize over his possible doom, and--wouldn't you know it!--we have to agonize awhile longer, since as far as one can tell from the first two new New Frontier books, he's still dead. Yet the title of the upcoming hardback Excalibur: Restoration offers hope...for why, one wonders, would the mini-series be called Excalibur if the ship and its captain won't be somehow resurrected?

We don't get a clue how that might happen in the first two volumes, and it's not until the end of the second that we get some idea of how it blew up in the first place. Despite an unfortunate paucity of Commander Shelby--who's in line for promotion to captain of the Exeter, though she's still mourning Mac--the former first officer of the Excalibur pops in long enough to agree with her crew not to belabor the details of the accident that has scattered them. Augh! In the meantime, we get to see the crew in some very atypical situations for Starfleet officers while they're on leave recovering from the loss of their ship. This is a clever excuse to send them all over the galaxy dealing with personal crises that begin to converge.

Excalibur: Requiem focuses primarily on Soleta, McHenry and Kebron, making it my favorite of the two new novels. This first book follows Lieutenant Soleta as she tracks down her vicious Romulan father, while space cadet McHenry and tough guy Kebron head undercover to deal with an alien crisis that they first suspect is an Academy prank, but there's clearly something else going on. Their investigation of a set of abductions both echoes and parodies The X-Files, with the Starfleet officers playing Deep Throat to a relatively low-tech society experiencing problems with UFOs and crop circles that most people disbelieve. Trapped under prosthetic alterations that weaken him, Kebron begins to feel some of the warm, squishy feelings he usually ridicules. Meanwhile, McHenry adapts cartoon philosophies to challenge illogical natural laws and discovers that maybe Wile E. Coyote's on to something, before the inevitable anvil hits him in the head.

Soleta is a fascinating character, pun intended, but not limited to her atypical Vulcan makeup. A message intended for her dead mother puts her on the path of the criminal who raped her mother, thus giving her life. Shocked to discover that her father is dying and seemingly reformed, she makes a leap of faith to complete a mission tying her to her Romulan roots, only to discover that the mysterious Rajari will continue to complicate her life for as long as she lets him. Although we see her played for a fool, and Soleta knows that she is being played for a fool, she never comes across as a fool. She's a complicated, conflicted, sympathetic character whose faults are also her strengths.

Author Peter David seems to love Vulcans and at the same time feel a compulsive need to reform them, giving us two Vulcan women who (fortunately) bear no resemblance to Spock's T'Pring, yet also demonstrate all the hypocrisy and flaws in Vulcan culture rather than attempting to make sense of the inconsistencies. In Renaissance, Doctor Selar and hermaphrodite engineer Burgoyne struggle over custody of their child, with Burgy resorting to an ancient and ridiculous Vulcan law that's not much of an improvement over King Solomon's methods. Not even a guest appearance by T'Pau does much to redeem the storyline, which isn't illogical by Vulcan standards--as far as I can tell, Vulcan rituals are some of the most ridiculous around--so much as seemingly designed to point out all of Selar's character flaws, and by extension the character flaws of Vulcans as a species. We hear that Burgy's an atypical Hermat just as Selar is an extreme case on Vulcan, but since Burgy is the only Hermat most of us know, it's a lot easier to develop a sympathetic view of hir and hir species.

The other major storyline concerns Robin Lefler and her mother Morgan Primus attempting to share a bonding holiday on Risa, where of course they both encounter romantic entanglements. The storyline seems very fluffy until it unexpectedly connects with another concerning Si Cwan and Kalinda, investigating a brutal murder from their own background. Though Morgan is a delightful character, Lefler still seems awfully superficial, and not very bright for a Starfleet officer. Like Deanna Troi and her mother (a good friend of Morgan's), the daughter is too often overshadowed and made to look immature...and, since comparisons to David's Imzadi books are inevitable, these two can't quite compete.

However, since these are David novels, they are naturally hysterical in places. Requiem opens in a bar that sounds just like Page's in England in our own century, where Starfleet paraphernalia and autographed photos of the captains decorate the walls. Renaissance has a scene in a similar place on Risa with an engineering theme, complete with Scotty as host and technical expert. Burgoyne's refreshingly dirty mind and Lefler's shuttlecraft nookie are a delightful change from chaste Voyager episodes. Since this is New Frontier, there are lots of subtle digs at canonical Trek--like the presence of gay characters, including Selar's brother, and strongly-stated disapproval of Spock's mind-rape of Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, in an eerie parallel context which makes that condemnation doubly powerful.

I am a great fan of this series, but I do have one gripe: The books are $6.99 apiece, with the expectation that everyone will want the hardcover to follow. I guess people must be buying them if Pocket keeps raising the prices of Trek novels, but the big fat Millennium volumes seem a bargain by comparison. I like New Frontier better than Voyager, but hey--at least Voyager is free.

Trek People

Once named one of People Magazine's most beautiful people in the world, Voyager's Garrett Wang has gotten stuck playing an ensign with a horrible romantic track record. As Tom Paris once pointed out, Harry Kim has fallen in love with a hologram, the wrong Delaney sister and a dead girl...plus he's tried to romance an uninterested Seven of Nine, marry three alien women who wanted to use and discard him, and pair up with a woman who gave him an intergalactic STD. Now he's dealing with becoming the oldest ensign in history.

'I think I'm going to be in The Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest ensign in the galaxy,' said Wang plaintively in a recent chat on startrek.com. 'I remember one day I even went up to Kate Mulgrew and asked her the question, 'When am I going to get promoted?' As if Kate really has anything to do with that. That's how desperate it has become.'

Paris, after all, has already been demoted and promoted once, while Tuvok got an onscreen career boost complete with roast. 'It would be nice to have a promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade at some time before the end of the show,' sighed the actor, who said he would wait until a Voyager feature film if necessary.

Executive Producer Ken Biller told Cinescape earlier this year that we would see an episode dealing with Kim's frustration at having hit a glass ceiling on Voyager. 'It's really going to test him and force him to examine how to balance his own desires with his loyalties to his family on Voyager,' said Biller. According to TrekWeb, the upcoming episode 'The Command' gives the ensign a chance to command an alien ship, allowing him to experience his dream of becoming a starship captain--though not a Starfleet captain.

Wang joked to startrek.com readers that the thing he'd like to change most about Kim is his hair, and that if he could play any other Voyager character, he'd want it to be Seven of Nine. Unlike some of his fellow cast members, Wang said he still watches all the finished episodes. He said he's always believed the series should end with a cliffhanger to be wrapped up in a feature film, but said he doesn't know at this date what the producers have in mind.

The actor revealed that he has a clarinet coach for the scenes in which Kim plays the instrument, because he's a stickler for authenticity. A fan of electronic music, Wang added that he suggested Kim should play the saxophone, because he wanted something 'a little funkier.' Though he expressed some relief that he will get to broaden his horizons when Voyager goes off the air and said he would not want to play Kim on another series as Michael Dorn did with Worf, Wang credited Trek with contributing to his maturity as a human being.

Wang said that when the show premiered, he was insistent that his character not become 'the Asian Guy on the show,' but rather an inexperienced young officer. 'I told the producers I didn't want him using chopsticks, you know. They have been very cognizant of my wishes when it comes to keeping this character a Starfleet officer first and foremost.' He added that because of stereotyping, Asian males 'have typically only been able to get roles [of] the enemy, be it the Viet Cong or the [North] Koreans or the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. The only other male characters that pop up that aren't the enemy are really asexual, non-masculine, dorky computer nerd guys.'

Wang cited George Takei's Sulu as one of very few exceptions. 'I'm very fortunate to be part of Star Trek, which has given me the chance to be all those things that Asian American males have not been. One of my goals as an actor has always been to change the perception of Asian Americans in this country...and I hope to use Voyager as a platform.'

How refreshing to hear a star who's still a fan of the series, and who still cares about what happens to his character even if he's a little tired of playing the same thing week after week. Give this man the promotion he deserves.