Schism, Part 1

The death of Michael Piller and his legacy of what he did during his tenure on TNG, DS9 and Voyager made me reflect back on what happened to Star Trek after he left. Deep Space Nine remains my favorite of the spin-offs. Mainly, I think, it was because Rick Berman and Brannon Braga were still shepherding TNG and getting prepared launch Voyager. He sort of had some free reign in what direction DS9 would take. And since he was also responsible for the open-submission’s, he hired and trained writers like Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe and René Echevarria in his style -trying to find the moral center of the story.

Still, DS9 had a rough beginning -suffering the same fate of TNG’s first two seasons. It wasn’t until Michael Piller joined Trek for the third year, did the first spin-off come into its own. But while there were some stinkers in DS9's first two-seasons, they were never as cringe inducing stories during TNG’s first two seasons.

I wrote this back in 2001, just as Voyager was ending:

When he help launch Voyager in 1995, he left the day-to-day work to show runner Behr, who made DS9 the most different and closer, I think, to Roddenberry’s more cerebral idea of Trek. But by the time Voyager came on, his magic touch seemed to fade, but the blame I think was not him. Rick Berman’s style of producing Trek was forcing the writers to produce less and less allegory stories (the franchises bread and butter, so to speak) for more action stories, with tons of violence directed at women and an overabundant reliance on sexuality. And the magical candy like reset button became a mantra that created a huge schism in Trek’s fan base.

Voyager's concept was to show what would happen to a crew stranded far from home, away from the protection of Starfleet and the Federation, with a crew made up of politically correct Starfleet officers and survivors of defiant Federation constituents -seeds of the this series were planted in a two-part DS9 episode The Maquis. Before her mission can begin, the crew is swept the crew 70, 000 light years away, into the uncharted space of the Delta Quadrant. While the series was a return to TOS old fashioned naval romance, it had a dangerous corporate utopian view that I was unable to overlook. That being said, however, the opener was not half-bad, and it set up many, many story ideas that could have been expounded on. One might have been the mixing of the Starfleet crew and the Maquis crew -a strong criticism from critics and fans that actually had its roots on TNG and something which many thought should have been explored in much more detail. Or Tom's voyage from a misguided youth to redemption (something that was covered a bit in season' one and two- all part of a plan to discover who was sending transmissions to the Kazon, and then oddly picked up again in season five -which by then seemed out of character), to the plight of Harry as always an ensign and never anything more How about Tuvok, who must deal with Chakotay as his commanding officer (one guessed that Tuvok was a full commander during the pilot, and somehow was demoted). But all of that was quickly brushed aside like so much dead leaves under the TNG's jingoistic notion that we were all one, big happy family. They took away the conflict, and any sort of great drama that comes from it.

Meanwhile, as DS9 was beginning to lose its episodic roots, Voyager was returning to TOS (and TNG somewhat) of self-contained story telling. The only real arc to the series would be them lost in the Delta Quadrant. So with Voyager, the show was designed not for the fans of either TNG or DS9, but for the causal fan; for the viewer who could not remember the show was on week-to-week, the "absentee viewer" as someone once put it. So the story telling of DS9 was replaced, because those themes were "too lofty for a (show like Voyager's) broad-based audience," as Piller once put it in an interview with the official Star Trek website (that locution, in particular, has become an over used catch phrase, which can easily be translated as straight, white males). So continuity and the Prime Directive were tossed out airlock with the baby water, all in the name of telling a story.

As the first season progressed, it wobbled, it sank, it rose, and it shifted its concept like sand in a desert. It introduced two very inferior alien enemies, the Kazon and the Vidiian's. Both mostly failed because they weren't sinister enough to scare a cockroach back into its dark corner. The Kazon, who where to be based on L.A. gangs, were just a bunch of petulant children who had cool ships, but were always fighting to find out which sect would rule. And despite the Seska/Culluh alliance, they never were more menacing than stock TV villains. The Vidiian's, while creepy, were mishandled. Besides they weren't really evil, they just did appalling things in pursuance of their goals. So, these two were not the Klingons or the Cardassians. They were just boring. So, the first season limped along like a cart with a misalign wheels. And while most of the acting was good outside of Mulgrew's, the stories lacked real originality, filled with terminally uninteresting characters, and featured way to much technobabble, with Time and Again being one of the most well known episodes to go overboard using it. Most of the stories seemed to be hobbled together from other concepts; as if Piller, Berman and Braga took all the stories they had not used on TNG and DS9 and tried to make them some how work on Voyager. But proposing the same flawed ideas over and over again was not making the show good. Only Eye of the Needle and Jetrel can be said to be one of the best of the first season, and while I enjoyed Emanations (because it will become a rare treat to watch Garrett Wang at the center of a story), the rest of season lacked a certain quality.