PRIME FACTORS: The basic premise

This subsection describes the producers' preference for a female captain, the idea of a Starfleet ship lost far from home and the reasons for developing that idea.

The three co-creators started with the concept and as part of that the character of the captain. What direction could they take that would make the show uniquely different from the others? All three agreed they wanted a female captain. Initially this idea was downplayed to the Studio in favour of a neutral strategy put as follows: "Let us interview both sexes, and if the best actor we find is a woman, can we hire her?" Paramount ultimately said yes, but not immediately. Paramount's hesitation about a female captain was less due to the entrenched attitudes of an industry long dominated by men and was more based on uncertainty over the viewing audience's possible reaction as the demographic was predominantly males aged 25 to 45. Would viewers accept a woman as captain of a starship, in the tradition of Kirk and Picard? Paramount was unsure, but did know for certain that what was required was another [TNG], i.e. a show that was in a brand new starship, going out to explore the unknown, with a new cast of characters. The choice of a female captain did, however, offer the advantage of eliminating the problem of fans comparing the new captain to Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. When [TNG] first debuted, viewers had a field day debating the merits of Kirk versus Picard, ending up highly divided, and indeed the debate still continues.

Therefore Berman, Piller and Taylor proceeded as if they would get a female captain.

Rick Berman: "The problem with a female captain obviously is that you're always balancing ... you don't want to turn this woman into a man. You don't want to make it a man's role that you happen to have a female actor playing. You don't want to take away her feminine qualities. You don't want to take away her nurturing and emotional qualities. But at the same time she's gotta be a Starfleet captain. She's gotta know how to be tough. You could believe that Sisko or Picard or Kirk could walk into a room and kick ass. It's not really all that true with a somewhat diminutive woman like Kate Mulgrew. Those are problems that we find enjoyable to work with and to overcome."

There were broad areas in which there was no fundamental disagreement or conflicting views: all three believed they had to avoid duplicating characters and concepts from anything Star Trek had done before. Ideally, they wanted to come up with a series that contained some intriguing similarities to [TOS] but also showcased unique differences. In other words: how to create something new and fresh and unique, yet clearly Star Trek, but at the same time different so that they are not 'ripping off' earlier Star Trek.

Michael Piller: "That's the key to television development. I think any network executive will tell you that they don't want anything that's so far from the audience's experience that they react with, "What the hell is that?" They want it to be familiar, but they want it to be fresh."

At the same time, they wanted to bring something of themselves to the process, while expanding Gene Roddenberry's vision and finding new ways to explore the universe he created. It was the desire to maintain the vision that led them to the series premise. Over the years any number of episodes had been done in which some alien, entity, or omnipotent being, like the character Q for instance, had whisked the ship and crew off to the far corners of the galaxy. They did not know where they were, and they did not know how they were going to get back. Of course, by the end of the hour the crew solved whatever problem was involved and did get back. But what if they could not get back? What if they were stuck there? Alone. Completely out of touch with Starfleet. Cut off from everything familiar. So far away that the crew could not return - without some sort of help or intervention in their own lifetimes.

Michael Piller: "We looked at the landscape and asked ourselves what would make this show a contemporary show for the mid-nineties. We saw that we here in America are facing a lot of problems that we don't see any immediate fix for. We are facing social changes that ... in order to solve these problems ... we are going to have to start things that we may not be alive to see the end results for. That fundamentally we have to do some things for our children's benefit rather than our own. In metaphorical terms, we created a show in which the cast of characters is so far away from home that they may not live long enough to see the end of their journey. But they are starting on this journey, knowing that at the very worst, at the end of the journey at least their children ... their offspring ... will be rewarded with the efforts that they have put into it. I'm not going to say this is what [Star Trek Voyager] is, but that was a discussion we had as we found our way into it."

To the co-creators, it represented a "back to basics" approach. It was the challenge that Roddenberry had faced in his original concept: The crew would be traversing the true unknown.

Michael Piller: "Because Roddenberry, in his original concept, was faced with the very same challenge that we're faced with: We don't know what we're going to face there ... the true unknown. He didn't know who the aliens were. He didn't know anything about Klingons. He didn't know anything about Romulans. He didn't know anything Ferengi. He didn't know anything about any of these things when he started. All he knew about was a bunch of guys on a spaceship. When he turned these guys loose in space he had no idea what he was going to find. That in a sense is what a writer does every time he sits down at the typewriter. Face the blank page. You don't know what you're going to find there. Now there's no backup. There's nobody to talk to out there. You're on your own; you're in the unknown. It's really what Star Trek originally was all about. Some brave guys out there, facing the unknown, on their own, using their wits and talents and skills to get into and out of the adventure they were encountering."

Michael Piller: "You have to understand that Rick, Jeri and I had no interest in simply putting a bunch of people on another ship, and sending them out to explore the universe. We wanted to bring something new to the Gene Roddenberry universe. The fans would've been the first people to criticise us if we had not brought something new to it. But everything new, everything was a challenge in the early stages of development of [Star Trek Voyager]."

The [Star Trek Voyager] crew would be lost in space (the term deliberately echoes the science fiction show 'Lost In Space' as Company staffers would later make the comparison), but not entirely: they know where home is, and are just unusually far away from it. It offers both the element of the unknown reinforced by the desire for something familiar to fans - home and Starfleet. This premise alters the entire energy of a series.

Rick Berman: "Star Trek is a show about wonder, and exploration, and uplifting hopefulness. When you are venturing out, going where no one has gone before, then venturing out is a movement like this [sweeps his arms outward). It's a broadening movement. It's a movement of exploration and wonder. Going home is an inward movement (brings his arms and hands together). There's not a lot of wonder and exploration and awe in going home. It has another direction to it. It funnels inward as opposed to outward. Since that's an important element of Star Trek and always has been, that's a problem we're forced to deal with ... always looking for that sense of wonder and that sense of adventure, when in fact you're just trying to get back home."

The premise certainly narrows the story-telling options - they can rarely go back to places they have already been. It would not make sense for the ship to turn around, retrace its path, and have some new adventure with aliens they have encountered in some previous episode. The writers have done it occasionally but it will not work as an ongoing story device. The best they can do is rationalise that it will take a season or so for the starship to traverse a particular region of space dominated by a specific alien race. This was done during the first and second seasons, with the Kazon. But it wears thin after a while and begins to strain credibility, if our starship is truly trying to get home as quickly as possible.

Another aspect of the premise, on first inspection, is that the writers cannot periodically go back to, say, the Klingon Homeworld to get B'Elanna Torres involved in stories, as they did with Worf on [TNG]. Nor can they continually have episodes set on Earth, or on the Talaxian, Vulcan, or Ocampa homeworlds, as they have done previously with Romulans, Cardassians, and Ferengi. There is very little opportunity for that type of "back and forth" action. The ship is always encountering new space, always moving in a single direction. The options are much more limited. However, it has forced the writers to be more inventive: during the series, they found ingenious ways to revisit already known areas, such as Sulu's ship Excelsior in [#44 Flashback] and Torres' Klingon heritage in [#123 Barge Of The Dead] and [#160 Prophecy]. In addition, part of the premise was that USS Voyager would be run as a Starfleet ship, and part of Starfleet's guiding raison d'etre is exploration, and so during the series Voyager makes a lot of course changes for the sake of exploration.

Rick Berman: "With [TNG] we had obviously a series that had been created by Gene Roddenberry: again, a captain and his crew aboard the starship Enterprise; very similar to the original series. So with [DS9] we had to do something different. What we did was we didn't put the show on a starship. We put the show on a space station, a Cardassian space station, in a very dark and dangerous part of space that allowed us to develop many secondary characters that you tend not to be able to do when you're locked onto a starship. When it came time for [Star Trek Voyager] we realised we could go back onto a starship because [TNG] was going off the air, and the only thing with simultaneously was [DS9]. But we knew we had to do something different, and the decision was to develop a show that had a female captain, and to develop a starship that was thrown into another part of our galaxy and had the formidable task of trying to make its way back home."

Michael Piller: "We remembered the episodes, many episodes, where Q would show up and throw one of our ships or one of our people off to a strange part of the universe, and we'd have to figure out why we were there, how we were going to get back, and also by the end of an episode we'd get back home. But as we had one of those lunches, the three of us - Jeri, Rick and I - we started to wonder what would happen if we didn't get home. That appealed to us a great deal. It wasn't an easy sell to the Studio, because again you had the influence of [DS9] where they were afraid that a ship alone in the unknown was too dark, too bleak, too depressing an idea."

Jeri Taylor: "We knew that we were taking some risks. We decided, in a very calculated way, to cut our ties with everything that was familiar. This is a dangerous thing to do. There is no more Starfleet, there are no more admirals to tell us what we can and cannot do. There are no Romulans, no Klingons, there are no Ferengi, no Cardassians - all those wonderful array of villains that the audience has come to love and hate at the same time - will no longer be there. This is a tricky thing to do. We felt the need to create an avenue for new and fresh story-telling. We were forced into creating a new universe. We had to come up with new aliens. We had to come up with new situations and this makes it a great challenge for us, but we really felt that it was the way to be truest to the ideals of Star Trek."

However, the underlying difficulty remained: how to convince viewers that the Voyager crew are "boldly going" when what they are really trying to do is get home within their own lifetime. Even when preproduction work began a year later, more than one staffer worried that [Star Trek Voyager]'s premise would doom them, with viewers labelling the show as 'Lost In Space' but with high production values. So the co-creators set out to put a positive spin on the exploration aspect rather than the going home aspect, and set themselves high standards for new and challenging creative writing.

Michael Piller: "We made it very clear that what appealed to us about that idea was the idea it was back to the basics of Roddenberry's original idea. It's a group of people in a ship alone in the unknown, facing who knows what, before we knew about Klingons, before we knew about Vulcans. So I think that the idea was really to go back and challenge ourselves as writers, to come up with the kind of material, and to face the kind of challenges, that Roddenberry had faced when he created the original Star Trek. Ultimately we were able to convince the Studio of the wisdom of that idea."

Arriving at the premise proved to be fairly easy. Now Berman, Piller and Taylor had to create a new cast of characters.