MICHAEL PILLER
ON
CREATING THE VOYAGER CAST

Our goal originally was for Janeway that we wanted her to be more of a scientist, an intellectual. We had not done that with other Starfleet captains. The idea that she'd be a woman of science appealed to us. So that's where we started from and originally there was a part of me that said that Paris was going to be the focus of our series, that this might be a series that might look at the Starfleet phenomenon from a lower character's point of view, and then seeing a very strong female captain as the anchor, but somehow things somehow shift in the Star Trek universe always to come back to be about that captain.

There's no question that the character of Paris was inspired by the [TNG] episode ([TNG: The First Duty]) in which Wesley is faced with a moral and ethical dilemma at the Academy when one of his friends urges him to lie about an accident. And in the back of our minds we always said to ourselves, "Whatever happened to that character? What might have happened once he got kicked out of Starfleet? What would have happened to him?" And obviously there were complications in taking that very same character. You don't want to take old characters and move them into the new plot because then you have to inform the audience about who they are and where they came from and remind them, and that makes it inaccessible to an audience (plus the time scale). So we wanted to create a new character. But ironically of course when it came to the casting process we had this image of the actor who played Locarno in that episode, although we cast far and wide, the actor who ultimately won the role of Tom Paris was the same actor who played Nicholas Locarno. So I think essentially that's where the origin of the character came from.

Well, you know, I love the idea of the new kid on the block who's wet behind the ears who can't wait to get out into space, and then wakes up and suddenly finds himself lost on the other side of the universe. And how does he react to all of the problems that face this crew? I mean, he's still close to his parents, he just said goodbye to them, and, you know, would go back to them on first leave. And I really enjoyed Kim because he had the eyes wide open that all of us had when we first started watching Star Trek. He was the guy who just couldn't wait to go into space.

We'd had a lot of good fortune with characters who were half one species and half another species. Torres was especially rich, I think, because of the Klingon part of her that she just loathed. Self-loathing Klingon, I thought, was a remarkable opportunity to explore a part of just sort of human characteristics that all of us have to face, because all of us have an anger inside of us that we wish we could repress, and that was her defining quality that she was embarrassed by the fact that she had Klingon blood in her, you know, she was humiliated by it and there would be times when she would want to cast it out. A character at war with herself is as much fun to write as any other kind of character for a writer.

Chakotay was one of the most challenging characters for us, I think, as a staff. One of the major decisions that we made in the pilot was to homogenise (does Piller mean "harmonise"?) the crew by the end of the episode and put everybody in uniforms. I think that Chakotay's role was the one hurt the most by that decision because he would've been on the alternate side of a lot of issues from Janeway had he not been put on the uniform and pledged allegiance. At least we would have had a year or so of things to play between the two groups as they tried to figure out a way to fit together. As a consequence he sort of became the vice-president and it took a long time, I think, for us to find a genuine definition for him as a character. And I think all this come from those earlier decisions that I was part of the consensus of, and I'd think twice about it now.

It had been a long time since we'd had a Vulcan as a regular character, and I just think the three of us felt it would be nice to have a Vulcan back as a nice touchstone for fans who really always appreciated Spock and that culture. We had not done a great deal with it over the years, and so we thought maybe it was time to start to re-examine what it might be like to be a Vulcan in the 24th century. So we went through the casting process as we did with any of these parts. But I think that the idea ultimately of casting an African-American without comment in that part really felt right to us, not to mention that the actor was the best actor who read for the part. I think that between Leonard Nimoy and all the episodes that followed his work that you would not find a better Vulcan than Tim Russ. I just think that he understood it, he got beneath the skin, he got the logic, the full logic because we know that Spock was half(-Vulcan), to me was a very very strong presence on the bridge when Tuvok was there.

The idea of a species that had a very short time to live, seven years, eight or whatever it might be, would force that character and force us as an audience to look at each day that went by in an entirely different fashion, to appreciate time that maybe the fact that we live eighty years as humans we might not stop to take a look at. We also thought it created great challenges for an actor, great challenges for the growth in the character for a seven-year role. So that ultimately became Kes. (Ultimately the average lifespan for Ocampans, at least those not on Suspiria's Array, was chosen to be nine years.)

Because we were in this territory far far away from anything we knew or understood, we had an opportunity to bring an alien on board who knew more about it than we did. And here (hear me talk about "we"; it's like I was on the ship and this is so the way a writer feels) but Neelix is a character is a guy who can do everything - he can cook a little, he knows the black market, he can get things done, he knows the people who knows the people who know how to get things done. And we wanted him to be an interesting character who's obviously not familiar with humanity, not familiar with the Federation, which put him right in conflict with Tuvok, and we saw a great potential of an interesting conflict between those two characters running through the series.

We had planned to call him Dr Zimmerman, and he was in the bible (the [Star Trek Voyager] bible, the constantly updatated production handbook or guide for the series) as Doc Zimmerman and it never was comfortable for him to....we wanted to make a deal out of him choosing a name. We thought it would be a great piece of business for the character. But the more we started doing it, and we didn't plan it this way, we were probably six episodes into the Season when we sort of looked at each other and said, "You know what, isn't it better if he doesn't have a name? If he's 'the Doctor'?" So Zimmerman became the guy who created him, as I recall, and ultimately, you know, gave him his looks and what he looked like, but the Doctor always struggled to find a name and struggled to find an identity. I always thought the Doctor would be the breakout character, always. And it was interesting because he had very little to do in the pilot. So when Picardo read it, he said: "Well, this is not a very good part. It's not a very big part." And I just said: "Trust me on this."

Picardo hit it on the head; he just nailed it. I think he went into the role blindly trusting my assurance that his role was going to be interesting, because he didn't see it at the start, but by the end of the sixth episode he was really strong. I think that when they gave him the mobile emitter (in Season 3's [#50 and #51 Future's End]) that they really hurt his character because it made him more like everybody else on the ship. I believe that a character's restrictions help define him, and I was very much against that decision. Because the Doctor is the classic outsider who is forced by restrictions not to be able to participate with the rest of the crew, and he's got a little chip on his shoulder. He's basically, you know, there's an ego problem for this character in that he wants to be taken seriously and yet he's not really a complete person. So he's struggling in a way that a lot of Star Trek characters struggle to fit in to our crew. And I just felt that there was a great possibility of humour in that character, and that Picardo just completely realised that.