Star Trek: Voyager writer remembers fight over the series’ soul

As Star Trek: Voyager celebrates its 25th anniversary, making me feel very old, coproducer and writer Bryan Fuller appeared on the podcast Inglorious Treksperts and recalled a fight for the show’s soul, between the Voyager writers room and Trek uber-boss Rick Berman.

Fuller, who also wrote for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and would go on to co-create Star Trek: Discovery, explained that initially the show struggled to be the “antidote to the vision of Deep Space Nine,“ without being a copy of The Next Generation.” The Next Generation was mostly an episodic affair, while Deep Space Nine embraced long-form storytelling.

Man, there were a lot of Trek shows on then, kind of like there are now.

"I think Voyager initially was trying to be The Next Generation and finally decided what it was going to be around season 4. I think part of that in a strange way is we lost very quickly the dynamics of the Maquis interacting with a Starfleet crew. They were terrorists and committed terrorist acts and everybody was like, “It’s okay, let’s all go together.”… That’s not good storytelling. You need to know these characters are coming from a place that is culturally different, so they can’t just be regular members of the crew which it fell into very quickly to solve the problem of Deep Space Nine."

Personally, DS9 has always been my favorite Trek show, so I’m not sure I’d call it’s serialized nature a “problem,” but I can see how it might be an issue to casual fans used to Star Trek’s more episodic style.

Eventually, Voyager found its identity, something Fuller credits to showrunner Brannon Braga and his writing partner Joe Menosky. “Brannon Braga should be given a lot of credit – Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky – and it really was their two voices more commonly than anybody else’s.”

But Voyager also had hurdles to overcome outside the writing room. “I think what was interesting in the evolution of the show was you could sense the creative struggle. I witnessed the creative struggle when I was working there. There was an appetite for these bigger, bolder science fiction stories. And there was a lot of resistance from Rick Berman in embracing them because he was chasing The Next Generation and was not allowing Voyager to be the show that it could be.”

At the time, Berman was serving as the overall head of all things Star Trek, including the TNG movies and Enterprise. It was Berman who drastically altered the course of the show’s fourth season, which had the two-part episode “Year of Hell.” It sounds like that was a pretty apt description of what the writers were going through at the time, as well.

"The “Year of Hell” and the behind-the-scenes drama not only to craft episode, but that season, was fascinating because we wanted “Year of Hell” to last the entire season. We wanted to see Voyager get its ass kicked every episode and through that season was going to be marbled the story of Annorax and the time ship that was changing things. So, we would go back to it every once in a while to remind the audience that is the larger story. But [it was rejected] because Deep Space Nine made Rick Berman allergic to serialized storytelling, violently so."

Those two episodes were great, though, with the Krenim officer Annorax (Kurtwood Smith) managing to put the Voyager’s crew through the ringer. But Fuller detailed how much more the writers wanted to do with that season. “We are really going to be on the outskirts of the galaxy and we are going to be fighting enemies that are kicking us when we are down. The crew is going to have to separate and we are going to be following episodes that are going to deal with people on shuttlecrafts with escape pods that are electrically buoyed together. There would be an episode where you never saw Janeway and never saw Voyager because you are with the people who are on the escape pods trying to find a new source of power or safety. It was like creative crack for the writers’ room, because all of a sudden there were so many opportunities”

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 13: Rick Berman attends Sir Patrick Stewart placing his handprints and footprints In cement at TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on January 13, 2020 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images)

Honestly, that sounds pretty damn amazing, and it’s easy to see why these ideas would excite the writers. But it soon turned to heartache. “I remember Brannon going over to Rick’s office with all of this enthusiasm and coming back broken and his head hanging low and having to break it to the writing staff,” Fuller said. “We all felt like we were doing it, we are making great Star Trek. For him to come back and say we can’t and we can only do two episodes as opposed to 22, it was heartbreaking. There was an interesting division between what Rick Berman wanted the show to be, which was episodic and for the syndicated audience, and how we wanted to be creative storytellers playing with the Star Trek toy box. ‘Year of Hell’ is such a fascinating point in Voyager history.”

Berman remains a controversial figure among Star Trek fans, with some crediting him with keeping the franchise going and others maintaining that he ran it into the ground with his lack of creativity. Either way, Berman would depart the franchise in 2005.

During his time in the big chair, different Trek showrunners dealt with Berman’s suggestions in different ways. According to Fuller, DS9 showrunner Ira Stephen Behr “didn’t give a fuck what Rick Berman said.”

"Ira was like, “I don’t care, this is what we are doing and if you don’t like what we are doing, fire me… If you are not behind it, then I suggest you find someone else to do my job.” He was kind of fearless about it. He was righteous creatively and knew that this was the right direction for Deep Space Nine."

Well, thank god for that. Too bad we also didn’t get that extended “Year of Hell” season.

Star Trek: Voyager as well as Deep Space Nine can currently be streamed in their entirety on Netflix.

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h/t TrekMovie