New Star Trek Spinoff Full Of Cliches, Devoid Of Charm
Bad news, folks: The universe is contracting.
“Star Trek: Voyager” launches this week as the proud flagship of the fledgling United Paramount Network. (In Spokane, the show will air Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KAYUChannel 28.) It boldly goes where pretty much everybody else has gone, much to the disappointment of this particular Trekker.
The premise is spun off one of the weaker plot lines of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” - a spinoff of “Star Trek: Next Generation.” A geneticist would call this “replication error.” Here goes:
A group of Federation colonists, displaced by a treaty from the fringe of Cardassian space, have become outlaws to both civilizations. They call themselves the Maquis - an offhand steal from the French Resistance movement.
A little ship of Maquis, fleeing a Cardassian dreadnaught, dodges into a plasma storm-wracked region of space called “the Badlands,” where it is zapped by a “coherent tetryon beam” and disappears.
Cut to Capt. Kathryn Janeway, able commanding office of the Intrepid-class starship USS Voyager, NCC-74656, who’s visiting the Federation’s penal colony in New Zealand to recruit a guide to track down the missing renegades.
Go figure.
She recruits Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), a cashiered Star Fleet officer who served the Maquis as a mercenary and got caught. Help us find them and go free. Oh, OK, fine. Welcome aboard.
At this point, “Voyager” starts flinging characters, “back story” and exposition at us so rapidly that only veteran Trekkers can start playing “spot the expendable crew members” - a Trek scam that was a wheeze in 1966.
Off to the Badlands, then, into another “coherent tetryon beam” and - whoops! Voyager, heavily damaged, is transported 70,000 light years from home. Think of it: Light takes 70,000 years to get there! At “maximum warp,” it would take Voyager 75 years to get home!
Scary, huh? Nah, the emotional fact of this fearful, wrenching dislocation is brushed aside by our characters in their almost immediate confrontation with the mysterious entity that abducted them. And, no, it’s not Q.
The Voyager survivors encounter a decadent technotheocracy that lives underground on a desert world, dependent on an off-world “Caretaker” for food, energy and the like.
For pity’s sake! We’ve only seen this gag four or seven times in classic “Star Trek” and “Next Generation” episodes! How about something new?
Topside, kept out by the Caretaker’s energy shields, is a space-faring civilization that lacks the means to produce adequate water.
Sure. They can go into deep space; they just can’t get a cool drink. Now, pull the other one.
Finally, in a startling breach of “Star Trek” canon, Voyager people can beam themselves through their ship’s defensive shields. This is unprecedented. Hey, Universal, Trekkers don’t LIKE it when you break the rules!
There’s more than enough wrong with “Star Trek: Voyager” to displease even non-fans.
First, there are far too many characters. Worse, they are shallow as dew and atrociously cast from a pool of second-tier TV actors.
Kate Mulgrew (“Mrs. Columbo”) lacks the emotional complexity and drive of a convincing starship captain. McNeill’s Paris is sketchy. Garrett Wang plays Ens. Harry Kim: He’s eager, he’s young, he’s impressionable … he’s a cliche.
It falls on poor Tim Russ to be Trek’s first black Vulcan - and he’s not even a halfling like Spock. And even if you can get past that, his unemotional delivery sounds more like a late-night FM disk jockey.
Cute alien duties go to Ethan Phillips (the press aide on “Benson”) and his main squeeze, Kes (Jennifer Lien), with the Peter Pan haircut.
Trekkers will be appalled by the way this two-hour pilot episode was flung together, and by the implicit greedhead mentality that understands only the Star Trek universe’s bottom line.
Call me a cranky, brokenhearted old Trekker, but I flat don’t like “Star Trek: Voyager.” It steals my wonder and awe of the vast universe and gives me only merchandise.