The Fed Con Special "Captains Table" took place last weekend at the Maritim Hotel in Düsseldorf, Germany. Guests were Captain Sisko Avery Brooks, Captain Janeway Kate Mulgrew, Captain Picard Patrick Stewart with his son Daniel and Voyager’s Ensign Harry Kim Garrett Wang as master of ceremonies.
Article submitted by Marco Sobek
(I was only able to attend Captains Table on Sunday, so this report will be for Sunday only)
First up was "Dr. Star Trek" Hubert Zitt, who held a lecture about the social impact of Star Trek. He explained how Star Trek (mainly TOS) dealt with issues like racism and equality. Never being overly serious or too light, Zitt pointed out the main themes of Roddenberrys message in Star Trek.
Avery Brooks
Avery Brooks was next and it got pretty philosophical in his 1 hour panel. With the overall topic of "Independent Thinking", Brooks turned almost every question into a discussion with the questioner. He even took three fans onstage, gave them the microphone to talk while sitting around in the back. In his truly unique and sometimes cryptic style, Brooks explained that children are the most valuable thing on earth and that these younger generations are set to “clean up the mess” their generation let happen.
Patrick Stewart
Greeted with standing ovations was the next panelist, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart. Garrett Wang stayed on stage for the first 5 minutes since he wanted to be the first one to ask questions. They talked about Stewart’s role in X-Men and the new X-Men movie. Stewart praised James McAvoy’s acting (he plays a young Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class) and jokingly added that playing Professor Xavier was probably hard for him because he had pretty big shoes to fill.
The panel continued to be very funny. Stewart joked around with Wang, answered fan questions and told anecdotes like when the TNG cast visited action figure vendors at a convention and saw a sign that said “Buy one Data, get two Rikers for free”. Jonathan Frakes was teased by the TNG cast with this phrase for a long time, Stewart said in tears laughing.
Stewart continued to answer fan questions about his other films like A Christmas Carol and Moby Dick. When his passion and involvement in Shakespeare plays came up, he explained that he likes “to travel back and forth” when he chooses to take on a modernized play or one set in the time it is supposed to be.
Kate Mulgrew
After a 4h break where photo- and autograph sessions with the Captains took place, it was time for the last panel of the day. Garrett Wang brought up his Captain, Captain Janeway, Kate Mulgrew. The first thing Mulgrew did was to finally promote Wang to Lieutenant, which was greeted with a huge ovation.
After Wang, Mulgrew expressed her deep gratitude towards the fans. The following Q&A session was fast paced. Mulgrew, tough and very well spoken, answered questions about Voyager, music and politics. People like Bachmann and Palin bringing down the US on their own and need to get back to where they came from, a visibly angry Mulgrew said after a political fan question and asked to be quoted on that.
This wasn’t the only time the overall funny panel got emotional. After a fan asked about her written work, a touched Mulgrew talked about the essays she wrote to deal with her mother’s death.
Besides asking questions, many fans went to the microphone to thank Kate Mulgrew for her work on Voyager since it helped many of them through hard times. Once more Mulgrew expressed how much the fans mean to her.
After the panel was over, all the guests came to the stage and thanked the fans. While screening pictures from the last two days, the Captains Table Convention closed.
All photos courtesy TrekZone.net. Check out more at their Flickr page here.
One more bald head and they’d look like a pawnshop sign!
Sounds like it was a lot of fun!
Garrett Wang, with his acting career in the dumpster, is now the official Trek convention emcee/usher!
poor Garrett, I’m halfway through re-watching Voyager on Netflix and I think he was a pretty good actor.
Good to see some more news today, thanks TrekMovie Staff!
Nice to see the gang together. Hope they enjoy these things as much as we do.
I shall refrain from Wang-bashing.
Snide Ballz comment in 4… 3… 2…
You’ll always find “Harry Ballz” hanging next to a “Wang”!
Great article! Gets me excited about the chicago convention the first weekend in October it will be my FIRST!!
Great to see this! Always nice to revisit thier Trek memories.
Great to see some new articles on Trekmovie. Keep up the great work.
I wish they could do a TV Movie with all of the Tng and Ds9 and Voyager cast in an epic miniseries. That would be so much fun to see.
Dang, that makes me miss the 90s when new Trek was on all the time.
BTW: Is Garret Wang like the offical Guy “crewmen #5” from Galaxy Quest? The role played by Sam Rockwell who had a small part on the original show but now emceed all the events but no real acting career of his own.
Old news.
@10 It’s news to me.
Glad to hear that Ensign Kim finally got promoted. It was kinda BS that Kim never got promoted during the series.
Avery Brooks and Patrick Stewart have actually ended up looking kind of similar in their old ages.
@12
I am always amazed to see how little PS has aged. It’s like he came out of the womb looking like that. AB is just catching up.
@8
I think that I’d rather see a new crew (we’d be coming up on what… 2390 by the time a new series could be on the air) but it would be great to bring by 90’s Trek actors as the admirals and supporting characters in the background. One of my complaints with 90s Trek was how little overlap there was–characters appeared on other shows as ratings games, not to provide a cohesive universe.
Given that a lot of the high sci-fi concepts have been mined in previous Trek, a more serialized, character-driven approach would be best anyhow. But I digress.
4. could you have picked a better term than “Wang-bashing” hahaha
@13
Patrick had his hair line by age 25 he has some genetic thing that causes early hair loss so he looked older then he truly was when he was younger. Now he is old. like 69 i think.
Are you guys gonna put up the report from the final day of the Las Vegas con?
For those of you who have been to a lot of conventions over the years, has Avery Brooks always been such a goofball, or is this a recent change?
FED CON does a great job, my hat is off to my German cousins.
I do have to admit that Avery Brooks is really “out there”. He did the same thing at the 2010 Vegase ST CON when he was on stage. But he really is great to his fans, while it may have taken about 3 hours to get through the line for his autograph, he spent time getting to know the fans ans ask questions about you. That goes a long way to showing you how much he appreciates his ST fans.
Avery Brooks has always been kind of out there. Half of him is still living with the Prophets I think.
4+5
On the contrary, you’ll find that harry ballz has no choice but to look up to wang!
Brooks was great in that DS9 episode “In The Pale Moonlight”
One of Brooks’ best performances on DS9 is as Dr. Noah in “Our Man Bashir” probably because he’s an inch away from being that crazy.
These guys and gal are just GREAT!
Nice report!
Weird how admiral Janeway out ranks all of them. I’ve been lost a few times, I even found my way home, but I was never promoted to admiral.
It’s too bad they did not make the last TNG movie have the Enterprise take some of the Voyager crew to DS9 on the way to the Enterprises next mission on the other side of the worm hole. Maybe the Dominion had a Picard clone too. When DS9 was running they could’ve had the Enterprise E help DS9 during part of the war. Crossovers are always fun.
Trek, for some reason, has always had a strong following in Germany and Austria.
Nice to see some “top brass” made it over for the Con.
While I admire Mulgrew as an actress and for her excellent work on Voyager having to step in at the last minute as she did–I wish when it came to politics we could see a better example of how Captain Janeway would have responded rather than some emotional bashing of women who happened to succeed on the other side of the political spectrum from Mulgrew (and by extension her husband who failed to win the governorship of Ohio where I now reside).
I totally respect people’s rights to disagree politically but how exactly have people like Palin and Bachmann brought “down the US on their own”? Such a statement is so baseless and unbecoming of Mulgrew (and her alter ego) other then to play to a crowd that really doesn’t appreciate everything America has been or still is. America has not been perfect, certainly, as the 60s might be argued was not necessarily one of our finer moments in history but we still gave birth to Trek and embraced the dream that Trek represented and sent that out to the world and continues some 45 years later. While Brooks may seem “out there” I am beginning to appreciate his more life-affirming approach to be a better representation of what Trek aspires to than the hatred spewing forth politically on both sides!
I’ll bet my bile duct Mulgrew was happy Shatner wasn’t present! Those of you who attended Creation last August will know what I’m talking about!
Also, did FedCon try to break the costumed Trekkie world record attempt this year?
#13 – You should go all the way back to 1978 and check out Sir Patrick in “I,Claudius” – the man has not aged a day in over 30 years! Must be all that Earl Grey tea
I just wish they’d do a tv special, a 2-hour movie, direct to dvd… SOMETHING, with DS9. I loved that series and the characters.
… before Brooks really passes to the other side… out there… somewhere… :-)
Re: #22
“Brooks was great in that DS9 episode “In The Pale Moonlight””
I think it was his best performance in the entire DS9 series. The standard of writing (storyline + dialogue) for the episode was absolutely fantastic too.
I also think it’s a shame that the episode wasn’t made into a full-length two hour cinema release instead. I bet it would’ve been a huge hit, including the non-trekkie mainstream audience once word got around about the story actually being a gripping political conspiracy thriller rather than the usual ST stereotypes. Hell, there was even a superb ready-made name for it: “Star Trek: In The Pale Moonlight”, and the movie itself would have been a fantastic addition to the film series instead of “Insurrection” and “Nemesis”. Avery Brooks had the right level of charisma (especially in that episode) to be able to pull it off on the big screen too.
Just imagine: Brooks/Sisko gives exactly the same famous monologue directly into the camera at the end of the movie. Screen suddenly fades to black. End-credits start. Stunned audience of hundreds of people in the cinema breaks into applause. Rave reviews by impressed critics.
Oh well.
”The first thing Mulgrew did was to finally promote Wang to Lieutenant”
That had me in tears laughing!! hahahahaha
“Mulgrew, tough and very well spoken, answered questions about Voyager, music and politics. People like Bachmann and Palin bringing down the US on their own and need to get back to where they came from, a visibly angry Mulgrew said ”
I am saddened whenever I read things like this. I understand that at times we all get frustrated and say foolish things, but Trek celebrities have a special responsibility to uphold Gene Roddenberry’s ideals of tolerance and civil discourse. Such vituperation as telling others with different beliefs to “get back where they came from” is a betrayal of Roddenberry’s ideals. He especially promoted the ideal of the open-minded exchange of ideas between people of polarized political viewpoints. Ad hominem attacks are always counter-productive.
@ #28 You can’t bring that up and not let the rest of us in on it. What did the Shat do to Mulgrew?
27. and 34.
Silence Liberals!!!!! Only we may speak!!!
Vituperation is award that is not used enough!
Lovely article TrekMovie.
Please keep them coming.
:)
Picard + Sisko. We needed more of that. Where’s our damn crossover movie?
I was there two weeks ago, and it was truly a great experience having the three captains there together. Thank for the article, although in its brevity, it doesn’t really do the convention justice.
hello, please write Sir Patrick Stewart, he got the title in 2010 may.
anyway, I just love this page!!