Interview: Garrett Wang And Robbie McNeill On Fighting Being “The Guys” And ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Bridge Fire

Tom and Harry - Star Trek: Voyager - interview

In part one of our interview with Star Trek: Voyager’s Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris), they talked about their new podcast, The Delta Flyerswhere they’re making their way through every Voyager episode in chronological order.

In this second part of the interview, the two actors take a thoughtful deep dive into their experience working on Star Trek: Voyager, and despite their disappointments about various unfulfilled possibilities, they clearly remember it with great affection, and laughed a lot as they were telling stories about it.

When you guys look back at the prep for the pilot, do you remember what you were told about your characters and Harry and Tom’s arcs?

Garrett Wang: Mine was pretty basic. He’s fresh out of Starfleet Academy, the young, eager duty-minded ensign. Ensign Kim had the most blank canvas to work with, right?  He was so green.

But did they ever discuss character arcs with me? Very rarely, to be honest. Every now and then I would get a call saying, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing an episode that revolves around your character, and this is what going to happen.” I knew before the hundredth episode, “Timeless,” that that episode was going to revolve around Kim. That call came from Brannon Braga probably two weeks before we started filming that one. And he said, “Listen man, this is going to be Voyager’s signature episode. So just want to make sure you prepare for this, get a lot of sleep, focus well, because you’re all over this one.”

And then there was another time they called up and said, “Hey, we’re going to do an episode next season, it’s gonna be our Quantum Leap episode… Kim wakes up in the body of a serial killer in modern-day Los Angeles. And he’s being chased by the FBI for the entire episode to try to get back to Voyager. I thought, ‘Wow, this is like The Fugitive mixed with Quantum Leap.’ I was so excited—and they never filmed it. [laughs] They ended up not doing it at all and that bummed me out.  Robbie, did they talk to you about your character and your arc?

Robbie McNeill: They never did really, no. I think they’d been doing it for so long, and they had so many projects going on. They’d just wrapped up Next Gen on television, now they’re doing movies, and they had DS9 going and Voyager and they didn’t have time to walk every actor through all of their individual character arcs and nuances. There were very few long-term conversations that I recall.

Robert Picardo is famous for pitching ideas to the writers, did you guys do much of that?

Robbie McNeill: I didn’t really pitch, no. Most of the time with Star Trek. I looked at it as, ‘You guys, tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.’ Because I wanted to direct, too. I was like, ‘I don’t want to confuse them with trying to be a writer and a director and an actor. Let me just do my actor job and keep focused on the directing’. So that’s where I put my energy.

Garrett Wang: I tried, but I wasn’t as persistent as Robert Ricardo. Bob Picardo just kept calling them until they finally capitulated. I gave it a shot, ‘cause I kept saying, “Listen guys, my strength is my impersonations, my ability to do accents and presentations. Let us have a B-storyline where the crew has a ship-wide talent show. And Ensign Kim gets up and does his impersonation at The Doctor, of Janeway, of whoever.” And they were like, “Eh…. no.”

And then what was so frustrating was that through the seven years, there’s a few times that actors on Voyager got to basically impersonate other characters; specifically, when the doctor is in Seven of Nine’s body, you remember that? And Seven of Nine has to basically impersonate The Doctor. And then the other time was when Barclay from TNG was in the mess hall. And he ends up doing his impersonation of Janeway. Now, both of these scenes: Guess who they had in that scene right next to the actor doing their impersonation? Yours truly. So it was almost like they said, “Not only are we not going to let you have what you ask for, we’re gonna rub salt in your wound and make you watch other people do their substandard, not-as-good impersonation of that person,” and it was killing me.

Star Trek: Voyager - "Inside Man"

Barclay (Dwight Schultz) doing his Janeway impersonation in “Inside Man”

And then another time I said, “I know that Worf did judo in TNG. I’d love to introduce some other martial arts where Kim gets to do that, maybe on the holodeck.” And I even went and trained—I chose Krav Maga—but they said no to that too. And so the only thing they finally agreed to over the seven years was I said, “The clarinet is not a very manly instrument. [laughs] Could you please give me a saxophone?” So they removed the clarinet, and the saxophone ended up in my quarters. So there’s an episode where do you see a saxophone in there, and that’s the only thing that I got pushed through.

Just the saxophone!

Garrett Wang: Just the damn saxophone. And I don’t think I ever—Robbie, did I even play it?  I don’t even think I even played the sax, I think I Just play the clarinet pretty much.

Robbie McNeill: Yeah, I think you did at the very end.

Garrett Wang: Every time you see Kim playing an instrument, it’s always been the clarinet. And then season seven, they threw me a bone. They’re like, “Well, we turned him down on the whole impersonation talent show thing. We turned it down on the Krav Maga suggestion, let’s give the kid the damn saxophone, but we won’t show him playing it. We’ll just put it in his quarters, just to show that we’re still in control.” And that’s what happened.

Harry Kim playing the saxophone - Star Trek: Voyager

Harry finally got to play his saxophone in season seven’s “Lineage”

On a podcast, Bryan Fuller said he felt bad that in later seasons, Harry and Tom fell into a sort of a trap of just being “the guys.” Do you agree with his assessment?

Garrett Wang: I definitely agree with Bryan. Part of that is because, as writers, it’s a lot easier to write for Seven of Nine. It’s a lot easier to write for Janeway, it’s a lot easier to write for The Doctor. Because the later seasons—I joke about this, I say season five, six and seven, it wasn’t Star Trek: Voyager. It was Star Trek: Janeway, Seven, Doctor Show, is what it was. [laughs] So Bryan is dead-on in his analysis that we just became sort of dull guys.

Robbie McNeill: Yeah, I agree. I think the one thing that I was grateful for in the later few seasons was the B’Elanna/Tom relationship because it allowed them to take a character that I think they struggled with early on… and they experimented with, in the middle a little. But like Garrett said, in a science fiction premise, it’s much easier to write for these kinds of amplified characters that are archetypes. You put the captain into any situation and it deals with the archetype of authority and the leader and the head of the ship. You use the archetype of this doctor who is not human, but yet has the character traits that he had. To come up with sci-fi stories for, like Bryan puts it, “the guys,” is a lot harder. It’s a lot harder to find something where our characters make that story better because of who we are, when our characters were, in a lot of ways, very undefined. Garrett’s character was very much the everyman of the innocent younger rookie, and that’s why he was always the ensign, because they wanted that archetype. And I was just the everyman who got to redeem themselves, I guess.

So I think we sort of faded into a lot of support roles and for me, at least I had the opportunity with B’Elanna to be involved in some stories that were about relationships and love and family and commitment, and because she was half Klingon, it allowed for science fiction stories that were easier for them to write.

Garrett Wang: The other thing that we were fighting against was the fact that we had the most series regulars. So when you talk about nine, compared to like TNG six and then you just don’t have enough episodes to share the wealth, especially when you focus everything on The Doc, and Seven, and Janeway. There’s just not enough episodes to go around. It’s not that they didn’t like us, or anything like that. [laughs] It just was easier just to write for those characters.

And I think at the beginning, your characters were the accessible ones, a good entry point because they were the more human ones people could relate to. And then as the show went on, they had accomplished that.

Garrett Wang: Yeah. I am surprised about how much Tom and Harry are in all these season one episodes that we’re watching. That’s one thing that was new to me—oh, goodness, we’re everywhere. [laughs]

When you’re watching from the beginning… I know you guys talked about the Maquis, and how wacky Neelix was initially—do you feel like there’s potential that wasn’t explored as much as it could have been on the show?

Garrett Wang: Regarding Neelix, I really felt that his comedic sensibility is awesome. But they didn’t allow him to really blossom. Most of the comedy went to The Doctor. It was sort of like, ‘Okay, of this comedy cake, we’re going to give every slice but a little bit to The Doctor,’ and I felt that could’ve been developed more to see some more comedy amongst the human characters, amongst Paris and Kim even more. And even Chakotay. Why do we have to relegate all the funny stuff to one character? That always kind of ate away at me and I felt that we kind of lost out on that.

Robbie McNeill: I actually think the thing that was not developed was Neelix’s… they turned him into this cute cuddly, people-pleasing alien when he was really this paranoid street-kid junk trader. He was not a warm fuzzy guy when we first met him. The whole… costume design to writing, I think Neelix could have been a much more complicated character than they gave Ethan the opportunity to play.

Garrett Wang: It could have been edgier and they kind of took that away from him.

Robbie McNeill: They took all that away from him very quickly; he had it in the pilot. But he changed very quickly into this people-pleasing helpful… he was like the social director, it was very soft. In the long run, it could have been made for a much more interesting character.

Tuvok and Neelix - Star Trek: Voyager

Neelix and Tuvok evaluating each other in “Caretaker”

Robbie McNeill: In this rewatch, one thing that I’ve seen so clearly and learned is that Chakotay could have been.. if they had put some time and effort into really trying to ground his character in the Native American tradition, in a real way—I heard that in an effort to not offend any tribe, they made him from some generic non-tribe that didn’t really exist. And so they gave themselves permission to make it up. I think that that really hurt that character. Chakotay, if he had been grounded in real, authentic Native American tradition, that could have been much more interesting. And I felt like it was just sort of a token gesture at this generic Indian thing.

It makes me frustrated because—not that I’m the PC police, but I think that’s a real missed opportunity for the character. There are native people around this country and indigenous people around the world that get exposed to Star Trek. And that would have meant a lot to them, if that had been taken a little more seriously. I think they could have really seen themselves and connected and been inspired in a way that that sort of broad-stroke cartoony version probably didn’t connect to them.

Right, it was more of just a representation.

Robbie McNeill: It’d be like [having] a Black character on and saying– imagine the most racist, stereotypical things you could think of that might be offensive potentially—but saying, “Oh, this Black character just likes these things,” and that’s as much as you explored it. If they’d done that on Deep Space Nine with Sisko, can you imagine? What was beautiful about DS9 is they really explored what it means to be a Black father, what it means to be a Black leader. They did not shy away from the opportunity to explore in a real way, the racial side of that character in that experience. But with Chakotay, they didn’t really.

Chakotay in "Cathexis" - Star Trek: Voyager

B’Elanna uses the Coyote stone to help Chakotay (Robert Beltran) find his way home in “Cathexis”

Looking back to when Jennifer Lien was let go and Jeri Ryan was brought in, do you remember how they presented that to the cast?

Robbie McNeill: I don’t recall. Garrett, do you remember how we found out?

Garrett Wang: I don’t recall that either. I think someone just said, “Yeah, they’re not renewing her contract. They’re bringing another character in,” or something. That baton handoff was so awkward because Kes’ last continuous episode—she showed up later for that one firestorm episode [“Fury”]— her last episode was Seven of Nine’s first one and they were on the set at the same time too, and that was just so awkward. But they never really prepped us for it.

I do remember that Kate had a dinner for Jennifer Lien. Robbie, you went to that dinner, I’m sure. And everyone was there except for me. I completely forgot, I completely spaced. I was at IKEA of all places, just walking around. I wasn’t even buying anything. And then I remember I get a message on my answering machine from Kate [in Kate Mulgrew voice], “I’m so disappointed in you, how could you not show up to Jennifer’s farewell dinner?” She was so pissed. I remember I was cowering from listening to her on the voicemail, I wasn’t even being directly spoken to by Kate. I was just sitting there getting smaller and smaller as that message went on. [laughs]

But just like Robbie said, there was no cast meeting saying, “Hey, this is what we’re going to be doing.”

Robbie McNeill: There was not typically a touchy-feely inclusive approach with actors on Star Trek that I remember. You found out when you got a memo or you got the scripts. I guess I would say there wasn’t a big “we’re one big family” kind of vibe from the office and the writers. It did feel like we were one family on set, when we were actually filming. The cast and the crew? Very close, really an amazing crew, a wonderful group of actors that all, I think we all felt very close. But from the management side of things, there was not a warm, fuzzy, “Hey, we’ll talk to you guys as a group about things that might be sensitive.”

I remember when Neelix wrapped on the series, a few episodes before everybody else… they wrote him out early. And I don’t think Ethan had been told that until he had seen the script. Or maybe he was told the day we got the script.

Garrett Wang: Yeah, there’s definitely a certain level of disconnect from the management, just like Robbie said. And it’s very indicative of… if you’re talking about Berman being the primary showrunner, Rick Berman. I’ve been very critical of him in the past. And I’m just going to say in this particular case, I’m not going to talk about his character or anything about that. I’m just going to say: In seven years, I saw him on the set twice, okay? Two times in seven years. And one of those times was to do an interview for Yahoo magazine, and he was standing in my station.

On Fridays, we would get catered dinner. And so the two actors that were released to go eat first were Neelix [Ethan Phillips] and myself. They set up this huge long picnic table right in front of the bridge. So I’m sitting with my back to the bridge and I see Berman doing this interview looking all smug and you know, “I’m the ruler of the universe” kind of confidence and I go, “Berman’s in MY station, why couldn’t he have been in Tuvok’s station? Why does he have to stand where I gotta stand?” And then while we’re eating, Ethan Phillips goes [in Ethan Phillips voice], “Um, are the steps supposed to be on fire?”

And I go, “WHAT?” I turn around, and to light Berman for the photo shoot one of the lights caught this really thin gauzy scrim that was right above the bridge. It caught it on fire. And literally I turned around in time to see Berman see the fire and run out of there. He made a sound and he ran. Billy Peets, the gaffer, he comes in and all the crew, we yelled for them to come in, and they came in and helped put the fire out. But the showrunner ran from the scene. Now you know how I feel. [laughs] It’s out there.

Well, you can’t fire me so I can say whatever I want to say, right? Robbie’s always good about trying to pull me back a little bit… I tell the truth.

Robbie McNeill: There were a lot of people running off that stage. I think I was outside when it happened, but I remember people pouring out, hysterical—lots of people. I think in those situations, the group panic sort of takes over.

Garrett Wang: But the group panic, Robbie, started with Berman. When the showrunner runs out screaming then everyone else was like, “Whoa, has the Tasmanian devil been released on the set? Are people being killed?”  He set the tone. Right?  The only people that didn’t run were Ethan and I. We were like, ‘Okay, so what do we have to do, we have to call somebody’ and we went to the little fire extinguisher thing on set. We didn’t run, we were still there.

I really feel that that that set would have been less damaged if Berman just handled it a little differently. I shake my head when I think about that day.

Rick Berman (center) on set to celebrate Star Trek: Voyager’s 100th episode

I think it was because of that fire that they sped up the filming of some of the “Bride of Chaotica” stuff, because they needed to do some work on the set.

Robbie McNeill: I don’t remember that detail, but you’re probably right, I think they did have some work to do it and change their schedules.

That’s what I’ve read. So I know you guys have talked about reviving Captain Proton, and when I interviewed Kate Mulgrew recently, I asked if she would ever want to do it, and she told me it was the most fun she’d ever had in all of her years on Voyager.

Garrett Wang: She loved it. She loved it! Robbie, were you on set when Kate walked in for the first time in her Arachnia costume? She didn’t walk in: She promenaded. She was in character. She had this really amazing stride. You could see her enthusiasm just from her walking onto the set–we weren’t even filming yet. It was great.

Robbie McNeill: Very funny. She was great!

Have you guys made any progress on trying to revive Captain Proton? And would you ask her to do it, because she sounded to me like she would love to.

Robbie McNeill:  I would love to. I haven’t really made a concrete effort, but I’ve talked to a few people, we’ll see. There’s a chance that there could be some version of it coming, getting developed and coming back.

Garrett Wang: My goal is to really try to keep Robbie from doing other projects and kind of focus at some point and focus on getting Captain Proton done. Kidding! He’s literally the busiest man in Hollywood, and if we could get him to focus on Proton, maybe that will become a reality. So we’ll see.

Kate Mulgrew as Queen Arachnia - Star Trek: Voyager

Kate Mulgrew as Arachnia in “Bride of Chaotica,” loving every moment

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It figures Berman would be the first to run from the fire. He is just like Michael Scott from The Office in the famous fire scene: the person in charge ran from the fire first. Dude, just grab the fire extinguisher and put it out! It’s not hard!

Such a shame.

I literally just saw the exact source location of that blackout this week. A tree branch grew into a 500kV transmission line which caused the chain reaction. Rest easy though, the grid is much better maintained now.

Wow! Where is that? I remember that day so vividly. (I was pregnant and got to ride in our company helicopter!)

You need to consider the source. The source has a personal grudge here and so I take that with a grain of salt. I would like to here others’ versions of the story who were there before I choose to believe this account.

My bet is that Berman, as the lead CBS official there, was trying to get everyone off the set pronto. Comparing him to Michael Scott of the office, based on “another Garrett Wang personal attack on Berman,” is uncalled for.

*Berman worked for Paramount, CBS wasn’t in the picture until many years later.

A Captain Proton Short Trek would be delightful. Just them having fun years later.

A Captain Proton Short Trek ought to be doable. FINGERS CROSSED!

At least as a fun animation, surely.

Berman give us the best Star Trek years, cry all you want about that, it does not change the fact.

I would argue that Michael Piller, Ira Behr, and Brannon Braga (and to a lesser extent Ron Moore and Jeri Taylor) are far more responsible for the success of those years than Rick Berman.

Rick Berman gave us TNG’s first two seasons, and it’s widely acknowledged that Michael Piller’s arrival in season 3 is what really helped the franchise take off.

TNG first 2 seasons was Gene Rodenberry. Berman took after Gene. Get your facts together.

Berman WAS on production even while Gene was there. Denise Crosby mentioned him hassling her multiple times, and other cast have referred to him as the man who would show up more often than Gene with news from on-high.

Agreed, while Pillar, Behr, Moore and Braga were excellent and deserve a ton of credit, it was Berman’s go ahead all their ideas needed.

Another point I’d like to add, I’m glad Behr and Moore were kept on a tight leash by Berman, especially during TNG, I just watched Moore in an interview on the TNG Blu-Ray’s and it was clear he wanted to make Star Trek dystopian.

Piller WAS That show, he was reworked all the best episodes. Berman was the hack who rejected every good idea.

And now for a song!:

“I miss you more than Rick Berman missed the mark,
when he made Voyager,
I miss you more than that show missed the point,
and that’s an awful lot, girl,
and now, now you’ve gone away,
and all I’m trying to say,
is Voyager sucked – and I miss you”

I understand his frustrations and he’s not wrong about most of his assessments of the show, but the chip on Wang’s shoulder is enormous after 20 years. I’m sure people who have seen his impressions can vouch for them, but he never really rose above his meager material to make me think he could carry meatier stories. He did alright by Timeless most of the time, and he’s good in The Chute and Captain Proton. They should have done more to keep him (and Beltran and McNeil) engaged, but he was lucky not to have been let go instead of Lien.

I agree that the chip on the shoulder is really off-putting.

It’s especially so given that Wang didn’t seem to be able to deliver some of the challenging material in season one. I recall being quite disappointed by his stiffness in the episode with Libby in the false apartment story.

I’d been very excited that Trek finally had an Asian cast as one of the main ensemble, as a world without the presence of Asian people doesn’t look like where I grew up. So, I was disappointed when Wang was struggling in the first season.

On the other hand, he had principally theatre credits before that, so I was hoping he’d be supported to grow his craft in the role. It doesn’t sound as though Berman or the other EPs had an interest in enabling that, which is really on them since they wanted someone young and had a policy of hiring actors with theatre background.

I hadn’t heard previously about the writers being locked into Kim being the young officer point of view. This shows that they didn’t have the even the softer serialization of DS9’s minor characters in their vision.

His ”woe is me” makes me want to vomit. He must make peace with the fact Ensign Kim was one of the worst characters in Trek.

Not sure that I’d say “one of the worst”, Wil Wheaton got a lot of hate for Wesley Crusher who was another character stuck in a badly written ‘young point of view’ role.

Now that I think about it, Chekov suffered much the same fate.

Tilly, for whom the writing has been wildly inconsistent, has lurched from being an object of humour to genuine growth in late S1 and early S2 back to poorly written comic relief. And there is no question Mary Wiseman has the acting skills, just that the writers room keeps resetting back to the initial ‘annoying Tilly’ from the series bible.

In Picard, an entire episode was devoted to bringing Evan Evagora’s character on board, but he was only very marginally used after that.

Pretty much all the young main ensemble characters have been stagnant and unrealistically stuck or advanced in unrealistic ways. Any young officer with a main shift bridge posting that doesn’t get promoted, is not going to stay at that station for 5 or 7 years.

Jake and Nog were the only ‘youth point of view’ characters that were permitted reasonable growth and 1) they were recurring characters, and 2) they were on DS9 which was not only serialized, but also plotted growth and change for all the characters.

There has got to be a lesson for the franchise in this.

Why do the showrunners believe that including a point of view character that didn’t grow and mature with the audience would hold attention? If anything, it led to viewers who identified with the characters at the start to turn away from them as failures.

A few more thoughts along these lines…

Jennifer Lien’s Kes on Voyager was supposed to grow rapidly as a person from a rapidly maturing and ageing species. However, the writers didn’t really know what to do with that, especially as Kes seemed to also be targeted to cover off the ‘titillation’ element for Voyager until replaced by Seven as a Borg in a catsuit.

And it’s not just the youth of the actors. For Tilly, Mary Wiseman was cast and she’s older than Sonequa Martin-Green, the chef de compagnie.

Not managing the character growth of youth representation in Star Trek a definite pattern at this point. Both the fans and the (often bitter) actors, can see it.

It’s so incredibly weird and unfortunate given how so many people become fans when they are youth or young adults. Sincerely, I’m wondering if this is one of the nagging, baked-in problem blind spots with the franchise that is holding it back from broad mainstream success.

Frankly, I suspect that Wang would get more fan support if he could look beyond Voyager, and his own disappointments, and say that the Star Trek franchise has a real problem with creating younger characters within the ensemble and supporting the development of younger actors in the companies. He could then speak to his own experience, but then relate it to that of Walter Koenig or Wil Wheaton.

Nice insightful posts as always TG47, I always enjoy reading them.

Thanks Dvorak,

I’m always concerned that I might just be analysing on to myself. Analysis is pretty baked-in for me at this point in my life. I can’t not do it. 😉

And he loves blaming others — he has a history of verbally attacking Berman, Bragga, Mulgrew and others. This has all been covered by his own statements over the years.

I don’t get a chip-on-the-shoulder sense from him at all. I must have read a different interview.

At the point of the interview where Wang did his usual “throwing Rick Berman under the bus” shtick, I would have liked to see the interviewer call him to task on his history of verbally attacking Berman, Bragga, Mulgrew and others. In this interview, he made it sound like Rick Berman wasn’t allowed to stand on a part of the set that Wang stood on for a TV interview, and then indirectly suggested that Rick Berman behaved like a coward with the fire on the set. That’s just smacks of someone trying to score points against someone they have a grudge against — I would bet that the truth on that event isn’t quite what he is suggesting?

Don’t feel Too badly about being ‘the guys’…on a show that I worked on, The Torkelsons, in Season Two the two middle kids were Written Out! The family moved to a new town and just Left Them Behind! :)

Man, I’d forgotten about The Torkelsons – I loved that show as a kid!

Oh my. They got Chuck Cunninghamed

I really really enjoy these interviews. To this day, Voyager has such a special place in my heart :) I would love love love a Captain Proton miniseries!

What a funny story

In other Trek-related news, LeVar Burton narrates the Juneteenth Google Doodle today.

The chip on Wangs shoulder is interesting, I could’ve sworn I read somewhere he was always late to set and forgetting lines but it was years ago, anyone else recall this?

..and throwing Mulgrew and Bragga under the bus. And here’s an actual quote of him on Berman:

“If there is a hell in this existence that we have that people can go to, he’s first on the list.”

And his whining for years about not getting a promotion or getting to direct just gets so tiresome.

Garrett Wang is great! Outstanding Trek actor and personality. He always says the right thing and he’s awesome treatment of the rest of the cast and producers has been tremendous over the years.

THANK YOU MR. WANG FOR BEING SUCH A GREAT ROLE MODEL FOR STAR TREK PRODUCTIONS!

Was this written by Garret Wang?

I wrote a post on my thoughts on Garrett Wang continually attacking Berman (like he did AGAIN in this article) and other Trek producers and actors over the years and Trekmovie censored it — it was not mean-spirited, and I clearly stated it was my personal option based on known things he has said against others over the years.

So I give up — I’ll just softball him and pretend he’s a great man like the interviewer here did.

My first episode. Huge Star Trek fan

That was a great discussion and some inside .

I think it was that episode where Harry and Tom were on that prison ship together and I had hoped that the series would further develop that friendship and bond to the end. Unfortunately, like Garret is saying, the show became more Janeway/Seven/Doctor featured, which is unfortunate.

“Listen guys, my strength is my impersonations, my ability to do accents and presentations. Let us have a B-storyline where the crew has a ship-wide talent show. And Ensign Kim gets up and does his impersonation at The Doctor, of Janeway, of whoever.” And they were like, “Eh…. no.”

Good call by the producers. The B-story sounds terrible (admittedly, many B-stories were during the TNG-VOY era), and I doubt Wang could top Picardo.

Also, the show’s not SNL.

No way to know for sure, but he likely played the politics badly or did not put in the work and this didn’t get into the director’s workshop unlike McNeil, Russ and Dawson in that cast. Berman was hardly above being vindictive, but Wang had it out for Berman and hasn’t gotten over it 25 years later. Just seems sad to me.

The episodes that never happened: “The day after” and “The aftermath”. The Voyager runs out of shuttles, photon torpedos and hull plates.

I’m a vendor at STLV and usually, Garrett is behind us, selling T-Shirts. I’d find it difficult, after being on a Trek series, only to be flogging shirts at cons.
Now, to his defense, he poses for endless photos, signs autographs and he’s always laughing.
It must be hard to have a peer who went into directing..

Funny, it always seemed to me that we got TOO MUCH Harry Kim and Tom Paris. I wanted a lot more Tuvok and Torres and a LOT less Harry Kim.

You guys think YOUR characters were short-changed? You got tons of air time compared to Tim Russ and Roxann Dawson, which was especially annoying, given that Russ and Dawson were better actors than Wang.

Russ really shined when given the spotlight. I can’t say the same for Wang. Also, his gripes about the cast being huge cut both ways. Yes, the human males on the show got the short end of the stick with the lesser scripts and their development tapered off after the first couple seasons with Tom caring the best out of the three overall. Once Seven came in that was that, he’s right to say the Doc, Seven and Janeway were the easiest characters to write for so the writers chose the path of least resistance, probably too much.

However, DS9 had a cast that was just as big starting in season 4, plus a huge recurring guest cast. Voyager never had to deal with the likes of say, Jeffrey Combs, Marc Alaimo, Andrew Robinson or Aaron Eisenberg coming in every other week, and yet DS9 still have the main cast meaty material. I would say that after season 4 once Worf settled down, only Jake, O’Brien and Jadzia got a bit of short shrift, and in O’Brien’s case that’s partly because he DID get along with Berman and took time off for films.

Kim could have been prioritized better, but the large cast was not the problem.

Excellent cast and crew you obey the prime directive of non inference i was not so lucky i was forced by USA authorities violate the prime directive of non inference and i was taken away and punished may 9 1989 until today cost me the life of family and friends and almost cost me my life as well. Congressional committee is having hearings on this matter and i want justice asap