Review: Nana Visitor’s ‘Star Trek: Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek’ Is The Book I’ve Been Waiting For

Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek
Written by Nana Visitor
Published by Insight Editions

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Nana Visitor’s expansive new book exploring the female characters and experiences of women who worked on Star Trek in front of and behind the camera is out today. This is going to sound odd, but it’s almost a disservice that this is a coffee table-style book. It’s large and heavy with glossy pages, and while the beauty treatment is deserved, it’s almost a contradiction to the type of book it actually is. This is a book to be read cover to cover, then referenced  and quoted over and over again—and maybe even carried around with you.

Then again, that’s partly what the book is about anyway: what happens beneath the pretty packaging. Nana Visitor has taken a deep dive into a fascinating, underserved subject and gone where no one has gone before—you knew I was going to say it at some point—to take a look at the history of women in Star Trek, both from a fictional and real-world perspective. She approaches this momentous task with a balance of research, context, and personal experiences, seamlessly weaving them all together to paint a full, rich picture…. or rather, multiple pictures, because another part of the takeaway is that everyone is different, and Visitor has respect for each and every story she’s been told. She thoughtfully sets the stage for each interview, reminding readers of what was happening in the world, what prevailing attitudes were towards women and gender, and where Hollywood was, women-wise, at the time.

Visitor didn’t take the easy way out on this one. She could’ve written a book about inspirational Star Trek women and filled it with uplifting stories, which was the original idea. Instead, she pulls back the curtain on Star Trek both onscreen and off, trying to chart the progression (or regression, in some cases) of the portrayal of female characters and then going behind the scenes to find out experience of the women playing them.

Sometimes the stories of conducting the interviews are just as important as the conversations themselves. With the three female cast members of The Original Series gone, she invited a group of TOS guest stars to her home to talk, along with Voyager‘s Irene Tsu (who, I learned from this book, used to date Frank Sinatra; who knew?). Because Visitor describes the gathering and her guests’ general reluctance to dig into the topic, the reader gets a more holistic view of how complex and layered their stories are.

Once she gets into the 1980s and ‘90s, Visitor has interviews from almost all the main female cast members, and when they weren’t available (due to timing or in Marina Sirtis’ case, a choice not to participate), she uses archived interviews to respectfully fill in the blanks. What she doesn’t do is create an echo chamber, a laundry list of wrongs done to women that readers can hold up and point to as symbols of injustice. She rejects the superficiality of that and delves into each woman’s individual, personal experience that covers what they were doing before Star Trek, what their experience was making it, and how they look back on the show and themselves now. She was also as kind as she was perceptive in her looks at Jennifer Lien & Kes, Majel Barrett & Chapel/Lwaxana, Grace Lee Whitney & Janice Rand,  Jolene Blalock & T”Pol, and Marina Sirtis & Deanna Troi. The book is profoundly insightful, often asking questions more than answering them, and keeping this particular reader riveted for hours. There was simply no stopping once I started!

Visitor also spoke to women who wrote for the different shows (including Voyager co-creator Jeri Taylor) and, with exactly the right touch and in exactly the right amount, some of the men who could provide additional information, insight, and—most importantly, perhaps—hindsight. Brannon Braga talks about the kind of feminist work Kate Mulgrew was doing during Voyager‘s filming and admits there should have been a lot more communication with the cast when Jeri Ryan was hired, which would have saved everybody a lot of misery.

She also speaks to women who were influenced by Star Trek, including their comments throughout and then devoting a section at the end of the book to them to illustrate just how important this franchise has been to the world. And her exploration of it includes women from the new Star Trek Universe TV era too: Strange New Worlds, Discovery, and Lower Decks are all represented (with Gates there for Picard). The fact that Visitor wasn’t able to get to absolutely everybody (like Rebecca Romijn, Michelle Hurd, Linda Park, Celia Rose Gooding, Alice Eve, Zoë Saldaña, and more) means that we’ll see more from her in the future, or at least that’s my hope.

The chapter about her own experience is the most detailed and in many ways the most powerful, due to Visitor’s combination of strength and vulnerability. If you heard her on Gates McFadden’s podcast, you know she has been through a horrific trauma, and she provides more details about the assault itself as well as her reaction to it, both at the time and now with some distance and a lot of hard work behind her.

She also describes life during Deep Space Nine production in vivid detail, showing just how grueling the hours were, the pressure she put on herself, as well as the imbalance she didn’t even recognize at the time, some of which came out during her conversation with Gates McFadden about Dr. Crusher on TNG.

Gates talked to me about something that, looking back, I think was taken for granted at the time. Once she accepted the role on TNG, she never felt that she had the same access to the producers that the male actors did. “I can’t just flop on the couch, put my feet up, like a guy can, and chat. It would be seen as a sexual come-on of some sort, and so it inhibits your behavior.”

Even though I was married to Alexander Siddig for years, I never knew he hung out in Rick Berman’s office during shooting until he told me of a time where Terry Farrell was brought in when he happened to be there. She was inspected in her costume and told to lose five pounds. Siddig was mortified to have witnessed it. I never even thought hanging out in the bosses’ office was an option, and nor did many women I spoke to.

All of the stories told in these pages will stir emotional responses: sympathy and outrage, compassion and frustration, love and dismay, and it’s easy to imagine the author being similarly stirred as she researched and wrote. The book will stimulate your thinking about our roles and how we all fit (or don’t fit) into society far beyond Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Star Trek fans will get the behind-the-scenes details they want, but I don’t think you have to be a Star Trek fan to find this book impossible to put down and lead you to  think deeply about both the individual and collective experiences within no matter what your background or gender. On a personal level, this is the book I’ve been waiting to read my whole life, and my brain hasn’t stopped spinning since I did so.

Available now

Nana Visitor’s full-color illustrated Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek was released by Insight Editions on October 1. You can order it on Amazon in hardcover and  Kindle e-book.

Interview with Nana Visitor coming soon

Keep an eye on the site for an in-depth interview with Nana Visitor. Until then, you might want to revisit the conversation we had back in 2021 when she was still writing the book.

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