When Deep Space Nine‘s Nana Visitor was approached about writing Star Trek: Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek about the women in Star Trek, the original idea pitched to her was that she’d do short interviews to work into a picture-filled coffee table book. When she started doing interviews, the concept changed to something deeper: a look at female Trek characters, yes, but also a deep dive into the actresses who played them and they times they lived in. We reviewed the book when it came out, then spoke to her in depth about her experience writing it and how it affected her.
Here is the final section of that extended and frank conversation, where she talks about the current batch of Star Trek shows and the progress that’s been made over the decades. (Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.)
In terms of the newer shows, let’s start with Picard. How much of Picard did you watch?
I watched a little bit of the third season. I watched quite a bit of the others. Now there are some women in there that I would have loved to have talked to as well—and that may be why Michelle got cut out, that I didn’t have a Picard section, but I couldn’t reach them either. Also, don’t forget, it was during Covid.
I thought that your thoughts on Raffi’s character were pretty spot-on. You didn’t get any pushback from anybody on that?
CBS read every word I wrote and didn’t make me change anything, which I was really impressed with.
And even Picard season 3, I loved it, but it still took some steps back. There are episodes where no two women have a conversation. I also felt like Beverly Crusher shows up with her son, and then everybody immediately forgets how important a mother is.
Yes. I hear you on that, but I was just so thrilled to see Gates kick some ass and do what she’s capable of, just like Denise in Next Gen, when she came back to guest. It was like, okay, you’ve been unleashed.
Right! Here’s the character that was always there but never got to be there.
It was fantastic.
Jonathan Frakes as Will Riker, Patrick Stewart as Picard, Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher and Ed Speleers as Jack Crusher in “No Win Scenario” Episode 304, Star Trek: Picard on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Trae Patton/Paramount+. ©2021 Viacom, International Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And then Strange New Worlds is, I think, the only Star Trek show with more than three women in the main cast.
And they all look different, and they all have agency, and uniqueness. I think I said, I don’t know if it got in there, that they’re like a bunch of wildflowers. And in the ‘90s, we all had to be cultivated flowers: If you were lucky, you were a rose, but they’re like these gorgeous, unique flowers all unto themselves, which is so great.
It’s gotta be a different vibe on set too. I would imagine.
I so wanted to be on set. But, of course, again, Covid. They absolutely would not allow that. And I understood, they were just trying to get a show done. I didn’t get to experience it, but I got to hear about the sets. I got to hear about the culture that Mike McMahan set up on Lower Decks. And Discovery. They gave Sonequa Martin-Green so much ability to set the tone, and she took it on. And I heard from everyone how great that set was, and it seems the same on Strange New Worlds. I only heard positive things about their working situation.
Oh, that’s great. Having met Sonequa, she has an energy that’s… there’s something sort of magical about that woman.
I expect big things from her in her career.
And she just has a very welcoming energy. When you speak to her, it’s like you come into her aura or something. It’s a very unique quality.
She does and she’s thoughtful and honest and vulnerable. In in my interview, it was just … Everyone said, “Oh, Sonequa,” and I thought, come on, it can’t be. And it is. It really is.
From Open A Channel – A Woman’s Trek (Insight Editions)
I know you’ve been working on a documentary, and you have lots of footage, so what’s the status of that?
Well, we’ve been in a holding pattern, because it’s the same people doing the Voyager documentary [455 films] while they finish up other projects, and there are a couple of things that I want to be able to be assured of before—I really want to be able to get on sets. I really want to experience the women in their workplace to see it, to see the cruise with more women to talk [to], so I want to make sure that that that can happen before we start anything.
We’ve seen a lot of progress, so I have two questions about that. One, what are the changes that you’ve seen? And two, do you have a sense of what we’re still really sort of stuck in right now?
I asked every person the same question. Since Star Trek is so good at predicting what will work in the future, how things may be better… What about childcare? I want to see how it’s done a thousand years from now. Do you have any good ideas about that? I would love to see that written about.
I was so happy to hear that the young women that I interviewed had no idea what I was talking about when I said, “Were you told you needed to be fuckable?” And they were like “What?” And that made me so happy. I see that as a huge change. Mike McMahan said something so important, that if you love a system, you must question it and keep at it. And he was talking about Hollywood, and I think that we’ve started to, obviously, to a great degree. I think we need to even more. And the idea that women, that the huge change that I’m seeing is that women are in all aspects of production now, and on the crew, that’s a whole different feeling.
And the addition of things like intimacy coordinators and things like that have changed, yeah?
Yes, and that it’s talked about instead of, “Ooh, this is weird so let’s not talk about it, let’s just do it and get it over with.” And yet someone ends up feeling uncomfortable or taken advantage of. It makes so much sense to choreograph it, to talk about it. I did a movie where there was an intimacy coordinator, and she said something incredible to me. She said, “Okay, so whatever we agree to today, if in the moment it doesn’t feel right to you, stop.” And the director was like “yep,” and that is a huge change. I also feel like there needs to be someone on set, and I know it gets elaborate if you have all these people on set, but really for trauma, because I know for my character, I really didn’t understand. There’s no education for actors. I remember asking this well-known Shakespearean teacher in New York that I was studying with, I had just done Lady Macbeth and I said, “What do you do with this afterwards?” and he said, “Just be glad you got there.” And it’s a weird thing actors do. We drop thoughts in our heads, our bodies believe them, because our bodies believe every thought we drop in our head and we tell our brain to believe. So it can be some dangerous stuff that actors do with their mental health. And I took an interest in this, and I read a lot online, and there’s so many actors who said “I got messed up by this part. I had to go to talk to someone after this part.” And I just think that it needs to be taught.
Of course your body thinks you’ve gone through a trauma. Because I assume, as an actor, you have to convince yourself you’re going through it in some ways,
And it’s just natural, unless you’re doing a version of acting where you’re pretending, and you’re creating something that you’ve rehearsed, but I just don’t know how to act that way. But it can be very dangerous. It’s easier on stage, because there’s so much ritual set up that you know that you’re entering a space, and it’s a safe space. No one’s going to, you know, hopefully, talk or interrupt once this thing begins, and then you leave it on the stage. There are lots of little things that you do that seem.. just ritualistic. But they’re really important, because they tell your brain, “This is not me, and now this is me again.” And if you’re doing a scene on the side of the road in a car and you have to get there fast, you’re not going to set yourself up and go, Okay now, but actually you need to. But very often, no one’s thinking about that. They’re just like, get there, be there, deliver. But no one’s thinking about what that does to your body, which then gives your brain the message that you’re traumatized, which then sends it… it becomes this circle.
It’s not just about women. In that case, it’s just about remembering that we’re all part of humanity.
Exactly, yeah, and we are systems. We are systems that need to work appropriately and be cared for appropriately.
I have to thank you, because this book—I’ve been wanting to read something like this my whole life, partly because of Star Trek because that’s been such a huge part of my life, but also because of all my thoughts about being a woman. So I was very excited, taking pictures of pages as I was reading it and jotting down notes for things I want to write.
I love that. And that’s the conversation that I was hoping for. That’s the kind of connection. I feel like connecting you with your thoughts and just thinking about what it was like and what could be different for you now is… that’s opening a channel.
Buy Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek by Nana Visitor
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“And even Picard season 3, I loved it, but it still took some steps back. There are episodes where no two women have a conversation.”
…Seriously? Considering the demographics of the cast, and how they are distributed- this is just such a silly, silly expectation. The criticism isn’t even that conversations don’t happen, but they don’t happen in every single episode, and that represents ‘a step back’? That seems hyperbolic and disingenuous.
Consider: Raffi, Vadic, Troi (in all but the last few episodes) are in separate locations from the rest of the cast. Aboard the Titan, Crusher, Seven, and Sydney (the latter two of whom have little reason to talk to Crusher, narratively, during the events). Ro comes aboard- but her interactions with her former mentor Picard are the narrative focus. So, Seven and Sydney are the primary female characters who converse (and do). That’s just a function of the plot; and when those other characters come together, they do converse. Whenever it is narratively reasonable for them to do so. This strikes me as a meritless criticism, simply because the allocation of characters to locations, as best serves the story, wouldn’t realistically allows for anything else, and when those characters are sharing a location, conversations do happen.
With all due respect, I feel like baseless complaints like this are what muddy discussions of this nature; people on the fence or unfamiliar with the issues get immediately shut down because they here ‘ah, unrealistic expectations, this person isn’t talking in a bizarre fantasy land where nothing’s good enough for them, therefore questions about equality are clearly not worth listening to, they’re based on absurd premises.’ It does a disservice to the issue by representing it as something that it’s not (in other words, something with unreasonably high criteria that can’t realistically be satisfied).
Everything Nana seems to be doing in her approach honestly seems to avoid that kind of sensationalism, and it feels like a disservice to bring that kind of unrealistic complaint into the discussion on her (much more unifying and grounded) work.
Past the editing window; third paragraph should read:
“With all due respect, I feel like baseless complaints like this are what muddy the waters for discussions of this nature; people on the fence or unfamiliar with the issues immediately shut down and stop listening because they hear ‘ah, unrealistic expectations, this person is talking in a bizarre fantasy land where nothing’s good enough for them, therefore questions about ‘equality’ being discussed are clearly not worth listening to, just fringe extremes whining, because they’re based on absurd premises.’”
And to be clear- that’s the exact kind of impression that I want to *avoid* people getting, because these are important issues that should be engaged with. Which is why I think such exaggeration should stay out of the discussion, to avoid turning people off of discussing the issues because of false impressions they receive.
Picard S3 started off great but ended miserably. Speaking of women specifically, Amanda Plummer was a strong character starting off but became a borg stooge later on… BUT, 7 was a lackie of the Captain in the beginning but later became a captain later on herself so there is that too. It went both ways.
I thought Gates was great in season 3. And I liked her scenes with Sir Patrick.
I don’t want to come in here all defensive (oops, too late), but I’ll say this about Gates/Crusher. I loved seeing her back in action, I loved that she got to show what she’s capable of in ways that had barely been touched on before. But once Picard found out that Jack was his son, it was all about dad and his boy. There’s even a point where Worf walks up to Picard and assures him they will save his son, and he doesn’t even glance at Beverly.
And yes, it is irksome when a brand-new Star Trek series made in modern times has several episodes in which none of the female characters talk to each other. It’s not 1966 anymore. I wouldn’t make that critique of TOS because, as Nana would say, it was caught in the amber of its time. But in 2023? And Troi’s first scene is her alone with a baby nagging Riker to come home?
(And I loved Picard season 3, despite the hiccups along the way.)
But I will reiterate- how would those conversations even have happened in episodes where all the characters were in separate locations? Why should a random non-plot-serving conversation have been added into the episodes in order to have two female characters converse just for the sake of a conversation existing? In the episodes in which no such conversation occurred, there wasn’t any reasonable logistical way, or reasonable plot demand, for the cast as they were allocated to have those conversations.
Which is why I would again assert that not having those conversations isn’t a failing, unrealistically demanding those conversations for their own sake is.
And I would also question why having two women talking together is a definitive sign of progress and its absence is a sign of progress lost, without factoring in the nature of the plot or cast demographics; that the idea of two women conversing for its own sake is virtuous, and its absence- regardless of how strong the female characters are and what they’re doing in the plot- makes the piece definitively less good. If it’s a solo-piece, or a two-hander in which the cast are one man and one woman, and that woman is the best-defined, most three-dimensional character in the world, is that story still inherently inferior because she doesn’t talk to another woman during it? I just feel that the logic doesn’t hold up.
It’s not about creating a random conversation that doesn’t serve the plot, obviously. It’s about looking at a script and realizing that you’ve given all the best stuff to the men and that your female characters have been quickly shunted to the background. It doesn’t mean the whole thing is bad (or “inherently inferior”); you can have beautifully written words and great scenes anyway. That doesn’t mean something isn’t missing and isn’t worth some examination.
But how would something be missing if, say, all of your characters are in different locations? The rationale here that something is missing implies that these conversations are a necessity to have regardless of plot logic or structure; for their own sake. Otherwise, their lack would not be attributed to something being absent, but simply to the plot not lending itself to those conversations.
It also implies that without two women having a conversation, they can’t have ‘the best stuff’ (unless that is a separate, tangential charge).
The complaint itself seems to be based on an assumption that I am challenging as (with all due respect) completely without merit and not standing up to scrutiny. What about an episode passing without two female characters conversing, when they are scattered across different locations, represents a lack of progress? In what way does that actually constitute any kind of a lack, rather than simply a side-effect of the plot structure?
I neither want to agitate you, nor to go around in conversational circles; my point has simply been that I don’t believe that idea, in and of itself, is a valid criticism, and I have yet to see any explanation as to why the existence of a conversation between two specific characters during a specific episode is a necessity or a marker of progress.
That’s a general and oft-debated metric that’s not really what she’s returning to in her criticism. The Bechdel Test to my mind is not perfect, and clearing it doesn’t automatically make any work suddenly stamped as Approved for Women. But I do find that if you notice it hasn’t been passed, then there’s probably a wider problem at work with how women are being portrayed.
The point about Crusher being sidelined once she brought a son for Picard to bond with is valid. She and Picard have it out with each other and she solves the mystery of what’s happening in “No Win Scenario.” After that she’s largely a background player like she used to be. Troi’s involvement is also limited (I believe this was due to logistics with Sirtis?) and does not flesh out her character as well as had happened in season 1. Worf ignoring Crusher when telling Picard he would retrieve his son is emblematic of a mindset that isn’t necessarily prioritizing women the same way as men. So we don’t need to get caught up in the Bechdel Test and hypotheticals about why it doesn’t always need to be passed in order to have great roles for women. Seven, Ro and Crusher (at first) were given great material, but there are some legitimate arguments that Picard season 3 wasn’t serving all its female characters as well as it should have.
This is the part where everyone is going to yell at me. But I don’t care. Crusher was WRONG! She was wrong to keep Jack away from Picard. Whether he leads a dangerous life or not is not the point. All that story did was to say mothers have more say over fathers when in fact they should have equal say. You do not get to be a feminist on one hand and then say women get more power on the other hand. CRUSHER WAS WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I found the conversation about actors’ trauma extremely interesting; thanks for including that topic.
I’m also a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I read an interview with James Marsters, who plays Spike, where he said that he had to go into therapy after filming the Season 6 episode “Seeing Red,” where Spike attempts to rape Buffy. Marsters said that he would collapse on set and SHAKE after every take during that episode.
I was a trauma therapist before I retired, and shaking is one of our natural responses to intense trauma. The idea that producers would make an actor perform a scene that gives him an intense trauma response … we need to take better care of the people who perform these roles. Rewrite the episode? Have a therapist on set? I don’t know what the right answer is, but if an actor is collapsing and shaking, we need not to just treat it as business as usual.
that ep was the producers trying to stop the fan love for spike by reminding them of what he really is- a vicious monster.
The producers of DS9 did the same with Dukat. With the episode Waltz.
And they were right to do so, because Dukat was becoming too compelling and even a little fun (my wife and I trade ‘attention Bajoran workers’ back and forth almost as regularly as SEINFELD-derived quips.)
I even remember posting that I thought they could have spun off an A-TEAM in space around the time of RETURN TO GRACE, with Dukat fully on his own, with a renegade band of my favorite guest stars that could have ranged from Yar’s sister to maybe Doctor Sehlar (hey, the excuse for her never reappearing could have been she had gone Maquis!)
… I thought of it as a 24th century version of what I’d wanted and not gotten with the features, when I thought the TOS bunch should have stayed renegade and cruised the ‘verse in that BoP looking for trouble and adventure instead of going back to being obedient servants to an increasingly unimpressive Starfleet and Federation, which between TSFS and TUC started to come off as politically paranoid as a protagonist in a PakulaVerse movie.
The willingness of producers to forcibly remind an audience of a beloved character’s essential badness is a fairly recent phenomenon, Archie Bunker’s slow transition from ignorant bigot to lovable crank being pretty much the norm for decades’ worth of television. Even Al Swearingen lost some of his edge after a time (and he was positively grandfatherly in the reunion movie), though his comic spats with Wu were almost worth it.
al was a pussycat compared to some of the real monsters in that show.
Really? Season 1 Al was willing (though he eventually dropped the idea) to murder a little girl to cover up his tangential role in the killing of her family. It doesn’t get much more monstrous than that.
The character did become more sympathetic as the series wore on, trading in at least some of his viciousness for an essential toughness, but that was precisely my point.
With it fresh in my mind from last night, I’d say the way Hearst casually mentions how he came just that close to murdering Seth and raping the rich Missus because of his temper, and that it was only his realization that these actions would only be temporary pleasures that weighed against his ongoing interests that stopped him, is a level of … well, evil, that sets a kind of standard for the monstrous.
Between Hearst and the insanely bigoted horse-buff Steve, season 3 has got some beauties that just so deserve to get clocked, and for the greater good of the community as well as that of my blood pressure.
The fact that it takes the extreme of Hearst’s presence — and that includes his front man who dominates a lot of 2nd season — in order to make Al seem okay by comparison doesn’t upgrade Al in any way, but it (along with the tremendous one-liners with which writers gifted him) does make him a lot more palatable than he probably should be.
I really need to see if there are fan DEADWOOD and CARNIVALE sites, or at least reddit forums (have only recently realized how much info is on reddit.)
One of the joys I took from “Deadwood” was in seeing Al’s unexpected sympathies towards men who were his opposites in every way, like the dying minister or Jeffrey Jones’ A.W. Merrick. (The pep talk where he advises Merrick to man-up after his printing press is vandalized by Hearst’s goons is one of my favorite scenes in a series chockablock-full of great dialogue.) By contrast, Hearst could only mimic such emotion, as when he expresses great affection for his black cook only to turn around and have her son murdered over a minor bit of thievery. So yeah, Al was bad, but Hearst was definitely worse.
As for Steve, he struck me as more pathetic than evil. I mean, that bit with the horse, eww.
Two nights ago I watched Steve’s nutso racist act go so far as to cause Hostetler [genre folks would recognize the actor from BABYLON 5] to just throw up his hands and shoot himself — even though he was already all set to leave for good (made me recall Stockwell’s self-offing in the last ep of nuBSG, except I felt bad for this one.) Steve’s like the guy who thinks he is entitled to run a red light who causes the other driver swerving to avoid him to kill himself, while the bad driver just blithely motors on. If you don’t hold those folks responsible, it will just keep going on.
As for the horse, I think bestiality is pretty monstrous too, though at least one of the horse’s brethren managed to get in a last word or kick with Steve.
By the time Stockwell put that gun to his head in the finale all the impish fun had long since been burned out of the character (still remember his reaction upon having his Cylon identity blown: “Oh. Well, this is awkward”), and I was also more than ready to see him go.
It has been some years since we rewatched nuBSG, and I had been thinking about giving it a try, but there’s so much spiritual weirdness in the last year that I’m not sure I want to invest fully. Maybe I’ll just watch the PEGASUS eps again, they’ve got that awesome music playing as Adama says, I’m getting my men.’
I just went to youtube and rewatched that part, the last couple minutes of the show (Olmos, awesome as ever), then went to ebay and amazon to check cd prices. The used prices are not too bad, it isn’t like IRON EAGLE score price anyway, and is also better than BLUE THUNDER and THE OMEGA MAN (others that I have long wanted but can’t pull trigger on, mainly because I can at least youtube the music for free), but maybe I’ll treat myself after the next article wraps.
I dunno, I thought they were toeing the line so well in season 6 until Waltz. Dukat is still able to turn on the charm, but with the overt lens of his being in power and and lording it over Kira, I thought that was enough to ensure no one would still be trying to make out that he was on a redemption arc or even trying to play down his villainy. He was a complex villain capable of loving his family and being funny, charming and even empathetic at times. That made him interesting, but never changed that he was an evil character. Then things got to the point where Dukat practically grew a mustache to twirl, and I felt like things were being bolded as if we couldn’t read between the lines anymore without a lecture.
That may be so, but, um, I was making a point about how some scenes can be traumatizing to an actor*, and I think the producers need to protect their actors’ emotional health better. This isn’t really the place for discussing Buffy.
*I’m following the lead of many female actors in using “actor” as a gender-neutral term.
The advent of intimacy consultants was borne of some of the concerns you are bringing up. Actors tend to be very vulnerable by default, so having a therapist available and sensitivity to their potential to be traumatized is important. It just wasn’t considered back then, and pressures of time and money still butt up against pushes for better working conditions.
That said, Joss Whedon was a serial offender for going over the line. James Cameron is another. The making of “The Abyss” is a cautionary tale for any actor, with Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio still holding what went down against him. Regardless of how oppressive and stressful the shoot, even the toughest and most game actor and crew member needs to feel protected.
I think there’s a difference, though, between asking an actor to perform a scene that the story calls for (and that the actor knew about when they took the role), as opposed to putting their lives in danger by practically drowning them.
I just heard that the main boss at Digital Domain, the VFX company Cameron co-founded in the early 90s, is doing a warts-and-all accounting of that company’s existence, and that promises to really lay into Cameron and the many attempts to paper over his excesses and tantrums.
It was other things on top of that, but yes, a toxic set is different.
But again, actors are vessels and sponges and so many feel deeply and take on their characters as part of their process. As Bisitor said, not everyone is the type who can just fully turn it off and play pretend. Many have to access things which are dark and traumatic. Even though most scripts are baked, it’s not quite fair to tell an actor to just deal with it because that’s their job. And in TV, that’s where the writers are king, so actors rarely felt empowered to push back. Star Trek certainly was no exception, and actresses often had the extra layer of having to navigate a Boys Club when it came to producers and directors.
That’s a very good point. I’ve wondered about this myself, how actors manage to perform difficult scenes with co-stars, especially men being violent towards women or even romantic scenes. As a married man, I would not even be able to kiss a co-star in a scene, let alone simulate raping her.
All this may be interesting if true (not sure it is) but surely we just want some good entertaining INTELLIGENT written story lines? We are not getting that and have never had that in Nu-Trek.
When you start caring more about diversity check boxes and less about quality, the show ultimately suffers.
As a man I dont see how seven with a phaser rifle & girlfriend is any more “progressive” than seven in a cat suit.
“Diversity check-boxes.” Drink!
Wow she really enjoys bad Trek!!
Voyager was surely the best show in terms of female representation and passing the Bechtel test. Even if they did have 7 in that catsuit.
I mean, sex sells though, so is such a suit strong and empowering because the woman is confident or demeaning because it is treating her as a sex object.
I thought they wrote for Raffi and 7 much better in season 3.
it was wrong to do that with a character who has gone through a horrific experience like annika did as a drone.