HOMEWARD BOUND

VOYAGER debuted on 16 January 1995 with “Caretaker,” the two-hour series premiere that catapulted the crew of the USS Voyager (as well as the crew of a Maquis ship) over 70,000 light-years away from home – marooning them in the Delta Quadrant and faced with an epic journey back to our solar system. Seven years and 172 episodes later, they finally returned to Earth. SFX opened hailing frequencies and caught up with some of the show’s key players to celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary

- IAN SPELLING

WHEN THE NEXT GENERATION ENDED, RICK Berman was tasked with developing another Star Trek series to run alongside Deep Space Nine. The creator/ executive producer tapped his DS9 partner, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor to help him launch a fresh show.

“The three of us sat down, and I don’t remember it being tortuous in any way,” Berman recalls. “We were given some time to come up with the premise. With Next Generation off the air, it gave us an opportunity to create a new starship and crew. Voyager was done back in the day when you would create a premise, create characters, and then start writing. We had some general ideas of where we wanted everything to go, but we hadn’t developed multi-seasonal arcs at all.”

Voyager brought together two disparate crews, from Starfleet and the Maquis, and forced them to gel as the USS Voyager warped her way home from deep in the Delta Quadrant. During the seven-year journey, Captain Janeway and her crew explored strange new worlds and sought out new life and new civilisations. Fans embraced most of the characters – particularly Janeway and The Doctor – but by season three, the powers-that-be informed Berman that the Kes/Neelix coupling concerned them.

“Michael, Jeri and I analysed it, and we realised that Kes just wasn’t clicking,” Berman says. “It was a shame, because Jennifer Lien was very talented and it was sad to see her go. The studio felt pretty strongly – we didn’t really disagree.

“We’d wanted to put a little sex appeal into the show and, simultaneously, we’d been thinking about a character who’d been assimilated by the Borg and was rescued, so we could have a partial Borg character on board. That it’d be a beautiful female… I don’t know whose idea that was, but that was the direction we went.”