Entertainment
Star Trek Actor Reveals Dark Side Of Franchise's Golden Era
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Beyond discussions of which shows and movies were best, it’s pretty easy for Star Trek fans to agree on one thing: that the ‘90s was the franchise’s golden period. This was when The Next Generation hit its stride, fan-favorite spinoffs Deep Space Nine and Voyager were launched, The Original Series movies wrapped up, and even the smallest towns had their own conventions. However, Star Trek: Voyager actor Garrett Wang’s latest comments about being snubbed by producers is a grim reminder that the “golden” era of the franchise was remarkably dark.
Recently, the Star Trek veteran sat down with CinemaBlend to discuss his happiness at coming back to the franchise in Lowe Decks, but Garrett Wang was quite blunt about what a long road this has been. He described watching how his costars like Jeri Ryan and Robert Duncan McNeill get invites back to the franchise and counted at least seven different wasted opportunities to bring his character, Harry Kim, back into the fold. Interestingly, he would have returned to the franchise sooner if an opportunity hadn’t been taken away from him, but he remains very tight-lipped over the details.
There was apparently some kind of unnamed Star Trek project in the works that would have somehow brought back Garrett Wang’s character from Voyager even sooner than his recent appearance on Lower Decks. According to the actor, “somehing happened, but then something else happened out of my control…And that offer was rescinded in a way.” Possibly due to an NDA or possibly because he didn’t want to spill the replicated tea, the Harry Kim actor ended this train of thought with a simple, “That’s all I can say.”
As longtime Star Trek fans know, Garrett Wang has never hesitated to spill the tea before about how he was mistreated by Voyager’s producers. For example, he alleges that he was kept from ever directing an episode, something that other Trek lead actors had always been able to do upon request. He also bristled at the fact that his character never got a promotion, relaying a sad story to CinemaBlend that he got so desperate over this that he once showed up outside Kate Mulgrew’s trailer and begged her to help Harry Kim finally get promoted.
Perhaps the ugliest Star Trek story that Garrett Wang relayed was that he and Robert Duncan McNeill were singled out and ridiculed for putting on additional weight during the production of the show. This culminated in the two actors finding girdles in their trailers one day and their characters even getting dialogue in which they teased each other for being out of shape.
When Wang pushed back against this insulting dialogue, executive producer Brannon Braga allegedly told him in front of the cast and crew “if you and your fellow actors go down the same path of eating the way you have the past two years, we’re going to have to change the name of the show to ‘Star Trek: Voyager — Pigs in Space.” This terrible body-shaming is an example of the fact that Star Trek’s golden age is disturbingly dark and grim.
Despite how much he loved his time on Star Trek, Garrett Wang has never been afraid to name names when it comes to those who wronged him. This includes Brannon Braga’s body-shaming and another alleged incident where Braga explained Kim never getting promoted with a breezy “well, somebody’s gotta be the ensign.” He had a particular beef with notorious executive producer Rick Berman, whom he alleges told the cast to “underplay our human characters” (i.e., act boring) so that the aliens would appear more realistic.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that these guys are basically Star Trek royalty: as writer and producer Braga worked on The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise while also helping to pen Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact. Fellow producer and frequent writing partner Rick Berman was an even bigger part of the franchise, exec-producing TNG before co-creating DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise. Berman is also a very controversial figure, one who was accused by veteran Trek writer David Gerrold of being a “raging homophobe” and accused by Jadzia Dax actor Terry Farrell as being “very misogynistic” towards women and their appearance.
Fans learning about this have often debated who the “real” Braga and Berman are. After all, they have created some of the best Trek content ever made (including the epic TNG finale “All Good Things”), but it also seems they have hurt some of our favorite actors. This includes Star Trek’s darling Garrett Wang, and his own tales about these producers are a reminder that these men can be both talented and flawed, capable of great creative energy and capable of causing great pain.
The golden era of Star Trek has a hidden dark side, but the men who allegedly caused it already gave us the perfect way to examine their creative legacy. In First Contact (cowritten by Braga and produced by Berman), Commander Riker gives Zefram Cochrane some advice from his future self: “don’t try to be a great man, just be a man…and let history make its own judgments.” The golden era of Trek has itself passed into history, and only time will tell how future fans and creators remember its greatest and most flawed architects.
Entertainment
AI stocks are cooling — this ChatGPT trading tool keeps delivering
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Credit: Sterling Stock Picker
The AI trade has seemingly had its moment — big runs, big headlines, big expectations. The AI fun is not over by any means. But now that things are settling, the real question is what comes next?
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Entertainment
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Cloud storage is one of those things that quickly turns into a monthly bill you forget about. That’s what makes a lifetime option like Drime worth a closer look.
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Entertainment
The Bear still doesnt know how to write romance
Whenever The Bear introduces a new female character, I pray she doesn’t become a love interest for one of the male leads. Not because I hate romance, but because I specifically hate the way The Bear does romance.
The clearest offender is Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon). A childhood friend who re-enters Carmy’s life, Claire is less a real human character than she is a walking self-help book for Carmy. She spends almost every moment she’s on screen talking about him: her memories of him, his mental health struggles, his relationship with his family. In theory, she has a life apart from Carmy — her defining character trait outside of being his girlfriend is vaguely “nurse” — but in watching The Bear, you wouldn’t know it.
Usually a great performer (see: Shiva Baby, Oh, Hi!, and more), Gordon is reduced to two modes here: luminous love interest hanging onto Carmy’s every word, or calming therapist. She’s not the only Bear character to meet this fate. As The Bear builds Ever staffer Jessica (Sarah Ramos) into a possible match for Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), it replaces her level-headed expertise with empty platitudes designed to ground him. (Season 4 line “honesty is sanity” made me want to drive my head through a wall.) Elsewhere, Richie’s ex-wife, Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs), acts as a similar pillar of support.
Their heads constantly askew, their eyes lit up in adoration, their mouths always ready to offer up an eager laugh or some cornball advice, these characters morph into The Bear‘s single idea of a Woman In Love. Now, The Bear‘s standalone episode “Gary” offers a new addition to this pantheon: Sherri (Marin Ireland) from Gary, Indiana.
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Sherri is a woman whom Richie and Mikey (Jon Bernthal) meet at a bar while on a work trip to Gary. She immediately strikes up a rapport with Mikey, playing a private game of “Fact or Fiction” with him, listening to his complicated woes while nestled together in a bathroom stall, and stealing his beanie and wearing it like a middle schooler trying to get a rise out of a crush. It’s a level of blindly supportive compassion we haven’t seen since Claire Bear, and Ireland, typically a huge asset to any project, soon becomes trapped in The Bear‘s love interest archetype. (Someone please ban affectionate head tilts from the set of The Bear, effective immediately.)
While Sherri feels like she was meant to be a moment of bright connection in Mikey’s life, maybe even “the one that got away,” she really just comes across as an empty vessel for him to pour his trauma into. “What are you looking for, Michael?” she wonders. Later, when he asks permission to do a bump of cocaine, she simply responds, “I want you to be you.” It’s a series of faux-deep exchanges that even two great performers can’t sell. (It doesn’t help that Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach wrote the episode.)
That faux-deepness is what sinks The Bear‘s other romances, too. The show tries to force these deep, cosmic connections, but it forgets that these relationships should be a two-way street. Perhaps that’s why many viewers are drawn to shipping Carmy and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri). While the showrunners have affirmed that their relationship is platonic — and I personally agree with that choice — what sets this hypothetical pairing apart is that they each have such rich lives, both in their work together and their time apart. That’s because The Bear is invested in both of them as characters, rather than just using one as a device to unlock the other. You simply can’t say the same of The Bear‘s other romantic pairings, and the release of “Gary” further proves that romance is the recipe The Bear has yet to master.
“Gary” is now streaming on Hulu. The Bear Season 5 premieres this June on Hulu.
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