INTERVIEW: Celebrate 25 years of ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ with Robbie Duncan McNeill, Garrett Wang
Photo: Courtesy of Creation Entertainment / Provided with permission.
There are many dynamic duos in the long history and many incarnations of Star Trek. Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and First Officer William Riker. First Officer Michael Burnham and Commander Saru.
Near the top of that list has to be flight control officer Tom Paris and operations manager Harry Kim — two beloved characters from Star Trek’s fourth incarnation, Star Trek: Voyager.
After The Original Series, The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine came this heralded series starring Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway, and helping her out on the bridge were Tom (Robbie Duncan McNeill) and Harry (Garrett Wang), in addition to Chakotay (Robert Beltran), Tuvok (Tim Russ), B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson), The Doctor (Robert Picardo), Kes (Jennifer Lien), Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and Neelix (Ethan Phillips).
Both McNeill and Wang have remained friends since they joined Voyager as series regulars, and in 2020, they have decided to join with the rest of sci-fi fandom and celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary. To pop the bubbly and start remembering Voyager’s seven-year run, which ran from 1995 to 2001, the two have a couple exciting projects in the works.
For starters, they will take part in a “Virtual Fan Experience” courtesy of Creation Entertainment. They will lead a Q&A panel discussion Saturday, May 2 at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EST). The experience is brought to fans on the StageIt platform, and the entry fee (and tipping) are up to each individual Trekker.
To sweeten the deal, Wang and McNeill will also take part in an exclusive virtual meet and greet, limited to 15 people, Wednesday, May 6 at 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST). This more intimate affair is open to people who win successful Creation auction bids, starting at $50 a ticket.
No doubt one of the topics of conversation during both sessions will be the dynamic duo’s multi-year project that they’re about launch: To properly celebrate the 25th anniversary of Voyager, Wang and McNeill are kicking off a new podcast called The Delta Flyers.
On the new podcast, they will share behind-the-scenes stories of each and every one of Voyager’s 172 episodes. Tune in each week to see the guys move from the pilot episode, “Caretaker,” all the way to the series finale, “Endgame.” They will tackle a new episode each week, so Wang and McNeill are set to be immersed in Trek fandom for at least two-and-a-half years. Expect the first episode to hit this coming week, and listeners can also contribute via Patreon throughout the podcast’s run to receive exclusive content.
Recently McNeill and Wang spoke with Hollywood Soapbox about their iconic roles on the memorable show. They opened up about the new podcast, their time working with the cast and crew, their impressions of Star Trek before signing on the dotted line and whether they believe in the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry.
Here’s Part I of that discussion. Enjoy fellow Trekkers and Trekkies!
On the excitement level fans have for the new podcast …
McNeill: “It’s crazy how the feedback has been phenomenal. Garrett and I we joked about this for years, like, ‘Oh, we’ll have a talk show someday.’ We’ll be like The Tonight Show. We kind of made a joke about it, and then during this quarantine, Garrett brought it up. It was his idea. He said, ‘Maybe we should go back, and watch all the episodes, and try to remember stuff, and talk to the other actors or the crew that we’re still in touch with.’ It’s been fun. We’ve watched a couple episodes so far, and just getting started has been really exciting.
[Read Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Star Trek: Enterprise actor Connor Trinneer.]
On what fans can expect on the podcast each week …
Wang: “It’s not queued up to the episode. It’s them watching it on their own and then taking a listen to what we have to discuss on each of the episodes. Really this is the perfect time because this is the 25th anniversary of Voyager right now. … [COVID-19] lit a fire underneath my butt. My original idea was to do a recap show by myself, but then Robbie also being sidelined by this pandemic, I felt that it would be great to pull him on this, too. And he agreed.
“Back when we were working on Voyager, I used to joke with him. I was like, ‘We’ve got to collaborate some time in the future, and we need to name our production company McWang Productions, so taking the first two letters of his name and then my last name.’ And I told him as a joke the logo will be a leprechaun straddling a pot of gold, but instead of gold inside the pot, it’s going to be fortune cookies inside the pot. So that was the original idea back when we were on the show because, you know, Paris and Kim are the dynamic duo. I think a lot of people have really enjoyed that pairing in the Star Trek world. Compared to all the other duos that exist, Tom and Harry are probably right up there. Really it’s a way for the fans to just get a little inside info, behind-the-scenes info and hear us interact one more time after all these years, 25 years later.”
On whether they remembered the details of each episode …
McNeill: “Garrett remembers a lot more than I do. First of all, he just remembers better than me. … We sort of embrace that, and so in our podcast, we’re just going to do the recap. But we’re going also do video, a web show on Patreon that will be an extended version where we start the format with, what do we remember? Can we remember anything? It’s been interesting so far. I’m surprised. Even Garrett has struggled. He goes, ‘Oh, I think I remember the outfits those aliens wore, but I can’t remember what happened.’
“So we try to struggle to remember, and then we go watch the show. And then we come back after we’ve watched it and made some notes, and we have so many memories triggered from us both watching it. Then we sort of piggyback on each other’s memory. ‘Oh, I remember a little bit of something,’ and then he comes in and goes, ‘Oh yeah, and this happened.’ It’s been a lot of fun. That’s really the format. Also as we bring in some of the other actors or the behind-the-scenes people, they’re going to have memories that are totally different, too, so hopefully we’ll all help each other to recall 25 years ago exactly what was going on and how things got made.”
[Read Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Star Trek: Voyager actor Robert Picardo.]
On how the podcast is produced …
Wang: “We use Zoom, just like we’re doing now. Obviously we have professional microphones, and we have a green screen backdrop. So we’re trying to make this production value as high as possible. We have an editor who is editing both the audio and the video versions of our show, so COVID-19 as it is, all we need to do is just have power. If the power goes out, then we’ll be screwed, but we have electricity. So we’re good.”
McNeill: “It’ll take us about two-and-a-half years to get through all these episodes if we do one a week, so it’ll be fun.”
Wang: “Hopefully we don’t get sick of each other two-and-a-half years weekly.”
On how the bond between their two characters formed …
Wang: “The pilot episode, ‘Caretaker,’ you see very early in the episode, you see that Tom Paris takes Harry and puts him under his wing when he saves him from Quark and Quark’s salesmanship trying to sell him these crystals. Then there’s a later scene in the pilot where some other officers are bad-talking Tom Paris, and Tom comes over and calls me out. ‘You’re hanging out with these guys, and they don’t like me. I guess we won’t be friends.’ I’m like, ‘Well, no, I can choose my own friends.’ The tone was set very early in the show.”
McNeill: “I was really surprised to see all the little things the writers had put into those episodes, the pilot episode that we built on, that they built these relationships on. Even when Harry and B’Elanna Torres get kept behind by the Caretaker in the pilot. The Caretaker sends the rest of us back to our ship, gets rid of us, but he keeps B’Elanna and Harry. And up on the ship, Tom is the one that says, ‘You know what, I made a promise to Harry to have his back, and I’m going back there.’ I had forgotten about that moment. It was really well written, well structured. I think from the very beginning they established some really strong relationships and characters.”
[Read Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with TOS actor George Takei.]
On the historic nature of Star Trek: Voyager …
McNeill: “It felt very modern. It felt like the next natural step.”
Wang: “I felt that our show was one of the most diverse of all the different Trek incarnations, and the fact that we had a woman captain, it was time. It was definitely time to have a female captain. I’m proud to be a part of the show, the first one with a female captain. For what it was, it’s different from all the other Treks; it really is, and it’s something that I’m very proud to be a part of.”
On whether Wang knew much about Star Trek before joining the series …
Wang: “I’ve been a sci-fi fan for my entire life, so my first sci-fi that I ever saw was 1977’s Star Wars in the movie theater at the age of 8. After that, I fell in love with sci-fi. I watched the original series Star Trek on reruns when I came home from school. Obviously, it wasn’t my favorite. I preferred Star Wars because the visual effects were much better, 1977’s Star Wars compared to 1966’s Star Trek, but I watched all the feature films when they came out. …
“TNG I tried to watch in college. The funny story behind that is season one they aired an episode called ‘Code of Honor.’ ‘Code of Honor’ is agreed upon as probably one of the worst written episodes of Star Trek ever, so that’s the episode that was my first introduction to TNG. And I thought it was horrible. I thought, oh my God, so I turned the TV off. I was a college student at UCLA at the time, and about six months later I turned on TNG again. And it was a rerun of ‘Code of Honor.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, OK.’ Obviously I didn’t watch it all the way through. Once I saw the beginning scene, I said, ‘This is the same episode.’ I turned it off, and a year and a half later, so two years after watching TNG for the first time, I tried to watch it again. And it was once again a rerun of ‘Code of Honor.’ Really at that point I took as a sign from God that I was not meant to watch TNG.
“And to be perfectly honest with you, I feel that happened for a reason. If it wasn’t ‘Code of Honor,’ if it was any other TNG episode, I would have watched every episode of TNG religiously like everyone else who watched TNG when it came out in the ’80s, and I would have been a huge fan. And then as an actor, when I was told that I was going to be auditioning for the Star Trek series that was taking the place of TNG, I really feel that I would have put so much pressure on myself that I would have been so nervous that I probably would not have been cast in the role of Harry Kim, so I think God or the forces or the universe, however you want to refer to it, was working on my behalf by giving me those reruns of TNG.
“So I didn’t have to do a lot of research. I understood the basic concepts of what is warp drive, what’s impulse drive, I knew technobabble. It’s interesting because during the first season of filming on Voyager, so many of the actors that I was working with they would complain about the script, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t understand this concept. What are they talking about here? This is very confusing. This is just not what I’m used to. Do you get this?’ I would look at them and say, ‘Um, yes, I do understand this concept. I paid attention in Physics class.’ Everything to me seemed very logical, whereas some of the other cast members they just didn’t get it.
“I would say, across the board, it’s only 10 percent of all the Star Trek series regulars that are sci-fi nerds to begin with, myself included. The other 90 percent are just actors playing a role, so they had to do extra work to be able to play their role effectively, for sure.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Join Garrett Wang and Robbie Duncan McNeill at Creation Entertainment’s Virtual Fan Experience Saturday, May 2 at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EST) and a special virtual meet and greet Wednesday, May 6 at 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST). Click here for more information. Also, catch Wang and McNeill’s new podcast, The Delta Flyers, premiering soon. Click here for more information.
