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Star Trek open thread: Reassessing Captain Janeway a quarter century later [1]

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Date: 2025-04-09

In “The Cage,” the initially unaired pilot of Star Trek, Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) actually says “It’s just that I can’t get used to having a woman on the bridge.” Misogynist Star Trek fans had some justification in canon for objecting to having so many women on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

But even that precedent was already being subtly overturned, presumably with the blessing of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, in the first batch of Star Trek movies and with the presence of Admiral Nechayev (Natalija Nogulich) in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a woman who surely will have to start out as an ensign and be a lieutenant, a commander and a captain before joining the admiralty. Or maybe she’ll be a commodore and not a captain? I’m not exactly clear on the rank of commodore.

I almost forgot about Captain Rachel Garrett (Tricia O’Neil) in the Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” The point is, Captain Janeway will not be the first woman starship captain in Starfleet (in the fictional universe). But she was the first woman to head up a Star Trek series.

The rôle of Captain Janeway originally went to Geneviève Bujold, an Oscar-nominated film actor with hardly any experience as a series regular on a television show. Despite having signed the contract and cleared her schedule, she left after just two days of filming, citing the rigors of television production.

Bujold did complete filming on at least one scene. It’s possible that at least one shot with her in it made it to the finished product: one in which Janeway’s hand taps a couple of points on a computer console. Even the most devoted Star Trek fans would not have suspected that maybe that isn’t Kate Mulgrew’s hand.

Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), an inmate at a Federation penal settlement in New Zealand, gets a special visitor: Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) of the USS Voyager, NCC-74656.

It’s certainly interesting to watch Bujold’s scenes. A side-by-side comparison of Bujold and Mulgrew shows quite clearly that Mulgrew was the right choice. Bujold just wasn’t any good as Janeway. For one thing, she lacked command presence. I can believe her as a high ranking subordinate to the captain, I could even believe her as an admiral, but not as the captain herself. In the scene Bujold completed with Robert Duncan McNeill as Lt. Tom Paris, the young man recently brought out of prison looks far more commanding than Bujold’s Janeway.

And her line delivery is rather bland. If she couldn’t make us feel the urgency of “Red alert!” or “Brace for impact!” she would have never been able to convince us that “There’s coffee in that nebula” either.

The producers perhaps felt they had a fine line to walk with a woman captain as a major character. She has to be authoritative but not bossy or bitchy, and her voice needs to project without being shrill. Not a thought process they would have gone through with a male captain, however much second-guessing there was about Patrick Stewart’s hairline.

Captain Kathryn Janeway was introduced in the Voyager 2-hour pilot, which some consider the best pilot in the entire Star Trek franchise. As the new commanding officer of the USS Voyager, NCC-74656, her first mission is to apprehend a Maquis cell that Lt. Tuvok (Tim Russ) infiltrated.

Everyone seems to think it’s a perfectly routine mission, but both Voyager and the Maquis ship get pulled to the far side of the galaxy (to the Delta Quadrant — our quadrant is of course the Alpha Quadrant in the Earth-centric perspective of Star Trek).

Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew, left) and Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxxann Biggs-Dawson) ponder how to deal with a spatial anomaly in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

Quick note about spoilers: in this open thread, let us freely discuss anything that happens in any episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Some details from Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Prodigy might be relevant, use your judgement.

The Caretaker, the dying entity which pulled Voyager and the Maquis ship to the Delta Quadrant, and several other ships from all over the galaxy, has some technology that presumably can return Voyager to the Alpha Quadrant as quickly as it yanked the ship in the first place.

But due to the situation with the Ocampa (the people the Caretaker protects) and the Kazon (lame, watered down Klingons), Captain Janeway makes the decision to destroy the Caretaker’s “array,” stranding Voyager and the other ships in the Delta Quadrant. Even at Warp 9.9 (the highest faster-than-light speed Voyager can manage), it would take Voyager seventy-five years to get back to the Alpha Quadrant.

This set up a show in which the crew of a Starfleet ship far away from the abundance and comfort of the Federation would be forced to make tough moral decisions and cope with austere budgeting. But aside from the occasional references to replicator rations and Neelix’s dubious cooking, the crew hardly ever seem to want for basic needs. And somehow the ship has plenty of shuttlecraft and an endless supply of photon torpedoes.

Still, Janeway’s decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array weighed heavily on her for the rest of the show. There are a few episodes dealing specifically with this. The most positive of these is probably “Good Shepherd,” which is slated to rerun tonight on the Heroes & Icons channel as part of the All Star Trek line-up.

Janeway must tend to her flock when she finds three misfit crewmembers need some special attention.

Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) helpfully explains few in Starfleet “make it past their first year on a starship. Normally, they're reassigned.” Chakotay suggests relieving the three misfit crewmembers of their duties “and let[ting] them pursue their own interests.” Because it “wouldn't hurt general efficiency.”

Dala (Kaitlin Hopkins, left) and Mobar (Gregg Daniel) pretend to be Janeway and Tuvok in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Live Fast and Prosper."

But Janeway doesn’t like that idea. “They aren't drones, Chakotay. We can't just deactivate them. … Three people have slipped through the cracks on my ship. That makes it my problem.” So she decides to take those three crewmembers on a special mission aboard the Delta Flyer (a short range small ship that the Voyager crew somehow had plenty of materials to build from).

At this point, Jeri Ryan had almost completed three seasons on the show as Seven of Nine, a human woman recovered from the Borg. She joined the show after the Season 3 departure of Jennifer Lien as Kes, an Ocampan woman who turned out to not be as interesting as the fans, the writers or the actor had hoped.

With Seven’s tight-fitting catsuit, it was easy to be cynical about the addition of the character to the show. Apparently the studio executives thought her sex appeal would be a much-needed shot in the arm for the show. Kate Mulgrew disagreed, and is said to have resented Jeri Ryan.

On the show, Seven of Nine was under Captain Janeway’s command, though frequently insubordinate, especially at first. But as actors, they were supposed to be equals. Their “feud” certainly colored fans’ perceptions of their characters on the show.

Now, with that acrimony being water under the bridge, but despite the show’s failure to fully deliver on the potential of the premise, we should acknowledge that Captain Janeway is a hero, and, as some put it, “a badass,” perhaps much more so than Seven of Nine.

The open thread question, for those of you who watched Star Trek: Voyager when it first aired: How has your opinion of Captain Janeway changed in the time since the show ended its original run on the United Paramount Network (UPN)?

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