Romance, isolation, return: Voyager

Abstract

The fourth Star Trek series was launched some seven months after the final episode of TNG and inherited a large proportion of its production team. Again the series was under the overall control of Berman and Piller, with co-creator Jeri Taylor joining them as Star Trek’s first female executive producer. While Berman remained mainly in an overall supervisory role, Piller and Taylor were highly active members of the writing team in the first two seasons. They were joined by Voyager’s most prolific writer, Brannon Braga, who contributed 18 stories in the first three seasons. Another TNG veteran, Joe Menosky, later came ‘on board’, along with new staff writers Kenneth Biller and Lisa Klink. With Moore, Fields and Echevarria joining the DS9 writers, the TNG writing team had now split into two units with fairly distinctive writing styles. Not surprisingly DS9 had attracted the more politically inclined writers, whereas Braga and Menosky, who tend to concentrate on a more fantasy-based approach, gravitated to Voyager.