Beltran Bashes Voyager Again!  

Actor Robert Beltran is refreshingly honest when it comes to Star Trek: Voyager.

After six years of playing Voyager's first officer, the actor has a few things he'd like to see for the show as it heads into its seventh and final season. But none of it revolves around his character specifically--as Beltran puts it, "That's up to the writers. They don't pay me to write."  Recently Beltran sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to talk about Voyager's present and future.  What stands out in your mind about the sixth season?    Beltran: I didn't have fun this sixth season. It was pretty dreary and tedious for me. I can't speak for some of the others, but I have a feeling it was the same for some of the others in the cast. I don't have many memories of the sixth season that are positive; I'm not saying anything I haven't said to [executive producer] Brannon Braga. I've called him up and said to him flat out, "I'm bored to tears." I told him that as an actor, I'm quite hungry to do something. This year has left me starving. And of course, [the writers] always ask me what would I like to see [Chakotay] do--I don't know what I want Chakotay to do, I'm not even that much into science fiction.

Maybe they hold it against me that I'm not exactly wild about their material, and that I have been pretty vocal about it, but I've never been one to sit back and be happy with scraps thrown to me. I think it's a waste of me and a waste of so many other talented actors on the show that are way undernourished from the stuff that they're feeding us.  What would you like to see with Voyager going forward?  Beltran: What bothers me so much is that [the writers] have a cast of really, really fine actors, actors that can hold their own with anybody, anywhere, anytime, and they're absolutely wasting three-quarters of that cast on the most mundane scenes per episode, and concentrating on two or three characters. It gets very boring. I feel that the whole Janeway and Seven of Nine thing has gone on so long that it seems that [the show] should be called Star Trek: Janeway and Seven of Nine, instead of Star Trek: Voyager.

I feel badly for Kate [Mulgrew] and for Jeri [Ryan], because it's like a tape on a loop.  It's the same thing over and over. They're not getting any great character development. Seven of Nine, I don't think, has grown so much so that she can say that they're concentrating on her growing as a character--I don't see it--and certainly the Captain hasn't changed, so to me it's like they're just repeating the same refrain over and over and over. My god--how long do they expect an audience to sit through that stuff? And frankly, the word that I'm getting from fans and people that watch the show is "enough of this already"--and they're just echoing what is so obvious.  Why do you think that is? 

Beltran: I think it's laziness on the writers' part; they tend to write for characters that they feel they can write well for, and the rest get all of the mundane, "Captain, shields are down," "Captain, there's a ship approaching." The bridge scenes are always the same, over and over, no matter what the episode is: "Reroute the power from the Scooby-Dooby to the fluma-fluma"; "OK, Captain, that's working." The few scenes that actually have some bite to [them] are taken up by the same two or three actors, two or three characters, and it gets very boring for the rest of us that are waiting around. Not that I've been so thrilled by the material this year that I haven't enjoyed my days off, believe me. I'd rather not say anything than spew forth some of the stuff they do write; it's much better to say nothing.  It's just so boring. If you think about it, why do Janeway and Seven of Nine need anybody? They're so smart and so capable, they can do anything. The captain has all the answers, and Seven of Nine has her Borg knowledge, so why do they need the rest of us? It's like the writers have painted themselves in this hole, that now they have to manufacture crises that Janeway and Seven of Nine should be able to fix just like that, considering what we've seen before.  What does Voyager need, then, to salvage itself in your eyes?  Beltran: The only thing can save [Voyager], that can bring some freshness to it, is the interpersonal relationships.  If they're not going to work on that, then they should just [credit] now, put everything in the episodes they filmed, and put us in syndication and let it go. We're basically repeating ourselves over and over. There are no interpersonal relationships. As it stands right now, I don't think the Captain has any personal relationship with just about anybody. She seems to be standing alone, either fretting about her pet project, Seven of Nine, and how to humanize her, or bossing everybody around incessantly, and we're all just snapping to her commandment. I don't think there's any relationship at all between her and her first officer; I haven't felt anything, other than, "Do this, Chakotay" or "Go see about that, Chakotay." There's no friendship; it's completely written out. And that's true with her and all of the characters. She just gives orders now. And she fixes everything. And that's the way I see it. 

Why do you think Trek has shown such longevity?  Beltran: [That's] a hard one to figure out. At times I feel it's worthy of its long life; at other times, I feel it's sort of been able to achieve it by tricks and smoke and mirrors. At times it's first and foremost a television show that has the premise of being in the future. Its premise is a strong premise. What happens, though, in a television show is that you have to write episodes based on this premise and you have to keep it fresh. And it's very hard to do. I feel for the writers and the producers who have to come up with this freshness. It's hard to achieve consistently, and they don't do it always. There are great failures. [But] the good writing, the good episodes, are what the fans come back to over and over again. And they endure the ones that fall short of their expectations, just so that they can hopefully get to one that has some substance to it. It's a matter of the writers and creators achieving something and meeting with the audience that appreciates it, and it's a large audience that appreciates it.  What do you like to do in your spare time? 

Beltran: I'm back in my acting class. I get to work on material [there] that I really, really love, and material that feeds my soul. It's called the classical theater lab, and it's a group of actors who get together and work on classical material. It's like an actor's gymnasium sort of thing. I've ... [also done] a poetry reading over at the museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach [California].