I’ve heard that there was “tension” between the two actresses and that in-fact Kate made Jeri’s life hell while on set. The explanation Kate gives is that she didn’t like the fact that this blond bombshell was brought on to introduce sex into the show. Seems pretty catty to me although she says it a bit more delicately. I even saw one youtube video of Ryan and Garrett Wang (Ensign Kim) doing some sort of panel and him breaking down in tears because he wanted to end the problems between them.
Does anyone know how true all this is and what sort of treatment Ryan received? Have they since reconciled?
I’ve never heard of any feuding between Kate and Jeri. I will say this though: Yes, Voyager obviously brought Jeri on as eye candy. But you know what? Jeri did a damn fine job of acting on that show.
Which is kind of unfortunate. Despite her well done performance, she was never given the respect she deserves because very few folks could see past the eye candy factor.
And one quote from an interviewwhere she mentions it.
Every time I’ve seen a mention approaching the topic she talks about how pretty Jeri was. But if it had “Nothing to do with Jeri” as it says above it seems that she was being purposefully hurtful to Ryan in order to protest against the studio types.
I saw Mulgrew just a few weeks ago at the Montreal Comic-Con. She described misgivings about Ryan’s casting for the reasons already described, but eventually formed a friendship with Ryan herself.
Personally, I didn’t like Ryan’s character because too many episodes relied on Borg technobabble and I was annoyed by the assumption that she had to learn to be “human” again. I’d’ve thought Vulcan society was a much better fit for someone of her temperament and talents.
The fact that she lists the entire 4 years as being hard plus the interview with Wang above makes me think that it wasn’t just a passing thing just when she got started.
I agree with Kate’s sentiments. I just don’t think she needed to be a bitch to Jeri to get her point across.
I mean, look, I like me some eye candy. And I’ve been guilty of watching shows primarily for the eye candy alone. But Voyager in my opinion was not the place for it. Despite Star Trek franchise’s past of objectifying women.
And really…sexiness is not just a shiny catsuit. It’s also attitude, and it would take just one line from 7 of 9 to kill any potential boner.
The Chakotay romance was shoehorned in poorly IMHO. Tom and Kes and Tom and Torres was much more believable. At least that had some roots. Now if Chakotay had constantly been championing her and was her buddy, I could see it.
I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not but if not for Jeri Ryan we would not have President Obama. Jeri used to be married to an Illinois politician named Jack Ryan (no relation to the Tom Clancy character). Although they divorced in 1999, the records were unsealed in 2004 when Jack was running for a Senate seat. And in those records it was found that while Mr. Ryan had a kinky side his wife did not share it and did not wish to have sex in public at a BDSM club. Ryan dropped out of the race, clearing an easy path to victory for his opponent - Barack Obama.
Dude was already known as a major disappointment on the acting side when he was named one of the 100 sexiest men or some dumb shit. Honestly could have seen them killing his character off before that point, then of course they couldn’t.
His IMDB profile is pretty thin past Voyager.
And wasn’t he the only one who wanted to direct that they said no to?
I’ve only seen a few episodes of Voyager, of which I think only one had Jeri Ryan in it.
In all three, Janeway came across as a bitch. Whatever the writers were trying to accomplish with her character, they needed to stop. Moral quandary? Janeway will order an explicit and wrong resolution, with no particular argument behind it. End of episode. Whee.
All of the rest of the cast were somewhere between bland and annoying. The second in command of the ship would briefly seem human, but even he seemed pretty blah.
7 of 9’s episode was clearly better than the rest. She seemed like a real character and wasn’t unlikable. I couldn’t care less that she was popularly good looking, that’s not my style (Dax, on the other hand, rawr). And, for example, Whoopi Goldberg’s character was (usually) a welcome addition to a TNG episode and she’s not a potential lingerie model (no offense, Whoopi). I’m sure that very few viewers minded the eye candy, but she didn’t make the show in the same way that Jennifer Love Hewitt (supposedly) makes The Ghost Whisperer. She genuinely appears to have been the only good thing on the show, what she looked like withstanding.
And if Mulgrew had an issue with a casting decision, that had nothing to do with the actor brought in for the part. She should have taken it out on the producers, or just been happy to have the show leave the cutting block.
ETA: Whoops, I forgot about the doctor. He was good. If the show had just been the Doc and 7 of 9, it might have been a hit.
I didn’t watch much of Voyager either. But my understanding is they set it up with a concept and then abandoned the concept, which pretty much left the series floundering.
The original concept was supposed to be about how two hostile groups were forced to work together in order to survive with limited resources. Lots of potential plotlines there as the two groups struggled for supremacy while also trying to scrounge up enough resources to stay alive.
But apparently this concept was quickly dropped. Any conflict between the crew members quickly disappeared, there were never any serious supply issues, the ship re-established communications with the Federation and found various shortcuts to get them home quicker. The series became a fairly routine Star Trek series.
To be fair, they only re-established contact with the Federation in season six, and then only for a few minutes of subspace radio per day.
It was a shame that the Maquis/Federation conflict was essentially dropped after the first few episodes. And of course there was the narrative problem with Voyager somehow regularly destroying shuttlecraft and using up photon torpedoes without seeming to run out. They did keep track of this stuff early on but gave it up pretty soon.
And Chakotay was the most useless character in Star Trek history, even including Deanna Troi.