Bryan Fuller Describes ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Serialized “Year Of Hell” Season Rejected By Rick Berman

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Bryan Fuller Describes ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Serialized “Year Of Hell” Season Rejected By Rick Berman

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https://trekmovie.com/2020/05/29/bryan- ... ck-berman/
The “Year of Hell” season

The season four episode “Year of Hell,” written by Braga and Menosky, is considered one of the Voyager‘s best. In the two-parter, the crew was split apart and facing its greatest threat yet, from Annorax (Kurtwood Smith) of the Krenim Imperium, who used time itself as a devastating weapon. During the podcast, Fuller talked about how the writers were originally hoping for the Krenim to form a much longer serialized arc, but the idea was rejected by Berman:

The “Year of Hell” and the behind-the-scenes drama not only to craft episode, but that season, was fascinating because we wanted “Year of Hell” to last the entire season. We wanted to see Voyager get its ass kicked every episode and through that season was going to be marbled the story of Annorax and the time ship that was changing things. So, we would go back to it every once in a while to remind the audience that is the larger story. But [it was rejected] because Deep Space Nine made Rick Berman allergic to serialized storytelling, violently so.

Fuller spoke enthusiastically about how the longer serialized arc “charged up” the writers:

We are really going to be on the outskirts of the galaxy and we are going to be fighting enemies that are kicking us when we are down. The crew is going to have to separate and we are going to be following episodes that are going to deal with people on shuttlecrafts with escape pods that are electrically buoyed together. There would be an episode where you never saw Janeway and never saw Voyager because you are with the people who are on the escape pods trying to find a new source of power or safety. It was like creative crack for the writers’ room, because all of a sudden there were so many opportunities.
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Re: Bryan Fuller Describes ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Serialized “Year Of Hell” Season Rejected By Rick Berman

Post by McAvoy »

That idea and Moore's criticisms about the show and what he eventually did with Battlestar Galactica is pretty much Voyager in a nutshell.

Comes up with a really nice fundamentally different Trek idea, and then reject anything that would make the show stand out from TNG and make it as close as possible to TNG as they can.
"Don't underestimate the power of technobabble: the Federation can win anything with the sheer force of bullshit"
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