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By Chris Snellgrove
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Star Trek is full of food and drink that would challenge the most adventurous palate. This includes bloodwine, live worms, Yamok sauce, and the scariest thing of all: Riker’s scrambled eggs. However, you could say this is only fitting because many parts of Trek’s unique storytelling are also an acquired taste. My favorite examples of this are holodeck episodes. Some fans like these stories because they are typically lighthearted and show us an entirely new side of these characters. Others hate holodeck episodes because they are silly trifles that get in the way of exploring strange new worlds and telling killer sci-fi stories.
Early on in Star Trek: Voyagerthe writers tried to do something a bit different with the holodeck: namely, using it to create regular locations for characters to unwind. Instead of one-off holodeck episodes like the kind in The Next Generationthis new show had crew members regularly relax in places like Chez Sandrine, a swanky French bar. Fans generally liked that place (it’s like a classier Ten Forward!), but there was one holodeck program on Voyager they hated. The program was “Janeway Lambda One,” and fans despised the captain’s submissive gothic fantasy so much that it was written out of the show altogether!
Holo Passion
Admittedly, “Janeway Lambda One” is not the most creative title for a holodeck program. Its story wasn’t all that creative, either. In this particular fantasy, Janeway plays governess to a rich lord’s two children. The lord is a widower, and the captain is trying to help the children cope with the recent loss of their mother. Most of the time, she spent her time bonding with these children by teaching them. When she wasn’t spending time helping out the kiddos, she tried learning more about the fourth floor of her lord’s home, somewhere she is surprisingly forbidden to visit.
Originally, Janeway Lambda One was a way of giving the Voyager captain her own holonovel to explore, the same way Captain Picard liked to re-enact his favorite Dixon Hill novels. Originally, producers wanted to give Janeway a Western holonovel where she would be a pioneer woman traveling with her husband and children. However, that plan had two problems: Kate Mulgrew hated working with horses, and adding the holo-Western to an episode could have cost an extra $100,000 per day of shooting. Instead, they pivoted to a much more affordable Gothic holo-novel in the style of books preferred by executive producer Jeri Taylor.
Submissive And Beamable
Unfortunately, fans hated Janeway Lambda One so much that it was written out of the show, and we never got a resolution to that mystery about the fourth floor. What did audiences dislike about this holodeck program, though? According to Captains’ Logs Supplemental–The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek VoyagesTaylor said that the program was “one of those things…we were not getting the feedback from the fans that seemed to justify its continuing. A lot of people had problems with Janeway being in what would be considered a servile position.” And, of course, “A lot of people just aren’t fans…of Gothic novels and just sort of didn’t get it.”
What’s up with the “servile position” complaints? Basically, when Star Trek: Voyager came out, it was a big deal that the show had a female captain. Accordingly, she wasn’t written as an overly nurturing or emotional character; instead, she was a tough-as-nails character who could make hard calls with the same dispassionate wisdom as male leaders like Kirk and Picard. In other words, she was the ultimate feminist icon of the ‘90s. Fans who looked up to her as an independent badass leader didn’t like the idea that she spent her spare time daydreaming about being a babysitter and love interest to some rich guy who has immense power over her.
In real life, this isn’t such a crazy idea: many people who are powerful and independent in their professional lives actually enjoy submissive roleplaying as a kind of escapism (just ask your local kinksters!). But that’s an idea that 1) doesn’t really translate well to Star Trek and 2) wouldn’t work in the ‘90s, when the kinkiest thing most audiences had ever seen was Secretary. Accordingly, “Janeway Lambda One” was written out of the show, allowing Janeway to explore a sexier adventure in a later episode that began with that three-word phrase all holodeck husbands love to hear: “delete the wife!”
