In the current issue of Star Trek Magazine (Jul/Aug 2007, No. 6), there is an interview with Garrett Wang who played Harry Kim on Star Trek: Voyager. In it, he says something very revealing:
“Some people accuse Harry of being emotionless. Well, we were all told that the actors playing human characters on the show were required to downplay their roles. Why? Because it would make the aliens look more realistic! Can you believe that? And if we tried to sneak in some added emotion they’d make us re-shoot it.”
I can believe it, because it has been one of my loudest criticisms of the various Star Trek spin-offs. As early as the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I wondered why everyone behaved as if they were little more than robots with occasional emotive malfunctions. Now we learn that it was all part of the plan to make aliens more convincing. Oh, the irony.
It’s funny how fans look back at the original Star Trek and remark how believable the aliens seemed despite the sometimes obvious budget limitations. Why? Because the actors, both human and alien, acted believably. The human characters did not muzzle their humanity. On the contrary, in stories that often dealt with the unique triumphs and frailties of the human condition under circumstances of extreme emergency, emotions were often amplified. And did this subvert the believability of the alien characters? Most assuredly it did not. The more that human characters behaved humanly, the more believable their alien counterparts seemed.
Many of the actors came from a professional background where acting was considered an art and had previously displayed their talent in such showcases of science fiction drama as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, where great writing and great acting were the highest goals. Great writing and great acting, and by consequence great characters, were what attracted viewers to Star Trek. The special effects were window dressing.
So, why would anyone want to restrain actors from acting? Perhaps it all lies with the alien forehead fetish prevalent in the spin-offs. As prosthetic make-up is added to an actor’s face, his range of expression is reduced. In order to minimize this disadvantage, maybe they reasoned that human characters deprived of their full range of emotional expression would draw less attention to the aliens’ limitations.
The result, in the end, is that every character of every species eventually seems to be playing a Vulcan of varying degrees with rare emotional (albeit subdued) outbursts. This is somehow supposed to make the aliens “look more realistic,” but all it really succeeds in doing is making everyone look unrealistic.