Acting skill (or the lack thereof?) in the Star Trek Universe.

Okay, so I'll admit it, I'm a Star Trek fan.  No, not like that.  I don't speak Klingon, don't have any Star Trek dolls (action figures, yeah right) and I don't have a hideous red/blue/yellow jumpsuit with pips on the collar hiding in my wardrobe anywhere.  Like I said, I'm not that kind of a fan.

I remember watching the original series in syndication back in the 80's while I was in elementary school and later in jr. and sr. high.  Those episodes were fun to be sure but having not seen many other science fiction television before I didn't have much to base an opinion.  Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) pretty much WAS my sci fi database.  When The Next Generation came out in the late 80's I wasn't a fan really, I remember watching it occasionally if it was on but I never made a habit of sitting down in front of the television just to see it.  Until about the last year or so I probably hadn't see more than 20-25 episodes of TNG and I couldn't have really cared less.

Waht started it for me was about 9 years ago when Star Trek Voyager was coming to the end of it's seven year run.  It was already in syndication and episodes of it came on at 10 or 11pm on weeknights.  For whatever reason I decided to watch it one day and I liked it well enough that I decided to watch again the following night.  In all it was nothing great but it held my attention at least long enough to get me to watch it again the following night which made it three nights in a row.  And then it happened.  That episode, the third that I'd watched was the Voyager episode "Relativity" which was basically a very involved time travel episode, at the time I thought it was much better done and conceived than anything like it I'd seen before, Star Trek or not.  After watching "Relativity" I didn't miss an episode for quite some time.  I ended up actually liking the series even before Jerri Ryan became a cast member, and a lot more after she did!  This led me to get the dvd's so that I could watch all the episodes in sequential order and it also caused me to do the same for the other series, all five in fact.

By now I've seen each series, start to finish, at least once.  I'm finding it hard to go back a re watch TOS simply because it's so far behind the times now and the episodes tend to deal with things like human nature and emotion more than say, being in space.  I'm sure that was necessary in the 60's due to the relative lack of knowledge compared to how things are today, but for me good sci fi needs to have little or nothing to do with human nature and emotions.  That's also the problem I have with TNG and for that matter Deep Space 9 (DS9) and Voyager though to a lesser degree.  Enterprise may well be the one Star Trek series that suffers the least from the Star Trek writers, producers and creators desire to explore humanity even though they did try to do so on a much more macro scale than the others.  With TOS it was Spock who provided the humanity fodder by not understanding human emotions.  On TNG it was Data and his near constant struggle to learn about humanity and try to achieve it for himself.  DS9 parlayed the Cardassian occupation of Bajor into character emotions for and against, though obviously mostly against.  On Voyager, for the first three seasons they lacked that seminal character, the one who didn't understand humanity and their complex emotional needs and responses.  I suppose the Nelix character may have originally been in mind for that role but perhaps since he was so annoying to begin with they didn't want to saddle him with yet another annoying trait.  And then along came Seven.  Seven of Nine, Tertiary adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One.  Seven was a human being who'd been abducted by the borg at a young age and thus knew very little of what real humans were all about, essentially being limited to some few memories of her mother and father.  Seven had to be taught all about humanity, and who better than Captain Janeway to lead the charge.  Sigh.

At any rate, all five of the major series are similar in the way they present humans and other species and the way they interact with each other.  Nearly every alien that's introduced is extremely one dimensional, shallow and derivative.   The Klingons are warriors who don't do anything passively, the Vulcans logical and near completely unemotional and everyone else (except humans) falls somewhere in between and not two places at once.  They're really all there to show different sides of humanity and how a singular attitude or point of view is bad for such emotional beings as ourselves.  If the Star Trek universe is anything like the real universe then it's going to be pretty easy for us to figure out the aliens we meet even if we never acquire esp or the ability to read minds.  If they look bad they probably are, if they look friendly they probably are but with an ulterior motive.  If they look gay then they're probably friendly good-guys.

I guess the main problem I have with the Star Trek universe is just my humanity and emotional self getting all twisted up and bent out of shape, because what I really don't like is all the bad actors.  Really.  I just watched the Star Trek Enterprise series again, start to finish, and I can tell you that very few of them are good enough actors to hold down a full time TV gig on a series not connect with Star Trek.  Jolene Blalock?  Let's face it, she's hot, that's how she got the job as the ships resident Vulcan.  Good thing she was playing a Vulcan by the way because if she did have to show any emotional range her limitations would have become even clearer.  Scott Bakula has been in the business for quite awhile going back to his days on Quantum Leap.  He's a fine enough actor for a Star Trek series but he's not a natural when it comes to things like.... saying words.  Really, whenever his character is supposed to say something important he immediately goes into "acting" mode, you know, like listening to your grandmothers voice mail greeting or watching the worlds worst high school drama team put on a play that's beyond their scope.  Conner Trinneer had his moments, both good and bad, and while I do think he got better as the series went on he simply isn't a great actor.  The worst of the bunch has to be Anthony Montgomery, the helmsman Travis.  EVERYTHING he says sounds like he's saying it in "acting" mode, nothing comes out of his mouth naturally.  To put it another way, if Jolene Blalock got her job because she is attractive then Montgomery must be the best looking guy on earth because he brought nothing whatsoever as far as acting ability.  Dominic Keating, John Billingsly and Linda Park all hold their own very well against the other cast members, as far as their ability goes all three are light years ahead of the rest of the cast members.  They're the only three I could really see surviving on talent in any other prime time series.

Bad acting isn't just a trait of Enterprise either.  In fact every Star Trek series have their own share of poor actors and actresses.  With Voyager it was Garret Wang, Robert Duncan McNeil and Ethan Phillips.  They were clearly outdone by castmates Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Robert Beltran, Roxanne Dawson and even Kate Mulgrew.  Whether you like the Janeway character or not you have to admit that Mulgrew is at least a competent actress, although there are points where you wonder if she understand the scene she's in.  Those are few and far between though and she's generally solid in her role.

DS9 suffered from it's share of bad actors or at least from poor characters whom the actors couldn't do anything with .  Quark and the Ferengi are meant to symbolize greed and having that limitation put on them meant that Armin Shimmerman had very little to work with.  Cirroc Lofton's character Jack is poorly acted as well as the Odo character, played by Rene Auberjonois.  Good actors on DS9?  Well there aren't many, but Nana Visitor, Michael Dorn and Terry Ferrel all are at least adequate and create believable characters.

TNG, besides being the first real series to come along after TOS suffered from poor acting just like the rest.  To this day I don't know why Will Wheaton ever got his job, he's just bad.  Denise Crosby and Diane Muldaur don't act well enough to make their characters believable and while I hate to admit it, Marina Sirtis just isn't very good either.  Yep, the lovely and talented Deanna Troi isn't all that talented after all.  On the plus side for TNG they have perhaps more good actors than any of the other series working for them.  Patrick Steward, Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes all play their characters very well, Stewart especially, and all come off as believable.  Spiner had a particularly difficult task since his character was an android but he proved that an android can act more naturally as a human being than probably 50% of the other actors involved in Star Trek series.

And how about the Grandaddy of them all, TOS?  Well, I'd like to just say Leonard Nimoy is a good actor and leave it at that, but that's impossible.  I don't have enough time or strength to write about William Shattner and while beloved characters like Scotty, Sulu and Chekov are well liked they are not competently acted.  Nichelle Nichols and DeForrest Kelly (Uhura and Bones) both do well in their parts and are much better than they're counterparts yet they still aren't as good as Leonard Nimoy.  It's tough to imagine that series without him and his character, Spock.  Would we even be talking about Star Trek today if it weren't for Spock?

To sum up, it seems to me that the creators of the Star Trek universe like to hire unknown actors who don't cost a lot of money when they're casting a series.  That would seem to put the actors in a tough spot to me since it's very easy to get typecast on Star Trek.  Very few former cast members go on to bigger and better things afterwords.  A few like Scott Bakula and Tim Russ have had prominent roles but then they're both descent actors or at least have the cache in the industry to keep getting work.  No doubt all of the ST actors keep getting jobs but rarely are they high profile jobs.  Many have taken to directing which may be for the best since their talents in front of the camera aren't always obvious.  Roxanne Dawson, Robert Duncan McNeil and LeVar Burton have all directed episodes of Enterprise and Voyager and probably won't get much acting work unless they're asked to reprise their Star Trek roles in the future.  Maybe unknown actors for Star Trek is for the best, maybe it doesn't muddle the waters with actors who've had extensive work and success in the past.  Star Trek characters are unique in that way at least even if they aren't always well thought out or multidimensional.  At least you don't confuse them with characters from other shows you've seen and let your expectations get in the way.