By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Here’s a story that dates me (hey, it’s not like anyone else was dating me at the time): I was a high school student when Star Trek: Voyager was on the air. I watched the show with the rest of my geeky friends, and we generally enjoyed the wacky adventures of Captain Janeway and her misfit crew. We also spent hours (and I mean hours) making fun of Neelix. He was the ship’s cook, but he might as well have been its mascot because he was always written as the broadest form of comic relief. Why, we wondered, did Star Trek go out of its way to make a new character such a butt-of-the-joke oaf?
As it turns out, Voyager showrunner Michael Piller shared those same concerns. When reading the script for the Season 2 episode “Twisted,” he began to worry that the writers were transforming Neelix into nothing more than “the buffoon of the ship.” That’s when Piller decided to take definitive action. He didn’t make Neelix into a deadly serious character, but he decided to do the next best thing. In the very next episode, he removed the character’s growing jealous streak that he rightly assumed viewers would absolutely hate.
Orange Man Bad
This all goes back to the most problematic thing about Neelix: his extremely underage girlfriend. In the Voyager premiere episode “Caretaker,” Neelix goes out of his way to save Kes, his Ocampan mate, and they both join Captain Janeway’s crew. Kes presents as an attractive young woman in her early ‘20s, but her species ages at a different rate than those of us here on Earth. She’s only one year old when she joins the crew (no, really!), and the writers had to take care not to present Neelix as the dirtiest old man in the Delta Quadrant.
That’s actually how Michael Piller’s concerns about Neelix began. The previous episode, “Elogium,” dealt with Kes’s mating drive activating years ahead of time, forcing her and Neelix to consider whether they were ready for children. While it’s bizarre enough to watch the weird orange alien try to figure out if he is ready to breed his one-year-old girlfriend, “Elogium” also made Neelix into a jealous figure. Specifically, he started thinking Tom Paris was being too friendly towards her and that the pilot was secretly trying to put the moves on Kes.
Jealousy, That Orange-Skinned Monster
When Piller read the script for “Twisted,” he became concerned about an early plot point in which the crew was celebrating Kes’s birthday (she had finally turned two). Neelix made her a cake, but Tom Paris gave her a locket. Once more, Neelix felt jealous of the hotshot human pilot. According to Captains’ Logs Supplemental – The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, Piller was “terribly concerned about Neelix.” He was “afraid we were going to destroy this character if we made him the buffoon of the ship. If all he is is comic relief, we’re in trouble.”
For better or for worse, Piller decided to focus on only one of the ways the writers had transformed Neelix into the comic relief: his jealousy. “The jealousy he was showing toward Kes was becoming irritating, so we wanted to put that to bed quickly,” he said. Accordingly, Piller made sure that “Parturition” (the episode that came directly after “Twisted”) killed this particular character conflict. That episode begins with Neelix and Paris having a fight over Kes, but then they are sent on a mission where they crash land on a hellish planet. They must fight for their survival and take care of a baby alien, ultimately becoming friends who never fight over Kes again.
It’s a heavy-handed fix, admittedly, but Michael Piller’s decision is one that Gene Roddenberry would have agreed with. The Star Trek creator never wanted his main characters to constantly bicker with one another, but Paris and Neelix were constantly fighting over Kes. Thanks to “Parturition,” Piller effectively killed the conflict that was driving these two characters apart. If you think that kept Neelix from being written as bad comic relief, though, I’ve got a whole shipload full of leola roots to sell you!
