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Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast

Jul 19, 2021

Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek's Directors' School.

To Star Trek fans, he is Tom Paris, the cocksure pilot of the USS Voyager. But in Hollywood, Robert Duncan McNeill is better known as a different kind of helmsman. From his first day of filming on the Voyager pilot "Caretaker," McNeill declared his intention to...


Jul 1, 2021

Twenty Thousand Leagues across the Delta Quadrant. 

Throughout Star Trek: Voyager’s seven seasons, Tom Paris repeatedly proved his credentials as a mid-20th-century history buff, with his replicated TV set, black-and-white B-movie holonovels, and even his own 3D cinema. But in the fifth-season episode “Thirty...


Apr 15, 2021

Suspiria and “Cold Fire”

Despite being teased in the series premiere, it took Star Trek: Voyager well over a year to actually introduce its female caretaker, a being with the power to send the ship home on a whim. And when the entity did appear, in the second-season episode “Cold Fire,” she turned out to have a...


Jan 16, 2020

Looking back on 25 years of Star Trek: Voyager.

On January 16, 1995, Star Trek got lost in space. The premiere of the fourth live-action Star Trek series offered not just the franchise’s much-anticipated first female captain (something explicitly ruled out in the final episode of The Original Series) but a strong...


May 30, 2019

Galileo and “Distant Origin.”

That Galileo Galilei, the man who Albert Einstein called “the father of modern science,” turned up on Star Trek: Voyager should come as no surprise. The series was, after all, the first in the franchise to feature a captain with a scientific background. The story of the legendary...