Voyager Ending 'Bittersweet' For Brannon Braga

Brannon Braga left his position as Voyager executive producer at the end of season seven, but in a new interview he said the upcoming end still felt "very bittersweet".

"There's a mixture of melancholy," he told the Sci-Fi Wire. "I knew I would miss the characters. But also a tremendous relief to not have to churn out stories week after week for these characters that I'd been doing for six years."

Looking back, Braga said everyone working on the show was very pleased with what happened with Voyager over the past seven years, and in fact the series was his favourite. "I felt more proud of my work on Voyager than of my work on The Next Generation. I thought it was a Star Trek show that had a certain level of sophistication in its storytelling, and I certainly felt closer to it, because I was involved with it from the beginning. And I think we pushed Star Trek one step further into modern times and did some nice things. At the end of a series, if you work on a series like that for six years, you kind of look back, and you realize that out of 100 episodes, you're really really proud of 10; you're kind of proud of 30, and the rest is all varying degrees of disappointment, because it's so hard to produce a television show. So I just hope that the fans were surprised and enjoyed the show."

For Braga the end of Voyager may not be as hard as for other people associated with the Voyager production. "I actually more or less left Voyager early this season [to develop Series V]," he explained. "I wrote a handful of episodes, but my producing chores ended ... at the end of last year. So I got through my emotional parting at that time."

Speaking of Series V, Braga told the Sci-Fi Wire that details of the show would be announced within the next few weeks. "All that I can tell you on the record is that Rick Berman and I have written a pilot, and we're gearing up to make the pilot," he said. "But in terms of the dates and in terms of when the show would premiere and where it will be, I don't know. I don't really know at this point. It depends on a lot of variables. The [impending writers' and actors' union] strikes, definitely--if there are two strikes, that's going to have a huge effect."

Braga did say that he was "reading the Internet rumours, with some amusement, just like everybody else." The level of detail in some of the rumours managed to amaze him. "But this is nothing new for Star Trek, you know? I remember the day after we wrote the movie First Contact. A day later, the whole story was on the Internet. I don't know how it gets out. And initially, you're kind of upset when it does. But then you realize, 'Thank God people are interested enough to go to those lengths.' It's publicity. And better obsessive interest than no interest at all."

For the full interview with Brannon Braga, click here to read more about his thoughts on Voyager, and here for a few more comments on Series V.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!