One Voyager Actor Hated Being On The Bridge
Most Star Trek actors really love shooting scenes on the bridge of a starship. For one thing, this helps them channel the energy of Original Series icons like Kirk and Spock; for another thing, the bridge is where most of the action in any given episode takes place. However, Ensign Kim actor Garrett Wang once admitted that he didn’t like the “harsh light…on the bridge set” and particularly enjoyed the episode “Prime Factors” because he got to shoot a scene in “sunset-type lighting.”
Prime Factors
To fully understand why Garrett Wang didn’t like shooting scenes on the Voyager bridge, you need to know a bit more about the episode he was talking about.
“Prime Factors” is a season 1 Voyager episode where the crew encounters a planet with technology that might help them jump 40,000 lightyears closer to home. Kim gets to check the technology out in the best possible way: by going on a date with a cute local.
Early on in this episode, Garrett Wang’s character gets to leave the bridge and go on an Away Team mission to the planet Sikaris.
At first, Janeway and her crew are mostly interested in simply learning more about this strange new world and (as advised by Neelix) purchasing some seeds so the ship can grow more of its own food on the long journey back to the Alpha Quadrant.
Harry And Eudana
Soon enough, Ensign Kim meets a local named Eudana, and they bond over something suitably dorky: how to use an atmospheric sensor. They hit it off, and later that night, he starts dropping the heavy details about how he and everyone else got stranded in the Delta Quadrant in the first place.
She suggests going somewhere private, but instead of taking the young officer to her bedroom, they step on a platform and are transported to a different planet 40,000 lightyears away, complete with a Star Wars-style double sunset.
Great Lighting
Being a good junior officer, Kim immediately wants to cancel their date and go report on this new transportation technology to Captain Janeway. As for Garrett Wang, it sounds like he would have liked this scene to go longer because it was a welcome excuse to leave the bridge set.
As he later confided to Starlog, this was an episode where “I got that sunset-type lighting which looks great on anybody.”
Lighting Issues
Weirdly enough, we never thought about the lighting in this way until the actor pointed it out. Typically, modern discussions about the lighting in Star Trek are just an excuse to complain about the weirdly dark bridge sets on shows like Discovery and Picard.
Garrett Wang’s comments are proof that the classic era of Star Trek had its own lighting problem–namely, that even the prettiest cast member (and make no mistake, Voyager had a very pretty cast) looked washed out whenever they were on the bridge.
Reality Blends With Fiction
While we feel bad that Garrett Wang and presumably some of his colleagues disliked the bridge lighting, we do find it funny how this likely helped them get into their characters’ mindset. Just as these officers were always eager to go on Away Teams because they feel cooped up, the actors playing them are just as eager to go on Away Teams because they finally get better lighting.
Maybe this is what got all those redshirts killed back in Kirk’s day: they risked life, limb, and the occasional salt vampire, all in the name of getting lighting good enough for a proper selfie.
