The Star Trek Actor Who Took Acting Cues From Ninjas
While the famous science fiction franchise Star Trek has effectively crossed over with other genres (including the fantasy and musical genres), it has rarely gone all-in on martial arts. In fact, The Original Series was somewhat infamous for devising its own over-the-top fight moves, like the double-handed punching technique fans cheekily nicknamed “Kirk-Fu.’ However, the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Emanations” is an exception to this rule because actor Garrett Wang tried using ninja techniques to believably look dead onscreen.
Garret Wang Channels Ninja Energy
Before we can detail how a Star Trek star used ninjas for acting tips, we need to review the episode in question. “Emanations” is an episode where, like many redshirts before him, Harry Kim ends up getting killed on an Away Team mission. Unlike those earlier hapless officers, though, we see the erstwhile ensign wake up in a kind of alien afterlife.
He isn’t willing to accept his fate, however, and eventually takes a wonderfully insane gamble. The aliens around him believe that he comes from “the next emanation,” which is their afterlife. Kim eventually consents to being euthanized, and for Star Trek: Voyager actor Garrett Wang, this is where his knowledge of ninjas came in handy.
Manifesting His Own On-Screen Death
Kim’s body is dead when Voyager finds it, and he is brought back to life by the ship’s holographic Doctor. Of course, acting completely lifeless was going to be a major challenge to the young actor. Wang then decided to try an ancient trick to get this scene just right: “When I was pretending to be dead, I concentrated on trying to slow my heartbeat down and on physical things and manifestations.”
Expert Aura Assassination
If that technique sounds familiar, then you and Wang likely grew up reading the same martial arts trivia. According to the Star Trek actor, “When I was young and on my martial arts kick, I would read about ninjas who are going to attack and people won’t know it because they’ve sucked in their aura.” While he simply had to play dead onscreen rather than attack someone, Wang found these ninja techniques useful for this difficult acting challenge, and his efforts were a success: he really did look quite dead onscreen.
The Many Deaths Of Harry Kim
In a weird twist, Star Trek: Voyager kept killing Harry Kim in future episodes, but Wang didn’t really get to put his ninja training to further use. When Kim died again in “Deadlock,” he was sucked into the vacuum of space, so the camera didn’t exactly linger on his dead form as it did in “Emanations.” And in the episode “Timeless,” an alternate reality future Kim died in a warp core explosion, giving him the kind of explosive death that most ninjas outside of Mortal Kombat never have to worry about.
Embracing The Ninja Code
As big fans of Star Trek in general and Garrett Wang in particular, we found this entire anecdote quite charming because the young actor taking inspiration from half-remembered ninja stories sounds like exactly what we would have done in his place. And let’s be real: Voyager would have been a cooler show if it had more ninja inspiration in various episodes. For example, after serving one too many inedible dishes to the crew, it would have been nice for Neelix to commit seppuku in order to die with dignity, a subject the euthanasia-loving “Emanations” aliens would most likely respect.
