By GustavoLeao / 18:20, 7 July 2009 / Voyager

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On January 16th 1995, a new network was launched with the premiere of the fourth series in the STAR TREK franchise. STAR TREK VOYAGER premiered on UPN with the two-hour pilot episode "The Caretaker".

In the pilot episode, we meet Kathryn Janeway, Captain of the USS Voyager NCC 74656, who commands the Intrepid class starship with a crew of 141, bio-neural circuitary, and a holographic doctor.While trying to rescue a renegade Marquis ship in the Badlands, the Caretaker transports both ships 70k lights years from earth and the crew must join forces to survive and get home.

Now, TrekWeb takes a look at the genesis of the first Starfleet female captain, 'Kathryn Janeway'

"The feeling was that the best direction for us to go in terms of trying new things, being socially responsible as STAR TREK has always been, was to go for a female captain." executive producer Rick Berman said in a video interview found in the VOYAGER First Season DVD "The Studio wasn't totally convinced about it, and we agreed that we would also look at male actors and, you know, be sure that we kept an open mind."

"When the casting process was over the selection that was made was one wonderful French-Canadian actress named Geneviève Bujold who got the job."

"In meeting her ... she's a very lovely lady ... I immediately sensed this wasn't a person who was the slightest bit ready to live through the drudgery of episodic television." Berman said "It's a vastly different world from features. So, I sat her down and said "I want to play a major devil's advocate here to you." I explained to her in painful detail what a nightmare episodic television is. Up at 5:00 A.M. on Mondays and Tuesdays, working till 1:00 A.M. on Thursdays and Fridays. Almost no rehearsal time. Instead of doing one or two pages of script a day like in features, she'd be doing seven or eight. Never knowing her directors, and working with them whether she liked them or not. I painted as dismal a picture as I could ... even worse than it actually is. I sent her home to Malibu to talk with her children and to discuss it over the weekend. She called me first thing Monday morning and she said, "Reek, Reek, I have an answer for you. And the answer is Oui." I asked Michael and Jeri to come over here and I said, "Well, she said 'yes.' Actually she said 'oui,' but she said yes." And I still didn't buy it. I still said this ain't gonna work."

The character's original name was Elizabeth Janeway, which was changed for legal reasons to Captain Nicole Janeway, as explained by Jeri Taylor to a 1995 issue of Cinefatastique : "There is a prominent Elizabeth Janeway, and we're not allowed to use names of prominent people because it can be sticky, although we heard sort of secondhand that Elizabeth Janeway was flattered about it. It then changed again to Nicole at Genevieve Bujold's request, because that is in fact her given name and she wanted that. For two days it was Nicole Janeway (then Bujold left during the second day of filming; when she left, the name Nicole was abandoned) and then when Kate came on board, it was Kathryn - in fact the name we'd already chosen even before Kate was cast in the role."

"She's (Bujold's) a very very good actor and I'm sure that if we had been doing a motion picture she would've been phenomenal." said Berman "But there was enough going on in that first day or two that we realised that for everybody's sake it was best to go in another direction."

"We went back to the drawing board and the first runner-up had always been Kate Mulgrew." Berman continues "She had been someone I had always been very fond of and so had the Studio and so had Michael (Piller) and Jeri (Taylor), and luckily Kate Mulgrew was still available, and we struck a deal, and within a week or so we were back in production."

"I was introduced to Geneviève, and we all took the tour of the sets together." said Robert Picardo (The Doctor) "My understand was that she had very strong ideas of what she wanted to do. There were certain basic conventions of being a captain on the bridge that she would not give into. An example I was given by one of the other actors was she would say 'Engage' like it was a private moment. You're actually teling the guy over there to take off, so you have to go 'ENGAGE!'. If you just go [whispers] 'Engage', the guy at the control just goes, 'What? Do I take off now?' Then I also heard that she was used to the feature film world where you shoot a page of material a day, and we do seven to nine a day. It was a mutual parting of the ways. We were a ship without a captain. Everyone was nervous. There was this tremendous feeling among he crew that any one of us could go. When they cast Kate, who is such a professional and an actress whose work I've known for a log time, there was a sigh of relief. She has the natural ability of command, tremendous ability of language and all the strength to be a commander but with vulnerability. When she looks into your eyes, she searches for what's happening with you. We knew immediately that we were in good hands."

Enter Katherine Kiernan Mulgrew. She was born on April 29, 1955, and raised in Dubuque Iowa. She was the second oldest (eldest girl) of 8 children. At age 17, she left for New York City to study acting. Kate enrolled at New York University and was accepted in to Stella Adler's Conservatory. However, at the end of her junior year, she left the university to commit herself full-time to acting.

"It was a very fortunate thing for me that when I was auditioning for Janeway, I was unaware of the magnitude of this, I would call it a culture, of STAR TREK." said Kate Mulgrew, who won the Saturn Award for "Best Genre TV Actress" for her role as Captain Janeway "I was only and myopically, and thanks be to God Almighty in His glory and goodness, concentrating on that kind of Elizabeth Janeway, they've now retitled her Kathryn Janeway, and that's a good thing because there were no other intrusions into that process for me. Who's not aware of STAR TREK? You'd have to be in an absolute paper bag not to be, not to know about it. However, it was peripheral knowledge. In no way did I find myself connected to it, I was not a Trekker by any stretch of the imagination, and neither was I a science fiction buff. If anything I would say I was to the reverse. So when it, the audition process, came about and they expressed some interest in me I thought it was fascinating, and actually quite clever of Rick Berman."

"I mean, it was a stunning thing." she continues "I did one once, weeks before the final one, went to Europe, came back, this awful thing had happened and she'd [Bujold] defected and now they were scrambling and so, as I said, they brought in the five of us and, you know, going to Network's an appalling system but it still stands and you do a knock-out one by one. We were all there at the end of the day. Go figure. Nobody could conclude who had won this, so we went home. It was Yom Kippur. The town shuts down, as you know, for this high Jewish holiday and I gave it up. I just thought, "Well, probably not. Forward and onward." And it meant very little to me. However, when I got home at the end of the second day of the holiday, I was greeted by my sons who screamed at me to answer, to play my answering machine, and he was on it. He said: "Rick Berman. Just wanted to welcome you aboard, Captain."

And the rest was history...

Thanks to the Janet's Star Trek Voyager Site for the transcripts from the DVD interviews.