By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Star Trek is a franchise that has always been known for its colorful villains: from the Klingons to the Borg, the episodes have always given us super villains like the audience had never seen before. However, the iconic villains of the popular spinoff were actually modeled after the type of real-life villain that audiences are most familiar with. In Star Trek: Voyagerthe alien Kazons were conceived as a group of street gangs in Los Angeles, but it took an entire season before one writer helped them become this special mold.
During the development of Voyagerproducers Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor wanted to create a new type of villain that represented the current concern. As quoted in Captains’ Logs Supplemental – The Unauthorized Guide to the New JourneyTaylor said “We felt with Kazon that we needed to deal with the situation of our times and what was happening in our cities and we saw the source of danger and chaos in society. We wanted to do that in a symbolic way.”
Blood, Crips, and Kazon
Piller (who almost changed on his own Star Trek: The Next Generation on must-see TV) liked the idea of villains embracing chaos and potentially fighting each other like they do with Captain Janeway. He and the other producers kept the LA gang metaphor alive, internally comparing the different Kazon gangs to the Bloods and Crips. They were all into these new villains, that’s why Voyager The first episode and its first season introduced various groups of Kazon as a continuation of our group’s quest to navigate the Delta Quadrant and eventually return home.
Unfortunately, the audience hated the Kazon in Season 1, and Michael Piller believed that the writers failed to turn these aliens into something truly unique. After Ken Biller wrote the first draft of the Season 2 episode “Initiations,” Piller called him back (as originally reported by It’s cinematic) expressed his concern that the audience saw the Kazon as “warm over the Klingons.” In order to bring these gangsters back to their roots, Piller gave Biller an unmanageable homework: to go talk to real gang members and report “what you find on the street.”
Biller did not take this dangerous advice outright, but he he did go buy a copy of Monster: Autobiography of an LA Gang Memberwritten (inside prison, no less) by Sanyika “Monster” Shakur. The information from the book helped the author to do better Star Trek: Voyager episode, and Piller was very happy with the final draft of “Initiations.” But what made him even more happy was that Biller went beyond his job to breathe new life into the Kazons.
The Secret to Building a Better Villain
You see, Biller wrote a sort of mini-Kazon Bible that explains their culture, history, and other key social aspects. This was very helpful because Star Trek: Voyager has already planned to dedicate its second season to Kazon, the basis of which is to give itself a second chance to make a good impression on the viewers. Whenever the writers had to do a heavy Kazon episode (like “Alliances”), they relied on Biller’s script, which ended up making the Kazon feel like something different than the Temu Klingons.
To this day, the Kazons aren’t exactly fan favorite villains, but they are arguably the most prominent. Star Trek: Voyager they are bad. In a show that will be dominated (or should that be equated?) by Borg episodes, the Kazon remains the original creation that helped shape it. Voyager in one of Trek’s most popular spinoffs. But that wouldn’t have happened if Michael Piller and Ken Biller hadn’t teamed up to do the impossible: return these angry immigrants to their inexplicable gangbanger roots.
