From Kirk’s occasional snifter of Saurian brandy, to Archer’s love of sweet tea, a Star Trek captain can be defined by their drink of choice as much as they can how they tell their conn officer to engage the warp drive. It’s a choice that can say so much about a character, in such a simple way–but none have said it quite so wonderfully as Captain Janeway’s lifelong love of coffee did on Voyager.
30 years ago today, amid the early stages of Star Trek: Voyager‘s first season, “The Cloud” introduced us to Captain Janeway’s love of the good stuff in a legendary moment. The fact that “The Cloud” is mostly remembered for the wry smile on Kate Mulgrew’s lips as she purrs “There’s coffee in that nebula” might say a lot about what is otherwise a pretty blah episode of Star Trek–the crew go into the aforementioned nebula hoping to bolster their energy supply, they find out the nebula is actually an organic being after damaging it, they choose to repair the damage despite the cost to their dwindled reserves because it’s the Starfleet thing to do, and they go about their business. It’s fine! But in among the perfectly serviceable Trek premise is one of the best moments of characterisation Janeway first gets on the show.
Entering the ship’s transformed mess hall to the usual chaos of Neelix’s cooking, Captain Janeway is on the hunt for only one kind of sustenance. She brushes aside the absurdity of what’s before her, she bats away Neelix’s suspicious attempts at a charm offensive. “Do we have any coffee left,” Janeway asks, a look of pained exasperation on her face befitting the look of anyone, Starfleet captain or otherwise, who embodies that “nobody talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” persona. Things only get worse for her and Neelix alike when he suggests that she avoid setting a bad example for the crew by using her replicator rations on java, instead offering his own “better than coffee substitute,” at which point Janeway glares at him with the look of a woman who is just about to rip him apart with her bare hands–his safety only guaranteed when she’s called away to the bridge, leading to that now iconic line.
At this point in Voyager the show is still trying to grapple with what being flung 70,000 light years from Federation means for a Starfleet ship, mostly in terms of resource scarcity–the entire premise of “The Cloud” is built around it, and perhaps the most interesting thing it has going on for it beyond the introduction of Janeway’s coffee habit is that the crew actually fails to resolve the situation, and ends up worse off heading out of the story than it does going in. But it ties Janeway’s coffee directly into that plight, personifying it, but also mirroring that failure through it. It’s her eagerness for coffee (via expanding Voyager‘s energy reserves) that arguably leads to the whole error of the episode in the first place, and its costly ramifications. It’s a lack thereof that has her, rather relatably, wanting to fix Neelix with a look deadlier than a phaser on max settings when he dares to suggest she go without. It’s not just a personality trait that she likes coffee, it’s that Janeway is willing to have it be almost a failing for her at times: she doesn’t care what you think of her, but regardless of who you are, if you’re between her and a cup, she’ll let you know that you’ve pissed her off.
It’s a fascinating comparison to the most famous mirror in the franchise at the time, Picard’s love of earl grey tea. Putting aside the fact it tastes like dishwater, Picard’s drink of choice is portrayed as a wholly noble trait of his. Star Trek might be set in a pan-interplanetary utopia where individual nation states mean very little, but it’s still a series made by a contemporary, American studio, and a largely American audience: tea has connotations of exoticism to that audience, and perhaps more pointedly an image of class connotation, connecting Picard to the American perception of English culture as posh and elite (despite the fact he’s a Frenchman played by a classically trained English actor). Tea, especially as specific a tea as earl grey, suggests refinement, taste, a certain intellectual and cultural leaning: of course it’s the drink of choice for a 24th century starship captain and his higher ideals.
But Coffee? Coffee has much more purchase in American culture, it’s the hot drink of the masses. It is associated with that attitude that it lifts spirits in such a way that you dare not cross someone who’s gone without it in a way that a similarly obsessive tea habit doesn’t. Giving Janeway a love of coffee doesn’t just humanize her, it becomes part of a nuanced picture of her as a person in that it’s occasionally treated as a flaw as much as it is a charming aspect of her character. It brings the position of a Captain right back down to earth, metaphorically speaking considering how far away from it Janeway is for the bulk of the show, that she too, just like us, can be surprisingly intimidating to deal with if she’s not plied her brain with a caffeine fix beforehand.
As Voyager progresses over the course of its seven-season run, Janeway’s love of coffee persists–and arguably becomes a much warmer aspect of her character than it is when it’s first introduced, the drink that she finely remembers as what helped her beat the Borg. But it doesn’t entirely forget this relatably flawed aspect of that love entirely. There’s still more than a few moments where she will steelily gaze at someone (mostly Neelix) and demand “Coffee, black” before anything else can be done. 30 years ago today she may not have found any in that nebula-that-wasn’t, but we found a wonderfully human layer in her that remains one of Voyager‘s sweetest little touches of characterization.
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