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For Janeway, captain of the Starship USS Voyager on the UPN series "Star Trek:Voyager," home is planet Earth. For 4 1/2 years, Janeway and her crew have roamed the Delta Quadrant in search of a wormhole or some other route.
For Mulgrew, single mother of two, home is freedom from 80-hour workweeks and shoots that can go on until 3 a.m. It's obtaining some sort of sensible life with her teenage sons. Ian, 14, and Alexander, 13, resent that their mother is never around.
"They need a mother, and they got a celebrity," Mulgrew told an intimate gathering of TV reporters in a brief but unusually candid chat here. "They need milk and cookies, and they got a housekeeper. There's just no question they'd like me to walk out and never look back.
"But I had no choice. First of all, I needed this job. My career was not going well. I wanted it. I was determined to do well by it and with it. And they, too, initially, loved it. But to have their mother summarily lifted from the house as if by a spaceship ..." One way Ian expresses his displeasure is by not watching the show. Alexander will only watch now and then.
"This business of being in the vanguard of the women in the '90s is very interesting," she said. "I will write about this... I want a few months, even if they're not in the house, to be able to cook them dinner and have them just walk in the room and know that I'm there.
"And I want this man that I'm in love with. And I'm going to have him."
The man, Tom [sic] Hagen lives in Cleveland and has children of his own, two girls, 11 and 9. Mulgrew, whose marriage to Robert Egan ended 5 1/2 years ago, said she hopes to marry this summer, maybe in June, "but it's crucial that the four kids approve. It's a delicate situation."
Mulgrew's presence here, as part of UPN's winter session with the TV press, was necessarily brief -- she was due back on the Paramount set for more "Voyager" work. Despite her protests, Mulgrew is committed to "Voyager" for another season after this one, and "probably" will do one more after that.
"I've been dedicated to Janeway from the get-go," she said, "but I didn't think I'd love her this much. I love this character."
Upcoming is a two-parter, shot mostly in black and white, in which Janeway is swept back to the 1930s and deals directly with Lt. Tom Paris' "holonovel" character, the evil Dr. Chaotica. She'll play the novel's powerful Queen Arachnea.
"I love Janeway, but she's the height of restraint and dignity," she said. "In this, I'm a complete vamp. The whole thing is so extravagant, so outre and so funny. I was amazed they allowed me to play it. It's a delicious departure for me because I don't usually get to play parts like that. And it was so needed."
Although no end to the series is in sight, she can envision "one season devoted to [the Voyager crew] reaching home and the provocative things that develop."
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