So after a rewatch of DS9 (still holds up, some episodes even better than when they came out) I thought I'd try Voyager to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
IMHO, it's worse.
Which is bizarre because it followed TNG and DS9, both of which are quite watchable still, and had a lot of the same folks behind the camera.
And at its core is a really good idea, a ship lost far from home with a crew assembled from Starfleet folks and freedom fighters/terrorist/criminals from the Marque. Limited resources, internal tensions, new threats... it should have worked.
But it doesn't. Many episodes are terrible, like 1st season TNG terrible, some are serviceable and the very best episodes only rise to the level of good.
(for the record the 2 good ones I found are Equinox and Year of Hell. In Equinox the Voyager crew finds another Star Fleet ship that's been utterly trashed and is trying to get home by kidnapping and torturing aliens for fuel. In Year of Hell Voyager is hunted (and blown to hell) by aliens with time weapons. It has a built in reset button but at least is entertaining. Is it a coincidence that both went to very dark places?)
Some of it may just have been exhaustion of the formula after 14 seasons of TNG and DS9 (which might explain why Enterprise was even worse). The last 2 TNG films were pretty awful too.
But it might also be that the show was in the awkward period in TV history when networks were trying serialized shows (instead resetting to the status quo at the end of every episode) but not yet committed. But considering that Buffy and B5 had already done serialized programs (to say nothing of shows like Dallas and Dynasty) it's more that Paramount made a decision not to build from episode to episode despite a concept that really called for it.
I’ve heard it oft blamed on the show having different writers for different episodes who didn’t always agree or communicate their intentions well, so you end up with like bi polar Janeway who’s a by the book Prime Directive adherent one week, and a rogue I’m getting my crew home no matter what the next. And then there’s the time Paris was turned into a newt and had newt babies, but he got better.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: So after a rewatch of DS9 (still holds up, some episodes even better than when they came out) I thought I'd try Voyager to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
IMHO, it's worse.
Which is bizarre because it followed TNG and DS9, both of which are quite watchable still, and had a lot of the same folks behind the camera.
I dunno. Any thoughts?
The Leftists and feminists who wrote and cast the show made sure the concept was destroyed before it even started.
The Leftists and feminists who wrote and cast the show made sure the concept was destroyed before it even started.
That's where you wanna go for your second post huh?
You won't be here long.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
AduroT wrote: I’ve heard it oft blamed on the show having different writers for different episodes who didn’t always agree or communicate their intentions well, so you end up with like bi polar Janeway who’s a by the book Prime Directive adherent one week, and a rogue I’m getting my crew home no matter what the next. And then there’s the time Paris was turned into a newt and had newt babies, but he got better.
Different writers for different episodes? Heck they had different writers for the A and B plots!
A plot - we have no power, we can't replicate food, we're gonna die.
B plot - Janeway's holodeck program as a governess in a haunted manor
TNG had the same issue
A plot - monsters are eating the hull! we gonna die!
B plot - Luxanna Troi's wedding preparation
But TNG managed to pull it off more times than not.
-The writers couldn't stick to the concept a lot of the time. This includes both the course of certain characters and the show itself. Many episodes have solid concepts that they failed to follow through on, or really fethed up messages (Tuvix). The show had a survival/adventure theme but rarely fully utilized it. Voyager would only occasionally have supply problems and would often engage in fights only to miraculously repair next episode which doesn't work when you're so far from base. Rarely did it feel like Voyager was as far from home as everyone insisted. The show basically never fully explored its potentially best theme; how would a Starfleet crew far from the Federation stick to their ideals/break from them when in desperate times? Of course, that would mean embracing the moral complexity that was brought to the fore in DS9 which the writers of Voyager explicitly wanted to avoid.
-The cast never got along and while I don't think this is too obvious on screen, you can kind of see it compared to TNG and DS9 where the cast often got along quite well and made the show better because they all got along. Voyager had constant arguments over billing, feuds between the cast (Beltran and Picardo being quite infamous for it), and this compounded with the arrested development of numerous character arcs that simply weren't allowed to advance (eternal ensign Kim). At the end of the day only The Doctor and Seven actually had any character development. The rest of the cast was more often than not inconsistently written.
I'd agree there was awkwardness in the late 90s as TV began moving to serialized storytelling and away from episodic, but I'd point out Voyager was explicitly a backstep on this front. DS9 is (IMO) the high water mark of Star Trek and its balance of serial story telling vs episodic relief is a big reason for why. Voyager in comparison was explicitly written to recapture the style of TOS, and don't get me wrong TOS has a special place in my heart but TOS is gak. TOS wasn't aging well even when TNG was starting and the idea of throwing the franchise back to that style of storytelling was practically self-sabotage by nostalgia nuts who wanted to relieve the good old days ignoring they weren't that good (and I'd accuse Kurtzman's tenure of almost universally committing the same cardinal sin). Much like TOS, Voyager really only has maybe a dozen actually good episodes. The rest are utterly forgettable and get more forgettable each passing year.
1) A lot of the writing was just plain bad. Awkward "moral dilemmas", bad science, shameless "LOOK BOOBS", plot elements that are never followed up on, etc. Too much of the show feels like they gave a budget to some 14 year old's Star Trek fanfiction instead of paying for real writers. And it extends to the entire premise of the show. Does nobody in Starfleet know how to make a timed explosive? Voyager should have been a one-episode tangent in TNG or DS9, where they plant a timed bomb on the plot device and go home.
2) The entire premise is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of show they were trying to make. A show in a fairly static setting where each episode stands alone works. A show where you have a single story broken up into multiple episodes that need to be watched in sequence works. But with Voyager you had the overall plot arc of getting home that had to still be compatible with hitting the reset button at the end of the episode. So it completely undermined any sense of meaning when the crew encountered a new thing that might get them home faster. You knew as soon as they mentioned it that the technobabble thing of the week would inevitably fail to work for whatever technobabble reason and they'd be no closer to getting home than when the episode started. And, having dug that hole, the writers insisted on digging it even deeper by being lazy and making "we found a new thing that might help us get home faster" a common story. With far too many episodes you're already hitting the "next episode" button before the credits are finished because you know you're about to waste your time with another non-story.
CadianSgtBob wrote: 2) The entire premise is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of show they were trying to make. A show in a fairly static setting where each episode stands alone works. A show where you have a single story broken up into multiple episodes that need to be watched in sequence works. But with Voyager you had the overall plot arc of getting home that had to still be compatible with hitting the reset button at the end of the episode. So it completely undermined any sense of meaning when the crew encountered a new thing that might get them home faster. You knew as soon as they mentioned it that the technobabble thing of the week would inevitably fail to work for whatever technobabble reason and they'd be no closer to getting home than when the episode started. And, having dug that hole, the writers insisted on digging it even deeper by being lazy and making "we found a new thing that might help us get home faster" a common story. With far too many episodes you're already hitting the "next episode" button before the credits are finished because you know you're about to waste your time with another non-story.
TLDR: How do you know Gilligan's not getting off the island? Because it would end the series
1. Evidently made from the sweepings of TNG’s writer’s room.
2. No tension amongst the crew. Like. At all. Maquis and Federation suddenly all just playing nice.
3. A general lack of chemistry amongst the cast.
4. Yes we got a new quadrant to explore, but due to the overarching plot (getting home), nothing is of any permanence.
5. Neelix. Oh god what a pointless and irritating character of precisely no redeeming qualities.
6. Neelix having a…..physical romance…with Kes. Kes, who was, canonically….two years old. Grrrrroooooooossssssssssssss.
Now. Here’s my pitch for an improved version.
Starts off as is. Federation and Maquis crew end up abducted to the Delta Quadrant.
Once there, they find they’re not the only ones. There are ships of different ages and designs. Some familiar, some not. The Caretaker’s Array isn’t doing it deliberately. It’s a malfunctioning piece of ancient tech, seemingly use by an advanced rate for rapid transportation across the Galaxy.
So advance, nobody has compatibly technology. Worse, the method of transport has utterly buggered their drives/computers/whatever to the point of being undebuggerable.
Except for Voyager, thanks to the new fangled bio-neural gel pack tnings.
Immediately puts Janeway in a powerful but awkward situation. The other ships have been preying on each other and cannibalising ships for their own survival. Distrust and outright hostility is rife. Morale is universally low.
She could do arguably The Right Thing, and share this new tech miracle as widely as possible. Provide each ship in turn with a means to get home. But can they be truly trusted? Is this more power over the fate of others than any Starfleet Captain should have?
In the end of the first season (or the first half) the decision is made, tech is shared, Sudden and Inevitable Betrayal blah blah blah. You now have a Galactica style ragtag flotilla heading back to home. Further drama comes in from a loose Council of Captains, and DS9 style genuine moral quandaries as to which approach is best when the devil is driving.
If you’re really, really brave? Let us see Janeway slowly become corrupted by her status amongst this fleet. Not in a moustache twirling way, but ever more compromising of her moral compass in the name of getting everyone home.
RealAndTrue wrote: It sucked for more than 2 reasons. The casting ruined the show.
I don't think that's entirely fair.
Much like Hayden Christensen, the cast of Voyager rarely, if ever, had a chance to do anything with their skills or talents. Mulgrew, Picardo, and Russ were all established actors. Ryan, despite constantly being cast as fan-service, managed to play the role of Seven very well. Enough that her character endures.
The cast wasn't the problem.
The writer's constant need to maintain status quo was. Garret Wang would be the most egregious example in this regard. He's a good actor. He could have carried more in the show, but the show wasn't allowed to break status quo so anytime Harry Kim advanced as a young officer nothing ever came of it. Year of Hell is especially blatant example of this where Wang really got Kim to shine only for it to all come to nothing.
The only bad actors in the show IMO were Beltran and McNeill. And it's not even that Beltran couldn't have acted better if he wanted to. He just clearly didn't care to try and constantly phoned it in. Chakotay as a character was probably the weakest of the entire show and I know people hat Neelix but Neelix is at least memorable for how much he was hated. Beltran was a complete non-presence. McNeill idk. Maybe he got hit with the same problem as Wang but I feel like he's really just not that capable of an actor.
At the end of the day Picardo and Ryan were the only members of the cast who ever really got a chance to show their talent and characters. Mulgrew on the other hand famously said she had to portray Janeway as if she were bipolar because Janeway's personality would flip randomly from episode to episode.
The big problem Voyager has is that the way Captain Janeway is written to always be right while displaying the highest virtues is incompatible with the long way from home scenario. The latter needs a measure of tension to work, a visible toll on ship and crew either ethically or materially that just doesn't happen because Janeway is always right in the end, both morally and factually, which ironically makes Voyager stranded in the Delta Quadrant a far safer workplace than ships in Federation territory. There losses can be replaced and damage can be repaired, so the writers are more willing to include dramatic moments. Voyager needs to be more careful with its resources. and because apparently the writers' mandate was that the captain can't fail, it manages to do so quite flawlessly. And with that goes any dramatic tension even in a serialized format in which the default expectation is that not permanent harm comes to the main cast.
It's not surprising that Equinox and Year of Hell work because they are true to the premise of the show, if the worst case scenarios that the show would not be able to maintain in the long run if the Janeway problem didn't get in the way of it to begin with.
I'm sure there are many things in detail which plague individual episodes, but the fundamental flaw of the show is that it never even tries to deliver on its premise (or promise, if you will). A few years later you have Stargate Atlantis, which is far more of a lighthearted space adventure than Star Trek, take the same idea and do a far better job of painting a grim picture. The "good" guys still win in the end, but every major step along the way they make the best decisions they can and things still only get worse. Voyager doesn't do that and the big threat presented to the crew is that they die of old age before they get home. The lights stay on, there's always food on the table, they don't run out of torpedoes to put in the launch tubes, they don't run out of reactor fuel, they don't run out of repair materials, they lose like half a dozen crew during the show and even the need to keep traveling means that even if they make enemies, they eventually just leave them behind. That's only somewhat changed when the Borg show up, but luckily Janeway is always right, so the Borg aren't a big deal, so whatever.
On the topic of this thread, fans have successfully funded a Voyager documentary.
This is the same band of people who created What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine. Hopefully, it's of the same quality and doesn't shirk from some of the messiness that really shaped what the show became. On the one hand, I can get the cast and crew wanting to be positive and talk about the show and its successes, but I think more than almost any other entry in the franchise Voyager really was defined by its failures. While DS9 stood the test of time and rose above to become one of the best-loved entries, Voyager I think has tanked. Even Enterprise or Discovery gets more fan discussion, if only because being genuinely awful sparks more reaction than just plain sucking.
It just wasn't good. There were some standouts every so often and a load of episodes that were good but not for the reasons they should be.
Anyway, #justicefortuvix.
I feel we should also consider the bits that made TNG and DS9 good. All three series had their fair share of utter guff, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
In TNG, we see solid character progression, which continues on and carries over. Picard becomes less curmudgeonly, and less, I wanna say childphobic but perhaps that’s overegging. Riker matures. Data gets closer to humanity (though never comes that close) and so on and so forth.
In DS9, we see a crew that can’t simply warp away from each adventure. It also did excellent fleshing out of not just characters, but entire species (Bajoran, Ferengi, Cardassian, Klingon, Jem Hadar, Founders, Vorta). We see where and when The Federation’s admirable ideals are compromised. It was a new and thankfully interesting perspective for us the audience. I mean…..Gul Dakat is a superb character, because even when he’s being a massive Child Born Out Of Wedlock, he’s just so effing charming. Garak and Quark likewise. It played with moral grey areas and indeed morally ambiguous characters beautifully.
Voyager utterly lacked that. The Kazon could’ve been interesting, but weren’t and never really developed beyond a two dimensional species. As said above, even the main characters never really developed and grew.
The Kazon were discount Klingons with none of the redeeming characteristics from TNG or DS9.
Neelix was... weird. He's super creepy and demonstrably untrustworthy from the get-go, and his usefulness as a guide always had a timer on it (the further they travelled, the less useful he was). Having a experimental chef isn't really a feature for another mouth to feed (especially given how many star fleet people have master levels in one or two non-star fleet life skills.
The premise is interesting in theory, but 'get out of the show' as goal is only meaningful if things happen along the way. No one plays Oregon Trail for nothing to happen.
There's a rogue internet voice-on-a-screen out there that goes by SFDebris, he's gone into some depth about the issues he has with Voyager and does a pretty good job outlining how some of its famous failings y'all have brought up factor in to the creation of certain episodes. He's also fairly knowledgeable, does his research, and is able to highlight how certain writers write certain characters a certain way, etc. It's all very informative.
Personally if I had to blame any one thing it would be Rick Berman.
There's a lot that can be said about Berman, a lot of it bad. He took over Trek as Roddenberry was in decline, and you can track his influence on TNG as it becomes less idealistic from those early two seasons (for more good than ill, IMO), he famously curtailed any attempts by that era of shows to tackle gay rights issues, including early TNG's somewhat legendary AIDS allegory episode. Jadzia Dax was killed off because he tried to bully Terry Farrell and she called his bluff, and then he tried to cover it up by saying she had quit the show to be on Becker. He's also the reason Garak and Bashir stopped having their friendly lunches and they both started dating noticeably younger actresses, and so on, forever.
Anyway, Voyager was his baby. For all the collaboration that is involved in the creation of a major network TV show, it can't be understated that he deserves credit for the brilliant premise that show has, and the absolutely brutal ways the show sabotaged that premise right out the gate. He used that premise, the small lone ship, stranded out and alone with limited supplies and two crews that had to band together to survive; in order to sell that show concept to the network and to the audience, and then he turned around and told the crew that they were all going to be wearing starfleet uniforms, every episode had to have a return to the status quo, and they'd have to tie him up and lock him in a closet if they ever wanted to do a starfleet/maquis conflict episode.
The constraints he puts them under is the reason the writers can never pull together and push the show in the direction they want it, because some of them love that great premise too much to let it go, and others need to appease the producer first and foremost. After DS9 wraps up, Moore comes to write for Voyager, and is so put off because of that working environment that he leaves to make Battlestar Galactica. In turn, without the Yin to his Yang, Brannon Braga goes off the deep end and spirals out of control with goofy 'high concept' episodes.
2. No tension amongst the crew. Like. At all. Maquis and Federation suddenly all just playing nice.
3. A general lack of chemistry amongst the cast.
4. Yes we got a new quadrant to explore, but due to the overarching plot (getting home), nothing is of any permanence.
5. Neelix. Oh god what a pointless and irritating character of precisely no redeeming qualities.
6. Neelix having a…..physical romance…with Kes. Kes, who was, canonically….two years old. Grrrrroooooooossssssssssssss.
1: Yeah, there were some pretty bad episodes which might have been TNG reject scripts, but honestly there were some pretty terrible episodes of TNG and DS9 as well.
2: There was a bit, at the beginning, and let's not forget Seska and her "mole" in the crew (who was a Maquis). Your point is fair though; that could have been more of what season 1 was about (getting the two crews to work together and trust each other).
3: Some characters worked well together (I actually like the "bromance" between Paris and Kim, as an example), but definitely not quite as good of a general camaraderie as there was in the previous shows (TOS, TNG, DS9). I don't think it was as bad as many are saying though.
4: This was inevitable due to the format of the show; when you have a ship traveling through space and not staying anywhere for long (due to the overarching mission to get back home), they are going to leave people/races behind and never see them again. I can't really call this a weakness; rather just the nature of the beast with this kind of story.
5: I actually like Neelix and don't get all the hate. Is it so wrong to have a character on the show who's an eternal optimist? He made a good foil for Tuvok, as the two are complete opposites.
6: Timewise, Kes might have been two years old, but her species matures at a much faster rate. She's as developed as a human being who's in her late teens/early twenties, and the actress was obviously of age. This never really bothered me other than Kes being a little too "innocent", which I suppose could make her seem much more child-like.
I actually enjoy Voyager, warts and all. I've been rewatching it recently, and despite the many completely valid arguments for it being a bad show I still enjoy it, and will defend it. Some of the episodes are truly pretty good, and others are truly dire, but that's true of all of the Trek series.
ZergSmasher wrote: 5: I actually like Neelix and don't get all the hate.
I feel like a big part of the problem really is that Neelix was consistently unhelpful. Like, it was a D6 roll every episode and on a 6 he knew a random tidbit of info but nothing particularly helpful to the crew. From there, the character was struck as a constant extra wheel on a show of poorly developed characters.
Timewise, Kes might have been two years old, but her species matures at a much faster rate.
I'd agree with this. I can see why people get hung up on it and it not just Star Trek.
One of the big couples in Worm is Armsmaster and Dragon and Dragon is only something like 10 at best while Armsmaster is in his 30s, but Dragon is miles away one of the most responsible and adult characters in the story (and practically the most mature person in any room she happens to be in). And she's an AI and the author set out not to write her like some internet dude's waifu to avoid the creepy gak. Watching out for pedo bait is one thing. Being dumb about it though is containing to writing IMO, especially Sci-fi where species maturing at different rates is a ripe topic that is so barely explored even in Star Trek. Kes character was not written like a child who didn't know how to handle herself. Her naivete about the broader world was matched by being one of the early season's most emotionally mature characters.
If anything the issue with her and Neelix is that their relationship felt incredibly hollow. The series would very rarely bring up that it even existed, or depicted it as a father/daughter relationship sometimes, and then it remembered they were a couple only to forget about it again. Which is really the most persistent issue with everything in Voyager; an inability to stick to concept.
The thing I remember with Kes was the writer’s bad math. They only live to 7. Sexually mature and have a single kid at age 4. Their parents help them thru it.
AduroT wrote: The thing I remember with Kes was the writer’s bad math. They only live to 7. Sexually mature and have a single kid at age 4. Their parents help them thru it.
I feel like that's endemic to speculative fiction to be fair.
People throw out spans of time that are utterly absurd half the time. Numbers that are bizarrely low or high. I mean if every Ocampa only has one kid, how has the species not gone extinct? They need 2 parents but only have 1 kid. They're going to die out in a couple generations.
But then again I'd never credit Voyager's writers with having thought things through so XD
It's so good to know that, in these troubled times when so many things divide us, we can all come together and really, really hate Voyager.
Like down to ad hominum attacks on individual actors, writers and producers. Like people have actually done research and dug into the question of how come this show was awful.
Poor Enterprise, the most I can say about it is disappointing and dull, it's not even worth the energy to hate
To be fair Voyager gave us the Doctor and Seven, so something good came of it after all.
I actually liked Enterprise well enough, perhaps the last season excluded. Wrap up seasons because the show got canceled are always so awkward. Season 3 having an overarching story arc was pretty cool, though, and the whole revenge for the attack on earth thing that eventually was solved by reaching out and making peace instead of blowing the hell out of things was pretty on spot for Star Trek.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Poor Enterprise, the most I can say about it is disappointing and dull, it's not even worth the energy to hate
We can even blame Voyager for that too! After Voyager burned all interest in giving a new show the benefit of the doubt it was really easy to just shrug and turn off Enterprise once it was obvious how bad it was going to be.
Geifer wrote: To be fair Voyager gave us the Doctor and Seven, so something good came of it after all.
I actually liked Enterprise well enough, perhaps the last season excluded. Wrap up seasons because the show got canceled are always so awkward. Season 3 having an overarching story arc was pretty cool, though, and the whole revenge for the attack on earth thing that eventually was solved by reaching out and making peace instead of blowing the hell out of things was pretty on spot for Star Trek.
And season 3’s arc was rushed too! The story was supposed to go into season 4, but they were told they were being canceled, so rushed a conclusion. Then we’re surprised with a forth season renewal that left them without a planned story. Same thing that happened to Babylon 5.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: It's so good to know that, in these troubled times when so many things divide us, we can all come together and really, really hate Voyager.
Hate is a strong word. I'd even go far as to say that as something to put on while I paint, Voyager is perfectly fine if not good and it's easier to sit and watch than TNG for me. Don't get me wrong I do like TNG sometimes (Best of Both Worlds, the very short Klingon Civil War) but overall I just CBA with it.
Poor Enterprise, the most I can say about it is disappointing and dull, it's not even worth the energy to hate
Nah Enterprise is a lot better than is generally accepted. I'd take it over Voyager and TNG.
It's interesting to think about what might have been if Voyager had been a serial instead of episodic.
Season 1 - Take the pilot and spend a season on it. Voyager and Marquis ship are sucked into the Delta Quadrant and chase each other around making allies and enemies. The Marquis captain goes full Captain Ahab vowing to get home no matter who he has to kill while Janeway tries to remain ethical. Some of the Marquis think they should jump ship, so do some Voyager crew. End the season with a bloodbath, kill half of each crew and THEN unite them. Have them pick up Delta Quad strays and only after exhausting any hope of using the Caretaker array to get home do they decide to try the 70 year trip on their own.
Season 2 - Marquis/Starfleet friction ending in Chakotay becoming first officer to appease the Marquis.
Season 3 - The Borg. Someone gets assimilated and never quite gets put back right.
Etc.
It would also help if the show could be done in a way that the cast is not necessarily permanent. If it had a Game of Thrones style 'anyone can die' set of rules the stakes would have been so much higher.
Or even if they'd just been more married to showing that Voyager is having a rough time. Every time some walks down a corridor have wires hanging and someone welding a bulkhead or two people screaming at each other as a display sparks.
Ron Moore's BSG did a fantastic job of this, and it only came a few years after Voyager.
During the first run, I stopped watching Voyager at the “get this cheese to sickbay” episode. But I came back to it later because the Doctor and Seven, and all the cool new starship designs, made it just worth having on while working on HW in college.
Voyager had a pretty good legacy:
1. Voyager hate on SFDebris and FirstTVDrama was hilarious. Recontextualized the show into bad-good, which is a better watch than it deserves.
2. The starship designs. The writers and producers may have lost all interest, but the effects guys were mining gold. Half of the good gak on Ex Astris Scientia comes from Voyager. (The other half is the exploration of TNG kitbashes seen in the background for half a second each.)
3. The messed up continuity lead to some truly creative problem solving in the novels. Writers with an obsessive need to tie together canon rose to new levels to fill in and flesh out the bizarre universe Voyager accidentally created. Christopher Bennet’s Department of Temporal Investigations book earned a slow clap-into-standing ovation for this.
It was a decent show but Trek had become the "MCU of the 1990s" and that led to it's eventual burn out. The trekkies would go nuts over it, but for the rest of us the Bajor thread had become annoying in that we now had 2-3 TV shows of the same thing and then also what was happening in the films. Its no wonder they went back to a single show, Enterprise, and later returned to the Kirk'n'Spock era for the films in an attempt to reconnect with what made Star Trek so popular in the first place...
Voyager was really just more of the same but with a slight nod to Battlestar Galactica, as to their situation. My favourite characters were Kes and Neelix, and lost interest altogether when one episode she was missing. Sadly the actress had been suffering from mental health problems and was unable to continue with the show, and written out. Kes and Neelix came as a pair and it just wasn't working without her despite Ethan's best effort.
In the grand scheme of things, Voyager held up well against TNG and DS9, continuing their tradition. It was well received at the time and went on to deliver another seven successful seasons. I didn't watch the whole series but I'm happy to whittle away an hour with an episode if I'm doing the ironing or peeling the spuds.
I've definitely noticed the show getting more warm talk over the year. Less in the sense of praise and more just appreciating it for what it did do right, however rarely it did it. I wouldn't say the show has seen a turn around like DS9. More like, a lot of people are kind of just done talking about all the bad and they're really only interested in talking about the rest? I kind of get it. There were good points to the show, however few they were.
Anyone remember that episode where Voyager is stuck in orbit over a planet where time moves super fast and they watch an entire civilization grow before their very eyes? It's one of the few episodes of the show not explicitly about the Doctor or Seven I remember and it was a pretty good concept episode that managed to follow through on its concept. I think the episode is literally called Blink of an Eye.
Course: Oblivion was also one of the few episodes in the show that was an explicit followup of a prior episode and was actually quite interesting for the effort.
The starship designs.
I do really like Voyager's actual design. And as cliche as it can be, the Prometheus was a cool-looking ship, and the Nova class is one of my favorite Starfleet designs. Definitely on board with the effects and design teams following through, even if the writing room managed to keep botching it up.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: So after a rewatch of DS9 (still holds up, some episodes even better than when they came out) I thought I'd try Voyager to see if it was as bad as I remembered.
IMHO, it's worse.
Which is bizarre because it followed TNG and DS9, both of which are quite watchable still, and had a lot of the same folks behind the camera.
I dunno. Any thoughts?
The Leftists and feminists who wrote and cast the show made sure the concept was destroyed before it even started.
Y I K E S M Y D U D E
Anyways, I'll throw something at this thread even more terrible than RealandTrue's post!
There is nothing wrong with Voyager at all. It's a great show, with mostly good characters.
There's probably something to be said Voyager only garnered a negative rep because it was an entry in the Star Trek franchise. Had it just been some scifi show it probably would be regarded very differently. I think that's true of a lot of franchise entries.
OK here's a good example. I've been hopping around looking for episodes I either half remembered or that sounded interesting and got to Scorpion, the episode that introduces 7 of 9.
And where Janeway, who said many times that the Federation does not trade weapons tech, offers to give weapons tech to the Borg.
And the sad thing is, the writers did not have to do that. A few changes here and there and she could offer to develop weapons, use them against the common threat, and then erase any information on how to make them.
But no. The deal is weapons for safe passage.
As it happens the Borg do not get the bio weapon tech, but that was still the plan.
In the following episode 7 is de-borged against her will and even points out what a hypocrite Janeway is by making her human against her will. At the same time Kes loses control of her powers (and the actress loses her job) and leaves the ship. But Janeway can't make her stay because it would be wrong to treat someone against their will.
Again there are easy fixes here. If 7 rejoins the Borg, the Borg get the bioweapons from Scorpion so Janeway much compromise her principals, but no one points it out. We just have Janeway take two opposite moral stands within 5 minutes of each other.
And where Janeway, who said many times that the Federation does not trade weapons tech, offers to give weapons tech to the Borg.
Not just any weapons tech!
A WMD that could genocide an entire species. At least when Sisko was dropping WMD's, he was just forcing the Marquis and the Cardassians to trade planets. No one was actually dying.
It kind of highlights how the show failed to follow through on concept too. Becuase this immoral in the highest caliber, yet, Janeway and crew spend almost no time renumerating on this decision. And 2 future episodes build of these plot point too*, both of which also fail to build on it!
*A future episode involves an alien trying to get revenge on Voyager because by helping the Borg Janeway doomed his species. The episode practically glosses over all the ways that dude was right. Janeway fethed everyone for the sake of one ship and she did it in so obvious a way she really has no excuse for it, which could still have been good drama but no. The dude is just evil and mean spirit and how dare he. Another episode features species 8472 plotting to attack Earth because of Janeway's actions, and Janeway is almost ancillary in the episode and everyone shakes hands and says bye at the end in a really cheap way.
In the following episode 7 is de-borged against her will and even points out what a hypocrite Janeway is by making her human against her will. At the same time Kes loses control of her powers (and the actress loses her job) and leaves the ship. But Janeway can't make her stay because it would be wrong to treat someone against their will.
Kate Mulgrew: Janeway has bipolar disorder.
Again they could have spun this into a cool moral episode with a complex dilemma juxtaposing 2 situations and how Janeway deals with them. But this is the team that gave us the tragedy of Tuvix so...
I do think Janeway (not Kate Mulgrew) is the biggest flaw, because as well covered she’s so utterly inconsistent as a character.
Picard and Sisko I would follow into the very gates of hell. Janeway? Not a chance. I wouldn’t trust that she’d just change strategy on a whim, and not in response to the enemy,
Harry Kim’s complete lack of career progression is another flaw, though one on a bigger scale than Janeway being poorly written. Nog, who faced dangers of his own but never on the sustained level of stress Kim faced makes it to Lieutenant Junior Grade. Harry Kim? Nope. The eternal ensign, regardless of his displayed competencies. Again this makes Janeway look not just a weak Captain, but perhaps an egomaniac. There’s no-one around to promote her, so no-one else is going to progress either.
Female officers. Black female officers! No money! No capitalism! Everyone in a Starfleet uniform is working for a giant space United Nations, not for a wage, or patriotism, but to grow as a person and because they feel it’s the morally right thing to do.
I guess for some people, that’s the Nightmare Scenario.
Of course one of the weaknesses in Star Fleet is writers don't seem to understand the difference between officers and crew (enlisted men). Officer seems to be a catchall for SF service members sometime but crewmen ranks do exist.
So making it clear that Voyager has X officer jobs and 5X crew jobs would help. Giving crew a distinct uniform would help too.
Then Harry as an Ensign might make sense. "I'm sorry Harry, we have 12 Ensigns, 5 lieutenants, 2 commanders and a Captain. There's no where for you to go."
But nope, there's tons of lieutenants and even when some of them die it doesn't seem to make room for anyone to move up.
It would be a better plot point for Paris, I can totally believe the dude Janeway pulled out of jail would never get promoted and watching him stew while Kim rises would be kind of cool.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: In the following episode 7 is de-borged against her will and even points out what a hypocrite Janeway is by making her human against her will.
I like that part because nothing says superior morality like abducting someone and brainwashing her to adopt a foreign culture while obliterating her own. It feels like a very Federation thing to do. It's a good thing there are no laws against it either. Can you imagine the problems that might cause someone?
Poor Seven...
LordofHats wrote: A WMD that could genocide an entire species. At least when Sisko was dropping WMD's, he was just forcing the Marquis and the Cardassians to trade planets. No one was actually dying.
If there is one glaring flaw with DS9, it's that. Sisko actually deploys a WMD in foreign territory after going full on ends justifies means. Instead of getting sent to prison he gets a promotion. His crew doesn't riot either. No one in that episode actually behaves like a Starfleet officer. What horrible writing.
This is not defending Janeway, mind. Blaming Janeway is a rewarding hobby that should be practiced daily.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: It would be a better plot point for Paris, I can totally believe the dude Janeway pulled out of jail would never get promoted and watching him stew while Kim rises would be kind of cool.
I'm fairly sure flyboy actually gets demoted to ensign but later earns back his rank. There is evidently plenty of potential for career advancement on Voyager as long as you're not Harry.
If there is one glaring flaw with DS9, it's that. Sisko actually deploys a WMD in foreign territory after going full on ends justifies means. Instead of getting sent to prison he gets a promotion. His crew doesn't riot either. No one in that episode actually behaves like a Starfleet officer. What horrible writing.
This is not defending Janeway, mind. Blaming Janeway is a rewarding hobby that should be practiced daily.
Oh no I agree.
The ending of that episode was, in a lot of ways, a very bizarro resolution. One they could have resolved with something like Starfleet and the Cardassians being pitched the plan and agreeing to it giving Sisko the okay. That could have worked since it was basically just a game of musical planets. Both sides could probably see it preferable to letting Eddington continue to run the Maquis and completely destabilize the region and risk another war at a time when neither the Federation or the Cardassians could afford it. Instead, the episode makes it out like Sisko just decided all on his own to go full villainous ham without telling anyone and no one ever looked at him and said 'wtf are you doing Ben?'
I think In the Pale Moonlight would ultimately do a similar thing much better by tying Sisko's actions in more carefully with the world around him.
LordofHats wrote: There's probably something to be said Voyager only garnered a negative rep because it was an entry in the Star Trek franchise. Had it just been some scifi show it probably would be regarded very differently. I think that's true of a lot of franchise entries.
I don’t think this is true. Voyager came out around the same time as Space Above and Beyond, and that show got crapped on mercilessly once they used their pilots as frontline ground pounders. Even Babylon 5 got a lot of hate for the first two years. People had high standards for Sci Fi despite there being very few Sci Fi shows of excellent quality.
I never watched Voyager, but I do like the mirror universe Marshall Janeway from Star Trek Online.
"My phaser outranks you, son, and it says you're relieved of duty."
Tannhauser42 wrote: I never watched Voyager, but I do like the mirror universe Marshall Janeway from Star Trek Online.
"My phaser outranks you, son, and it says you're relieved of duty."
The boss fight against her is annoying as feth tho XD
LordofHats wrote: There's probably something to be said Voyager only garnered a negative rep because it was an entry in the Star Trek franchise. Had it just been some scifi show it probably would be regarded very differently. I think that's true of a lot of franchise entries.
Is that really unfair though? TNG and DS9 proved that Star Trek could be better so of course Voyager should be expected to meet that standard.
LordofHats wrote: There's probably something to be said Voyager only garnered a negative rep because it was an entry in the Star Trek franchise. Had it just been some scifi show it probably would be regarded very differently. I think that's true of a lot of franchise entries.
Is that really unfair though? TNG and DS9 proved that Star Trek could be better so of course Voyager should be expected to meet that standard.
I don't say it to be fair or unfair.
I mean it only in the sense that expectations are different in an established franchise vs unestablished material. It's a weird thing, because what can often fly and even be great in regards to being the latter, might not be remotely good enough in the former. In such case, it's not even that the media is bad. It's just not as good as what came before it. I think we judge such things more harshly because we know there was better stuff before it and we don't cut it as much slack.
I'm not saying people should cut it more slack.
I'm only pointing out that if we cut 'Star Trek' from Voyager's title, it's probably an above-average scifi show. It's just that in reality it's also a Star Trek show, so we regard it in context of a broader franchise.
I'll always have a soft spot for Voyager as it was my first real foray into Trek. I'd caught a few episodes of the Original series and TNG here and there so I knew what the Federation was, who the Klingons, Romulans, and Borg were, but that was about it.
I think the biggest problems that Voyager has is that it wasn't able to be a B5 or DS9 that had a cast of evolving characters with an overarching plot.
I think the reason that I like Voyager more than most people is the way that I watched it. Completely out of order and context of all the other episodes. It was on TV re-runs by this point and I just caught whatever episode they put on whenever it happened, completely out of chronological order. I never really noticed the character inconsistencies, because I just assumed that I was at a different point in the timeline than I was for the last episode and that they had since changed, or would later charge. Put in a box and told as a short story where you only only really know general info about the characters, I think that a lot of the episodes work well and still stand out to me decades later even though I've watched many objectively better shows. Perhaps this is just because I was exposed to some of these concepts for the first time with Voyager that they stuck so well, but even so, stick they did. From what I recall (had to look up the chronology, not sure what order I actually watched these in)
- Ex Post Facto: Conceptually the idea of someone having to re-live a crime they committed from the victim's perspective over and over again was really cool, though on re-watch it could have been executed far better.
Seems like the first season was pretty rough, that was the only stand out episode for me.
- I liked the 37's okay, it was dumb fun, but I still thought it was fun. Kinda the same way I liked the one with the Hadrosaurs.
- Projections: This is (Chronologically) the first episode I really liked. The concept of a malfunction interfering with the "mind" of an AI was nothing new, but I thought the position it put the Doctor in was a nice inversion of the norm. On one hand he was being pushed to action to take charge of his own fate and on the other being told that inaction was his only chance for salvation, that his friends were trying to save him and by taking action he would doom himself. Without knowing what was real, I think any other show would have had the episode's main character take it upon themselves to solve the issue and I liked that it was the reverse. (Also, I had no idea this one was directed by Jonathan Freaks, cool.)
- Twisted: I just really liked the idea. The ship is getting more and more distorted turning into
this crazy labyrinth while the characters get more and more desperate throwing anything at the wall to try to stave it off, until Tuvok finally stops them from making a bad situation worse with some Vulkan logic that both goes against human nature, but also turns out to be the correct course of action.
- Persistence of Vision: We all have our secrets, any good writer knows the first thing you need to ask about a character is "What to they want?" (Insert B5 Shadow's music). Telepaths have been floating around Star Trek for a while and I really liked one so powerful that he could trap people in their own minds by making them think they've achieved their greatest desires. Yeah the ending was kinda pulled out of the shows ass, but it was still a memorable idea.
- Deadlock: I think that this is actually one of my favourites. It's not anything crazy special, but it's one of those "wrinkle your brain" kind of episodes. Voyager has a lot of these, everyone dies but not exactly episodes, and starting it off with Harry Kim getting spaced actually really caught me off guard. His whole speech at the end to "other Janeway" basically put to words exactly what I was thinking in the closing minutes of the episode so I certainly think it got it's point across during a pretty cool invasion/last stand episode that I wish could have been a two-parter with more action.
- Tuvix: I personally really liked this moral dilemma. Two people die and a new person is created by accident. You can bring them back by "killing" this new person, but they don't want to die. Is as close to an even split in the "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" that you can get and it ramps up the impact by it not being in a moment of crisis, this is a calm, cold, and calculated decision that Janeway has to make.
Season 2 really picked things up IMHO, not all of them were slam dunks, but they really started stretching their conceptual legs.
- Macrocosm: I remember this being one of the first episodes I ever saw. I thought the idea of the creatures and how they looked were both really interesting and creepy, and later, quite enjoyed the brief appearance of the alien Tak-Tak's. Felt like they came up with a whole culture for a race that only had a few minutes of screen time. This felt like the closest Star Trek would ever get to a (non-borg) zombie/Flood style episode.
- Distant Origin: See above, the 37's.
I actually don't remember much of the latter third of season 3, I'd though I'd seen all the episodes, but looks like I missed a few.
- Both Year of Hell episodes were great, but as per usual with the Voyager everybody dies episodes, the clock gets reset by the end of it. Was a great ride though.
- Message in a Bottle: Possibly because I watched them all out of order, this was the first episode where the Doctor really came alive as a character for me. Seeing him interact with another EMH really put into perspective how far he'd come as a character when it's hard to see that growth on an episode-episode basis. The whole commando hologram thing was pretty fun too.
- Living Witness: Another of my favorite episodes, I was pretty young at the time I saw it and didn't realize how commonplace the re-writing of history for one reason or another was. It really made me think on if we could speak to someone who had witnessed things in our history books, how would they tell the story?
- One: I thought this was the "one" (pun intended) where Jeri Ryan finally really got to shine. I personally thought she did a great job of someone so used to connection (though on a different level) having to deal with such a prolonged isolation.
- In the Flesh: I'd always liked species 8472, but thought they never really were developed enough. It was great to learn more about them and really see some consequences of something the crew had done for once.
- Timeless: Okay, I'm a sucker for time travel stories, so sue me.
- Latent Image: In many of the episodes, The Doctor seems like either a program that is kind of a person, or a person who is kind of a program. This is the one where he really feels like both, where his programming has to somehow reconcile with what it means to be human. Another one of my favourites.
- Course: Oblivion: This is my favourite episode. I may be biased because it was the first episode of Voyager that I ever saw and is what hooked me on the show, but I think it's easily the best of the "everyone dies, but not really" episodes. It's also another good callback to the consequences of one of their decisions back in Demon. Seeing the crew slowly dying to an incurable disease and having to come to terms with who and what they are was just great.
- Relativity: Again, sucker for time travel episodes. I loved the twist in this one and the fact that from Voyager's perspective, they will never know the whole story.
- Equinox Part I and II: A really great pair that tested the limits of the moral code of the federation and what the captain(s) would do to get their crew(s) home.
-Life Line: The doctor "coming home" as the son to meet/cure his dying "father" who considers him a total failure without ever bothering to understand how he has evolved hit me a little too close to home. The two reconciling at the end was pretty sweet even though they clearly still had serious differences and issues with each other. Great performance from Robert Picardo in this one.
- The Haunting of Deck Twelve: A ghost story in space was still pretty novel at the time for TV, (especially for me at the time since this was also one of the first episodes I ever saw) but the story was interesting and Janeway had a lot to do and portray without really having to be inconsistent with other episodes.
- Inside Man: The Barkley subplot which is one of the only really long running subplots in the show comes to a great head when the crew's over eagerness and trust of their perceived friend nearly spell their doom. The episode is a bit fractured and it's really nothing crazy special, but I still liked it.
- Nightingale: It takes 7 seasons, but Harry Kim finally gets the spotlight. It felt weird him not really knowing how to lead, I know it's not natural for everyone, but it did feel like they dumbed him down a bit. Even so, the concept of the episode was interesting, and it was great to see him with more to do.
- Flesh and Blood: Another consequences one where the tech that Voyager gave to the Hirogen's nearly wipes out the alien species and creates a massive ethical crisis as well.
- Shattered: Another of my favourite episodes. Yeah, the "solution" to the problem is just a Mcguffin, but at least it's stated like that at the beginning of the episode and not pulled out of it's ass, and the journey across the various time periods of Voyager with a current Chakotay and pre-Delta quadrant Janeway having to team up was a great dynamic.
- Author, Author: As a writer, I love the hell out of this episode. You can only write what you know, and having the doctor's limited experience and very poor writing skill become adapted into a smash hit holo-novel just because he's a hologram (and then not have the rights to it for the same reason) felt like such a great rendition of dealing with tokenism.
- Endgame: Not a perfect end sure, but again, I'm a sucker for time travel. We all knew they had to get home eventually and it was always likely going to be through a Mcguffin. Still, I think this was a pretty good Mcguffin.
This turned out to be WAY longer than I intended. Voyager isn't a great show sure, a lot of it's episodes have issues and especially so with any overarching character development. However, despite that, I think there is a lot of good on the episode to episode basis, even if it is only 30 or so if it's nearly 200 episodes. Try these out in a vaccum, or make your own greatest hits list. There's a lot to get out of the show without having to be bogged down in all the mess hiding the gems. Season 2 had most of the cool idea episodes, but it didn't stop the other seasons from getting in a few solid hits here and there.
Voyager always struck me as a great concept, very poorly executed. I would have preferred the entire series to be much closer to the style of Year of Hell but they never got anywhere close to that. If I was to summarise Voyager in two words they would be "missed opportunity".
They set up a lot of really cool possibilities. From the practical side, how does a ship survive away from the support of the Federation? What sacrifices does the crew have to make to keep Voyager viable? More importantly, from the character side, how do the two rival factions interact? What tensions develop and how are they resolved (if they even are resolved)? There's a lot of scope for typical Trek stories about exclusion, principles etc.
Speaking of principles, the most interesting thing for me should have been how far the captain or crew are willing to go to preserve their ideals. It's very easy to uphold this highly idealistic view of the galaxy when you have the backing of the Federation and the safety net of all that support. But how do your ideals hold up when you're the sole defenders of them? Do you re-examine the validity of them in the face of your changed circumstances, or hold tightly to them regardless of the consequences?
None of these things really happened. When they did there was almost always either a reset button at the end of the episode, or they had no lasting consequences and were forgotten about in the next episode. Worse, they were often directly contradicted in the next episode - see Kate Mulgrew's comments about bipolar Janeway.
To top it all off, I found a lot of the "classic" Trek style episodes in Voyager just weren't as good as they were on other shows. Maybe the cast weren't as good? Certainly the writing wasn't as good. Maybe they were just retreading old ground from TNG and DS9 without anything new to say.
The issue i had with it is with most star trek series is the reset button at the beginning of each episode, and crewmembers dieing left and right without having an impact.
Sometimes I feel like a real weirdo, Voyager was and is my favorite Trek series. The first season or two were a bit rough but it got better with time.
Of course, my perspective might be skewed by fond memories of gathering around the tv every wednesday at 9pm with my parents to watch it. We watched TOS and TNG reruns randomly/whenever, and occasionally one-off episodes of DS9, but Voyager brought us together as a family and was something we committed to watching in "real time" - the few times we weren't able to watch it live we would record it to VHS and come together to watch it together at the next available opportunity.
Maybe it was better than voyager but god what a drama-fest.
SG-1: Lighthearted space adventure. Atlantis: Lighthearted space adventure. Universe: Ceaseless misery porn (IN SPACE!).
Universe may have done the lost in space premise better (I wouldn't know, I certainly didn't keep watching), but it was a pretty significant and as it turned out unwise departure from what fans wanted to see in a Stargate show. Know your audience and all that.
For all its flaws, Voyager at least provides more of the same and slots in well with Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. In terms of audience expectations it's simply inoffensive in what it shows. It's hardly surprising that they could keep it running longer.
It was the Cylons that had the plan, after all… Also the All Along the Watchtower episode was amazing (along with quite a few others). But the constant grinding negativity was quite hard to push through sometimes. It’s the reason I stopped reading and watching game of thrones.
Its important to note that Ron Moore tried to write for Voyager after DS9 wrapped and the amount of pushback he got in it was what spurred him to leave Trek, which ultimately led to the BSG reboot project. You can absolutely see some elements that the Voyager writers were super bitter about (lasting damage, dwindling supplies and personnel) reflected in that show.
And yeah, BSG had a big writers strike, and fell back on misery porn in lieu of workshopping its ideas. I always recommend watching it up to Crossroads Part 2 and let that be the capstone for the series.
So I added Tulix to my rewatch and yeah, holy cow, Janeway straight up murders a dude who was begging for his life.
It's criminally bad writing unless you want Janeway to be the villain of the show. It's like the writers forgot they control the scenario.
You need to put things back, OK, do the episode, include Tulix's Shylock speech ("if I'm happy, I laugh") then we learn the fusion is unstable and either they take them apart or all 3 die. Or put some stakes in it, there's something only Tuvok (or Neelix) can do so they have to separate them to save the ship. Or something!
But Janeway has no reason to kill Tulix, she just liked having them separate better.
Incredible.
Or, alternately, keep Tulix, write out Tuvok and Neelix, make it part of a meta plot about the people on Voyager are being irrevocably changed by their journey.
It was too soft and mushy in the interpersonal relationships to feel that real. It had an 80's feel good sit com vibe to the cast. The captain was amazing, they neglected the first officer and turned neelix into a bop bag. Not a lot of growth occurred for too many of the crew to be great.
I don't think Voyager was as bad as it's made up in the OP, but it's surely behind TNG and DS9. Still miles above Discovery, but that's easy .
- There were very strong single episodes that are on par with the best Trek has to offer. "Distant origin", for one. Nearly the whole 4th season is a highlight and showed what Voyager should have been. Most episodes are linked in a way that makes sense and you have some proper development in the crew coping with the Borg threat. Unfortunately, from season 5 onwards they seem to have forgotten that there are more people than Janeway, 7, Paris and the Doctor on the ship.
- However, one main problem lies in the basic approach: They always move in one direction. Yet, inspired from DS9, the writers in season 1 and 2 tried to build up returning enemies like Seska that would appear every couple of weeks while being obviously low-tech idiots. So how could these guys keep up with the Voyager without even actively pursuing the ship? It just didn't make sense. Same problem happened when the Hirogen returned in season 7, 2 seasons after you saw them the last time. Even though that episode about the Holo-rebellion is awesome, it's just far too late to make any sense logically.
- Instead, the series should/ could have been about the crew. But apparently noone in the writing team wanted that. There were, again, singular moments where they played a little with the Starfleet/ Maquis problem, but it never went deep. I remember that quite nice "Lower Decks" episode from one of the later seasons which would have been great if any of the guys of that episode had ever been seen again (or before).
- Too many Borg. Ties in to the problems mentioned already. Scorpion made it sound as if the Voyager had basically crossed the borg territory in that episode already. But they kept coming up again and again while apparently the same Queen that stayed in the same main base followed Voyager whenever she wanted, despite being tens of thousands of lightyears away in the end.
- Some of the "values" or moral problems haven't aged well or were already outdated in the 90's. I remember that episode where the Doctor programs his own family in an extremely sexist 50's USA style which was already out of place 1995, let alone 2020, and let even more alone 2370 .
I’m one of those crazies who liked Voyager better than DS9, and enjoyed Enterprise (except the 3rd season).
Part of that was that I had run a Star Trek (FASA) game where the PCs ship had been hurled far, far away and were having to make their way back to the Federation (through Klingon occupied space), so the journey appealed to me.
However, never really did care for the Kazon, they were so two-dimensional thugs. And I really enjoyed the addition of Seven’s character to the series.
Stormonu wrote: I’m one of those crazies who liked Voyager better than DS9, and enjoyed Enterprise (except the 3rd season).
Part of that was that I had run a Star Trek (FASA) game where the PCs ship had been hurled far, far away and were having to make their way back to the Federation (through Klingon occupied space), so the journey appealed to me.
However, never really did care for the Kazon, they were so two-dimensional thugs. And I really enjoyed the addition of Seven’s character to the series.
I think you just summarized my own thoughts exactly! Even getting to not liking the Kazon. To me, they were so forgettable that I always literally forget about them until someone or something brings them up again.
I didn't hate Voyager, but there was no compelling reason to watch it at the time. Was it Star Trek? Sure, but was it compelling? No. Was it inconsistent and meandering? Yes.
Regarding some other shows mentioned:
Stargate: Universe was terrible for a Stargate show. Too many characters, too much melodrama and misery. It only got interesting to me right at the end of season 2 and then it was cancelled because... it threw out what made Stargate fans love Stargate.
Battlestar Galactica was two of the best seasons of TV I ever watched. Then season 3 happened and it never recovered.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: So I added Tulix to my rewatch and yeah, holy cow, Janeway straight up murders a dude who was begging for his life.
It's criminally bad writing unless you want Janeway to be the villain of the show. It's like the writers forgot they control the scenario.
You need to put things back, OK, do the episode, include Tulix's Shylock speech ("if I'm happy, I laugh") then we learn the fusion is unstable and either they take them apart or all 3 die. Or put some stakes in it, there's something only Tuvok (or Neelix) can do so they have to separate them to save the ship. Or something!
But Janeway has no reason to kill Tulix, she just liked having them separate better.
Incredible.
Or, alternately, keep Tulix, write out Tuvok and Neelix, make it part of a meta plot about the people on Voyager are being irrevocably changed by their journey.
But no. Let's make our hero a murderer.
The thing is, for basically all the reasons you stated, I think that this was one of the show's strongest episodes.
I get that people feel uncomfortable with the premise and the resolution, but that's the whole point. In so many cases across Trek, people's lives are in imminent danger and they (almost) always pull some McGuffin out of their ass to solve the problem and everyone walks away safe and sound. It's a good thing that the show didn't do this.
In so many other situations, it's very clear what the moral choice of the situation is and the characters (almost) always do the right things and everything comes out sunshine and rainbows. I'm not saying that it should never happen that way, but it happens improbably often. Here is a situation where there is no good outcome, no matter what, someone is dead, and Janeway is given the power to decide whom that someone is. (DS9 excluded from both these examples because it was great and knew how to tell a long running in depth story with character growth.)
There is Tuvix who very clearly is an aware sentient being who wants to live, but should never have existed in the first place. On the other hand, there is BOTH Tuvok who is both their security chief and essentially Janeway's best friend and this point in the show, as well as Nelix who aside from being romantically involved with another member of the crew, was an important guide to the unknown region of space they are trapped in. Both indispensable members of the crew (even if the show often forgets that).
"It is not only what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do."
By not reversing the procedure, Janeway is functionally choosing to let both Tuvok and Nelix die, and by doing it, she is killing Tuvix. There is no moral high ground, no right decision, there is only the least tragic one. Either way, she will bear a burden of guilt and responsibility that she never asked for, thus is the fate of the person in charge when you are lost and on your own.
While I think the show really wasted the potential for some darker stories, (though we still got Equinox which was great) this episode really set a precedent of what the show could be. Something that asked tough moral and philosophical questions of its characters, and by extension the audience.
I still think about this episode 20 years after I watched it, and while I still think that Janeway did the correct thing, I honestly don't know if I could have done the same in her shoes. To me, that is the mark of a great story.
My only real gripe about this is that it's forgotten about after the episode, we never see Janeway having to deal with her emotions and guilt over this decision. However, we do later in the series get a similar story and similar payoff with another character. In Latent Image we see the Doctor dealing with the guilt of having to choose one life over another. I wish we'd seen some of that introspection on Janeway's part instead of her just being the strong captain and moving on as though nothing happened. However, that is the fault of the series and not the episode itself.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: So I added Tulix to my rewatch and yeah, holy cow, Janeway straight up murders a dude who was begging for his life.
It's criminally bad writing unless you want Janeway to be the villain of the show. It's like the writers forgot they control the scenario.
You need to put things back, OK, do the episode, include Tulix's Shylock speech ("if I'm happy, I laugh") then we learn the fusion is unstable and either they take them apart or all 3 die. Or put some stakes in it, there's something only Tuvok (or Neelix) can do so they have to separate them to save the ship. Or something!
But Janeway has no reason to kill Tulix, she just liked having them separate better.
Incredible.
Or, alternately, keep Tulix, write out Tuvok and Neelix, make it part of a meta plot about the people on Voyager are being irrevocably changed by their journey.
But no. Let's make our hero a murderer.
I mean... you could look at it that way.
But I mostly remember the episode as gak fake melodrama. Its an accident, fix it and don't kill your two crew members and pretend they have no agency. The end.
The fused being has no real connections or presence in anyone's life, including its own. The individuals have history, relationships, meaning and (in the case of Tuvok) depth. There's zero reason to flush them because 'oops, technobabble.'
That episode was better than it had any right to be. Mixing two people up in the transporter seemed like a stupid premise to me, but after the first time watching the episode I was left speechless. It really did ask some uncomfortable ethical questions, and that is one mark of a great Trek episode.
I don't think Voyager was quite as bad as has been hinted at in this thread. It definitely wasn't DS9 good, but still not horrible.
I think the series would have been better with just a few tweaks.
I'd have likes to see Voyager change over time. Mounting damage and scars on the hull, even if they had a few episodes where a "nice alien race" donated a shipyard for a few weeks just to help them and reset the look of the ship to a newer state.
It was shown that Janeway was open to the idea of using alien tech to improve Voyager, even wanting to mount a mega-cannon on the nose. That concept would have been great for a growing storyline. Adding in a new background piece of non-Federation tech every once in a while.
The crew. I'd have liked to see at least one or two main cast members die. Also, I'd have liked to see them get reinforced by volunteers, or even the moral dilemma of inducting crew member's kids when they got old enough. In The 37's episode I'm surprised not one human wanted to go with them.
In the last season and a half they should have been skimming the back-corners of the Beta Quadrant. It would have been cool to see more stragglers from races introduced long ago, kind of like that episode with the Klingons.
While not really feasible, it would have been interesting to see them have 10 year jumps in time between seasons. They supposedly had 75 years before they got back to federation space, so if they spread it out we could have seen what they tried to do with aging crew and raising a generation or two of kids along the way.
Voyager was kinda doomed from the start, witch what they wanted to do.
It was concieved as a spite show to DS9, Braga didnt like the darker more mature stories it was telling but still suceeding despite him. so he wanted to get back to more light hearted Trek with simpicity, so he made voyager, but they knew the dominion war was coming so they had to have voyager in another place free off that.
But with the idea of straning them in the quadrant there, they then created another problem. What now, how do they do light hearted "Get Home" in a hostile place like that.
They just couldnt. It never made sense. it got repaired every week somehow, crew replacements where not a problem, nothing.
It was all around a shitshow
Ill also never understand why they did have the issues they did, why couldnt replicators work? Why was there power issues at all but not fuel problems? NOTHING
My understanding is replicators don’t make something from nothing. Rather they have banks/vats of raw materials stored elsewhere and they pull from that and rearrange the molecules into your requested item/food. They were unable to easily restock those raw materials away from their support system.
The TNG technical manual highlighted that replicators are very energy intensive; they’re OK for producing small items, but not large components. They were at pains to point out that shipyards were still conventional fabrication facilities, not giant replicators. Starfleet is willing to pay the energy cost on ships, because it means their supplies can be much more efficient (the bulk chemicals AduroT mentioned), rather than having to store every item you might ever need, and in normal circumstances they can just keep the ships fuelled up.
It also stated that there are certain materials / components that were too complex or esoteric for replicators to produce correctly.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: I don’t think this is true. Voyager came out around the same time as Space Above and Beyond, and that show got crapped on mercilessly once they used their pilots as frontline ground pounders. Even Babylon 5 got a lot of hate for the first two years. People had high standards for Sci Fi despite there being very few Sci Fi shows of excellent quality.
I did like Space...
The multirole crew makes perfect sense... if you have a resource constrained logistics and deployment system. If getting PAX to target area is difficult, but equipment is not as difficult, or the costs of doing so are great so you only send the brightest and best it makes sense.
Example is the excellent Forever War (I force all Sci-Fi fans to read it and lament there has never been an awesome film or TV series of it). You can send limited people, so they are highly intelligent, highly trained and multirole.
Sadly they then threw in marine boot camp level training and giant spaceships that had enough space for infantry and aerospace experts that would allow more specialisation in each.
I rewatched S:AAB a couple of years back out of nostalgia and it held up remarkably well. Your post got me thinking; it would have been great if they’d done that series with an A team and B team set of characters (maybe make two of them brothers or something), one in the air wing and the other with the ground forces.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: But hey. At least we got Battlestar Galactica out of it, in a round about way. And that is largely brilliant.
Galactica is interesting in this discussion because save for a few episodes of Roswell and a failed Dragonriders of Pern pitch, it was Moore's next big project after leaving Trek and being let off the leash shows us a lot of expansion of ideas from DS9 and a lot of clear parallels to Voyager's premise (one would argue inescapable parallels since a lot of them are drawn from the original BSG, but they're there) - and I think it shows us what Voyager could have been like, tonally, if it had been his baby instead of Berman's.
Berman sold the networks, and the audience, through the networks, on the 'stranded ship, far away from home' concept with the implicit promise that there would be struggle against bad odds and pulling together - and argued vehemently against delivering on that promise for years (only a season or two of the show proper until the writers basically seemed to give up arguing with him) based on his own misgivings about what the audience wanted. In this regard, BSG is an answer to Voyager: Moore arguing directly with Berman that sci-fi audiences want (and more importantly, are not too stupid to understand) a serialized story, an argument vindicated by serialized stories becoming the standard over the ensuing decade.
The_Real_Chris wrote:The multirole crew makes perfect sense... if you have a resource constrained logistics and deployment system. If getting PAX to target area is difficult, but equipment is not as difficult, or the costs of doing so are great so you only send the brightest and best it makes sense.
I have not seen S:AAB beyond a couple of episodes I may have caught as a kid while channel surfing, but this is something BSG and Star Trek also did which doesn't make sense to me. Pilots are a massive training investment, and even assuming that training somehow also makes you a good ground-pounder (something most operators would highly contest, I think), any one of them is going to do more for the ground war effort by transporting troops to the field or providing close air support than they can ever realistically provide on the ground.
Jadenim wrote:I rewatched S:AAB a couple of years back out of nostalgia and it held up remarkably well. Your post got me thinking; it would have been great if they’d done that series with an A team and B team set of characters (maybe make two of them brothers or something), one in the air wing and the other with the ground forces.
Definitely a solution to the above problem. Probably prohibitively expensive for a show like S:AAB was, or even Voyager or DS9 at the time. A recurring ground-combat element would basically require you to pay two sets of starring actors, or relegate one to a recurring guest role.
It'd be expensive either way, but I'd love to a see a show do that too.
AduroT wrote: I loved the Dragon Riders of Pern books. Would definitely check out a show based on those.
From what it sounds like, be glad that it didn't get made. From Wikipedia:
In 2002, Warner Brothers Network and writer Ronald D. Moore had completed sets and casting for a pilot episode, and were within a few days of filming. Moore had sent the pilot episode to Warners for final approval. It was returned with so many changes to the basic structure of Pern – making it more like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess – that it no longer much resembled the world created by Anne McCaffrey. As a fan of the Dragonriders of Pern series, Moore refused to continue. Filming was canceled, and rights ownership remained with Zyntopo Teoranta's assign, Kua Media Corporation (Canada).
Regarding Space aab, it already has a dozen or so main characters. While having them be experts in everything May stretch believability, I think it lets the series tell a much wider range of stories, and allow for a better set of character development without the viewer needing to remember another dozen or so characters. If they had split between aerospace and ground, then it would have been restrictive on the storylines. Amd they are the heroes. Why shouldn’t they be good at everything
Flinty wrote: Regarding Space aab, it already has a dozen or so main characters. While having them be experts in everything May stretch believability, I think it lets the series tell a much wider range of stories, and allow for a better set of character development without the viewer needing to remember another dozen or so characters. If they had split between aerospace and ground, then it would have been restrictive on the storylines. Amd they are the heroes. Why shouldn’t they be good at everything
That's usually why this happens in TV. It may not be entirely realistic that they send Starbuck out to lead a bunch of Marines assaulting a prison ship, for example, but the audience needs a character to invest in, so adding some random new guy just for that purpose doesn't have the same impact. It's also cheaper. You've already paid the actor, so might as well use them. I think it only becomes really egregious when it's always the same character who seems to acquire extra skills as the plot demands.
“But I’ve always been able to play the piano while balancing a pile of books on my head and hack into the bad guy’s database that uses a different basis of programming than everything humanity uses… anyway, it’s well known that everyone in the galaxy uses unix”
I have not seen S:AAB beyond a couple of episodes I may have caught as a kid while channel surfing, but this is something BSG and Star Trek also did which doesn't make sense to me. Pilots are a massive training investment, and even assuming that training somehow also makes you a good ground-pounder (something most operators would highly contest, I think), any one of them is going to do more for the ground war effort by transporting troops to the field or providing close air support than they can ever realistically provide on the ground.
But if the command deck didn't go and investigate the cave the episode would be them trying to apply the extra long screwdriver of command over the comm link with occasional screams to break the micromanagement! And... Biggles!
Forever War handled it quite well. We can send (at the start) a ship. It can carry X people. So here that is the constraint, not training efficiency. So get the brightest, train them to do everything well enough, and hope whatever happens they are somewhat prepared for and can adapt to.
One of the things I loved about BSG was that they did have a lot of background characters in the deck crew, etc. that they brought back in at times when they needed them. The Master Sergeant was one, Socinus, etc. Plus they had some ascended extras like Callie. I only really realised this when I rewatched the pilot and there were a bunch of people who I remember popping up two, three, four series later.
I don't remember the exact specifics of what was ad-libbed and what wasn't, but I seem to recall the commentary track for the mini series saying that Chief Tyrol was originally slated to die but Aaron Douglas' delivery of "Let's get the old girl ready to roll and kick some cylon ass!... This better be for real." bumped him up to series regular.
-The writers couldn't stick to the concept a lot of the time.
I think that's it in a nutshell. The premise was interesting but they ignored a lot of it once they got past the pilot. And if you're just going to do episodic, standard Trek plots and scenarios and not something a little more desperate and bold...the quadrant setting eliminated any of those Starfleet plots that the other series could bank on. So it kinda ended up with the worst of both worlds.
But IIRC some of Ron Moore's frustration with Voyager helped spawn Battlestar Galactica, which is a good result.
I *loathe* the new BSG, and even moreso Craprica. And it's because of Starbuck.
The show was full of people who couldn't make the right decision (except Cmmdr Adama - and even he started having issues), if it was handed to them on a silver platter.
I get and would like a story about a rag-tag fleet and their struggles to escape an enemy and find a new world. The constant bad decisions I could have done without.
.
