I hated Janeway because she psychotically alternates between lawful stupid(the initial stranding in which ironically she violates the prime directive in order to not violate it?!) to spineless(“give me back my crewman’s lungs!”) to bullheaded stubbornness(too many examples to list). There was an episode where mooching aliens with a sob story nearly make off with the whole ship because Janeway can’t say no!
The show also squandered a wonderful premise intentionally, it was apparently a executive decision for instance not to have any friction between the original crew of Voyager and the Marquis crew.:smack: It also had as many stinker/never leave the ship episodes as TNG.
Funny thing is I never noticed how diverse the cast was until that article pointed it out, and B’lanna was supposed to be Hispanic? I could swear we saw her dad in one episode.
“Torres” is a dead giveaway, now that I look at it. But I really wouldn’t have known that if the article hadn’t pointed it out.
I’m sorry, that moron is complain in the first paragraph that a big difference between the Abrams movies and older Trek is that the Abrams movies have more “random T&A”. As if the five TV series were ever lacking in that, between the TOS female uniforms with short hemlines, every weird alien chick that Kirk banged, Deanna Troi’s breasts, Tasha Yar having sex with Data, every chick that Riker and Picard banged, and, of course, freakin’ Seven of Nine, who is a blatant attempt to correct the moronic conclusion that B’Lanna Torres wasn’t hot enough? I haven’t seen enough DS9 to comment, but the romance plots in Enterprise with T’Pol were insufferable, and Hoshi Sato is pretty easy on the eyes and the costume designer wants us to know it, too. I don’t like the Abrams movies, but there is no more blatant sexuality in those than the old stuff.
To me, hate is way too strong an emotion for Voyager. There are some incredibly good episodes in that show. My disapprobation stems from the inconsistencies of character and plot, which are much noted. But hate? That’s a bit much.
What a goofy article. DS9 had only one white male in its cast of characters: Miles O’Brien. Unless you count Odo, I suppose, but I’m not sure solidified ooze counts as playing a white male. Even if you do count Odo, that ties with Voyager on the white male-ometer. Yet for me, DS9 trumps VOY in every possible way.
I’ve always preferred Voyager to DS9. There I said it.
Though I will concede that if I were God, after watching any Captain Proton or Nazi episode, I would gladly pull the plug on mankind.
But there were some great episodes and at least it explored.
ETA: I agree the article linked in the OP is nonsense
I don’t think Torres was put in the show with the prime role of being eye candy. I think they wanted a “loose cannon with a short temper” character. (In season one, she was clashing with Janeway all the time about who was in charge in Engineering.) She was supposed to show the friction between the Maquis and the Feds, and possibly a reason for Jakotay and Janeway to have arguments and work things out.
Kes was supposed to be the eye candy, playing sweet and innocent. But I guess that got old, after a while, so 7-of-9 was brought in: eye candy with a more strong, assertive, and confident personality. I assume this self confidence thing is more attractive than “sweet, innocent, but otherwise boring”.
A show that had its female lead turn into a lizard and be impregnated by a similarly lizardized crewmember is an epitome of female empowerment? Well, at least they didn’t stuff her into a fridge, I suppose…
Janeway bugged the hell out of me because she seemed to have no flaws, and was always right. Nearly every episode I saw (I stopped watching after the 3rd season or so) had some crewmember being all skeptical of Janeway’s plan, and every time Janeway’s plan was the right one.
And they went the other way with Enterprise, in making Archer an indecisive, pathetic mess of a CO (stopped watching this one after season 2 or so).
The reason I didn’t like Voyager wasn’t because of its crew. I thought the crew was good and they had some solid interpersonal drama and character development.
I disliked it because it utterly refused to acknowledge its own premise. The Voyager is the only Federation ship in a quadrant with no safe harbor and hostile forces everywhere, and yet, except for a handful of references to “replicator rations” (which doesn’t jibe with how replicators even work in the ST universe), life for the crew goes on just like it were any other starship. Nobody has to deal with being irreplaceable, with the stress and psychological issues brought on from working seven days a week with no days off for years straight, and the idea that they’ll likely die on that ship without ever seeing their loved ones again is barely addressed. They focus on “going home” every episode while barely acknowledging that it’s impossible for them to do so barring some deus ex machina. They go through photon torpedoes like candy. There’s a shuttlecraft crash every week. The hull always looks shiny and new at the beginning of each new episode, no matter how much damage it took last week and the fact that there’s no starbase for them to pull into for repairs. They have enough crew casualties to depopulate the entire ship three times over and nobody seems to notice. And so on.
Contrast, say, the remade Battlestar Galactica, where entire episodes revolve around the basic issues of food, water, equipment maintenance, succession planning, and the like, and it’s easy to see where Voyager went wrong.
Voyager went wrong in a lot of ways. Smapti makes a great point that’s often brought up, but I also feel like the crew itself was incredibly weak and forgettable. It quickly became The Janeway-Doctor-7of9 Variety Show, as those were the only 3 even remotely interesting characters on the show. Every episode that revolved around any of the others were just so boring and mind numbingly stupid.
That being said, I still liked Janeway. I think she’s the 2nd best Star Trek captain after Picard. The writers often fucked up with her, but more often than not she was a pretty awesome captain.
Believe me, I’ve tried.