I definitely agree with this. Also, in the pilot, neither side trusted Tom Paris. But by episode 1 of the regular series, he was everybody’s buddy. It would have been much better to show him gaining respect gradually over a long time, and still encountering occasional hostility.
Voyager had DINOSAURS!
On a SPACESHIP!
I still don’t get why being in People’s Top 50 meant they kept Garret Wang. Did they really think those audiences overlapped? I know Kes was harder to write for, but they had just started figuring her out before they got rid of her. (Keeping her as Neelix’s girlfriend was holding her back tremendously, as she had to be, well, the type of person who would stay with Neelix.)
I had a unique experience on the series, in that I discovered it and TNG and DS9 all at the same time, so I didn’t have the problems most people had with Voyager. Plus I was initially exposed via Internet recaps by a Voyager fan, rather than the actual show. This fan subconsciously fixed a lot of the flaws.
That’s why I love sfdebris, as I finally get to see why people hated the show.
Funny story… they relied heavily on some guy named Jamake Highwater for the background elements of Chakotay. As it turns out, Highwater was a fraudster who peddled tripe under a fake name to appeal to various parties too stupid to realize they were being conned. And conned rather obviously by someone who knew nothing whatsoever about AmerIndians and didn’t really care.
Of course not. She only qualifies as human because no other species was willing to take her. Janeway’s special brand of unstoppable arrogance doomed thousands or millions to horrible fates and, in then end, actually killed everyone on Voyager at least three times (but all involved were saved via magic). Even without magic, large numbers of her crew were killed, she made numerous enemies, and generally caused as much trouble as possible everywhere she went. Then she was promoted to Admiral.
Oddly, I find that entirely consistent for Starfleet, an organization dedicated to smug incompetence.
Although the article is of course utter rubbish, I’m not surprised to see it posted at RogerEbert.com. Ebert was a wonderful writer and film reviewer and I miss his wit and insight, but he was also a politically correct liberal ideologue, and I could see him believing this kind of nonsense.
And the best thing is I didn’t even notice. The characters weren’t outrageous stereotypes like in Voyager.
Don’t forget about Kes being a *2 yr. old *when the show started. Yes, it was an interesting aversion to the usual sci-fi rule about aliens having longer lifespans, but I think they strayed 2 far into mayfly territory. Oh having and the whole “Ocampa women can only get pregnant once in their lifetime” doesn’t make a lot of sense; especially when the only Ocampa birth we ever saw onscreen was Kes’s a and she was a singleton.
The replicator rations weren’t too ridiculous (they were a restriction on energy use), but the fact that everyone was constantly running personal programs on the holodeck was.
Year of Hell was originally conceived as a season-long arc, but ended up getting condensed to a 2-parter (that technically took place in an alternate timeline).
If you really think about it they spent the entire show drinking their own recycled urine (& eating their recycled faeces).
True, though I was annoyed he defaulted to heterosexual when he decided to explore relationships. I mean he was an asexual computer program who had to have made a conscious choice to program a sexual orientation for himself. But it’s Star Trek, alternative lifestyles are only allowed in alternate universes (& even then only by villains).
To be fair she was promoted into a desk job at Starfleet HQ, and that was only after bringing a shitload of advanced Borg technology back to the Alpha Quadrant for reverse engineering.
There’s such thing as a “Black Vulcan”? Then how come all the Vulcans we ever saw before him were the same color?
What’s wrong with Avery Brooks? I thought he was terrific as Sisko! Don’t tell me you think he’s only got one mood: “rage”? I thought he portrayal of a captain at the edge of Federation territory next to a wormhole leading to across the galaxy was nuanced, emotional, deep, and totally original. They couldn’t have put Patrick Stewart in that role
And Romulans, too.
I was very pleased by the inclusion of Doctor Bashir, but I’m not sure how many people realized he was of Muslim descent.
He was genetically engineered, too!
Vulcan has race issues too. Prejudice means it is very difficult for blacks (and non-hawt women) to be accepted by High Command.
I thought he was a bit pompous and hammy. If I were a crewman on the base I’d probably think he was rehearsing for Othello. All of the time.
…which is ironic considering my favourite captain is Picard. But Picard, while being a thesp, can do understatement IMO.
Well, that’s certainly a valid observation, but when Tuvok was presented, he was never presented as half human. He was 100% Vulcan, and articles at the time discussed this. The observation was “Yeah, there are Black Vulcans, so what?”
Sure, it was out of nowhere and didn’t tie in to any other Vulcan (or Romulan) portrayal, but that’s what the show runners said.
He was invented for a cartoon show, and not part of official DC canon.
Seems more like a verb that way. Tell them to stop it. 
Did anyone here watch the show Last Resort? It was a lot of what Voyager should have been: a divided crew stranded far from home in an increasingly desperate situation. It was just as silly as Voyager ever was but did the whole stranded bit much better.
Regarding black Vulcans, I am sure they can be seen in the background in ST:IV or ST:VI and there was a black Romulan captain in TNG season 6 or 7. It makes sense that a desert planet would have darker-skinned people on it. (FWIW, Firefly had a similar problem in which the Chinese were supposed to be fully half of the dominant galactic power but we never saw a single Chinese character anywhere.)
Hmm… never realized there was so much Janeway hatred out there. In the gay sci-fi fandom community she is insanely popular. I really like her a lot. Some of the episodes were written terribly for her, it’s true. But most of the time I thought she really kicked ass and was a fantastic captain. I kind of feel she was the best of Picard and Kirk. I still prefer Picard, however. Stewart’s acting chops are almost 2nd to none. Mulgrew was good though, I disagree she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.
But honestly, I’ve seen every episode of TNG and every episode of VOY, and both shows had a lot of crappy episodes. TNG just had a much better crew. VOY had a pretty forgettable and downright unlikable crew, except for a few characters, and a lot of wasted potential which has been pointed out. Overall, the best episodes of each series are pretty good, with TNG beating out VOY pretty easily. But the worst epsiodes of each series, TNG takes the cake easily for me. VOY rarely ever reached the insipid depths of the terribleness that TNG did.
Space is big. Really, really big. So big that coming across a '37 pickup truck — in the Delta Quadrant for your deity of choice’s sake — that started after floating around in nothingness for hundreds of years, with its gas, oil, battery and water intact, along with an aviatrix — and not just any aviatrix but that aviatrix — well, I never.
Deserts, yes; not rain forest. It would be far more logical for them to resemble Middle Easterners than Sub-Saharan Africans.