:dubious:
That was the whole point!
Kirk would have had them home by the end of the first episode, because he would have teleported his ship and crew out of there and left the total strangers behind rather than violate the Prime Directive.
Kirk would have boned half the crew as well, and at least then there would have been something worth watching.
“Sevenof…Nine. Resistance…is… futile.” <swagger swagger>
I loved the premise: Half the crew is Starfleet crewcut types, the other half is Maqui cutthroats, they have to work together to get back home. And cut off from communication with Starfleet, they’re on their own with unprecedented moral dilemmas. You really can’t ask for a better premise.
I loved the characters, for the most part. Tom Paris is maybe the most complex character in the history of the franchise; Seven of Nine is up there. The Doctor was great! Neelix kinda spoiled it for me, though.
The weak link is the scripts. Amelia Earhart indeed–!
I watched Voyager all the way through, and it occasionally had episodes I really enjoyed, but overall wasn’t nearly as good as DS9 or Next Generation. Overall, I didn’t care for the first couple seasons, mainly because I thought the Kazon were a fairly pathetic villain. They had more intimidating villains in later seasons, but unfortunately since Voyager is only one ship they had to basically neuter these villains to keep the protagonists from meeting an untimely end. What they did to the Borg was inexcusable. And then they did the same thing to Species 8472, who were supposed to be even more powerful than the Borg.
I, too, almost gave up on the show completely after “The 37’s.” But a couple episodes later they drew me back in with one of my favorites, “Projections.” I thought some of the best episodes of the show were the ones where the Doctor deals with his desire to be human. (“Real Life” was another that I enjoyed for this reason.) But of course, this had already been done (and arguably done better) with Data on The Next Generation.
You knew it was going to stink when one of the first shows had brutish, big hair aliens running around in star ships, and what was more valuable than anything else to them was … wait for it… water, and I don’t mean a planet full of water. They were willing to go toe to toe with the Enterprise for a few bathtubs full of H[sub]2[/sub]O.
Now I’m no Star Fleet graduate, but if you have a civilization that can build and pilot a f***ing starship, I would think that condensing or making enough water to drink out of hydrogen and oxygen would be a workable scenario,but if scientific illerates are good enough for the writing staff well… you get what you get.
Actually, Kirk probably would have had Scotty install a timer on a photon topedo and then send it over to the array, teleporting out just before it the thing was set to go off.
Kazon don’t get the array, Voyager gets to go home. Problem solved.
While I would wonder if “They must make it home with a dumbass of a captain handicapping them” is really “the point” of voyager, the particular story line that made me give up on her forever was when the crew was transported to 20th century earth. And they decided to go back to their time via the wormhole that would take them to the other quadrant, rather than using the warp-slingshot-around-the-sun method of time travel employed in every 3rd TOS episode.
-lv
Janeway and Paris turned into NEWTS!
They got better.
And for the slightly more serious answer: It’s long been my opinion that Voyager, from a storywriting standpoint, needed Q far more than TNG did. Granted, Q was mostly great on TNG, while his appearances on Voyager were often embarrassingly bad.
But what was Voyager’s mission? To get away from where they are, and get home as fast as possible. There’s no chance to develop any interesting recurring villains because they’re supposed to be leaving them behind. (And when they did have recurring villains, like the Kazon or the Vidiians, nobody understood why the same people kept popping up when Voyager was supposed to be high-tailing it for home!) A near-omnipotent being like Q could mess with Voyager no matter where or when in the Universe they were.
Meanwhile, Q could have offered them exactly what they want - a way home - instantaneously. All they’d have to do is prove humanity’s worth (as Q made Picard do on numerous occasions.) That task would’ve been made all the much harder, with Voyager all alone in hostile ground, with half a crew of Maquis.
I liked Voyager, but it seemed that they rehashed a lot of ideas…and not just ideas from other series, but they’re own ideas. Each season was really very similar to the previous season. They needed one time travel episode, one about the kazon, one with the vidiians, one with hirogen, one about the doctor wanting to be more human, one with seven dealing with her new humanity, a holodeck episode, and a couple borg episodes. Although I must say, they did have some really good episodes. A few of my favs are:
Shattered- Yes, a time travel one, but a good one. Chakotay is in some warp core accident inside a weird nebula, and sections of the ship are all in different times during different crisises the ship has had, and he has to save the ship.
Nemesis - Chakotay is basically brainwashed into fighting a war on another planet against a race that commits horrible war atrocities. The Voyager crew enlists the help of this horrible race to find Chakotay.
The Killing Game - Through use of the holodeck and memory wipes, the crew is forced into thinking there are allied soldiers and members of the French resistance in WWII fighting the Germans, played by the Hirogen.
Workforce - The crew is captured and brainwashed into working at a large power plant for a planet. Chakotay, Kim, Neelix, and the Doctor have to free them.
[slight nitpick]
They actually HAD to use the wormhole. A timeship from the 29th century forces them to go to the exact place and time they left for the 20th century. Irronically enough, the ship that brings them back is the ship that crashes on Earth in the first place, causing the wormhole that also brought Voyager there.
[/slight nitpick]
It’s actualy not that bad an ep., altough it has a huge paradox. The microprocessor revolution was caused by a crashed 29th century spaceship which wouldn’t have existed without the microprocessor revolution.
I think you missed a recurring theme. I agree, though, those first two are great episodes. I’ve never seen the third, yet.
Not just “turned” into newts…
::Spoiler box, though I don’t know why::
[spoiler]they “evolved” into newts. Because they took a ride on a shuttlecraft that had been modified to travel at “Warp 10.”
Now, “Warp 10,” as it’s commonly understood to be under the modern “rules” of ST, isn’t just “a really high speed that it’s hard to go to.” It’s infinite speed. It would take infinite energy to acheive. You would occupy all points in the universe simultaniously.
(Even Q, who is omnipotent, is calculated to move at something like Warp 9.99999999. And with that, he is able to reach any point in the universe, at any time in the universe, instantly.)
But the Voyager shuttlecraft did it, with some simple (if exotic) modifications to it’s engines. That’d be like a 747 being able to go faster than light after getting a tuneup.
And—get this—the whole occupying every point in the universe simultaniously bit?
They didn’t gloss over it. They actually had Paris say that he did it. He occupied every possible point in the universe, simultaniously. And he was able to comprehend it.
And then, after getting back to Voyager with fuel left over (AAARGH), Paris didn’t just start “mutating”…they said he was “evolving at an accelerated rate.”
That, of course, is not how evolution works. No F****IN’ WAY—
::pauses, catches breath, runs fingers through hair::
Anyway, you’d think that if he were “evolving,” maybe he would be transforming into an organism perfectly suited to survive living on a hospital bed in a windowless room on a starship. But no…apparently, life naturally tries to “evolve” towards an end result.
Which, in Mr. Paris’ (and later, Captain Janeway’s, and by extention, all of humanity’s) case, seems to be a five foot long newt creature that breaths some toxic-corrosive gas, has no tongue, and has “super intelligence” (which just sounded like psychotic ravings) which he apparently used for the great task of lying naked on a mudbank in an alien swamp, not moving a whole lot.
Oh, and Paris kidnapped the captain, took her on the Warp 10 shuttle so she’d “evolve” too, landing on an alien world with a pleasant enough climate (although an alien world easily within a few days of Voyager, which is a little odd if you’re trying to make a getaway in a shuttlecraft that can take you anywhere in the universe), where he and the now “evolved” captain proceeded to screw each other (!) and produce a litter of little newtlings. (!!!)
Then, Voyager managed to recapture the two, and turn 'em back to normal. They left their offspring in the swamp, though.[/spoiler]
So, in short, I hate this episode. And everything it stands for. I wish it had a neck, so I could throttle it like a chicken.
For the rest of the series…
As for the ship itself…for a vessel that’s supposed to be so tight-knight and homey feeling, it looked a hell of a lot more cold and sterile than the Enterprise-D.
And Janeway’s personality was like clamping a file between your teeth and pulling it out, slowly. She ain’t no Ivanova.
On the other hand, I did really like “Revulsion” and “Living Witness.” There were, to be fair, a few handfuls of episodes that I liked, but those last two stand out in my mind.
Actually, after recently re-reading the Hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy, I’ve actually realized the pivot on which the entire episode turns.
Namely, Voyager managed to create the Infinite Improbability drive, which make incredibly Improbable things, like being able to occupy every spot in the universe simulatainously, and transform the occupents in newts. not only possible, but actually happen.
as already mentioned, the british TV station Sky One is showing repeats of a lot of the Star Trek shows, for the most part of late last year and early this year two episodes of TNG were shown at midnight on weekdays. I watched most of them and got a bit addicted, so when they started showing Voyager, I watched that too. Il agree that its not as good as TNG but I dont find it to be that bad either.
Anyway, Ive no idea what series is being shown, but basically the last episode I saw had the crew messing around in Fairhaven and Janeway apparently falling for Micheal Sullivan. So anyone know what series this is in? And one other question, do they ever get home?
…which is something that had already happened to Troi in one of the all-time stupidest episodes of TNG.
Episode #131, Series 6.
They do in the final episode. Berman & Braga (the producers) evidently wanted to conclude the series after 7 seasons, just like all the others since The Next Generation, but had no idea how to do so. They ended up throwing together a piece of crap that not only features time travel but two Janeways and the destruction of the Borg hive mind.
Yeah, I didn’t see a hell of a lot of desperation on the show in the season or so that I stayed with it, and they were in pretty desperate circumstances. What I saw in the third season of “Enterprise” – the back-against-the-wall stress, the ethically questionable decisions – is what “Voyager” should have been about, and it appears from your comments that they never really hit that note.
I’m fully aware that the time ship was herding them towards the wormhole. But even if the timeship hadn’t been there, not a single crewman was aware of the technique that Kirk used lastt than a Vulcan lifespan ago to save the Earth from the Aliens that Wanted to Chat With Whales, nobody mentioned the POSIBILITY of using a common time travel technique to go home, while people DID mention the possibility of just staying on ancient earth.
Which, in my book, labels them all dumbasses.
-lv
While I’m no real Trekkor (I hate TOS for example) I did watch every single episode of ST:TNG as it was originally aired. I lasted about a half-season into Voyager before throwing in the towel.
I think it was the casting. As has been said, Neelix (“Froggy”) was insufferable. Kes (“Pixie”) was insufferable. Janeway was pretty irritating.* The actress who played Belanna (sorry, I refuse to deal with the apostrophe thing) was … not good. (They should have substituted Michelle Forbes as Ensign Ro – perfect Makee tie-in, wouldn’t you think?) The African-American Vulcan was unbearable even for a Vulcan. (Should have studied eyebrow-lifting and the intonation of the word “indeed?” from Leonard Nimoy.) I loved Robert Picardo but as has been noted, the character was totally a Data ripoff. I did approve of Robert Duncan McNeill for the eye candy alone, but it would have been better if he had played Ensign Locarno. Garrett Wang and Robert Beltran were, at best, third-rate actors. The saving grace, acting-wise, was Jeri Ryan. I never heard of her before Voyager; I’m off to IMDB her now.
*About a thousand years ago I saw Kate Mulgrew in Hedda Gabler. I never got over it. Janeway was Hedda for me.