And I am including Space:1999 in that, which at least had Martin Landau to watch (hey, I happen to like Martin Landau).
But Janeway and her troupe of iron-jawed, slim-waisted, deadpan actors just make me want to throw my copy of The Making of Star Trek across the room. And Bonzo sits there watching it, and I keep making retching noises from here in the dining room, and I keep trying to tell him how DUMB it is.
And the plots. The vomitous touchy-feely 90s “get in touch with your inner Borg child” plots. And the aliens all speak perfect English. Yeah, yeah, I know, Kirk’s aliens all spoke perfect English, too, but at least they weren’t quite so SOLEMN about it.
And the aliens’ makeup, all they are is variations on the basic humanoid. Um, hello? Can we do something else now? I even start to feel a certain nostalgia for the giant chicken in the episode where Kirk almost had to marry the chieftain’s daughter (Nancy Kovack?).
Thank you for listening. Now I feel better. Anybody else?
The problem that I have with Voyager is that it isn’t more real. I know, I know, how stupid does that sound? Bear with me.
OK, let’s assume that you are trapped…where? 40,000 light years from Earth at this point. You know you ain’t coming back anytime soon. Wouldn’t you be scared, frightened? Do you think one rinky dink cook who moonlights as a morale officer is going to change the fact that you and your 300 of your crewmates will never see their families again?
What about the ensigns? Five years of dutiful service under harsh conditions and they’re all still ensigns. Why? There’s no one to replace them. They will continue to be ensigns forever. They will continue to serve under the same people for decades on end despite having basically the same experience because they happened to not have that experience when Voyager was launched. Don’t you think the ensigns are pissed about this? I would be.
The stories should be progressive in nature. Their ship doesn’t get torn apart one week and then return to “straight out of the spaceport” cleanness the next. It would add realism to the show to show that when you use something up, it’s gone! When someone hits the ship with a torpedo, it takes time to repair.
I don’t watch the show regularly, but since one of my best friends loves it I’ve seen it a few times. It just so happens that an episode I saw with her not long ago dealt with Kim’s unhappiness over his lack of career advancement opportunities.
It is kind of sad commentary on ST:VOY when two of my favorite episodes were when 7 of 9 jobbed to that great galatic gladiator The Rock, and the one with the clown during the first season.
The problem with the show is that you can’t feel a sense of either urgency or wonder among the crew considering where they are. They engage in encounters with the Borg and the Kazan as a ho-hum manner, which greatly subtract from their potential for either of the races to be great villians in the tradition of the Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians.
Character development of the was really poorly done, with a few exceptions. Captain Janeway had her moments, but sometimes she didn’t have the commanding presence to handle the two groups in her ship, the Federation and the Maqui, who once were tearing at each other’s throats. 7 of 9 unfortunately never was developed as being more than eye candy, despite Ryan’s potential. Ensign Kim had the energy like Chekov and Rom did, but that wasn’t channeled properly. Tuvok made for a better Vulcan than Spock was (though Spock was a better character), but there was no equivalent of a Dr. McCoy on the ship to make banter with him. Tom Paris, oh please he made me want to turn the channel. The token half-Klingon engineer wasn’t given an opportunity to be Klingon, as if it was something bad. Kes was unfortunately underutilized, then became a Wesley-cum-god-like character. The only character in the show who was developed perfectly was Richard Picardo’s The Doctor, and that was only because he started off as literally an uncarved block, to use the Taoist expression.
And then there were the plots. You will not be surprised from reading my previous posts on assisted suicide and euthenasia upon my saying that I was totally disappointed with that episode when a Q wanted to die and The Q protested, leaving it up to Janeway to arbitrate totally incorrectly about his suicide. (When the same subject was broached on ST:TNG, it actually made me think about the view from the other side–for about five seconds.) I almost gave up on the show ST:VOY right there and then. It is unfortuante that many of the best episodes didn’t occur with the situation of the crew being in another sector of the galaxy, but instead the crew being held up in a simulation game, either from the ship hologram or a simulation from alien origin. The Borg and Kazan episodes were less than epic. Only Pichardo saved them from being a total loss.
This has been a less-than great Star Trek. My only hope is that it would end with a bang just like ST:TNG. Or at least a soothing poker game.
Yeah, it’s horrible compared to all the previous Star Trek shows. However, for some of us, it’s our only fix of Star Trek and the movies are just not enough. DAMN YOU PARAMOUNT! DAMN YOU DIRTY APES!
Stories: There aren’t any. Not any big ones, really. Practically nothing carries over to other episodes, with the only exceptions being the occasional 2-part miniseries. EVERYthing got wrapped up in exactly one hour, EVERYthing allowed everyone to have a laugh at the end, and NOthing affected a character in any way (the Doctor’s evolution was season-to-season, not episode-to-episode).
Plot twists: Half the time, it was “good guy turns out to be bad guy”, in which case, the Voyager crew manages to find out in the nick of time and kills/captures the bad guy. The other half of the time, the main threat was a string of technobabble, which was solved with another string of technobabble (almost always involving the word “pulse”).
Action: Or lack thereof. Every now and then, we’d get treated to a cool shot of Voyager, or, more often, the Delta Flyer pulled a cool-ass maneuver while launching a spread of torpedoes and firing full phasers. But most of the time, it was “let’s fly in a straight line and maybe fire once or twice”.
Unnecessary drama: EVERYthing had to be a big-time deal. One of the coolest episodes I ever saw was when they sent the Doctor back to Federation space through the nifty long-range communications hookup of theirs. The plot? The Doctor met his former maker. Was there any big alien armada coming to fight them? Was there a traitor in their midst? Was Voyager in any danger? Nope. All the drama in the plot was internal, personal conflict, and it was actually handled nicely.
Anyway, that’s all I’m going to whine about… but I CAN keep going.
Oh, I am SO grateful, wordlessly grateful, for the people in this thread, who miraculously have been able to articulate EXACTLY what it is that bugs me about this show. I’ve never been able to put it into words, other than just, “It’s dumb.” Thank you, thank you. What a relief–it isn’t just me.
I have to admit, though, that I like the opening theme song and title sequence. Seeing Voyager gliding through the nebula cloud and flying above the planetary ring with its reflection underneath it is really beautiful.
Duck Duck Goose,
The aliens are not speaking English. The ship’s computer is just translating their words simultaniously- using ‘algorithms’ of course. They have talked about this in several episodes. Especially the one, I think it was called “The 47s” or something like that. The crew came across about a dozen earthlings who were abducted by aliens back in the 1900s, including Emelia Earhart. There was a Japanese pilot who said “Wow, you all speak Japanese!?”
I thought it was good that they decided to mention this. Unlike in TOS where it was ok for everyone to speak English with no explanation.
Also, TNG covered the whole ‘everyone looks like humans’ problem. Turns out, we are all decendants of one being who seeded this galaxy with her DNA. This is why some species, like Klingon and Human, can mate and have fertile offspring.
All the other gripes are right, though. That show is crap!! 'Course I still watch it, hoping for a good episode. Man, it has so much potential, but it consistantly just sucks ass.
I think I gave up on Voyager when I heard Neelix told, “You’re not mad at him because he exterminated your people in a fiery holocaust. You’re really just mad at yourself…” And guess what? They were right!
One has to wonder where writing that bad comes from. I think the problem with sci-fi these days is that it isn’t ghettoized. The old Star Trek worked- if it didn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here arguing over Voyager. But they’re so concerned with making sci-fi “mature” that they have to inject all sorts of Hallmark-card emotion. The same goes for a lot of modern sci-fi; I remember reading a “year’s best” collection a few years ago alongside a collection of classic stories, and the difference between them was quite marked. To wit:
Old story: Two guys invent a time viewer (ie a device which lets them spy on past events,) and the story details the kinds of ramifications that would ensue, both scientifically and in terms of their personal lives, from such an invention.
New story: a female scientist is living in the rubble of a nuclear war, and builds two statues of lizards with big genitals. They come to life and start copulating. It all has something to do with her unresolved feelings about her mother.
You’ve all mentioned a lot of valid things that bug me about the show and make it unenjoyable - but what gets me the most is the sheer number of holodeck-related mishaps. Ugh.
I think better 'Espescially’s would come from DS9.
Twice (That I can think of off-hand), they had problems with their Universal Translators:
Once, they picked up a group of alien refugees (IIRC, that’s what they were, I haven’t seen this episode in YEARS), and the UT spent the bulk of the episode trying to figure their language out.
In the episode where Quark, Rom, and Nog went back to 20th Century Earth (Roswell!), for the first 15 minutes (TV-time-wise…seems to be several days within the context of the show), their UTs are non-functional, so we get to hear a little bit of the Ferengi language.
You know, I think I read that same story myself about ten years ago. I’d forgotten all about it until now. Did the men use the time viewer to make historical movies? I remember the first one was about Alexander the Great. I think the story’s title was something like “E for Effort”, although that may have been another one in the same collection. Anyway, it was a pretty good story.
I think it’s an overall OK series, with some obvious problems. It would be nice to see Voyager have a little bit of wear and tear.
Another problem is the inconsistency in the plot. For example, in one episode they’re willing to attack and raid a Borg sphere in order to steal a trans-warp doohicky, and thus get them closer to home. Calamity ensues. After a bunch of crap, they wind up with the doodad and they use it until it gives out which cuts X light years off their trip.
(Cut to 1 or maybe 2 seasons later)
Voyager is once again fighting with the Borg. (This season’s premiere) They wind up with several Borg separating themselves from the collective, taking one or two cubes with them. (Who incidentally were allies with the Voy. crew) Why not just get the transwarp things then? Ask allies for technology versus raiding an enemy ship for it… (Now if only I knew how to make that rolling eyes smiley…)
Yes, Voyager is done badly. It’s a shame, because if people didn’t like the show’s potential, no one would care. You know a show is being misdirected when you realize that you could write better scripts than the people hired by Paramount!
Erm…People ALWAYS ‘realise’ (read: ‘think’) they can write better scripts than the pros. With VERY few exceptions (writers, not shows) they’re very, painfully, deathly wrong.
There was a TNG episode where they encountered aliens whose language was so dependent on cultural references that it didn’t make any sense, even though word-for-word it was translated into English. It was pretty stupid, too. I know why they have the ‘Universal Translator’, I just wish they would at least try to make it seem a bit more realistic, like mentioning having to spend a bit of time figuring out how the new alien languages work when they make first contact with them.