I can’t really put my finger on it, but the show irritated me on some primal level that the other Star Trek series did not. The special effects were quite good, and the ship looked great, but a lot of the characters were like bad cartoons.
I could never figure out if the actors were awful, or the writing was to blame. Just watching the show riled me to the point I eventually just avoided it, and I do love my outer space sci-fi, so that took some doing.
I never minded the acting much, but the problem I had with Voyager was that it refused to consider the consequences of the ship’s situation.
They’re the only Federation ship in an uncharted land, with no means of resupply, no friendly ports, no means to repair or replenish. And yet, on a ship with less than 200 crewmen, they crash a shuttlecraft every other episode, go through photon torpedoes like water, and have enough redshirt casualties to depopulate the ship three times over.
ISTR a poster a few years back, when Battlestar Galactica had just hit the airwaves, commenting that it was what Voyager should have been - when Galactica loses crewmen, is damaged in a firefight, or has its food supplies compromised, it’s a meaningful event that gets felt throughout the crew and has a lasting impact on future episodes. On Voyager, all casualties and damages can be cured by liberal application of the reset button.
This is why I stopped watching. Sure, they tried to deal with it in early episodes, but after they shrugged their shoulders and said “oh well” to losing their 5th shuttlecraft or so, it really started to bug me.
I seem to recall Robert Beltran admitting that by the series’s final years, he was pretty much phoning it in. So yes, bad (or at least apathetic) acting may have been at least part of the problem with the show. But I am with Smapti in that the writers pretty much ignored the series’s premise in some very obvious ways. They also tended to write Janeway as not only very authoritarian but also very fickle, a combination which does not endear the audience to a protagonist.
My biggest problem with Voyager was that they ignored the obvious source of dramatic tension: here you have two ships, full of two sets of people who *hate *each other (Federation and Maquis), crammed into one ship for survival. Yet they all now seem to *love *each other! There should have been a lot more friction between the groups.
Also, Janeway was way too much of a den mother and not enough of a Captain. She seemed to care more about making people get along than about any sense of mission.
As for the writing and acting, I don’t think they were any worse than any other Star Trek franchise. They all had their share of cringe-worthy stories and performances. The Treks that worked, worked because of the concepts involved.
I’ve wondered this myself. I was first introduced to Voyager from retellings made for people overseas, and I thought it was great. I watched the real show later, and realized it didn’t live up to what I thought. But I don’t know if it was that I didn’t see the actors, or if it was that the reteller just knew how to write it where it worked. She made it a character show, through and through, and probably fanwanked some stuff without realizing it. Plus, she through a review at the end.
With her and the guy who did the Delta Blues–both people who loved the show, I grew to love it. Now that I am watching a series by a guy who doesn’t like it, I see the numerous flaws. I don’t think it’s because I’m suggestible, as I still like Voyager more than that guy.
They created a premise that could have been interesting but was not very Star Trek and then decided writing within that premise was too hard so they ignored it and just made it Next Gen-Lite.
In a way though, it was sort of ahead of its time because if Next Gen were on the air now and someone wanted to create a spin off, a ship used to having the support of a powerful nation behind it now lost and adrift with little chance of returning home is probably the concept they would come up with but in this case they would actually play to that concept instead of ignoring it.
That was what pissed me off the most, other than the psychotic inconsistent BAD Captain.
They took a great initial premise and completely neutered it from day one. All the promise of what could be totally squandered by insisting that it had to act like just another Star Fleet ship, and that it could not follow pre-planned story arc because that might confuse and lose fans who couldn’t watch every week.
Lucricrous use of the reset button, ridiculous situations or counter-intuitive consequences all enforced not by the organic flow of the show, but by the silly artificial constraints of the series.
All watched over by the only Star Fleet Captain that I would willingly frag, were I on the vessel.
I’d say about 90% of the problem was the writing. I thought the acting, by and large, was just about as good as on any other ST series. Janeway’s mood swings were a bit much, though.
I don’t even want to click on that. Was “Threshold” the episode where Janeway and Paris exceed warp 10, turn into space salamanders, mate, and are miraculously returned to human form in the last two minutes of the episode? :: shudder ::
It’s definitely the writing. Though it seemed more fundamental than that. The creators were to married to their ideas, I think, to change them to make them work better. I just find it hard to believe that of the many writers the show had, none of them pushed to tone Neelix down or make Janeway somewhat reasonable about something. There had to be someone at top overruling them.
It’s funny, since that concept was pretty much formalized with Battlestar Galactica, and Ronald Moore had worked for a year on Voyager. I always felt Moore conceived of BSG as Voyager done right.
And even then I always thought things seemed pretty easy with the human fleet on BSG considering how long they were out there. Where did Lee Adama get that gorgeous new suit? Why were they so cavalier with ammo?
A lot of things have to go wrong for a show to not work but I’d agree this was a central problem with Voyager. The concept of the ship being lost in space simply wasn’t explored beyond the first few episodes; after that they might as well have been orbiting Earth.
The writing had its moments. I only watched the show occasionally but by accident tuned into an episode in which we find out that somehow the Voyager we are watching is a dupicate of the real thing, and has been cruising around thinking they’re the originals, and now their bodies and ship are disintegrating. Doomed, they race towards a faraway ship, hoping desperately to transmit information about themselves so at least someone will remember they existed, but they fail, and the ship disintegrates. The ship they were chasing after was the real Voyager, which notices some debris in space but didn’t get the transmission and so just carries on.
The end of the episode is remarkably poignant. It’s really first rate television, and serves well as a microcosm of part of the crisis Voyager is facing - what if they don’t make it? What if all they did and felt and suffered and accomplished is not just for naught, but is forgotten?
I looked it up and I am referring to the episode “Course: Oblivion.”