I had hopes for Voyager being something different. For some reason, I assumed the way it was going to work was that Voyager is blown way the hell away from home. So far from home, in fact, that returning is kind of out of the question. So I figured they would be miles away from anyplace that’s ever heard of the federation and would have to make do in this unfamiliar territory. Rebuild themselves and find a purpose. Maybe even try to unite the races in this new place into a new federation, or whatever. To me, that would have been somewhat interesting. However, when it became clear that they were just going to go home, I wasn’t all that interested.
But I’m not a huge Star Trek fan in the first place. I don’t find that universe to be overly compelling.
I agree with the posters who said they couldn’t stand Janeway’s voice and hand gestures. Another thing about her that bugged me was her hairstyle. There was one episode where she let down her hair – literally and figuratively – and I liked her a lot better that one time. I don’t know the name of the episode, and I don’t remember the details clearly, but basically some of the crew members, including Janeway, were kidnapped and taken to some planet where they worked in a factory of some kind. They were brainwashed to forget their true identities and to believe that they always lived on this planet and were supposed to be working in this factory. I thought Janeway was actually likeable in this episode, and I was disappointed afterwards when she went back to her usual captain’s manner, hairstyle, etc. Does anyone know the name of this episode?
Don’t know that episode, ** Merejane ** , but wanted to put my oar in (again) to agree with you previous comments about how much less colorful the voyager charaters were than their TNG counterparts.
Though I have my issues with TNG, too - like the idea of kids on ships. Eww, kids.
Kn(keeping fingers crossed that Enterprise doesn’t turn into a crapfest. So far, liking it)ckers
Okay, okay, ask a simple question, get an overwhelming response. Sheesh. Alright, I WILL admit Voyager was waaaay too PC. There were times when Janeway’s stupid insistence on following this or that rule was so obviously jeopardizing the lives of the crew that any sentient being would have hit her on the head and taken over the ship.
But a lot of the above objections are simply matters of taste.
I don’t know what else you were watching but Voyager was clearly in the bottom five percent of writing. I know there’s differences in taste but even from the objective viewpoint of juding the show based on structure of its plots it fails miserably (I also hated the dialog and the inane concepts that were thrown out as plots but then we’re getting into things that are matters of opinion).
I had a roommate who would watch Voyager religiously so I saw too much of the series and I can say without hesitation the single biggest problem was the writing which was just slightly above the level of the average junior high student.
The worst example of this was Voyagers absolute reliance on the deus ex machina ending. It’s a problem that all recent Trek has had (which turned me off it back when Next Gen was getting big) but Voyager raised it to an art form. Characters are confronted with a problem, spin their wheels for fifty minutes, and then pull something out of thin air to make it all better and put things back to precisely as they were at the start of the show (with problem fixed if it was there at the beginning). Even worse on Voyager where they were supposed to have limitted resources (something that was brought up in passing in dialog but never shown). The shuttlecraft like they were pintos every other week but they never run out.
It’s also the place where Star Trek went way overboard with the not thinking about the consequences of the plot devices they introduced (again, a problem with all new Trek that helped turn me off the shows). Often within a show there’s a simple and obvious answer using the tech or a technique provided in the story that an elementry school student could point out. Naturally this isn’t used since it would end the episode quickly and instead they just go around in circles until the inevitable deus ex machina shows up to fix everything. It’s even worse when you include the stuff that comes up and then is never mentioned again.
Then there were the inconsistant characterizations. One week the characters are willing to do underhanded things to get home, the next they’re too high minded to do such things. On especially horrible occasions flip flopping of the behavior occurs in the same show.
So, even without judging the actual quality you have three key signs that the writing is among the lowest you’ll find.
As for the people who hate Voyager, I totally symapthise with you, the reason why I hated the show was its’ general blandness, and the colour sceme of the Kazon was just added to it.
Here in Britain, Sky1 has just repeated it endlessly, on the most boring of afternoons just to get people interested in it and another so called ‘jem’ of gene rodenberry, Earth final conflict.
Just cancel the crappy show and put DS9 on again! (DS9 IS PUT ON AT 6AM!)
Keep blasting Voyager! I love this piss taking of it!
VOYAGER never lived up to its potential. It had the best characters and most intriguing premise of any TREK francise up to that point–Half the crew was Academy straight-shooters, the other half was cutthroats, and the straight-shooters caused most of the trouble. With Starfleet out of the picture, Janeway was an authority unto herself. Tom Paris is the coolest character ever in any version of TREK…
…and they frittered it all away! In an uncharted area of space, they sure run into a lot of familiar faces. Remember the Amelia Earhart episode? They described an amazing city so they wouldn’t have to go to the expense of showing it to us! And while I like the Holodeck as a plot devcice, too many episodes relied on it too heavily.
ENTERPRISE is by far the better show. I may even like it more than TNG. All the other versions of TREK are adventure/allegory of varying degrees of success. ENTERPRISE has a theme it sticks to, that being it’s a show about making hard decisions. I wish VOYAGER had stuck closer to its initial premise.
Oh, and while it’s a little off-topic, I’d like to clear up a “mystery” from DS9: Remember that strange wall in back of the sickbay? Ever wonder what that is? It’s a plastic stacking pallet, painted silver. Most warehouses and all pressrooms use them. CHEAP!
Yeah, i noticed that as well, i thought it was a neat touch, fit in with the “working class” feel of the show.
Oh, anohter complaint. Holographic rights. Doesn’t the Data rulings pertain? Are Turing Tests banned in the future? Why is this an issue? [sub](bad writing)[/sub]
Better than Law & Order? Better than Simpsons? Television may be a vast wasteland, but let’s not go nuts.
It all started to go wrong in NextGen’s first season, with Symbiosis. In that particular episode, it becmae clear the Prime Directive was made of taffy, to be twisted into whatever shape was required so the main characters could still retain the moral high ground. After this episode, Prime Directive stories almost always ended up with the following premise:
Aliens with problems show up. Sympathetic crewman wants to help. Commander says “Nope, Prime Directive and all.” Crewman goes ahead and helps anyway. It all goes horribly wrong when the aliens are revealed as being real scumbags. Crewman gets wrist-slap and the whole thing is forgotten by next episode. There was very little desire to have morally ambiguous endings (i.e. you acknowledge that the situation is much like 20th-century warfare, but you give the Hill People flintlocks, anyway, because the alternative is worse).
Ironically, for all its Prime Directive flagwaving, the very premise of Voyager hinges on a PD violation. Has Voyager not been yanked to the Delta Quadrant, the Kazon would have clobbered the Okampa. That would have been the “natural” course of events. Janeway could have decided to leave immediately, but she broke the PD to help the cute aliens fight off the ugly aliens instead. Strangely, I don’t recall any of the characters ever pointing this out.
During Voyager’s run, this became ridiculous. Sanctimony became the norm and Janeway’s solutions often ran to “Stop being mean to us or we’ll self-destruct!” For a while there, she seemed awfully eager to jump on the self-destruct button instead of following a course that frankly is more logical and effective: someone is killing you, you kill them back. The dedication to nonviolence was taken to preposterous extremes. Certainly, you should avoid battle if possible, but when someone is killing your people, don’t you have some kind of duty to defend yourtself? Apparantly not, because the nameless crewmen being killed off in every other episode are apparantly replicable, so Voyager’s complement could stay at around 150 over the show’s entire run. I wonder if anyone’s ever added up the number of casualties?
As attempts go, it was a pretty weak one. Gilligan’s Island got there much earlier. Many episodes had moments where Voyager could have gotten home or at least much much closer, but Janeway refused for some hairsplitting moral reason (in an attempt to bouy ratings, Q appeared at least 3 times. Why he didn’t snap his fingers and send the ship home remains a mystery to me). This is the thematic equivalent of Gilligan dropping firewood on the radio.
At the end of one episode, Harry Kim delivers some dramatic speech about “the voyage” and the characters play along. I, on the other hand, would be thinking “gee Harry, I’m really glad you managed to make some friends on this trip, but I’ve got friends of my own back on Earth and I’m not really looking forward to spending the rest of my life on this ship. Frankly, I’m kinda sick of you people.”
Putting aside the eye-candy elements, you should throw in Data and the Doctor for the sake of completeness. T’Pau is severely distinctive from Data/Seven/Doctor in a major respect: she’s not trying to become human. T’Pau may end show sympathy for the humans, and may argue on their behalf, but (so far) we haven’t been subjected to episodes in which Data/Seven/Doctor learns how to be funny, Data/Seven/Doctor learns the meaning of love, Data/Seven/Doctor learns how to dream, Data/Seven/Doctor overcomes prejudice ad nauseum. Unfortunately, from NextGen onward, being “human” (especially being a human with Western attitudes and a touch of new-age crap thrown in) became the ultimate moral goal. If you weren’t human, you were flawed in some critical fashion.
T’Pau, though, is refreshing because she is confident and content not being human. She doesn’t need to be “educated” in human ways and though I can imagine her picking up bad habits from being around humans for any length of time, I genuinely hope the character never resorts to doing the “human thing” over the “logical thing” during a crucial moment. That would suck royally. The 'human thing" is often nasty and destructive and should definitely not be the automatic choice. Janeway was really insistant on making human choices whenever they offered a chance to be preachy, but when the natural human choice was “They tortured and killed crew members, let’s wipe them out!” she was silent on the issue. Janeway’s insistance to Seven that “you’re human/you should learn to be human” was also troubling. Shouldn’t Seven be allowed to define herself any way she wants? Why does she have to conform to Janeway’s concept of being a human? At least one episode where she talks frankly with Tuvok and contemplates going the Vulcan philisophical route would have been refreshing.
Plus I loved the scene in the Vulcan monastery when T’Pau tears into Archer (he deserved it) and then steals the blanket. Classic.
I dunno, judging from Janeway’s security-blanket clinging to Starfleet regs, how psychologically alone could they have been?
Harry Kim, Hoshi Sato and arguably Sulu are all pretty well-assimilated Asians. None of them introduced any significant Asian philosophy into their shows. Each role could have been played by a nonAsian without any major change to over tone of the show.
Enterprise just started its second season, so you’ll have to defer “resting your case” for a while, yet. Superficial similarites in casting don’t really matter and Enterprise isn’t a copy of Voyager so much as both shows are copies of TOS (which itself was a copy of Wagon Train).
This isn’t really an argument you should be basing your case on. The fact that the suits at Paramount wanted to milk the Star Trek cow a little more doesn’t gaurantee that their formula is good, it only implies that it’s somewhat successful. There have been ten “Jason” slasher movies; that doesn’t prove Jason is Shakespeare; it only shows that Jason can make money.
Voyager suffered from too many touchy-feely episodes and far too much sanctimony. They could have called it Touched by a Starship. When I watch a program of any kind, I expect primarily to be entertained. I didn’t waste all those years becoming an adult so I could be spoonfed moral lessons, and Voyager was just too much cod liver oil for me to take.
Point of information: Berman had taken over well before Roddenberry’s death in 1991 (early season 5). And Braga started as an intern, earning his first on-screen credit with season 4’s “Reunion”.
And at other times, cling to the Federation like religious dogma. That’s what bothered me so much about “Alliances”: Janeway’s sanctimonious speech about how they will hold true to Starfleet principles, no matter how many crewmembers are killed. When I heard this, I realized Voyager was not going in a direction I wanted to watch. (Contrast this with Janeway’s similarly sanctimonious, yet entirely contradictory, speech 5 years later in “Friendship One”. Suddenly, exploration isn’t worth a single life. Whatever happened to “risk is our business”?)
Come to think of it, I was beginning to give up on Voyager even before “Alliances,” since it had stunk (infamously) for most of the 2nd season up to that point. The following week: “Threshold”. Good lord, what a turkey. (To be fair, the following week’s “Meld” is still one of the series’ best outings.) I wasn’t the only one to notice; season 2 also drove reviewer Tim Lynch away from the fold.
Trust me, adding Seven didn’t improve things that much.
To me, the “Risk is our business” speech is inextricably entwined with an image of Captain Kirk dancing across the bridge in his underwear while “That Old Time Rock n’ Roll” blasts on the intercom.
Voyager is basically, what you might call Star Trek-Lite. Star Trek for Teens. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek Babies. Ok maybe not that last one, but the show suffered from:
[ul]
[li]Under developed plots[/li][li]Under developed characters[/li][li]Excessive deus ex machina science[/li][/ul]
In other words the show didn’t concentrate on plots too much, didn’t concentrate on characters at all, and used techno-babble, bad techno-babble, as a plot contrivance way too much.
Also, the same thing that made TNG so good is what made VOY so bad- the cast.
Janeaway- I have no problem with a female Capt but she was just a bad one. She refused to ever realize it was time to stop negotiating and time to FIRE FREAKIN’ PHASERS until it was way too late. Every bad situation they got into was always totally her fault.
Tuvok- The actor played a Vulcan perfectly. Too perfectly. He was so totally without emotion that you didn’t love him or hate him. You didn’t give a rat’s ass about him.
Chakotey- Nice enough guy but again, such an undeveloped character, he was dull, dull, dull.
Neelix- His character was one that all the other Trek shows were smart enough to avoid- comedy relief.
Tom Paris- What can I say? This guy was a howdy-doody looking doofus with such unbelivably bad judgement that he should have been thrown out an airlock in season one!
Harry Kim- Again, nice enough guy, but kind of a pathetic loser.
The Doctor- Neat charater, but very tiresome in anything but small doses (bad pun not intended).
Torres- You can’t get much more unlikeable than a half-Klingon woman with constant PMS who hates everyone and everything.
7 of 9- She was Voyager’s Spock or Data. Logical, reasonable, intelligent but not totally without a sense of emotion. As such she was the only really likeable character on the show.
So there you have it. A Star Trek series where a Borg is the most likeable person!