I grew up watching Kirk & Spock reruns, and always took interest in new Star Trek productions. However, until very recently, I didn’t have access to cable TV, so I never got to watch Star Trek Voyager during it’s initial run. I did get to see one or two full episodes in reruns in 1999, but other than that, I knew nothing of the show.
Since early September, I’ve been watching reruns weekday nights. And I want to know where the anti-Voyager sentiment comes from.
Of course, all I’ve really seen is parts of the last two seasons. I’ve never had the chance to see the pilot. And if anybody posts spoilers for the series finale, I swear I’ll have you all assimilated! (“Endgame” should be on in a week and a half or so)
Recent episodes included “Lineage”, “Repentance”, and “Human Error”. I thought they were pretty good. The show seems loyal to the Star Trek philosophy, on the whole.
Anyway, I just can’t understand the seemingly universal distaste that people have. Any comments?
You know, I haven’t even seen the series finale, but I’ll just bet it has a ten-second countdown in it somewhere.
And, I’ll bet the holodeck was used for some new and heretofore uninvented purpose.
And I’ll bet that one dude gets busted down to private again and then reinstated, while the other more competent dude remains his subordinate.
And the Vulcan guy will remain the best Vulcan ever in the history of the series, but without a major role to play.
And the Klingon chick will get vaguely upset about something, but will just manage not to kick anyone’s ass or do anything assertive or confrontational.
But Jeri will be there, standing straight as an arrow because she doesn’t dare bend the wrong way and explode out of her Saran-Wrap outfit. That, at least, is cool.
Anyway, that’s why Voyager sucked. Same show, a thousand different faces.
I loved Voyager, except for that insufferable Nelix. I did think the final episode was, without giving anything away, less than what I’d hoped for. But frankly, I think Captain Janeway is the best of all the ST captains. Oh, stop your hissing and booing.
More than anything else, I just hated the easy cop-outs of the plotting. Hey! Let’s not tax the writers’ minds too much–let’s just resolve it all by routing something through the deflector dish! Great idea! Doh! We need a new episode! Let’s write something about the holodeck!
For me, I found Voyager to be somewhat of a letdown in the fact that I was hoping that, having them bloawn far far away from the Federation, they’d either have to make it on their own or somehow create a new Federation or something. For some reason I thought the split from the Federation was permanent. For me, this was far more intriguing a possibility than what actually happened - turning around and heading back.
I also found absolutely none of the characters interesting or engaging. I thought this was as white-bread as you could get, until Enterprise came along.
Ah, the failings of Voyager! Here are a few of mine, but in general they pretty much all boil down to weak writing. Some minor spoilers ahead.
Boring characters - the only one that has any even a slightly distinctive personality is the doctor, and he isn’t even a biological entitly. Seven-of-Nine wasn’t bad either, but she came in late in the series run. Without strong, identifiable characters, you have no real basis for a good story.
Mediocre acting - I have recurring fantasies of what might have been, if they’d actually gotten Genevieve Bujold as the captain, a real actress instead of a TV retread.
Way too much dependence on the holodeck for plot elements
Way too many incidences of time travel as essential plot point. Why is this bad? Once you introduce time travel as a viable tactic, anything becomes possible, so nothing is dramatic. Cmdr X got killed, well let’s go back in time for a do-over.
Too much dependence on technobabble. As a trek fan, I expect a degree of technobabble now and again but they go far beyond reason. IANA engineer but it seems to me that many of the things they do on a regular basis (Quick, re-sequence the phase inverters!) would require significant changes to the basic hardware of the ship. In the real world, those kind of changes can have unforeseen consequences down the road. Doing that kind of stuff is okay a few times but they depend on it too much as the solution to a problem.
Plots that ignore basic aspects of human psychology. Spoiler alert – Case in point, the episode where they found a human colony and had an opportunity to stay, but not a single crew member chose to do so. Not one.
Lack of drama - There’s an old Twilight Zone episode where a gambler makes a deal with the devil to live forever and always win. After not very long, he realizes that if you always win, there’s no point in playing. The Voyager team never learned this lesson. Despite the fact that they’re a zillion light years from home, facing terrible dangers, nobody ever gets killed or even seriously hurt.
One might counter that these elements are endemic to the whole latter-period Trek universe (TNG, DS9, and Voyager) but I think the others each have them but to a lesser extent which is what makes Voyager so weak in comparison.
Voyager used to beat me when i was a small child, used to lock me in the closet, drop me from open windows, and beat me up for my milk money. That left seething anger and a stain on my soul that only mocking Voyager could repair.
Or maybe i just hate Harry Kim, Neelix, Kes, and Janeway.
Bujold wouldn’t work hard enough to do TV. Isn’t Bacula a “TV retread”?
Maybe. That English village was cool. The hunters using the techology for the most dangerous game was good.
The major objection to these was the ‘reset button’; the purpose of a time travel story is to change time. I rather dislike that genre myself, but it was good story telling.
Yes, but true of DS9 and TNG as well. Andromeda uses a high-guard force lance for anti missle defense in an upcoming episode. They have “effectors”.
That is story telling. “Willing suspension of disbelief”. Now, that doesn’t mean that it you don’t disbelieve it fellates, it means that it isn’t real.
Sure they did. The Saurians found whats-his-names bones. The Bajoran guy got whacked. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth when a terorist killed off a semi-regular guy, the one Torres punched out once. Those come to mind easily, there are more. One complaint during the series was that they would run out of crew.
I always thought that Voyager would have been better if the crew only consisted of seven characters, stranded on a large asteroid.
You’d have the overweight starship captain, the lovable but incompetent first officer, the wealthy Ferengi merchant and his wife, the holodeck movie star, the Vulcan Science Academy professor and a Terran farm girl. The Vulcan would attempt to construct a subscape communicator using indigenous materials, and the farm girl would develop creative pastries using the local flora.
Oh, and the first officer would have a penchant for messing up their efforts at escape. Hilarity would ensue.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the series, but from what I did see, it came off as a Federation version of “Lost in Space”, with about as much realism and attention to detail (i.e. very little). In terms of realism, if the term applies to a TV show about a 26th-century starship, it might have been better if the writers had shown the ship and crew slowly deteriorating thoughout their wanderings about the quadrant. Systems failing permanently from lack of spares; grafting clunky alien devices bought and bartered from other civilizations encountered along the way. You know, a bit of dirt collecting here and there. Maybe they covered this a bit, but not in the episodes I saw.
Otherwise, I gotta rubberstamp the complaints about incessant techno-gibberish, excessive relience on time travel, and that bloody holodeck. As far as acting performances go, the female characters seemed better than the males, for some reason. I had a blind, unreasoning hatred of Neelix, especially when he’d wear that ridiculous chef’s hat. Oh, yeah, and the pinched, fussy personality that supposedly was built into the holographic Doctor made no sense at all.
OTOH, I thought Janeway wasn’t bad, and one more, er, thumb up for 2 of 38–I mean, Seven of Nine.
The Doctor wasn’t programmed with a pinched fussy personality. He wasn’t programmed with a personality at all, that’s the problem. He was for emergencies, and in an emergency you don’t need a bedside manner. He seemed pinched and fussy because he was slowly being forced out of a limited existence into being quasi-human.
I didn’t mind Neeliz, although he didn’t seem to have a lot of point to him. I liked Harry, except he didn’t get enough plot development. Ditto Tuvok.
There were a lot of good holodeck episodes and time travel episode. Unfortunately there were so damn many of each that the good ones get washed out. They definitely used them too much. Don’t even talk about the deflector dish, its just embarassing.
“Well, we’re doomed.” “Wait Captain! We’ve got a deflector dish!” “Oh yeah! Use it.” “Yep. We won.” I just used to make up my own endings for those episodes.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed the series, even though I must admit that much of the criticism voiced here and other places is valid.
I guess I just don’t place that many demands on a tv show. I watch it for the drama, to see how and if the characters will develop in ways that appeal to me. I guess I don’t really think of it as science fiction so much as space fantasy, or “space opera”; it’s something with which to escape life, for a moment. It’s not an epic work of literature.
That being said, I have my criticsm, too. I would cheerfuly have driven a spike through Neelix’s head, if given the chance, but I accepted his character because it was fun to watch him and Tuvok get after one another. I also got tired of Harry Kim being this hapless dork who was always getting lost. There’s lots of stuff like that.
OTOH, I really enjoyed episodes like the one with FEAR trapping minds inside a computer system, or the one where Torres helps out a Shakespeare-like poet. I really like the one where Jeri Ryan plays both 7 of 9 and the Doctor. I also liked the episode where Q visited; I thought the interplay between him and Janeway was lots of fun.
In short, I just enjoyed the series for what it did well, and I really don’t see the point in getting all worked up about whether or not the “science” was tremendously consistent from show to show, as I have heard so many people rant about. :rolleyes:
And depending on which females were wearing clothes, the Ferengi merchant would be kept entertained!
I agree with the general assessment of Voyager’s problems, all of which could be boiled down (I think) to poor writing, intermittently so at first and more predictably so later on. Although I enjoyed TNG and DS9 much more, in general the ST series seem to suffer in varying degrees from a tendency to make the characters subservient to the plot. Story lines are driven by the plot and populated with the characters who best fit the needs of that plot. In the opposite approach, story lines (single- or multi-episode) are driven by the characters, who are changed by their experiences and live to bring about engaging new plot twists and story lines as they develop.
TNG started out with plot-driven characters but developed more of the opposite traits as it progressed. Characters built up personal histories which influenced their future behavior – though not to such an extent that one couldn’t enjoy episodes “out of order”. DS9 had more character-driven plots, but this made it more soap-operatic in that one generally had to watch episodes in a particular order to understand what was going on. Voyager had an interesting array of characters, but perhaps got too caught up in the plot to spend much time on character at all. Thus one ends up with strong characters who have nothing to do or weak characters who play prominent roles.
Mind you, I’m not saying it’s wrong to make characters subservient to the plot; it all depends on what the show is going for. But if the characters are weak, the plots had better be strong, exciting and innovative. The consensus here seems to be that this wasn’t so for Voyager.
I would like the newest series, “Enterprise”, to develop into a character-driven plot series. I see early signs of this and am hopeful.