As much as I hate jumping into feminist crap, I think they were worried that the they might lose ratings if they made the woman too good.
Then again, the entire series is a lot better on paper than it is actually shown. My first introduction to the show was through Jim Wright, who wrote recaps. A lot of the shows were sunk by the acting. I could actually believe that Janeway was dynamic enough that her mood changes did not seem out of character. And I could understand why she would strand them, even if there was another way.
ETA: The more I think about it, the more I’d rather be with House. Mostly because I don’t want to be on a spaceship. Remember, I’m the guy who, if I got sent to the the Star Trek universe, would rather stay at home and explore everything through a holosuite. I don’t like danger.
And it seems that House has a way of keeping his actual people out of danger, as long as you aren’t a bitch or feel like killing yourself.
House, on an especially bad day, might actually get a couple of people killed. And then, probably by accident, not from standing for a principle. And even then, they wouldn’t actually be the people working for him.
And I don’t know about them worrying about making Janeway too good…I think it might have been the opposite problem, and they were too worried about making her look bad, i.e. showing genuine personality or command problems, because it would make it look like they were bringing her down because she was a woman.
Unfortunately, they didn’t actually write her well enough to be an unbeatable super captain (even just in the Jim Kirk level, not even getting up to Batman/James Bond/Chuck Norris memetic badass stuff), but at the same time they can’t actually acknowledge the character’s failings onscreen, for reasons above, so they just tried to act like she was that great.
Artistically, it would have worked well if they presented Janeway almost identically, but wrote in the flaws and shortcomings on purpose—they touched on this a very few times in the series, such as in “Year of Hell,” where she’s explicitly guessed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress—and it really would have been a good point in the franchise to try something like that out. But then, of course, you’d get the inevitable complaint that the first woman captain in a Star Trek series is being intentionally portrayed as a borderline-incompetent headcase.
I guess I looked at this totally different from all of you. I thought about what it would be like to have Janeway or House replace my boss at my job…no chance of life being lost where I work…and the answer is Janeway all the way. House is just too much work. I need a boss who is consistent and compassionate, and doesn’t need his ego stroked 24/7. And who isn’t on drugs. And too preoccupied to get the paperwork done.
Who will never give you the time of day. She falls for the Doctor because he teaches her about humanity, but she only trusts him because he isn’t human. She then falls for Chakotay because he’s the Alpha male on the ship. You’re only chance would be to be Kim before she knew anything about humanity. But you do not want to be Kim, as you’d be the buttmonkey.
And you make fun of the only doctor on the ship at your own peril. He may be ethically bound to treat you without harming you, but he’d be more likely to try some really weird experiment on you. If Kes is still there, she’ll make your life miserable for hurting him (remember, she helped kill Tuvix, too), and, if it’s Paris, he’ll be mad because you’re moving in on his turf.
I could work with House, even work for him because he wouldn’t bother me too much and I see some profit staying with him, but Janeway would turn me into Fletcher Christian in no time.
I admit, I may be a little over-generous from time to time, but I’d grant if she was completely and utterly incompetent, she’d have gotten most or all of the crew killed even faster. Or kept getting lost on the way to the bridge, or tried to diagnose warp core leaks by taste, or something.
In a way, though, I suppose that’s actually better—it’s like a disease. A horrifically deadly plague is going to be obvious, and burn it’s way through it’s victims too fast to spread very far. A disease that’s less obvious, a little slower to develop, can get a chance to infect a lot of victims before anyone realizes it, and by then it’s too late to treat or contain it.
So…yeah, I just tortured a metaphor to compare Captain Janeway to AIDS. I’m so proud.
I stand by my theory that Captain Janeway was the way she was because the actor playing her sucked so badly. Well, I guess I have to splash some blame on the director too, then, for not making her act better.
I never got that far. I watched two episodes of the show, realized that she would probably ruin the rest of them with her rabid chipmunk voice, and never turned it on again.
Occasionally when I bump into a rerun I will watch it up to the point where she appears on the screen.
The thing that amazes me about Voyager is how, even with Mulgrew’s lackluster acting, it could have so easily been very, very good. All that would have been needed was for the writers to take the story’s premise to its logical conclusion: Voyager is a small starship, impossibly far from home and isolated from support, and with no way to return to the Alpha Quadrant. The show should have ended with Voyager slowly breaking down and eventually being destroyed, with very few if any crew surviving.
Bleak, sure - but you could tell a really effective, moving story along the way. And the Voyager writers knew how to do that. They did it in “Year of Hell”, and in the episode where the sand-creatures made their own version of Voyager, forgot they weren’t the originals, and slowly began to die.
It really could have been, and it seems to me too that it wouldn’t have taken much. (now that you mention it, the episode with the sand creatures was quite moving). Take Neelix and replace him with a character that isn’t damned near as annoying as JarJar Binks, take Kess out and replace her with an more interesting female character (okay, checkmark for that one), cast excellent actors that are compelling on screen, and darken the show down a little so the humans weren’t just sort of gallivanting around the Delta quadrant, and you’re there.
Just to clarify: getting lost would have been a single episode or perhaps a 2 parter for either Kirk or Picard, and both of them have not only been lost in space, but in time and other dimensions.