Why were the Maquis even on Voyager?

[Christopher]

The Overlord wrote:

---

But really the network and writers should have worked this out in advance, if the writers wanted a Maquis-Star Fleet conflict storyline, but the network didn't want any conflict, they should have agreed to drop the Maquis angle.

I doubt it would've been that simple. It would've been an ongoing process, as the producers developed their show, the network gave notes, and the producers tried to balance those notes with their own goals. Maybe the network execs didn't decide to ask for the Maquis aspects to be toned down until after they'd seen the pilot. That happens all the time -- things get put into pilots that the network decides it doesn't like, so they get abandoned. That's part of what a pilot is for. It's one thing to read about an idea in the abstract, but you often need to see it actually there on the screen before you can get a feel for how well it works. So things often show up in pilots that get discarded afterward. For instance, in the original Battlestar Galactica pilot in 1978, the character Cassiopeia was a "socialator" -- implicitly a prostitute in a society where that profession was legal and respected, foreshadowing Inara on Firefly but addressed more indirectly due to censorship of the time. But the network objected, and by the second episode she'd become a nurse. And there are plenty of pilots -- two that come to mind are The Flash and The Invisible Man (2000) -- where the heroes have girlfriends who disappear without explanation by the second episode.

You can argue all you want that the Maquis element is more important than those and that they "should" have worked it out in advance -- but the bottom line is, you can't always know. It's not a single discussion that leads to these decisions, it's a whole ongoing, evolving dialogue with both sides pushing for what they want. It's a complicated business, and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback and claim to know what they "should" have done, but if you actually had to do the job yourself, you'd find it wasn't that simple by a long shot.

[Temis the Vorta]

I think people could have gotten the idea behind the Maquis pretty quickly with just a few lines of backstory-explaining dialogue. The real problem has been hashed over plenty here. The VOY producers - or maybe UPN was to blame - just wasn't prepared to really deal with the series premise in any more than a shallow way.

[stj]

More and more, it seems to me that one overlooked aspect is that having so many Maquis for main cast means having so many characters who won't be all bummed out about taking a long time to back to jail. Which means a lighter tone. Somebody may have had ideas about terrorists and dropping morality to make the ship go faster and insane quarrels about starting a war 70 000 lyrs away. But in practice those were all really stupid ideas. The only thing dumber was the shortages idea.

Most importantly, The 37s did a soft reboot. Everyone was on board Voyager voluntarily, for the duration. Anyone who thinks all that other stuff was really fascinating needs to shut up and go watch their Stargate Universe DVDs.

[ssosmcin]

Did they ever specify how many Maquis crew members were on the ship? You never saw more than a handful and there couldn't have been that many on Chakotay's ship. So really, just how much tension could they expect to drum up over a few people who have an axe to grind with the Federation? I never had the impression there were many of them, but sometimes the early dialog made it sound like there were to huge crews than needed to join forces.

[Christopher]

ssosmcin wrote:

---

Did they ever specify how many Maquis crew members were on the ship? You never saw more than a handful and there couldn't have been that many on Chakotay's ship.

Not counting Paris, Tuvok, or Seska, we know of 20 named Maquis in Chakotay's crew. However, there were no doubt others we saw as extras.

In "Repression," it was stated that "almost a quarter" of Voyager's crew was Maquis, meaning the number was somewhere around 35, and that's after all the fatalities during the Caretaker's abduction and the previous six seasons. So Chakotay's ship must've been roomier than it looked.