So many horrible characters aboard the Voyager

[teacake]

flandry84 wrote:

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I feel sorry for poor Chakotay (and Beltran)Chakotay should have been the type of guy you would bet on in a Klingon knife fight but the character was ignored and yes somewhat castrated(metaphorically)by a very strident captain.

Oh that poor baby!

[Guy Gardener]

The problem with our Spy Mistress draining the Indians sack is what happened after she shot herself up full of his swimmers?

Either she was already knocked up by Cullah, or Chuckles is shooting enough blanks that Cullah still inseminated his missus despite giving Chakotay a significant tortoise and the hair head start... And then there's fighting sperm. Maybe the Kazon sperm killed all the human sperm on their way to the uterus? Maybe even, Kazon sperm are such assholes that they attack eggs already fertilized by foreign donors?

And another gross question.

How many doses did she get out of Voyagers XO when he was tied up for her?

4?

5?

10?

And if she ran out without nary any result... Would Seska have gone back to the spunk well for more?

[teacake]

I picture Chakotay lying there like a big fat potato while Seska has her way with him. Now and then, he blinks.

I'm sure it was a terrible blow to realize she didn't get his at least moderately intelligent genes for her child but instead ended up with the clay headed savage for the father.

[Guy Gardener]

The extraction happened on camera.

We saw it.

He was tied a chair.

A lieutenant was beating him.

Chakotay is talking big with mindgames.

Then Seska walks in.

Puts a huge syringe into his scrotum and harvests what looked like a 1 quart milk bottle of jizm.

It's possible you blacked this out of your memory to preserve your mental health.

[Dale Sams]

Udat wrote:

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All Trek has annoying characters, need I mention Jake Sisko, Wesley Crusher etc etc. Whilist Chakotay and Harry were bad I could alway tolerate them, Paris and Belanna were cool. But thats just me.

Sixteen Candles: "JAAAKE??"

Please, I thought Jake was very unannoying.

[Bry_Sinclair]

stj wrote:

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In the pilot, Janeway was clearly depicted as someone who would bend the regs to do what she thought was right, even at the cost of not getting home. You're imagining inconsistency because you've ignored what's on screen.

I have no problems with Janeway bending the rules, given the situation any CO would need to. But from what I can remember (it has been a while since I saw VOY and gave up on most of S6 and S7) there wasn't any hard-drawn lines for just how far she would or wouldn't go. Many others comment on how inconsistent Janeway was written, I use the Noah Lessing incident as probably the most extreme example.

stj wrote:

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There is no reason for such anger. Pointless conflict has no dramatic interest. Petty squabbles would have been dull.

He's from a world that was abandonded by the UFP to maintain the peace with one of the more brutal species they've made contact with, then quits Starfleet to fight for his homeworld and freedom. He's going to be more than a little miffed at that. In the ep where he and Janeway are stranded on the planet he says about how he was always angry, I never got that from the early episodes. Aside from maybe Parallax where he won't be her "token Maquis officer" there really wasn't much differences between them and he just became a bog standard XO. Kira and Sisko butting heads in DS9 was good to watch, with two people having very different goals and priorities having to find common ground to work together. But then again Kira was a better conceived, written and acted character.

stj wrote:

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Kim wasn't in enough scenes to whine for years. The handful of Kim episodes was less than 5% of the series. 5% is the rule of thumb for negligible! Also, Garrett Wang was very good looking and certainly fit into the People magazine "Beautiful People" spread. It really seems as though the mere sight of the character enraged you, which is a little odd.

'Enraged'? Please. He is an example of just how poor many characters were (which I believe is the point of this thread, correct me if I'm wrong), as he did nothing and went nowhere--proven by the fact that the PTB almost got rid of him in Scorpion. Had he not been deemed 'beautiful' he would have gone and VOY may have been better for it. As for not in long enough to whine for years, Voyager went missing in 2371 and returned in 2378, I'd call that years and he was frequently the one talking of how much he missed home. The whole rookie thing got old, very fast.

stj wrote:

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No, there were no directions for her to pursue on Voyager. It was never clear why the woman was there in the first place. You could have made a show following Kes on her adventures in the Milky Way, but it wouldn't have been Star Trek. Jennifer Lien was very attractive (the voice was gorgeous!) but the actress' sex appeal does not justify the character. If only they'd had enough ruthlessness to ditch Paris and/or Torres, who were also dead end characters.

My personal belief is that Kes was a far more interesting character compared to Seven, but that's my opinion. She wasn't meant to be a 'sex symbol', as she had the acting chops to be more than a walking pair of boobs. The character was in a way the innocent sense of wonder, taking in the big new galaxy she'd never dreamt of, a sweet young woman with loads of untapped power which never altered who she was (until you hit Fury, which throws her totally out of character).

As for Paris, they could have lost him and I wouldn't have cared much. But not Torres, she was one of the few strong characters they had until Seven destroyed the show.

But again, that's just how I see things.

[stj]

The Noah Lessing "incident" is perfectly consistent with The Caretaker: Janeway bends the rules to do the right thing. It's just that you can't imagine an alternative idea of what was right. That isn't character inconsistency.

The Maquis are kind of unbelievable, but it doesn't matter. Chakotay has no reason to fight a civil war with Janeway. Again, it just seems as though you can't imagine not wanting to, but that's not character inconsistency: Chakotay knew in the pilot episode that they were all together and their differences were as remote and pointless as the Cardassians. Drama is about making choices. Janeway is the Captain, the one who makes the choices, so the show is not going to be about the second.

Kim didn't frequently do anything. Any argument that asserts this fails. He was a token character.

"The character was in a way the innocent sense of wonder, taking in the big new galaxy she'd never dreamt of, a sweet young woman with loads of untapped power which never altered who she was..." I agree.

But your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sketch how this has anything to do with Voyager, or even Star Trek, which at its average hasn't been big on the heroes god-like power. And at its best has been rather hostile. I could see wanting to watch the Kes show, but wanting to watch it while it's named Voyager is quite unreasonable.

I suppose by "how I see things," you mean "how I feel about things." But Janeway was not particularly inconsistent (especially compared to normal variety of individiual behaviors); Chakotary was not castrated by loyally accepting a female commander but was humiliated by Seska; Kim just wasn't there enough to add or subtract much from Voyager. You will feel about those characters the way you do, but no one is required to accept your rationales.

[Anwar]

The problem with the Maquis, in general, was that the source of their conflict, the DMZ, was now 75 years away. The Maquis were the enemies of Cardassia, not the Federation, and whatever negative feelings they had for the Feds wasn't going to blind them to the fact that these were the only familiar folks around for decades. It wouldn't have been productive for the two crews to be that combative to one another the whole way through.

And even if they were, the tensions would've died down after 1-2 years. If they kept it up after that, then they had to have serious mental issues and they'd likely never get home.

What the show needed was another plot to drive the stories beyond "Going home" which could never be accomplished because...the show would be over.

[stj]

^^^Yes.

But one good thing about the Maquis, is that they can reasonably be expected to be more reconciled to not getting back to a Federation prison more quickly. Having half the crew with mixed feelings about getting home kept the tone much lighter I think.

Kim was the designated angster about not getting home. Given how unpopular this was, it is really hard to understand how people can say/assume/imply that the entire crew should have been more like that.

[JirinPanthosa]

I would have rather more of the Maquis behave a little more than pre-betrayal Seska. After Learning Curve every single Maquis seemed more than happy to conform to Starfleet regulations. There shouldn't have been an outright rebellion, though maybe it should have come a little closer to that.

Like, maybe there are three or four Maquis constantly in the brig on minor charges, and they start to feel specifically targeted. Maybe a Maquis crewmember dies where Starfleet idealism causes Janeway to go into a trap, and Chakotay starts to fight Janeway on the philosophical appraoch for more than five minutes and doesn't cave in.

I would have ended that episode by Chakotay stopping a Maquis plot to assassinate Janeway, then Janeway making some concessions on 'regulation' behavior.

IMO Kes was a good character but for her to be really interesting they had to take her in darker directions than the network would have allowed them to. I like the idea of having a pure civilian character who was just discovering the universe with innocent eyes, but has all these scary abilities about her to discover.

They nudged against those themes in Cold Fire, then dropped them completely until instantly making her a telepathy Goddess to write her out.

[Guy Gardener]

You know what would have been a daring and fantastic Choice?

Having Neelix and/or Kes JOIN THE MAQUIS!

All they had to do for Marquis initiation is get drunk, kill a Cardassian and have sex with the Maquis leader which is probably still Chakotay and not Janeway who hadn't seemed to have eaten his responsibilities, duties ad benefits as the Political head of the Terrorists on Voyager... Although considering there are almost no Cardassian's to gut and pitch on a pike in the Delta Quadrant, and Chakotay is undersexed, the amended initiation rites probably wouldn't be so challenging.

Janeway couldn't let them join Starfleet, and they don't want to be antisocial or excluded, so why not join the Maquis if it doesn't really "mean" anything?

[Anwar]

Kes' character and the whole "shorter lifespan" thing wasn't portrayed as well as it could've been, IMO.

She should've started off really looking like a 10 year old girl, then by next year she's a teenager. Then by 3rd year she's an 18 year old, and by 4th she's in her adult form and played by Jennifer Lien. By then she has her powers and the aging stops because her powers give her a normal lifespan by then.

[teacake]

I would like to see Kes as a suicide bomber.

Oh WAIT, we got that already in Fury.

[Guy Gardener]

She was just a bomber.

There as no risk to her safety when she blew up Voyagers warp core.

[heavy lids]

Harry Kim is the worst Trek character ever. Chakotay was incredibly boring but, that's mostly due to Beltran not giving a shit.