What would have improved Voyager?

Nah, can't really be bothered with it myself.

As far as the topic at hand goes, I'll stick with my original answer; Jeri Taylor, fired out of the nearest airlock. Works for me!

 

The "my show is better then yours" argument is so very old. I can't be bothered to care about it anymore.




[/QUOTE]I agree.

People love to complare and contrast Voy. from DS9 to BSG to the latest GEICO commercial. Next thing we'll see is the Geko in a Janeway wig.

 

^^ Well she had the voice for it!

Re UPN, no you're right. There likely would have been another series after DS9, or more likely, just before DS9 ended. Whether that would have ended up being Voyager who knows?! Of course, the other factor for concern there is that the syndicated market started to fall apart in terms of first run syndication shows, hence it may not have come about at all with the climate being what it was when DS9 was finishing.

 

If Voyager was that bad it would not have been on seven seasons. It could have been on with a season eight, it is just that seven years is a long time to take out of peoples lives. If we wanted to improve Voyager it would be to move from UPN to SCI-FI

 

Seven year contracts. Year 8 would have meant renegotiating fro every one, which would have doubled or tripled the budget allocated to actors salaries...

Voyager was a mass produced generic product the public was medically addicted to. If star trek was crack, the dealers knew the junkies were too pissy to go cold turkey, so they could cut the potency forcing an increase in sold quantity...

Sorry, I watched the first season of the Wire yesterday.

 

Comments on each hypothetical exchange---

The Federation has the same right to dispose of colony worlds in a peace treaty that France had to cede Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia or Mexico had to cede California etc. to the US. Or were the Maquis inspired by the glorious British struggle to liberate the sheep herds of the Falklands/Malvinas?

The Starfleet way on a Starfleet ship is the only option. The idea that some space is more hostile than others makes no sense---perhaps some planets were meant, except that would have nothing to do with the ship in space? The notion that being cool outlaws makes you street smarter is a really tired cliche. It is especially stupid when there are no streets in space!

When the Maquis started a fleet, they became professional service people too.

And finally, there is no reason to think that the Maquis would be anything but ambivalent about heading straignt back into jail. Paris was open about his lack of desires to return to Earth. Chakotay was always ready to quit.

Which brings up the obvious possibility that the Maquis, by definition a bunch who had burned their bridges behind them, were really imported into Voyager so that the crew wouldn't be a bunch of people down all the time because they were suddenly ripped away from their ordinary lives.
The premiere introduced two main cast characters, Kes and Neelix, who are just along for the ride. The only Starfleet characters who have happy personal lives they miss were Janeway, Tuvok and Kim. Sure enough, they weren't always happy campers. Except the Vulcan Tuvok wouldn't be a downer and the captain has to keep a stiff upper lip.

Getting lectured about emotional truth by people who can't see something that obvious but prefer nonsense about Maquis/Starfleet conflict does get rather tiresome.

The stuff about saints in paradise suggests that the real objections are to humanitarianism. To start with, I don't see how anyone could confuse the Voyager characters with saints in the first place. To continue, I don't see how being mean suckers is going to make the trip any shorter. And to finish, the idea that technological doesn't affect a society's mores is astoundingly ignorant.

The topic is how the show might have been improved, not silly cliches that would have made it much, much worse.

 

This is presuming that everything else on UPN at the time wasn't equally bad or worse, which predominantly, it was. Voyager was amongst the best of a bad bunch on a godawful network.

 

Angel ... UPN was bad ... it would have been better if it was on SCI-FI

 

1 Warning for trying to blow away everyone's invalid arguments.

 

Quoted for truth.


People just want conflict in their fiction because they want it to mirror their own lives. Well guess what people, some of us actually get along with the people in our lives. And some of us, when we have issues with people, hammer them out and *gasp* MOVE ON. We don't drag it on for SEVEN YEARS, like some posters have suggested Voyager should have done to seem more "real".

I worry about these posters with their almost lecherous hunger for strife.....look for what can be better around you than for what can be worse!! Life is a lot more enjoyable that way!

 

Honestly MissKim, what is this adding to the conversation? Yes we get it, DS9 makes you wet. You nut calling Garak's name. Big frakking deal.


If you're going into Voyager expecting it to be "Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Part C", then you are gonna be in for a disappointment. Appreciate each show for its INDIVIDUAL merits...DS9 was inherently meant to be darker because it was the Federation at war. War is dark. Voyager on the other hand was meant to be about maintaining our ideals when no one's watching. If anything, I expected it to be more optimistic than TNG, because that's what humans do...they not only rise to the occasion when they have to, they do it with more style and more flair than they ever have before.


It's perfectly fine if you prefer DS9....but I wonder, have you ever thought about seeing someone professionally for this almost excessive fascination with "darkness"? Don't get me wrong, I like the darkness too, but I also know that you kinda need to balance it with things that are uplifting as well.

 

If you read previous posts it's an answer to people who asked why there aren't any "what could be improved with DS9" postings.

And I think you might mix me up with someone else, I've never mentioned I like DS9 because I like darkness(?) or Garak.

I like quality story telling with continuinity, give me a season with great scripts where a Federation crew works hard to build a super duper colony and in the end everyones happy with flowers all around and no reset buttons and I will like that just as much as I did when the Breen obliterated the federation fleet.

I never went into Voyager expecting Deep Space Nine Part C (what happened to B btw?)

I did however expect arcs and scripts that stretched beyond Alien of the week with a reset button

 

One thing I've noticed about you though is that every time you express adulation for DS9, you also couple it with some underhanded jab at Voyager. "I like DS9 because it's not Star Trek Enterprise C." Must your affection for DS9 be so intricately attached to your dislike for Voyager? I love both shows, and don't feel I need to diss one show to prove my loyalty to the other...

Garak was sarcasm. And, Darkness, you're right, was admittedly an overly general term, but I meant it to be more referential to previous comments you've made, as I do believe in the past you've alluded to something very similar in the "Why the hate for Voyager?" thread. Looks like that thread is not on the main list now (and I don't know if or how it can be pulled up), so I can't really say for certain, but I recall very vividly that in that thread one of your reasons for liking DS9 was that it was darker, and thus by extension supposedly, more evolved and more realistic than the other Star Trek series.


And as far as quality story telling, don't suppose that your opinion on quality story telling is the final opinion. Voyager was quality story telling, but there is a difference between a quality story and you just not liking the story they are telling.

 

I think it's funny that DS9 is still seen as dark.

At the time. When it was made. Compared to other shows which were on. Sure. But now?

Making Voyager as dark as DS9 was "Then" in retrospect isn't that huge a darkening on the on the optimism swatches, because DS9 was plenty with the cheery.

The Chute. Now that was dark. O, you coud just see harry bashing Toms skull into jelly with that pipe like the monkey from 2001... Hey, that defines Kim utterly! O, and I wet myself a little when Janeway said she was "into" killing that clown because that was damn spooky.

What could HBO really do for Star trek which UPN couldn't?

 

No that must have been someone else I'd never write I like DS9 because it's dark simply because I didn't consider DS9 especially dark, it had a lot of cheerful episodes

 

There's also a difference between high and low quality. We can all agree that Voyager told 'quality' stories. The conjecture is more around whether they were of a high calibre nature or not. Voyager produced plenty of 'average' episodes, but also more stinkers and fewer outright classics than either TOS, TNG or DS9. IMO.

 

Well that was pretty much my point.

Not necessarily. It would most likely have had a vastly reduced production budget for a start.

All things being equal it would have been far better remaining in syndication like TNG and DS9 had done before it. Sadly, by that point though, that was no longer a viable option.

 

No way bro.

Rewatch TNG. It's equal to Voyager on how many bad or forgettable episodes it had.

What Voyager was is every Trek film made condensed into an hour episode. Voyager is the type of show you pop on if you don't want the heavy intellectual drama of TNG or the dark moody feel of DS9. It was made for a sci-fi crowd that liked Xena, which was all the rage at the time. Voyager was designed to capture a crowd that normally found Trek boring & humorless.

Is it so wrong to try and make Trek cool?