Well, yeah. It's about those characters being written more plausibly, which has the added effect of making them more real, which has the added effect of making them more entertaining. When you could easily go through the majority of scripts, tipex out all of the character names, and pencil in "Generic First Officer", "Generic Ops Officer" and so on, then it's an indication that those characters are not being served well by the show's writers. We as an audience can't be entertained by characters who are being written as generic ciphers instead of as real people.
And look at stuff like SG1 and Farscape. O'Neall and Daniel Jackson disagreed about everything. Everybody in Farscape disagreed about almost every course of action. They weren't constantly bickering, they gained respect for each other and formed a good working relationship without abandoning their disagreements.
Isn't that another critisim that is sometimes levelled at VOY. It's scripts where often generic that could just as easily have been done had the show been set in the AQ. That it didn't make full use/best use of it's settings?
The premise of the show wouldn't have allowed them to properly exploit the DQ setting anyways. In Farscape, Crichton (the human) was the odd one out and everyone else was from the are of space the show was set in so there was lots of connection to what was going on around them. VOY, the DQ natives were the odd ones out and still they had very little connection to the surrounding areas. Plus they were always on the move and knew exactly where to go. Kind of hard to contrive reasons to develop the surroundings when there's nothing keeping you there and no one has any reason to stick around. For example, if more of the crew were random DQ aliens that were being held on the Array and if Neelix was a Kazon himself then there'd be easier ways of making a connection to what was around them. Actually, they got over a lot of their internal tension by S2 anyways. After that, it was mainly romantic bickering between Crichton and Aeryn and some occasional external matter (Scorpius holding D'Argo's son) that caused the real conflict.
I do tend to agree with this. That Voyager always knew where they were relative to where they came from is one of the biggest flaws in the premise. But then, one excepts that if we can see so far into space even today with conventional telescopes, then Starfleet would already have some relative mapping of the DQ already, before Voyager even goes there. Fundamentally what they needed to do was to have thrown them out of established space entirely, maybe out of the galaxy "into the black void beyond", somewhere so far away that they can't triangulate their position and their only hope is to soldier onwards for the chance of finding something familiar. We never really feel that they're facing overwhealming odds, because at all times they know *exactly* where Federation space is, and are *always* heading towards it. Even though VOY pays lip service to the idea, it maybe doesn't push the boat nearly out far enough that their 'lost in space' premise has any impact whatsoever. As you rightly say, if they didn't know where they were relative to Federation space, then they'd also by necessity need to plant roots in this unfriendly part of space, on the assumption that they may never get home again...
Actually, much of our in Galaxy is not visible to astronomy today as the brightness of the Galactic plane obscures it....I think.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the episode "The Void" is in microcosm everything that the entire series format should have been. http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Void_(episode)
In the rewrite I did, I had Voyager get pulled into and area of space that's inside a massive nebula (around 10,000 Light Years as a bubble) that blocks out their ability to see long-range. They realize there are dozens of these nebulae around the Galaxy and they could be in any one of them without knowing where they are relative to unblocked space. Later, they find out that everything is too perfectly contained and it's actually an "experiment" they got pulled into by the Caretaker before he died. So something is keeping everyone who lives there from leaving beyond the boundaries of the Nebula. So until they find some way of breaching the Nebula they have no choice but to get involved with the local alien empires inside of it and the other stuff that happens.
^ That's not bad, Anwar. It does make me think that if I was restarting Star Trek from scratch today, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to go back to the concept in the original workprint version of the second TOS pilot, where Kirk's opening log mentions that their "mission to this point" has been regular Federation type stuff, but that they now have been given a new mission, "a probe to where no man has gone before". In other words, they're leaving the Federation behind them and are charting out of the known galaxy and into unknown territories away from Federation space. The idea of the Enterprise leaving everything comfortable and familiar behind it, and deliberately setting out into places unknown would I think be a good launching point for a 21st century version of the series. In theory that's exactly what VOY wanted to be, but ultimately wasn't.
I would have liked to see more about Tuvok, Janeway and Harry Kim. They got a lot of screen time, yes, but we didn't really find out a whole lot about them. I still think Harry should have been promoted once, at least. I think Seven and the Doctor were pretty well explored, and I think that was a good thing. Whatever happened to the Equinox crew members? One thing I would have enjoyed, is if they had an episode dealing with the lower ranking officers on the ship, similar to TNG's "Lower Decks" episode. We would see how the younger officers react to the situation they fins themselves in, stranded in the Delta Quadrant, and how the have no idea what is really going on around their ship.
I'd like to have seen one episode where the Borg children were given back to their parents. And more scenes with the relatives of the crew members and their reaction about Voyagers disappearance. They started to introduce family members when they established contact with the AQ via Pathfinder. But what happened before? But it was obvious that the focus was on the ship itself and the locations in the DQ, including strange aliens.
I would have liked to see more seat-gripping material where they were at real risk. Void-like battles without being trapped and mixed with frayed nerves and some ship debris like YOH. see relationships come together and fall apart and reconnect under these stresses. The ship wouldn't be as battered as YOH because we want them home or generational, but I'd like to see the ship take on a gradual change as new and improvised technology was implemented. Erasing some of that SF look. Not sure if that'd get old quick but that squeaky clean ship was a yawn. I'd like to see more seamless tension between Janeway and Chakotay their secret feelings more on screen but no love affair. I much prefer the tension. I'd like to see Seven build relationships with others besides Doc and the head butting with Janeway. I actually did want to see more Tuvok and Chak screen time with Seven. I felt they could have guided her better than ALWAYS Janeway. And it'd allow us to see chakotay deal with his residual animosity he carried from the Borg chick who used him to Seven and seeing him soften. but no C7 long term because I'm close minded there.
As someone went through Voyager's database time to time, such as the Devore and few others (can't recall who), I would have had someone mention one of the hundred. They probably passed through regions where at least few of the hundred were sent to. That would be better than finding Klingons. or colony of abducted Humans. I would have a couple families too. I wouldn't have had Ballard as someone Kim was close to.