The Continuity and Serialization of Voyager

I wonder how Voyager would have continued had they not that "TNG was 7 seasons, so all other shows have only 7 seasons" thing.

 

Well, Voyager's premise was never really that sustainable to begin with. So without the "7 Seasons" thing it probably would've lasted only a few seasons before finding a way home.

Really, every "Lost Ship" series from the last 40 years worth remembering weren't that long compared to TNG:

1) Blakes' Seven was only meant to last 3 seasons, they got one more so it was 4.

2) LEXX only had 4 seasons, the first of which was made up of 4 TV movies.

3) NuBSG ran out of steam after 2 seasons, and limped on for 2 more until it hit 4.

4) Stargate Universe barely made it to 2.

Really, the whole "Lost in Space" subgenre doesn't lend itself to a lengthy story because there just isn't enough there to sustain anything.

That might have been nice, but frankly the best route to take would've been to have them be stuck in one general area for the entire series where all their aliens co-exist so they could tell stories about them criss-crossing with one another instead of going one at a time.

 

I was putting together a post for another forum about Voyager's nature as a Serialized Procedural, and realized that, because I haven't seen every episode, rearranging episodes largely in Production Order had kind of unintentionally undermined my position concerning the order the series ought to be watched in in order to get the very most out of it and emphasize its nature as a Serialized Procedural, and therefore needed some revisions, so I looked at episode synopses on Memory Alpha and revised things as follows:
* Season 3's Coda and Blood Fever should be watched in their Original Airing Order
* Season 5's Infinite Regress and Thirty Days should be watched in their Original Airing Order (this means there's a Stardate discrepancy, but it's more important to maintain continuity with regards to Paris' rank)
* Drive, Repression, and Imperfection should be watched as Episodes 2, 3, and 4, respectively, of Season 7 (discarding both Production Order and Original Airing Order in favor of Stardate consistency and continuity as it concerns the Delta Flyer II and Tom and B'Elanna's wedding)

Everything else can and should be watched in the revised order I posted earlier.

 

In cancellation with a rushed ending on par with TATV?

 

The series could have finished fine, perfectly even, after Terra Prime.

What must have happened was that Berman got back from his 2 year long holiday and said "Fuck you! You can't just end the show without me! No! No! Enterprise is MINE ! MINE! MINE! No! One more, one more episode which I will write, and then it'll be the end for realz... Um, oh... Since I don't have any new ideas there's this dusty script I we workshopped 2 years ago but turned out to be alittle shit so we tabled it for the time being... YES! My most greatest and susseccful idea ever!"

You know the tuth isn't too far off this.

 

I like this idea, although I would have been royally pissed if we had an entire season "Year of Hell," which turned out to be a total reset at the end of the season. Without reset, perhaps killing off a major character (or having them in a coma for a few episodes, or something), plus a badly damaged USS Voyager (that still looks in bad shape) with depleted supplies at the beginning of the next season? Now that would have been awesome.

I just finished "In the Flesh" toward the beginning of S5. Species 90210 (or whatever they're called) was shaping up to be a Dominion-like foe, at least until the end of this episode. I think if they kept the species more mysterious and made them the S7 antagonist, perhaps also popping up here and there in prior seasons, that would have been possibly interesting. Then perhaps at the end they could figure out a way to use fluid space to gush their way back to the alpha quadrant without turning into lizards.

 

If it Took Captain Janeway, or Captain Chakotay a year to bisect Krenim Space... Even though depending on the timelines, the size of Krenim space is entirely variable, it should haven taken a lot longer to circumnavigate the Krenim Imperium and put it in the rear view mirror than to just charge through.

A year, almost a year, of Humdrum and tedium could still have taken place between Scientific Method and Random Thoughts.

 

But as others have said it's not that VOY didn't have any serialisation is just that it should have been more heavily serialised. VOY differs from the other Trek shows (well at least the ones that preceeded it) by having a distictive goal. To get home. So each episode is a sense is a chapter in a book telling that story. If when reading a book you are told something in chapter 3 (episode 3)then when watching chapter 101(episode 101), you expect it to remain consistant with chapter 3 (episode 3) unless you are told why something has changed.

A fair few of VOY critisims could have been avoid by a line or two of dialouge, background extras repairing parts of the ship etc.. Give us a sense that without access to a starfleet repair yard they are struggling to keep the ship in top spec, it nearly always just seemed too easy, a seemingly endless supply of shuttlecraft, the crew number flucturating up and down from one episode to the next. Didn't they think they had killed Carey off before brining him back (just to kill him). It's all these little details that detract from the show. Sometimes the little details are important.

Characters (at least) giving the perception that they are flip-flopping from upholding the regs to screw the regs. Upholding your principals sometimes makes thinks harder for yourself. My view is pick one and run with it but be consistant, if you want to change have something meaningul happen to the character to cause the change.

VOY did have some great episodes, but it had far more average episdoes. Sure the FX is good, but good FX cannot replace a so-so story. Conversely a good stroy can overcome bad FX. It's almost as if it was playing it safe, sure the network might want TNG 2.0 (or in some regards TOS 3.0), but VOY unlike TNG was competeting against other genre shows.

Now as I said VOY wasn't all bad, but for this viewer it could have been so much more. For those that enjoyed it for what it was, great for you. We all have different tastes, and sometimes what we've watched before can impact on what we expect from a show, for someone who thinks this story line is recycled from X, Y and Z show, to someone else it might be something more fresh. After all VOY might be many's first introduction to ST whilst for others their second or third.

 

The reset at the end of YEAR OF HELL would have never happened after my run. I very much prefer what we saw in "Before and After" with the crew still feeling the effects of that whole year in a sense, maybe actually having one or two dead. I do like the idea of Chakotay being a captain, he was so underdeveloped over the whole series that a change like that might have helped him step up, making Tuvok the first officer.

Funny thing, I just finished "In the Flesh" last night as well. I'm not sure how 8472 would have worked if they kept them as antagonists. It was very expensive back in the 90s to pull that off, heck that's why BSG invented human looking Cylons so they didn't have to use the robotic Cylons so much.

 

Very articulate post, even though I disagree with the idea that Voyager needed more serialization than it had because, as I've tried to point out, there was actually quite a bit of serialization as well as continuity.

I used to be of the mindset that Voyager ought to have done a lot more with its premise, but have since come to appreciate the series for what it was, especially after realizing that, despite the Series Bible indicating that it was to be more of a DS9-type series, it ended up being a Serialized Procedural along the lines of stuff like Bones, The Mentalist, etc. and managed to, by and large, strike a good balance between the serialized and the episodic, especially as I (re)watched the early episodes of Season 1, in which there's a clear progression of story and things that happen in one episode are in fact referenced in subsequent episodes, even if said references are indirect and subtle.

 

I could certainly see Chakotay and Tuvok butting heads a lot more than Janeway and Chakotay did...which was almost never (so far in my watch). But at this point, I can't see Voyager without Janeway permanently. And anyway, I think they could have further developed Chakotay without killing her off.

The only way I could see Janeway being killed off is in the series finale if somehow she sacrificed herself so the rest of the crew could make it back home. Then they have a big memorial service, and they name ships and haircuts after her and whatnot.

But an even better ending would be if she ended up stranded in the DQ while the rest of the crew made it back home. That would be the ultimate justice coming full circle after her decision in the first episode. Tying a nice bow around it. Well, it would be a "valentine" for me anyway.

Yep, good point. I don't know, perhaps showing them in other forms since they're able to do that with their genetic altering gizmos? But it would be hard to do an entire season with just them, you're right.

By the way, after they extracted Chakotay's DNA, I thought they were going to put a Chakotay look-alike on Voyager while holding the real Chakotay prisoner, kind of like what the Founders did with Bashir on DS9. But I certainly got that wrong. Instead it was a negotiated ending that seemed all to friendly, quick and easy to me.

 

What didn't help the show was them not really having a plot.

"Lost ship going home" just isn't sustainable for more than 2 seasons. It's too nebulous to really drive the show, and TBH it's just them taking what already happened to Kirk and Picard and trying to stretch out a one episode plot into an entire series.

Plus, it's "Gilligan Syndrome". You KNOW all their attempts to go home before the finale will fail, otherwise the show would be over because they never gave them any other plots.

What the show would've benefited from was having plots that could drive the series and be accomplished WITHOUT ending the show.

 

The series really would've been more interesting if they had to settle down somewhere because the ship was too damaged. Build a home, establish relationships with the locals, even tenatively start building a "new Federation." That kind of stuff would've been interesting than "will they get home?" when you know the answer is always "NOOOO!!!"

 

But you saw what happened when they tried that one Battlestar Galactica or Star Gate Universe... The other shoe dropped.

 

Never watched either actually.

 

Oh boy, I can hear some Trekkies now...

Well, I definitely like that idea. And when they get to the planet, their phasers, tricorders, nothing works because of something in the atmosphere. So they have to "live off the land" until they figure out how to "compensate" or discover some way to make them work, which happens many episodes later -- not in the same episode. Then at the end of the season (or end of the series) they're able to finally repair their ship, leave the planet and set a course for home...and maybe some of them decide to stay behind because it feels like a home. And that could have led to another spin-off with those who stayed behind eventually creating a base for a new Federation in the Delta quadrant. Again though, not "Star Trek."

 

But then that reminds everybody of what "Lost in Space" did back in the 60s. Neelix would have started some sort of garden, and we would have had a VOY version of LIS: The Great Vegetable Rebellion.

 

Voyager works just fine as the ship-based Serialized Procedural it is.

 

In the first they found a planet, built a colony, lived there for a year without incident until the Toasters found them, and enslaved the last human beings like cattle and all seemed lost.

In the second, just like Enterprise Squared, or DS9 Children of Time, after a faulty Stargate twinned the crew, they went back in time a thousand years and built a vast star flung civilization that numbered into the billions spanning dozens of planets, however a super volcano, natural forces, frakked their home-world, and still years later after a supposed successful exodus, the past finally caught up to the present, where the duplicates (Equally real counterparts?) begin finding the devastated ruins of the worlds they seem to be responsible for the erecting of, wondering why all the statues look like they do, and they get simultaneous judgy and melancholic.

Both these stories took 4 or 5 episodes to tell that spanned a season or two.

 

Farscape dropped Crichton's quest to get home and switched to the Wormhole/Peacekeeper-Scarran War storyline and no one complained.

Instead of landing on a planet, they could've just had the series take place in one general area where the Kazon, Krenim, Vidiians, Hirogen, Malon, etc all co-existed in and then had VOY be about them trying to pull various aliens they encountered together into a Delta Federation to fight off the Borg and 8472.