Why was Kes written off the show?

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Voyager' started by Kooz, Feb 23, 2012.

  1. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Nazis come up a lot because of season 6.
     
  2. Captain_Nick

    Captain_Nick Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Sounds delicious. I think I'll read some spoilers during my break later today
     
  3. Lynx

    Lynx Vice Admiral Admiral

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    You're absolutely right, Exodus! This has nothing to do with Kes because Kes and Star Trek is the opposite to what Communism stands for.

    As for the avatar, in that case I hope that no one objects if I put a swastika or some Al Qaeda symbol in my avatar. But since I don't support mass murderers, I will settle for my current one.

    Just a final comment regarding this matter before I go back to the original topic which, despite my misgivings with "Fury" and the way Kes was treated, is a rather harmless thing to debate compared to the diabolical thing called Communism.

    Most of you people seem to have a very rosy-eyed view of Communism. You are talking about communism in theory when I talk about Communism in practice which is far from the fairy tales about the equal society which Communists fool people with. Or are you mixing up Communism with Social Democracy which is an entirely different thing?

    I also get the impression that some of you have your only experience of Communism from Hollywood WWII movies where the "heroic" Red Army (pronounced Rape Army) helped the Western Allies to wipe out Adolf's army. The reality is very different from that.

    Don't you know anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, how the Commies and the Nazis attacked and divided Poland? How Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupiedand the Communist terror in those countries? The Soviet attack on Finland when Adolf and Josef were the best buddies?

    And I have to mention the ethnical cleansing which the Rape Army conducted in the east German provinces (which are now part of Poland) in the end of the war. That was worse than what happened in Bosnia (and yes, the Serb leader Milosevic was Communist too).

    You do know of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other Nazi death factories. Do you know about Kolyma, Vorkuta, Virandozero, Butyrki or Ljubljanka prison? I suppose not.

    Don't you know anything about Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968? Mao's terror in China? Pol Pot in Cambodia? The KGB, The GULAG? The continuing genocide in Tibet? North Korea?

    And there are people who think I live in a dream world with Kes and Voyager! :lol:

    I have a book written by the Ukrainian refugee Viktor Kravchenko who was an important politruk in the Communist organization before fleeing to the US. He once visited a factory outside the town of Podolsk, a real terrible place located underground where political prisoners were held as slave workers, where the working conditions were terrible and where lots of prisoners died every day.

    He could never forget that terrible place. And many years later when he heard people he met in the US talking about the wonders of Soviet Communism he always thought: "If I could send you idiots to that factory for two days, only for two days, then you would sing an entirely different song."

    Now back to Kes and the Star Trek dreamworld!
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2012
  4. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The hippies in my area are currently holding free showings of some movie about the wonders of Castro's Cuba, how incredibly fabulously egalitarian it is. Of course most of them would be thrown in prison for their lifestyle choices and otherwise if they were in Cuba but the need to believe that there is a magical ideology that will make life fair is too great.

    Part of the appeal of Star Trek.
     
  5. lurok

    lurok Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Now we've reached Godwin.

    Goodbye, cruel thread...
    [​IMG]
     
  6. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Godwin is like the galactic barrier, everyone is sure something you can never undo is at the other side of it. However I feel confident in the power of this thread to absorb Godwin like that absorba-zorb in Dr. Who and suffer little more than a page of indigestion.

    Why was Kes written off the show? I didn't give a fig about her so I did not speak up when she was written off. And then TPTB came for Janeway :(
     
  7. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    And I thought the female orgasm was a myth.
     
  8. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    What a confession!

    This thread has everything now.
     
  9. Lynx

    Lynx Vice Admiral Admiral

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    For me, the "annihilation" of Janeway in the recent books is like the Kes tragedy all over again, this time with another favorite character. :weep:
     
  10. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Kes turned into a god a went home.

    If that's a shitty way to treat someone what do you think of Neelix's final fate or Hogans?

    Dinosaurs picked through giant snake skat to see if his bones were museum worthy.

    That's an Opposite Day level sort of a clusterfuck.
     
  11. stj

    stj Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think I've clearly articulated why I think Kes was written off. The only thing I can think of to add is that everything I've read about Berman Trek backstage is that it is extremely hierarchical (reflected in their revival of military hierarchy, in ways the WWII veterans of Star Trek didn't choose to incorporate.) In terms of career experience, Lien was very much a junior. The guy with the least experience gets laid off.

    As for the detour on the avatar: I forgot that the quote function automatically italicizes. So my effort to highlight the particularly offensive claim that the "system" murdered more people than the Nazis.

    Proportionately, Stalin killed more members of the Communist Party than any other group. It is a notorious fact that the Old Guard, the members who joined before it would be personally profitable to do so were particularly targeted. This is especially true of Party leaders, central committee members in particular.

    He created security organs (and their labor camps) that were outside Party control.

    Indeed, they were essentially recreations in modern times of Ivan Grozny's oprichniki and their forced labor camps, which were then innocuously called estates. Concentration camps of course were used in Cuba by the Spanish and in South Africa by the British, so they are perfectly respectable. Obviously this type of thing has no connection with the Communist "system" as such.

    Stalin of course found it necessary to kill even members of the security service and at least one camp administrator (sorry, forgot his name, but he was a Communist with peculiar ideas about rehabilitation, which are not very commonly accepted today.) Hitler's concentration camps first held Communists and Socialists, so the right-thinking people of the democracies loved and admired Hitler.

    Stalin's pursuit of personal power also led him to attack the Communist Red Army leadership, decimating the "officer" corps.

    Additionally, Stalin also reversed many of the socially progressive policies associated with Communism, reinstituting laws against homosexuality and so forth. And reinstituting the usual military hierarchy typical of democracies and dictatorships alike.

    The Nazi/Soviet Non-Aggression pact is in fact the stellar example of Stalin's break with the Communist "system." Oh, it has its justifications in hard necessity. After all, after the democratic powers had assisted the Fascist victory in Spain, and helped Germany and Poland dismember Czechoslovakia, there is a powerful case to make that Communist ideals had to give way to reality. After Munich, war was inevitable and there was no reason to think England and France would turn on their Nazi friends. It is still true that the Pact was not the Communist ideal.

    And the upshot of this brief lesson in history is that it is a Big Lie to assert that the "system" is responsible for the Yezhovshchina. Hitler didn't have to kill the Nazi Party leadership, Hitler didn't have to decimate the general officers, Hitler didn't have to reverse the Nazi Party policies of years to keep his personal power, Hitler didn't have to execute the rich in his system. If there is anyone who merely executed the "system's" directives, it's Hitler.

    The other part, about the relative number of casualties, is not so short and clearcut. Also, it's perfectly obvious that the people who insist on screaming this stuff are never going to accept reason. But, briefly, Jews were not the only victims of Hitler. They are the commonly estimated six million. They were by far the largest single group of course, so well worth considering.

    They way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control.

    The official estimates of victims of Stalin's kangaroo courts numbers well over 600 000. Plus there must be some murders that were carried out like the kind democrats carry out in Colombia, where the victims more or less disappear, just killed out of hand by offduty cops or soldiers on night ops. These numbers are quite sufficient to condemn Stalin. I have no idea how people can deceive themselve into thinking that this is some sort of apologia for Stalin's crimes. That is a horrifying figure. Yet, as criminal as the frameups were, they were still not the same as going into a Jewish neighborhood, just grabbing everyone and then sending them off to be exterminated. Inflating the number of victims to millions is intended to get Hitler off the hook.

    Many of the millions attributed to the "system" and dragged in to make Hitler not look so bad are victims of civil war and fighting in rebellions and victims of famine. There is another kind of responsibility for misgovernment that leads to this kind of death. But it's not the same thing as murder. These numbers are mostly made up and rely upon a double standard. There was a famine in India during WWII. Aren't those victims of the Raj? Of course we know that ranting about Churchill and the capitalist system murdering all those people is tendentious and ideological. The same for Stalin. The kind of "logic" and evidence that is used in these figures for Stalin's victims, applied to someone like Abraham Lincoln, would also give horrifying numbers. You would end up saying things like, the 600 000 dead in the Civil War were victims of Lincoln and the abolitionist system!
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2012
  12. Lynx

    Lynx Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ^^
    I'm really sorry that I have to break my promise about going back on topic but I just have to contradict some of the BS written above.

    Stj wrote:
    Haven't you read of the "destruction brigades" which were essential in the Soviet terror in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and eastern Poland? They did exactly what you describe above, going into peaceful villages, murdering and raping at random just to scare the population. I'm sure that you can find information about that on the Internet if you bother to look.

    I have no intention at all to "make Hitler look good", I'm only pointing out the Communist crimes whic actually are worse than even what Hitler could come up with. Or aren't Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians or other people under Soviet opression worth as much as the Jews who Hitler murdered?
     
  13. stj

    stj Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I wrote "[Look at] (T)he way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control."

    Googling "destruction brigades" I really only came up with one Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_battalions
    This strongly suggests that this article was a contribution by an amateur wanting to grind an ideological axe. This is exactly the type of article which has won Wikipedia a reputation for unreliability.

    Even so, this article tells us the term properly applies to paramilitary units organized to carry out scorched earth policies during the Soviet retreat in 1941. In other words, it was not just wartime but during an actively contested campaign. It cites some really nasty stories about what happened in 1941, but curiously none of them seem to have been done by Nazis. But these were no peaceful cities and villages, no lands under Soviet control. Just as I said, this is not a parallel to what the Nazi did, which is truly unparalleled.

    This is what it says about the post-war situation:
    I'm quite sure that there was a great deal that was perfectly awful but there's nothing like the Nazis going on here. There are not even inflammatory atrocity stories.

    As for not being for Hitler, well if you say so. I must wonder however, because the Wikipedia article had a useful link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_long-range_reconnaissance_group
    This one is about another paramilitary organization, this one Nazi organized, that engaged unspecified Soviets after the Kautla massacre (one of the best attested atrocity stories, Wikipedia even lists most of the twenty victims.) The postwar Forest Brothers movements was also a continuation of Nazi organized forces, including Baltic Waffen-SS units, etc. continued with the assistance of Swedish, English and US intelligence support. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers This too, after the Nazis had slaughtered millions of Soviets of all nationalities (except, I gather, Balts and Poles, where apparently the relatives and friends extended a warm welcome that was happily reciprocated,)
    was certain to be a bitter struggle.

    But, again, what happened then was not the same as Nazis seeking out Jews as such, before suffering enormous losses and hardships that would embitter most people, and murdering them. As for indifference to human suffering, it is quite clear that the anti-Communists are quite happy to commit enormities. For example, the CIA assisted Suharto in his massacre of perhaps 500 000 people in 1965, contributing hit lists. Unlike the Baltics, there was no war, just killing. But those really were people whose lives were worth less than the Balts or Poles.
    In anti-Communist eyes.

    But then, the lives even of Balts don't count for much in the eyes of anti-Communists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps_in_the_Baltic We find there a lovely example of the lovely mind of the anti-Communist:
    Incidentally, the expulsion/evacuation/flight of the German population of the Baltic states is conveniently overlooked in the jingo histories. Really, gullibly swallowing the self-serving recollections of criminal friends and relatives is not the same as studying history.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2012
  14. Lynx

    Lynx Vice Admiral Admiral

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  15. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Frakking hell DEAD is DEAD.
     
  16. smarine

    smarine Ensign Newbie

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    I had no idea about any of that, but then I've usually been rather too busy to 'dig' into the extra details, and just watch the show for it's incredible value. But knowing those things as outlined, might explain a few things for me.

    I thoroughly enjoyed her chartacter, feel that if she had stayed , as you stated, that they could have explored her character traits amazingly well.

    I'm normally never someone to critisize acting, but I felt some of Jen's acting in places was a tad either rushed, or simply again as stated, possibly not felt enough?

    I didn't have all that many moments like that, but they were enough that I can see them wanting to replace her, but having said that, what she did while there I thought was enough to make Voyager better for it indeed.

    I also think with the utmost certainty and emotion, that 7's addition to the show was a very smart move, for obvious reasons. Her acting was stunning and her entire character was so spot on, and the scripts absolutely genius.

    I enjoyed all the series, but I think Voyager has managed to grab me even now, as I watch reruns fairly often, and lets face it everyone, the 'chemistry' between all the characters was amazing, no matter their salaries ;)

    New technologies afforded for the shows special effects etc., given its the last currently of the series notwithstanding, allowed everything to come together perfectly.

    I hope the next one, if there is one will be just as good.

    They were actors portraying characters, but still, given my love for space and wanting to ' go where no person has gone before' , when I watch this show its like hanging out with friends. I can't think of a better compliment ;)

    Thanks to all of them, and prior series as well for giving us all something to look forward to ,as our technology evolves, and we as a species grow into maturity.

    Watching it as part of my dvd collection had me slightly missing the 'tv' show again and wishing I was on that ship with those amazing people exploring worlds together; so short of that, finding this list was as fulfilling as well.

    Cheers
    smarine


     
  17. DeepSpaceWine

    DeepSpaceWine Commander Red Shirt

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    I finally get to quote the illustrious Wadsworth:
    "Communism was just a red herring."


    And I believe the wrong clip is used the previous page. Given the epic derail this thread has had, the clip of mutant Paris taking Janeway to warp 10 so they can have cold, clammy amphibian sex should be used.

    [​IMG]
    This thread did devolve after all.


    and this thread is about as healthy as this:
    [​IMG]

    and this for good measure when looking at the thread:
    [​IMG]
     
  18. Miss Chicken

    Miss Chicken Little three legged cat with attitude Admiral

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    Her voice was the main reason I couldn't stand her. It irritated me so much, it was 1000 times worse than Keiko's whine. I din't want to slap her, I wanted to throttle her. The other reason i didn't like the character was because she was so sickly sweet.
     
  19. You_Will_Fail

    You_Will_Fail Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Wow really...Kes's voice was so sexy and alluring and distinctive.
     
  20. Lynx

    Lynx Vice Admiral Admiral

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    :guffaw: