TV shows do have fairly rigid runtimes...if you're going to say they should have added something, you should be willing to say what they should have removed at the same time. Yeah, the EMH thing is an inconsistency. I say big deal, the episode itself was good and the inconsistency was hardly, IMO, one of the more damaging ones in Trek's history. I only recall good reviews of the episode, and I think Anwar's perspective is inconsistent with what actually occurred. Hell, has Trek ever produced an episode that was entirely beyond reproach?
Has any TV show an episode that was beyond repraoch. I would dubt it. But many shows seem to manage to drop bits in for a later play off. I.e B5, DSN. They had episodes which were self contained but maybe had an element that would have a later pay off.
Some people get all their enjoyment out of whining. Or out of discovering script inconsistencies and talking about them. It doesn't mean they didn't enjoy the episode, it's just they are geared towards dissection. That's how their relationship to fictional universes works.
The degree VOY gets it, shows that the audience cares more about what went wrong than what went right even when the wrong is far less than the right. All they see are the flaws and NOTHING else. Exactly what I said, all they care about are the flaws. TOS did this a lot, no one cared. Which shows that VOY gets this harder than any other Trek show. A good audience would be willing to think "Yeah, there were some minor petty things I didn't like there but the overall episode was good enough that it doesn't matter." Which is exactly the kind of audience VOY DID NOT have. All they got were folks that cared more about the minor petty things than any of the good. B5 and DSN had inconsistencies too, it's just that their audiences were more open-minded and merciful instead of being ready to tear into those shows for every minor petty little thing.
Again, Anwar, do you have any supporting evidence for your claims, or are you coming up with your theories based entirely on places like this one, which ultimately represent a very small (and more vocal than average) portion of the viewing population? It's been well-established that when it comes to forums, people with complaints tend to speak up louder than people with no complaints.
Most of the forums I've visited and been a part of (and I don't go out looking for negativity) as well as recollections when that episode aired from people I knew watching the show. VOY had an audience that was out to rip into the show for any slights, no matter how petty.
It's somewhat ironic to me that you say that, given that I've had some fairly bruising experiences in the VOY forum when I said negative things and got pounced on for it.
TOS was a product of it's time, by the time VOY rolled around having strong continuity was part of what a portion of the general TV audiance wanted. VOY was an episodic show when it should have been a serialised show, VOY was an episodic show when TV was shifting towards a more serailised approach. All TV shows have minor falws, no one is arguing that they don't. Take for example the premise of VOY, we are told time after time during the run of the show that they have to watch their resources. Yet the ship looks like it had ust left Utopia Planitia shipyards virtucally every week, can seemingly build shuttlecrafts at will etc.. But even if we accept that they build a new back-up module for the EMH inbetween episodes, They never build another one when that one was lost? Why a lack of resources. You can't have it both ways. At least with not addressing it somehow. It shows a disregard for the intelligence of your audiance. Of course different people have differene tolerance levels for mistakes, continuity errors. And VOY did have some good episodes.
Enterprise's significantly smaller audience? I suppose with millions and millions and millions less people bitching and praising, that it's easier to make out individual voices.
It's up to people like me to shout. The really fun thing to me is that every person I've known IRL over the years who was into Trek has declared DS9 boring. Not the fandom people, the regular audience. If I was polling them for how the audience reacted I'd say DS9 was quite the dud.
Oh, that old excuse gets flung around too much. Even by the mid 90s, serialization wasn't that much in style. If they'd done what Berman had wanted and waited til after DS9 to do the show, that when the show would've been more serialized because by 2000 serialization was more common, not 1995. Except in VOY's case folks let the petty flaws eclipse anything else and ruin it for everyone who can look past those because those petty flaws are all they care about. The backup module was based on advanced tech from hundreds of years in the future and thus would be harder to duplicate compared to normal stuff from their own time. It's not hard to figure out. VOY's audience had NO tolerance, that's the difference between them any any other Trek show. Hell, if "Scorpion" was a TNG episode no one would claim it ruined the Borg but if VOY does it then the story will be nitpicked to death and no one will care about any of the story's good points.
At first it was, but even ENT's got a better treatment over time (mainly because it lasted only 4 seasons) compared to how still gripe over VOY.
If TOS was a product of its time, I can't help wonder what's terrible wrong with this time, considering the many crappy series we have to stand these days. As for this thread, I still can't help wondering why we have this debate. What's the point in wanting to kill off the main characters in a series? Even in my worst anti-Seven days, I wouldn't dream of killing off the character. That would have been totally wrong.
Trust me, there was likely a ton of crap back then too. It's just that they got canceled and folks forgot about them, whereas now thanks to the Net and things we can't easily forget.