The Original Concept for Star Trek Voyager?

Not exactly, no.

Nothing warped about a moral code if people go to fight for what is right.

 

I suppose one could argue all moral codes are culturally relative.

 

I mean, without disclosing too much she works in a lawless area to provide support to struggling people's outside of Federation jurisdiction.

As far as vigilantes go, it's fairly tame. And in line with Seven as a character from VOY.

 

Back in the day one of the Star Trek: The Magazine magazines had trivia, as I recall, that "Year of Hell" was originally meant to be an entire season.

 

Can't really comment on what they would have done with it but, if I were to create some changes along this line:

1) Warp engines need maintenance. They can't just run at warp 7 or 9 or whatever indefinitely. TNG touched on this in Starahip Mine I believe. So, over the course of a season have the Warp engines become gradually less efficient with a lower max velocity until they are forced to stop for extensive repairs to being them back up to full.
The lower speed can create some interesting drama trying to run from baddie of the week.

2) Have systems, lights, etc slowly need replacing so that parts of the ship look very alien in their tech.

3) Have some characters rotate in and out of the show - some Maquis may decide its better to split off and leave. Have them be replaced by some friendlies they meet on the way. As attrition of crew from death, leaving, etc takes place, long working hours fray nerves and play on the psychology of a weary crew.

4) don't destroy the marquis ship in the pilot. The maquis stay on their ship until failing systems on both ships require cannibalizing Chakotay's ship so that they have at least one functional vessel. Only then do we start seeing them do the hard work of integrating. Prior to that marquis and starfleet regularly rotate between vessels so that both crews are familiar with operation the other ship.

5) Have the general tone be one of hardship but not walking dead-esque constant survival fight. I think there's room for some light stories interspersed in the misery.

6) don't totally ditch the soap opera. Have the crews forming romantic relationships and have multiple children of officers start appearing in the later seasons signifying that some people firmly believe it will be a multigenerational effort and embrace it.

 

In the Voyager book Violations, the ship is described as becoming sentient at the end of the story.
It was an idea that was't followe-up in any episode or book and now I realize why.

It coud have been an interesting concept.

 

TNG already did that (Emergence). Even though it was an episode without any follow up, unfortunately. More in general, it's interesting how their computers are sophisticated enough to run programs that develop sapience (EMH) even without explicitly being instructed to do so (Moriarty), but don't generally develop sapience themselves (with this one exception). Seems to point in the direction of sapience being more of a software than a hardware feature.

 

The original concept was a 50/50 split by the showrunners and writers. Half of them wanted to try something new and a bit more of a survival show, but the thing is that a lot of the others just wanted to do more TNG. That's why when production began, they listed "Caretaker" as 8x01...as far as they were concerned it was the 8th Season of TNG and that was the approach they'd take. A lot of VOY's earlier scripts were leftover TNG ones they never got to do.

Voyager would never have gotten away with being UPN's lead show and some gritty survival series, especially not in the mid 90s. It's not a premise that lasts anyways.

Look at the Walking Dead, fell apart within 3-4 seasons.

 

So maybe stop shooting for longevity and focus on quality.

 

That's the attitude you approach for a miniseries, not major TV

 

No.

You always want a through line of story in a series.

 

I always felt that at some point they should have just ditched the whole 'get back to Earth' shtick (since the audience already knows that that won't happen for at most seven years, and would effectively end the show.) By the third season they should have just found a specific area of space to settle down and try to start their own Delta Quadrant Federation with the locals rather than just aimlessly flying around space meeting aliens-of-the-week, pissing them off, and then having to get out of Dodge while their ship is constantly being attacked and damaged (but with the damage miraculously fixed by the start of the next episode.)

 

Either they're incompetent idiots who can't find a way to survive over the course of 7 years (to keep the show going) or they find a way to replenish their supplies and thus the "survival" aspect no longer is a major thing and the plot has to be changed otherwise the show is over. You can't have it both ways.

This, this is what I'm talking about.

 

Yup.

Thus arcs and limited story beats.

 

So what, have them succeed, then screw up somehow so they have no choice but to go back to "Lost in Space" and scrounging, rinse and repeat for 7 years straight?

 

Not even close.

And we need to let go of the "7 years" bit.

 

I remember hearing that Voyager and the Maquis ship would both be in the show, travelling together, long term. -------------
Overdoing the "grittiness" would have been a mistake, but so was what they did, making it another Next Gen. My impression was that they threw the ship across the galaxy because Next Gen had gotten stale, and they wanted new, startling, stranger things... But you don't get that simply by throwing them across the galaxy. You actually have to make good on the heightened imagination level of the scripts, not just hope it happens. And if they'd been able to increase the imagination in the scripts, they'd have done it in Next Gen.
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They tried it with DS9 too... livening things up with a magic door across the galaxy to deal with script lethargy. Both shows worked the kinks out, but they couldn't jump start Trek simply by changing its location, with the same team of writers ... !

 

Maybe, but the changes seemed a bit extreme... early on, replicating an eight-ounce (or more likely 250 ml) cup of coffee was a problem. By the start of Season 7, rebuilding a whole new Delta Flyer was no big deal. Now I'm no expert, but I would think that a 21-meter warp 7 shuttle would be multiple orders of magnitude harder to replicate than a cuppa joe. So yes, the ship could undoubtedly discover better ways to use and allocate its energy resources... but that's a little extreme.

 

Let me use the Walking Dead as an example, in Season 3 they finally find a safe place they can build their own little colony at with walls and structure and farming land that's defensible from the Zombie Hordes. It all looks good until a nearby re-settled village run by a Sadistic Lunatic Dictator can't accept anything outside his control and war breaks out until both areas are destroyed and the characters have to move on again back to where they started before they found their new home.

From that point on it became the same repeating plot of them finding a new safe place until it's inevitably destroyed and they have to leave again. They just take the Season 3 plot and kept repeating it until the show ended after 11 seasons. So that's 8 more seasons of the repeated S3 storyline.

That's all Voyager could do, they find a place they can live at until something forces them to get back on the move. From that point on, you either repeat that same plot of "Stay somewhere, until they screw up and have to leave again" or they just find a way home and the story just ends.

They can't accomplish anything and still be on the move, not without things getting stale.

 

We have the advantages of being nearly 30 years down the hindsight road and production regime change. Back in 95 that 7 year run was likely as baked in as the idea Voyager was a Starfleet ship.

So, sticking with the 7 year concept with the overall arc of getting back to the Federation could still have included mini arcs. Year of Hell could have been an arc. They could have done a better job of focusing on the concept of reduce, reuse, and recycle. And I don't mean plots but give us a slow change in tech, slowly change weapon types, etc