I believe the best camera work is the one you don't notice. When you start thinking about it, it's usually a bad sign.
I agree. The first time I saw that I was wondering what the hell was going on.
Did Voyager Just Fail to Adapt The Changing Landscape of Televsion
- Thread starter The Overlord
- Start date
I agree. The first time I saw that I was wondering what the hell was going on.
There were too many clunkers and I am not even talking about Threshold, but episodes like Darkling or Favorite son, were beneath contempt.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Voyager might have been bad Star Trek, but it was Shakespeare compared to today's TV.
You didn't like the pilot of Backstrom yesterday?
Or does the score in Galavant make you want to stick cheese in your ears?
Or does the score in Galavant make you want to stick cheese in your ears?
"Cheese in you ears"! It must have been really bad music. What kind was it?
I agree with this and would add that it was even distinctive in its execution. VOY was simply a bit bland, and forgettable, for the most part, rather than engaging. And that goes back to writing and characterization.
I think the changing landscape of TV had something to do with it, to a certain point. The attempt to do TNG style stories in the 90s with out the same characters rang a little bit too hollow. Was it something I could watch and enjoy? Sure, but it isn't something I want to revisit. There isn't a sense of life in the characters that grab me in a meaningful way.
I hear complaints that VOY gets a bum rap (and read several articles about it) but I don't hold VOY to some magic standard. I just want a story that has characters that are interesting. VOY just wasn't unique enough with the competition that it faced. Doesn't make it bad, but it doesn't make it good either.
I think the problem with Voyager is that the acting was often great, except maybe for Beltram who sometimes looked like he wasn't taking his role seriously, but the stories were often lacking.
That is a fair point. I have no problem with any of the actors. I just don't feel any connection to the characters they are portraying, and that is not all their fault. There is only so much they can do with the material given to them.
Like I said, I can be entertained by the episodes, but nothing sticks, or feels like it matters to me because I don't connect with the characters. Again, that's just me, and I'm glad people enjoy it. I don't fault VOY for not being TOS, or TNG or DS9. I just think the characters and stories left much to be desired.
I still contend that there was no "Changing Landscape of Televsion" to adapt to when VOY was still on the air.
Sure, there were already a couple trail-blazers leading the way (Babylon 5, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, DS9 to an extent), which in retrospect can be looked at from 2015 as having been the fore-fathers of what we hold genre TV to be today... but I would say that, at the time, the mass adoption of 'long form storytelling' as a standard format in sci-fi/genre/cult TV in America was not by any means assured, even by 2000.
Enterprise was really the show that existed at the time when a change to long-form storytelling was becoming necessary. And to their credit, the producers of ENT *did* in fact change and adapt the format as they went along.
Sure, there were already a couple trail-blazers leading the way (Babylon 5, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, DS9 to an extent), which in retrospect can be looked at from 2015 as having been the fore-fathers of what we hold genre TV to be today... but I would say that, at the time, the mass adoption of 'long form storytelling' as a standard format in sci-fi/genre/cult TV in America was not by any means assured, even by 2000.
Enterprise was really the show that existed at the time when a change to long-form storytelling was becoming necessary. And to their credit, the producers of ENT *did* in fact change and adapt the format as they went along.
Sure as you more serialised shows were just starting to gain traction. The issue with VOY is it's premise leant towards a more serialised format, yet what we got leant towards episodic format.
Braga wanted to make year of Hell last a Season.
5 years later, they churned out the Xindi Arc on Enterprise.
Do we assume that Voyagers Year of Hell lasting 26 episodes would have been better or Worse than the Xindi Arc?
Here's a real marshmellow for your cocoa... If the Killer Bees had been doing season long Arcs since Season 4 Voyager, by season 3 Enterprise they would have mastered the process and given a cogent story line that made sense without commiserating that Berman was only 4 scripts ahead of us and had no frigging idea what the conclusion was or who the bad guys were.
5 years later, they churned out the Xindi Arc on Enterprise.
Do we assume that Voyagers Year of Hell lasting 26 episodes would have been better or Worse than the Xindi Arc?
Here's a real marshmellow for your cocoa... If the Killer Bees had been doing season long Arcs since Season 4 Voyager, by season 3 Enterprise they would have mastered the process and given a cogent story line that made sense without commiserating that Berman was only 4 scripts ahead of us and had no frigging idea what the conclusion was or who the bad guys were.
Then they should have adopted a premise which would have leant itself more towards an episodic approach ala TOS and TNG. Seialsied doesn't always mean better than episodic and vice versa, just that you use the one which best suits the overall premise of your show. Which a fair few believe VOY failed to do. The fact that the edict might have come from the network is irrelevant, one of the key critisims levelled at VOY was that it failed to live upto it's premise. Would it have been a better show if it was more serialised no one can say. I suspect that we would be having a similar debate had it been for those that favour a more episodic appraoch to their TV.
It's the simple fact that you can't please everyone all of the time, some people love VOY for what it was, others feel they missed an opportunity and the biggest sense I get is that a many were disappointed in what we got. Not hatred but disappointment.
I think things would have been better, had they gone a little lighter on the stupid stuff. Like the inane pseudo-scientific crap, that only works if you don't listen to it or have just incurred a lobotomy.
The thing is, and I've seen it argued elsewhere, TNG didn't have this reset-button mentality. Sure, it wasn't overtly praying at the altar of serialisation, but they did have this "unspoken agreement" that episodes could be left with threads hanging, and that later episodes could pick up those threads and run with them. Out of that we got the Duras storyline, we got Worf and Alexander, we got the ongoing thing with Data/Lore/Soong, we got Romulan episodes that built upon each other, we got Hugh Borg... on the whole, TNG had an open universe, where decisions in one episode could (and often *did*) come back and bite them on the ass in a later one. While that wasn't exactly serialisation, it was hardly the reset-button either. And TNG did explore many ongoing arc plots as a result. It's a part of what made the show really come into it's own.
Voyager's conceptual problem, more than anything else, was that the crew have got a fix on their location in the DQ, relative to their start point in the AQ, from the very beginning. And a constant mission to "set a course... for home". Which naturally meant that by it's very nature they would constantly be leaving things behind that would never be picked up again. If Voyager had been truely lost, and had to "fly blind" in their adventures in the Delta Quadrant, then there would have been more opportunity for them to be going around in circles and picking up ongoing plots involving semi-recurring characters. Just like TNG often did.
Voyager didn't need to change. It needed an open-ended format to begin with, but it didn't get one, it got the USS Reset-Button instead.
At least Voyager didn't have an episode with a planet with white people quickly followed by an episode with a planet with black people. That was a really stupid move by the writers of TNG.
