Biggest problem with "Voyager" is that they didn't really take any chances.

[fireproof78]

Given all the different viewers out there the writers were never going to please us all. Was Janeway an example of a proficient military Captain, was she conventional enough? Careful enough. Could she satisfy that and take more chances? How can you do both? Be buttoned down to survive and still explore, still take risks.

By letting her fail, that's how. By creating more serialized stories were she might make big decisions that have long reaching implications, and the next time she is more reluctant. Let her values be challenged and her to decide to stick by them, whatever the cost.

And, to be fair to VOY, it dabbled in this from time to time, but it never felt like it "stuck" in terms of character growth. Which, is why I can enjoy VOY on an episode by episode basis, but the whole "lost ship" overarching story doesn't work for me.

I was avoiding mentioning Kirk in case he challenged Janeway in my reckoning. Kirk embodied the spirit of adventure and ability. He commanded respect. Yet with that smirk of his which was still likeable he was at home in the Captains chair. He was the yardstick.

I don't use Kirk as the yardstick, so I would differ in that respect. Kirk, for me, is a good captain and leader, a flawed man who is aware of his flaws, even if he can still make mistakes.

Picard refused promotion and could often be a bit stuck in his ways, which can be a good thing, and can be a bad thing. I think Janeway was kind of similar in that way.

Sisko is an interesting case study because he has a lot of growing pains and personal pain that he is dealing with. I personally sympathize with him more than the rest, and that may be why I tend to enjoy him more on screen.

YMMV.

 

[Refuge]

I don't subscribe to (personal) failure making someone better, in its very nature failure is validating mistake.. better someone else's than your own. Learn from their loss, I say. Janeway did not need to lose her confidence there were enough odds stacked at against a lone star ship as it was. And she did suffer a crisis of confidence and a command challenge along the way but thankfully not many.

What about the Kazon arc, the Hirogen and the Borg?

I prefer Janeway because she was a nurturer. I don't see any of the other Captains creating the bonds on their ship as Janeway did. It wasn't just their isolation, it was the woman herself. Without each other they would have been sunk. Yet while I'm using nautical speak Kirk was a pioneer he was swashbuckler. I swear I can't imagine Kirk thinking he had any flaws. He was the kind of man who would kiss the mirror in the morning. Sisko would see spiritual depths in it, Picard would see his own face, and Janeway wouldn't be miles away.. in a good way.

 

[Prax]

I swear I can't imagine Kirk thinking he had any flaws. He was the kind of man who would kiss the mirror in the morning.

I Can't see him doing that...maybe if he was in a really good mood, but he is depicted as totally confident and sure of himself. And he rarely comes off as arrogant(imo, and unlike Kirk in ST09 and STID) He mostly depicted as the perfect leader and fearless hero.

 

[Jayson1]

I felt like Janeway was a good captain for the most part but the one porblem is they sometimes made her look either naive or stupid, but to me this more of the case of bad writing for a particular episode and not a overal concept that was always part of her character.
A couple of bad moments to me was having her back out of the union with the Trabe because they tried to kill the Kazon leadership. If your not wiling to work with people who aren't always going to be nice then you basically might as well find a planet to settle on because sometimes you don't have the luxary of dealing with just people you agree with.

The second one was not letting Torres destroy the holograms in "Spirit Folk" who had some of her people held hostage with the safety's off, just because people had fun in that program.

Jason

 

[Refuge]

Off topic.. just did a quick read about Captain Archer. I think I might like him after all.. he has a dog.

 

[at Quark's]

I swear I can't imagine Kirk thinking he had any flaws. He was the kind of man who would kiss the mirror in the morning.

No, that's a caricature. I sometimes can make the same remark about Kirk, but always in jest. I don't honestly believe Kirk was a narcissistic egotist. Just like the womanizing aspect, which he is famous for, but isn't actually that bad if you look at TOS itself. Or the shirt-tearing. Sure, elements of these are present (it couldn't have turned into a stereotype in the first place otherwise), but to Kirk, ultimately the ship (and the safety of his crew) came first. But yeah, it was the 60's and looking back now, things that were put on screen back then can now be interpreted differently from the feel they probably had at the time.

Though there's this little gem in The undiscovered country:

<beautiful woman turns out to be a shapeshifter and turns into Kirk>
KIRK: I can't believe I kissed you.
MARTIA: Must have been your lifelong ambition.

But even in this movie made about 25 years after tos, I think this scene is just playing with the popular caricature of Kirk that had sprung up in the public consciousness in the time between, not to make a serious comment on Kirk.

Sisko was the least of the Captains, let's face it, he captained a bus. Janeway was the best, she did something the others never did or could, and she made Admiral. Picard stayed a Captain plodding along never quite excelling.

I don't really understand why you seem to enjoy playing down other Captains. Or yes, it makes sense in some way when I see the flak Janeway has to take by some unfriendly posters.

"Sisko only made captain in the finale of the 3rd season, I believe, and yes, he commanded a space station. Primarily. Besides having a religious icon status to an entire planet. That station grew out to be the most important space station in the entire alpha quadrant, but still. In later seasons he commanded the Defiant as well, a dedicated battleship, something Voyager never was. Then, he received a promotion again, to direct executive officer of Admiral Ross and in that capacity, commanded the fleet of 600+ ships at the battle of Favor the Bold, and was in command of entire fleets more often after that, too. He was absolutely instrumental in saving the familiar Alpha Quadrant powers. Finally, he received a 'promotion' to at least the status of demi-god as pupil of the prophets. Kinda hard to top that, especially when compared to a dinky promotion to what? rear admiral? Those paper pushers?"

^Do I really mean this? No. Of course not. It's a selective presentation of what we see in DS9, the goal being to make Sisko seem 'top dog', and pushing others down. I could do the same for Kirk, Picard, or Janeway, but honestly, I don't see the goal it would serve.

P.S. I'm leaving on holiday later today to a region without too much internet coverage so it may be a while before I'm able to respond.

 

[Nightdiamond]

When I see episodes like Tuvix, Dear Doctor, or Sons of Mogh, I can't help but feel that the writers of post TNG Trek have a very different view of right and wrong than I do. I'm not so sure that they think they are writing something to challenge the audience or if they are just making a moral judgment that seems obvious to them. I say that because there are really never any consequences, repercussions, or regrets for their actions.

At the most I've seen the prime directive episodes, but in those everything always worked itself out in the end. Riker and the Pegasus thing--it all worked itself out in the end, despite what Picard said about hard questions for real. The reset button made it very hard to have an ending or issue where something wasn't solved so easy.

Although some of the ideas of right and wrong were pretty bad in the other shows. On Enterprise, the Dr Phlox thought that evolution meant for one species to survive and the other to perish???

Imagine you have a time travel premise where Israelis and Palestinians are transported back to say Palestine 15th century BC? Would there be tension? Yes . But if they wanted to survive they would put it past them.

This is a good point, and I was thinking of using this example in my last post. One of my peeves is that the bulk of the crew never seemed fleshed out or real, just background characters. Some if it might be because of the way the two crews quickly reconciled and just vanished into the background.

When you're 75 years away from home, of course the two crews are going to band together, but somehow I don't think the crews would quickly abandon their views, especially when they start wondering why they were even stranded out there in the first place.


I really have to rewatch Janeway now. I always thought she did the best she could under the circumstances. Her getting an promotion didn't seem too odd to me, as she successfully guided Voyager back from 75 thousand light years away.

 

[fireproof78]

I don't subscribe to (personal) failure making someone better, in its very nature failure is validating mistake.. better someone else's than your own. Learn from their loss, I say. Janeway did not need to lose her confidence there were enough odds stacked at against a lone star ship as it was. And she did suffer a crisis of confidence and a command challenge along the way but thankfully not many.

What about the Kazon arc, the Hirogen and the Borg?

I prefer Janeway because she was a nurturer. I don't see any of the other Captains creating the bonds on their ship as Janeway did. It wasn't just their isolation, it was the woman herself. Without each other they would have been sunk. Yet while I'm using nautical speak Kirk was a pioneer he was swashbuckler. I swear I can't imagine Kirk thinking he had any flaws. He was the kind of man who would kiss the mirror in the morning. Sisko would see spiritual depths in it, Picard would see his own face, and Janeway wouldn't be miles away.. in a good way.

Agree to disagree about personal failure. Often times, personal failure has much more impact that seeing someone else fail.
Perhaps Kirk in the TOS film era, but Kirk in the series was very much self-reflecting. A great example of that would be "Conscience of the King" where Bones challenges Kirk as to whether or not he's looking for justice or revenge, and Kirk has to admit he's not sure.

The Kazon was probably the more interesting of the arcs, with the Borg getting depowered over and over again. Hirogen were interesting, but few and far between.

 

[Tenacity]

On Enterprise, the Dr Phlox thought that evolution meant for one species to survive and the other to perish

It's possible that Phlox thought just that.

It could have been a personal position on his part, or it could have been the general philosophy of majority of Phlox's species and how they interpret the theory of evolution.

In a way, this is something I'd like to see more of in (future) Star Trek, people in Starfleet who don't think alike and have different, even profoundly different, philosophies, politics, and views of the universe

Of all the Captains in Star Trek the writers gave her the least effective set of skills for the job of being a warship Captain.

Archer was clearly the lowest on that particular totem pole, he had the least training going in.

 

[marlboro]

But it wasn't just the doc, Archer eventually agrees with him.

I think it is more likely that the writer had no idea what the theory of evolution actually says. There have been a lot of "evolution only works in one direction" science fiction stories over the years.

In this episode Phlox basically says 1) evolution stops and 2) organisms have a preordained destiny. These weren't presented as Denobulan beliefs, but as basic scientific facts. It's like saying "E=MC2 is the formula for Crystal Pepsi ergo seamonkeys will be the dominant species on Mars some day."

If you are going to have a character make a moral decision based on science, you have to get the science right. This was just bad writing all the way around.

 

[Voth commando1]

At the most I've seen the prime directive episodes, but in those everything always worked itself out in the end. Riker and the Pegasus thing--it all worked itself out in the end, despite what Picard said about hard questions for real. The reset button made it very hard to have an ending or issue where something wasn't solved so easy.

Although some of the ideas of right and wrong were pretty bad in the other shows. On Enterprise, the Dr Phlox thought that evolution meant for one species to survive and the other to perish???



This is a good point, and I was thinking of using this example in my last post. One of my peeves is that the bulk of the crew never seemed fleshed out or real, just background characters. Some if it might be because of the way the two crews quickly reconciled and just vanished into the background.

When you're 75 years away from home, of course the two crews are going to band together, but somehow I don't think the crews would quickly abandon their views, especially when they start wondering why they were even stranded out there in the first place.


I really have to rewatch Janeway now. I always thought she did the best she could under the circumstances. Her getting an promotion didn't seem too odd to me, as she successfully guided Voyager back from 75 thousand light years away.

You understand they can't flesh out every redshirt don't you? The episodes run for 47 minutes(on average) and that they have a limit to seasons ya know.

 

[a thousand-yard stare]

But it wasn't just the doc, Archer eventually agrees with him.

I think it is more likely that the writer had no idea what the theory of evolution actually says. There have been a lot of "evolution only works in one direction" science fiction stories over the years.

In this episode Phlox basically says 1) evolution stops and 2) organisms have a preordained destiny. These weren't presented as Denobulan beliefs, but as basic scientific facts. It's like saying "E=MC2 is the formula for Crystal Pepsi ergo seamonkeys will be the dominant species on Mars some day."

If you are going to have a character make a moral decision based on science, you have to get the science right. This was just bad writing all the way around.

The writers didn't care about the Theory of Evolution. It was just a 'name-drop', the Macguffin, as they worked toward the 'Prime Directive' payoff.

 

[MacLeod]

You understand they can't flesh out every redshirt don't you? The episodes run for 47 minutes(on average) and that they have a limit to seasons ya know.

Whilst they can't flesh out every "redshirt", VOY unlike TOS/TNG/DSN didn't have access to replacement crew. So surely that would make it easier to flesh out several secondary characters on the crew and yes they did some of that with the likes of Seksa and Icheb, and to a lesser extent with the likes of Carey and the Wildeman's.

Lets examine DSN's secondary characters

Nog
Rom
Leeta
Garak
Dukat
Damar
Eddington
Brunt
Weyoun
Winn
Zek

I could go on, and before anyone plays the stationary setting card and some of them were villians. I'm merely using that as an example that if the DSN writers could develop secondary characters without hindering the primaries too much then VOY could as the one thing that really didn't change on VOY was the crew they had.

 

[Akiraprise]

A couple of bad moments to me was having her back out of the union with the Trabe because they tried to kill the Kazon leadership. If your not wiling to work with people who aren't always going to be nice then you basically might as well find a planet to settle on because sometimes you don't have the luxary of dealing with just people you agree with.

If you come at this from the perspective of a Delta Quadrant power why would you want to trade or form an alliance with Voyager? It's one ship far away from home always on the move. It's not going to be of much use in a conflict for very long as it's in the process of leaving and being a Starfleet vessel it doesn't like to trade any of it's technology. It would be more effective for a few DQ powers to form an alliance, overpower the ship, and split the spoils of war among themselves.

 

[Nightdiamond]

You understand they can't flesh out every redshirt don't you? The episodes run for 47 minutes(on average) and that they have a limit to seasons ya know.

Whilst they can't flesh out every "redshirt", VOY unlike TOS/TNG/DSN didn't have access to replacement crew. So surely that would make it easier to flesh out several secondary characters on the crew and yes they did some of that with the likes of Seksa and Icheb, and to a lesser extent with the likes of Carey and the Wildeman's.

Lets examine DSN's secondary characters

Nog
Rom
Leeta
Garak
Dukat
Damar
Eddington
Brunt
Weyoun
Winn
Zek

I could go on, and before anyone plays the stationary setting card and some of them were villians. I'm merely using that as an example that if the DSN writers could develop secondary characters without hindering the primaries too much then VOY could as the one thing that really didn't change on VOY was the crew they had.

I'm a fan of giving secondary characters dialog and more speaking roles. The secondary characters a lot of times end up being the most interesting. Today shows build their plot around secondary characters. In fact, many secondary characters are the primary ones now.


As far as the crew seeming to be invisible, I always had that type of feeling about Voyager. It's just a perception I got as a viewer, not a deliberate critical thought like, "the show gets a C- because the background characters are fleshed out enough".

Voyager was supposed to be about the crew trying to get back to home to their friends and family, which is everyone on the ship, but all we would see is just a few background characters walking around. And some of them were killed. Plus, background characters like crew members hardly ever get to say anything, so that makes them seem even more invisible.

We got the Naomi Wildman and the Borg children and they were the fleshed out, but the show didn't seem to be able to flesh out the entire crew itself. You got the feeling that only Janeway, the bridge crew and some others made it home, even though you knew there were others on the ship.

 

[fireproof78]

Not even Lt. Carey made it home, and was killed of because...reasons. Also weird that he only showed up in the past scenes in "Relativity." It's like he died but no one showed him dying. Ensign Wildman just stopped showing up on screen as well, so a lot of the secondary characters were literally one shots. It's just baffling to me that you can't have even some consistency with recurring secondaries.

 

[MacLeod]

Not even Lt. Carey made it home, and was killed of because...reasons. Also weird that he only showed up in the past scenes in "Relativity." It's like he died but no one showed him dying. Ensign Wildman just stopped showing up on screen as well, so a lot of the secondary characters were literally one shots. It's just baffling to me that you can't have even some consistency with recurring secondaries.

I suspect the writers thought they had killed him off at some point, only to realise a few episodes from the end they hadnt and they needed to correct this greivous oversight.

 

[fireproof78]

I suspect the writers thought they had killed him off at some point, only to realise a few episodes from the end they hadnt and they needed to correct this greivous oversight.

I tend to think that as well.

 

[Tracy Trek]

^What does it say if the people who watch the show keep better track of the story and characters than the people who run the show?

And many shows in other genres are guilty of this.

 

[Tenacity]

But it wasn't just the doc, Archer eventually agrees with him.

Phlox talked him into it.

Archer as a engineer and a test pilot, he probably knows the theory of evolution as much as he knows ancient Sanskrit or breeding sheep.

I think it is more likely that the writer had no idea what the theory of evolution actually says.

Or in-universe, 22nd century Phlox knows more about evoution that early 21st century Humanity.

if you think about it, the idea that modern Human science knows everything that there is to know about science is completely absurd.

If you are going to have a character make a moral decision based on science, you have to get the science right.

Why would that be the least bit important? Science has absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of moral right and wrong.