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

[fireproof78]

Nonetheless, to put them in the BQ would be to have them travel further than they already did. They simply didn't get that far, and them nearing this "border" in the second to last episode shows that the trajectory, distance, and progress shown in the astrometrics maps wasn't ignored.

If you ask me, the whole "quadrant" thing was abused wayyy too much. In worked well in TNG the one or two times it was mentioned, but DS9 and Voyager dumbified it. In Voyager, there's nothing wrong with saying "Here in the Delta Quadrant," but almost every mention of Alpha Quadrant should have been substituted with "Federation Space" or "Home" or any other appropriate designation.

Likewise for DS9. It was fine referring to the other side of the wormhole as "Gamma Quadrant" but more and more they started saying "Save/lose the entire alpha quadrant!" or other such phrases that would equate Federation space with the whole quadrant. In the last few seasons, these phrases start to appear in almost every episode.

Well, I think that DS9 would occasionally refer to the "Alpha Quadrant powers" and the the threat that the Dominion posed to all of them.

I do agree that the designation did get overused and a bit inconsistent at times.

 

[Prax]

"Alpha quadrant powers" is okay I think. It's more the "...and risk the ENTIRE ALPHA QUADRANT!" or "The key to the alpha quadrant!" or in VOY "Get home to the alpha quadrant." If I'm in Europe, I don't say "I can't wait to get home to the western hemisphere.

I'm telling ya, they'd say this stuff in almost every episode during the dominion war stuff.

 

[Nightdiamond]

And what if she was 57? Or 67? Or 77? What is a Talaxian life span? What is their aging process? We don't know

What are you guys saying? That it should have taken her 40 years and not 30? Do you see space travel as an interstate highway? As Sophie just mentioned also; do we know how long Talaxians live? If they had come up with some explanation, would it stop you from hunting for nits? Both real and imagined

You could be right, their aging process could be different from humans. But there's no evidence either way. This the go-to explanation for when we see discrepancies like this. Like I said, I noticed that the dialog is suspiciously absent about how they could have gotten there at so fast.

Like I said, "if but for a few lines of dialog" to explain it, but it's left blank. Wormholes, space anomalies, anything.. But c'mon, even casual fans are bound to notice things like that. Lots of fans noticed the oddity of it, but it was still a good episode.

 

[MacLeod]

You could be right, their aging process could be different from humans. But there's no evidence either way. This the go-to explanation for when we see discrepancies like this. Like I said, I noticed that the dialog is suspiciously absent about how they could have gotten there at so fast.

Like I said, "if but for a few lines of dialog" to explain it, but it's left blank. Wormholes, space anomalies, anything.. But c'mon, even casual fans are bound to notice things like that. Lots of fans noticed the oddity of it, but it was still a good episode.

Now to be fair to VOY it's not like the other Trek shows (or other shows in general) weren't guilty of that from time.

And what each individual viewer is willing to put up with varies.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Exactly-- similar things happened with TNG and DS9-- like Alexander, Worf's son. He would have been only about 8 years old when he was serving aboard a Klingon ship during the war. Trek in general tended to leave out explanations of something odd in order to go with the story.

I think it's pretty much Ok most of the time--it's something I would probably do if I had a story that was too juicy to leave out.

 

[Tracy Trek]

My head canon about the Talaxian colonists is they came across a wormhole that Voyager missed.

 

[Sophie74656]

Exactly-- similar things happened with TNG and DS9-- like Alexander, Worf's son. He would have been only about 8 years old when he was serving aboard a Klingon ship during the war. Trek in general tended to leave out explanations of something odd in order to go with the story.

I think it's pretty much Ok most of the time--it's something I would probably do if I had a story that was too juicy to leave out.

I think it was said in TNG that Klingon children age faster

 

[Jayson1]

I think it was said in TNG that Klingon children age faster

I don't think it's ever been said in canon but I think it makes sense. Alexander was conceived in season 2 and was a young boy in season 4.

Jason

 

[Anwar]

The thing about how long the travel would be in Voyager....it didn't match up with what TNG told us. TNG gave us speeds that, considering Voyagers' position, would take them only 10-20 years to get home.

 

[Prax]

The thing about how long the travel would be in Voyager....it didn't match up with what TNG told us. TNG gave us speeds that, considering Voyagers' position, would take them only 10-20 years to get home.

Warp travel is dependent upon the area of space being traveled through, but part of the inspiration for DS9 and Voyager comes from TNG's The Price:

DATA [OC]: The Barzan probe had no way to recognise this. Eventually, both sides will be unstable.
LAFORGE [OC]: It's a dry well, Captain. Worthless.
PICARD: Acknowledged, Shuttle. Main shuttlebay, prepare for final approach.
CREWMAN [OC]: Aye, sir.
WORF: Captain, DaiMon Goss is demanding to know where his men are.
PICARD: Advise him to set his coordinates for the Delta Quadrant. He may run into them in eighty years or so.

 

[KJY]

A while back I started rewatching Voyager on Netflix. I hadn't seen it and a while. I initially started just skipping around before I decided to rewatch the whole series from the beginning (which I just finished doing recently). One of the first episodes I rewatched was 7-4 Repression. That's when it hit me "Wow! This is like the best premise for a show ever! An ideologically divided crew fending for themselves far away from federation space. This should've been more addictive than crack. So why did it seem so lackluster so much of the time?" I decided to look up what people were saying on forums and, sure enough, the complaints were very similar. The maquis being swept under the rug, the limitless resources, no ongoing battle damage (there's a reason Year of Hell sticks out in so many people's minds). And someone mentioned Ronald D Moore, one of the major driving forces behind DS9, had quite a bit of criticism for this show (http://www.lcarscom.net/rdm1000118.htm). He seemed to touch up on a lot of the major issues brought up in these forums:

Unlimited resources and no accumulating damage:

Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and Sternbach and Okuda were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn’t going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn’t going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want. That didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen at all, and it’s a lie to the audience. I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. VOYAGER is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spick-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this.

You are trying to tell the audience on the one hand, ‘We’re so far from home, and it’s going to take us so long, and we really wish we could get home. It’s rough out here.’ Janeway wrings her hands about all the things that she has sent the crew through. Then, it’s off to the holodeck. You can’t talk with any kind of a straight face about food rations and energy conservation, and having a real kitchen in the mess hall, when at the same time you’ve got the holodeck going. It’s such a facade, and no matter what kind of technobabble bullshit you come up with, the audience intuitively knows, again, that’s not truthful. There is no reality there. That would not happen. Even on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, they didn’t have the Skipper and Gilligan sitting in the Minnow, watching color television. But on VOYAGER, who cares? We want the holodeck to run so we can go do period pieces, and we can do dress up and we can do fun adventures on the holodeck, and we don’t want to give that up. Okay, but don’t try telling me at the same time that you are really out scraping by and barely making it out there on the frontier, when none of their hair is out of place, and their uniforms are pristine, and the bridge is clean every week.

The homogenizing of the crew:

By the end of the pilot, you have the Maquis in those Starfleet uniforms, and— boom—we’ve begun the grand homogenization. Now they are any other ship. I don’t know what the difference is between Voyager and the Defiant or the Saratoga or the Enterprise or any other ship sitting around the Alpha Quadrant doing its Starfleet gig. That to me is appalling, because if anything, Voyager—coming home, over this journey, with that crew—by the time they got back to Earth, they should be their own subculture. They should be so different from the people who left, that Starfleet won’t even recognize them any more. What are the things that would truly come up on a ship lost like that? Wouldn’t they have to start not only bending Starfleet protocols, but throwing some of them right out the window? If you think about it in somewhat realistic terms: you’re on Voyager; you are on the other side of the galaxy; for all you know, it is really going to take another century to get home, and there is every chance that you are not going to make it, but maybe your children or grandchildren will. Are you really going let Captain Janeway rule the ship for the next century. It seems like, in that kind of situation, the ship would eventually evolve its own sort of society. It would have to function in some way, other than just this military protocol that we repeat over and over again because it’s the only thing we know. You’ve got the Maquis onboard. From the get-go they are supposed to be the anti-Starfleet people. They behave exactly like the Starfleet people with the occasional nod towards B’Elanna making a snide remark about Starfleet protocols, or Chakotay getting a little quasi-spiritual. But in essence, they are no different than any other ship in the fleet. The episodes that you watch week after week are so easily translatable to NEXT GEN that it’s almost a cookie-cutter kind of thing. It’s a waste of the premise. That’s not to say they don’t have any good episodes. There are some good episodes in the mix, and I have seen a couple. The show can work. "But the ship wouldn’t look like that,"

What is the difference really between Voyager and the rest of the fleet? When that ship comes home, it will blend right in. You won’t even know the difference. They haven’t personalized the ship in any way. It’s still the same kind of bare metal, military look that it had at the beginning. If you were trapped on that ship and making your way home, for years on end, wouldn’t you put something up on the walls? Would you put a plant or two somewhere in a corridor? Wouldn’t you try to make it a little more livable? That is the challenge that I think they have really dropped. They just won’t deal with the reality of the situation that ship is in. They look for stylistic twists, and ways to make the show interesting visually, and up the action quotient, and up the sex quotient. But that’s not the problem.

The lack of continuity and inconsistent characterization:

The continuity of the show is completely haphazard. It’s haphazard by design. It’s not like they are trying desperately to maintain continuity of the show. They don’t care, and they’ll tell you flat out that they don’t care. Well, that is misreading the core audience. The STAR TREK, hardcore audience loves continuity; they love accumulating data on these ships. They love knitting together all the little pieces, and compiling lists, and doing trivia. That’s been a staple of the STAR TREK culture from the get-go. People really love the details. They love the fact that the details all add up and make one mosaic, and that the universe holds together. When you don’t give a shit, you’re telling the audience: don’t bother. Don’t bother to really learn this stuff, because it’s not going to matter next week, anything that happened this week.

It’s really hard to keep all the ducks in a row, which we found at DEEP SPACE NINE. In that last ten-episode run, where it was almost completely serialized, that’s a tough act to carry off. But it’s also worth the effort, because the payoff is the world has more validity. The audience can sense there is truth in it. It’s a better show, and it will last longer as a result. If you are really just so concerned that this week’s episode won’t make sense because you didn’t see that episode three years ago, why can’t STAR TREK do like ALLY MCBEAL, or THE PRACTICE, or ER, all the big successful shows do. Put a little recap at the top of the show: ‘Previously, on STAR TREK: VOYAGER...’—even if it’s an episode from two years ago. You just quickly get the audience up to speed, because the audience is not stupid. The audience has watched television for a long time. They understand that they have missed some things, that perhaps this is a reference to a show that they didn’t see. They aren’t just going to throw up their hands and move on. If you are presupposing that, you are aiming towards the person that is grabbing a beer, and isn’t really paying attention, and is walking out of the room every ten minutes and coming back and sitting down; all you are going to do is dumb down the show. You are reducing it to its lowest common denominator, and what’s the point of that? What do you get out of that? You just get a so-so kind of television experience.

On the one hand, you hear them say, ‘We don’t want the Captain to look weak.’ They don’t want to make Janeway look foolish. But then the things that you do make her look weak and foolish anyway. It’s this strange, schizophrenic attitude about their lead character.

On VOYAGER, there are characters they have given up on. They will just say that to you, flat out. I started asking questions about B’Elanna, who she is. I was saying, ‘I’m having a little trouble watching episodes and getting a handle on her, and what she is about.’ The response was, ‘We don’t have an idea. The past doesn’t matter. Just do whatever you want.’ What are you talking about? How can you give up on your own show? How do you give up on your characters? There is such a cynicism about the show within the people that do the show.

The inane technobabble:

When I was studying the show, getting ready to work on it, I was watching the episodes, and the technobabble was just enervating; it was just soul sapping. Vast chunks of scenes would go by, and I had no idea what was going on. I write this stuff; I live this stuff. I do know the difference between the shields and the deflectors, and the ODN conduits and plasma tubes. If I can’t tell what’s going on, I know the audience has no idea what’s going on. Everyone will say the same thing. From the top down, you bring up this point, and everybody will say, ‘I am the biggest opponent of techno-babble. I hate technobabble. I am the one who is always saying, less technobabble.’ They all say that. None of them do it. I’ve always felt that you never impress the audience. The audience doesn’t sit there and go, ‘God damn, they know science. That is really cool. Look how they figured that out. Hey Edna! Come here. You want to see how Chakotay is going to figure this out. He’s onto this thing with the quantum tech particles; it’s really interesting. I don’t know how he is going to do it, but he is going to reroute something. Oh my God, he found the anti-protons!’ Who cares? Nobody watches STAR TREK for those scenes. The actors hate those scenes; the directors hate those scenes; and the writers hate those scenes. But it’s the easiest card to go to. It’s a lot easier to tech your way out of a situation than to really think your way out of a situation, or make it dramatic, or make the characters go through some kind of decision or crisis. It’s a lot easier if you can just plant one of them at a console and start banging on the thing, and flash some Okudagrams, and then come up with the magic solution that is going to make all this week’s problems go away.

It feels too much like TNG:

VOYAGER won’t accept itself. It won’t believe it’s really in this situation in this area of the galaxy and that these are really the prospects in front of them. They just won’t embrace it. They fight against it. There have been more episodes that have taken place on Earth, or alternate Earth, or past Earth than I think the original series did in its whole run, and the original series was set over in the Alpha Quadrant. Kirk and company never went to present day 23rd century Earth, their contemporaneous Earth, ever. Gene wouldn’t do it. Voyager is on the other side of the galaxy, and they have already run into some alien race recreating Starfleet Academy. They’ve run into Ferengi, the Romulans. It doesn’t feel like they are that far away from home. It just doesn’t feel like they are in that much trouble out there. At its heart, VOYAGER secretly wishes it was NEXT GENERATION. If you really get down to it, VOYAGER on some level just wishes it was NEXT GEN. It really wants to be back in the Alpha Quadrant: ‘Just let us be normal STAR TREK.

Brannon goes back and forth on whether they should come home or not. They have been talking about it for a long time. I said this years ago: it’s giving up on the show. If you bring that ship home before the series is over, you have given up. You’ve rolled over and said, ‘We can’t make it work. Let’s just go back and do TNG all over again.’ It comes back home, goes to Earth, there’s like a two-part episode as they go down to Earth and revisit their old lives. What’s going to happen at the end of that two-parter? All the characters are going to re-up and say, ‘I love Voyager. It was such a family. I learned so much from you. Let’s not break up. Let’s stay here.’ All the Maquis people will take regular commissions in Starfleet. Chakotay will chose to be second in command to Janeway. B’Elanna will embrace those warp engines. Now Starfleet has given you a mission, and off you go. Essentially what was the point of this entire series? It’s a wasted opportunity. That’s what pisses me off. You are not really taking advantage of this golden opportunity that you are handed as writers and as producers.

He talks about some issues behind the scenes:

"What I found on VOYAGER was suddenly it wasn’t about the work anymore. It wasn’t about making the best show that we possibly could; it was about all these other extraneous issues. It was about the politics of the show, and the strange sort of competition of egos within the writing staff and the producing staff and the management of the show. ‘Competition’ is probably a misleading term. The politics of the show were such that the egos of the people in charge of the series were threatened by the people who worked for them. To be blunt, writers Bryan Fuller and Mike Taylor were treated very shabbily, and it pissed me off. They took a lot of crap, and the only reason it was done was to keep the guys on the top of the pyramid feeling good about themselves. It also had the effect of keeping the writing staff from working in concert as a group. The DS9 staff by contrast was very tight.

"The fun factor dropped precipitously, and I think that shows on the screen," Moore continues. "I think that the product that you are getting now is also a reflection of the way the show is produced. Certainly the spirit of DEEP SPACE NINE, and what we were trying to do, and what we believed in, informed what we put out. You could say that DEEP SPACE NINE was too inside, and it was too complex. It got too much inside of its own head to be accessible to people who just approached the show for the first time, but that is a reflection of deep passion and commitment to the show. Whereas VOYAGER is so scattered internally, the way it’s put together, that in a large measure, the product is very scattered, and doesn’t have cohesiveness.

DEEP SPACE NINE was this real sense of, ‘We’re here. Let’s do the best show we possibly can, and let’s push the concept as far as we possibly can.’ I was hearing stuff about VOYAGER all along. Then to go to VOYAGER and just to find out that on a personal level that the environment was not conducive to doing good work. The environment was chaotic and fraught with other issues that just didn’t have anything to do with the work."

For everyone saying people are just infinitely forgiving of DS9 and overly critical of Voyager, it's an awfully big coincidence that Voyager was fraught with all of these behind-the-scenes issues that DS9 never had.

 

[Prax]

All these behind the scenes issues from a guy who worked there for two months during one of the last seasons?

 

[MacLeod]

All these behind the scenes issues from a guy who worked there for two months during one of the last seasons?

Doesn't mean they aren't valid.

 

[Phil123]

I agree with everything Moore is quoted as saying there. I don't not like Voyager, but it is the weakest of the series by far. Such a disappointing missed potential, both from a story and character point of view. I really liked the cast, and wish we'd gotten to see them shine more.

The lack of difference from the Alpha quadrant in the Delta quadrant and long with making next to nothing of the possibilities offered by having a Marquis/Federation crew and the most disappointing. Many didn't like TNG/Gene's desire to have no conflict between crew. Well here is the perfect chance! Some conflict borne from conflicting political viewpoints, but no. Eventually they just went with a watered down version of the Borg as a big bad.

 

[Prax]

Yes, it just might. It would be akin to showing up for a new job on a Monday morning at 7am, finding out your old partner was now more your boss, and then try to change the direction to fit your old job. Then, quitting before lunch.

For someone to use that as a way to say voyager was fraught with behind the scenes issues that DS9 wasn't is nonsense. It's a small window into the pre-season 6 writers room from a guy with sour grapes. We get an entirely different picture from people like Robbie McNeal, or Bob Picardo.

So what does Moore do on his first episode? He sticks them on a space station, with quirky characters, makes it a seven "confronts her past" episode, and throws in a Bajoran for good measure. His second episode? Klingons! They aren't bad episodes. The second was written with Bryan Fuller. And then he was gone...

If you want a dark, dreary, hopeless Voyager, with little humor, and lots of angst, just go watch BSG. You'll find even more cynical fans to go with it.

 

[Prax]

Many didn't like TNG/Gene's desire to have no conflict between crew. Well here is the perfect chance!

There's more interpersonal conflict on Voyager than any other series.

 

[fireproof78]

There's more interpersonal conflict on Voyager than any other series.

There is? ENT had Archer and T'Pol constantly going at it, DS9 had several personal relationships that almost came to blows, and had longer lasting implications or impacts. Even Jadzia ended up going against the advice of her commanding officer and murdered a guy.

I think the larger thing for me, is that it is both believable and varied. I don't know. I never really noticed the conflict in VOY.

 

[Prax]

Yes. Easily.

 

[KJY]

Phil123: I don't not like Voyager,

I don't not like it either. It's actually my second favorite after DS9. Part of that could be blind nostalgia though. It's the second ST I started watching very shortly after I started watching DS9. I don't think it would be getting as much flak as it does if it had never promised to be something other than normal ST (then again, we wouldn't be having all of this fun talking about squandered potential). Voyager has a lot of great episodes (but probably more bad ones than the other ST's) and The Doctor is one of my favorite characters in the whole franchise and Seven is great too.

Phil123: but it is the weakest of the series by far.

Really? I think Enterprise is way worse. It seemed to double down on Voyager's main mistake of ignoring it's premise and telling stories that could easily have been adapted to the previous series - but lamer. They also came up with contrived excuses to show alien races the crew had no business seeing on a couple of occasions - just like Voyager.

Phil123: The lack of difference from the Alpha quadrant in the Delta quadrant and long with making next to nothing of the possibilities offered by having a Marquis/Federation crew and the most disappointing.

What's funny is that the series was already a couple of seasons in when I started watching and the pilot isn't the first episode I saw. When it finally rolled around again, I was really confused by the dramatic opening text scrawl explaining who the maquis were when it didn't seem like an important part of the show. It really looks like they had bigger plans for them initially.

Prax: For someone to use that as a way to say voyager was fraught with behind the scenes issues that DS9 wasn't is nonsense. It's a small window into the pre-season 6 writers room from a guy with sour grapes. We get an entirely different picture from people like Robbie McNeal, or Bob Picardo.

I, for one, believe him. I have a hard time believing his experiences were drastically different from business as usual on the show or that he'd try to run a smear campaign against Voyager out of spite. Plus, it does explain some things we really do see on the show. I've heard rumors of a network edict forbidding any serious conflict among the crew, which explains why the maquis were so quickly swept under the rug even though it seemed they initially had bigger plans. Apparently the network also pressured them to avoid serialized plots. I definitely believe that because I remember the writers of Fringe complaining about the exact same thing. I also remember hearing that one of the main people behind Voyager (can't remember which one) wanted to make a whole season out of The Year of Hell but the network said no. Moore admitted that the cast was very close though

There's more interpersonal conflict on Voyager than any other series.

There is? ENT had Archer and T'Pol constantly going at it, DS9 had several personal relationships that almost came to blows, and had longer lasting implications or impacts. Even Jadzia ended up going against the advice of her commanding officer and murdered a guy.

I think the larger thing for me, is that it is both believable and varied. I don't know. I never really noticed the conflict in VOY.

I personally recall more interpersonal conflict on DS9 than Voyager myself, but I don't have the tables in front of me. People's perspectives might be skewed because Voyager seemed like it was set up specifically to deliver conflict though.

 

[Prax]

Even if his pov is earnest, forthcoming, and without spite, it's still just a tiny window of time in a show that was on air for seven years. He had a falling out with Braga, who was EP during season 6. Moore didn't feel welcomed on the show.

I mentioned Bob Picardo because he gives so many interviews and talks specifically about Braga, early season 6, the writers room, etc. And by listening to him, you'd get type impression that these were the best of times. Ditto for other actors/directors.

BTW, it was also Braga who wanted to do more with Year of Hell(he wrote it) He was about to take over as head writer for season 4 and planned it to the season finale/premiere, before the Borg storyline came to fruition, but not a season long episode. Season 4 is possibly the most solid season of the show. How many great stories would be lost?

I've said this before: There seems to be this false dichotomy and popular notion that More serialization=good. There are trade offs. Voyager is (as others have said) a "serialized procedural" just like TNG, DS9, and Enterprise. It has many ongoing arcs, and still acts as a platform for telling interesting sci fi stories. IMO, it doesn't need to be more melodramatic, more soap opera, more angst, or any of the other things people have imagined into Voyager's premise.

Network execs really started to tamper with the producer's vision for the show in Enterprise, yet Enterprise had the most "serialization" of all. The premise fir Enterprise was to be sequel to First Contact, and a prequel to the other shows. It was supposed to take place only on earth for the whole first season, and without any temporal cold war. You can see how much compromising happened there. Execs even wanted to have a band that played in the mess hall.