Tuvok, Seven, The Doctor.. interchangeable?

[Refuge]

Picking up on the unique personalities within the Voyager crew. Example I can imagine only B'Ellana saying the things she does.. Maybe a crossover here and there with Janeway and Kes, but Janeway is more 'motherly'. Neelix is unique. Tom and Harry are actually different but Harry does grow into being a little like Tom as far as being a big brother. Then there is The Doctor. Maybe he's too vain or snippy to be like Tuvok but I get a feeling that the writers had three very similar constraints to give limited lines to three characters.

Was Seven really that necessary or unique to Voyager regards her wit and personality? Did she actually steal from the other two (Tuvok and to a lesser extent, The Doctor)? I keep reading how much of an addition Seven was and she was. The character had impact and insight but most of it was her looks. Borgs tend to drone on. What makes Seven saying the same lines Tuvok could say so special? It's the silver suit, right??

 

[Triskelion]

If you have your "Outsider" character in a Trek series, your Spock, Data, or Odo, Voyager did indeed have three "logical" types to be naive observers of humanity. It was like saying "more must be better" - which also explains their technobabble crutch, Janeway's hair, and of course, Seven's casting.

A lot of Voyager's issue lies with its formulaic storytelling, such as relying too heavily on forced technobabble tension and easy technobabble solutions. One thing that the Seven character brought to the table was the willingness to contradict the hero captain; a trait we never saw in Tuvok, due to their supposed long backstory together; nor the EMH, who could simply be muted.

And not even from Chakotay, who immediately fell into line, along with the entire Maquis crew, in order to completely nullify that robust field of drama. I suppose that had to do with adhering to the Roddenberry bible of humanity all scratching each others' backs in the future. But there it was - to have a strong female lead, all others must be weak. Otherwise you start having to deal with Dynasty's Alexis and shoulder-padded masculine power, and - men bad, after all. Men are good for two things - filling blouses or castrating with wit.

Now, to avoid that self-imposed anodyne dullness, enter Seven of Nine - an outsider not only to humanity but to Roddenberry's definition of humanity, to finally bring aboard some much-needed conflict that not only sparked some drama, but also strengthened characters like Janeway. A captain who up until then we had to take at face value was somehow superior by virtue of never being contradicted or challenged in any significant way. It wasn't enough that Janeway be strong, everyone else had to be weak, seemed to be the message - up until Seven.

It was about time Janeway earned her position in every argument; so I think this in part explains Seven's success in the series; but only because of the general lack of meaningful shipboard conflict prior to her arrival. I suppose this is in part because of the premise - putting a Federation ship on the other side of the galaxy and watch them all get along famously - despite the strains of a short term mission suddenly becoming a generational journey that destroys lives, hopes and dreams. Let alone even vaguely disrupt the power hierarchy, as a two year contract to obey in a job now becomes the complete socioeconomic status of your life by dint of one's rank. Your entire life outside of Starfleet - disposed of. Yes, I'm sure the heir to the throne of Betazed would happily, dutifully serve as assistant to Milford the IT guy, not only for the next two weeks, but for the rest of her natural life. Because Marxism rainbow sunshine future.

So attributing Seven's success as a character on her silver jumpsuit isn't exactly fair; her boobs looked good in a number of outfits. Just kidding; but for this cast's hierarchy, a character like Seven's could be cast by very few other types of person. Forget males. That would be too threatening, and there was already an oversupply of them. Forget even Torres, let alone the Samantha Wildmans on board. Torres was too loyal to Chakotay and could be heeled under his obedience; and we weren't having any more Maquis conflicts within the main cast. Forget logical types, since they were firmly under Janeway's womanly-intuitive thumb. Forget teenagers, because they were just lost children who needed mothering. Forget females with superior experience or intelligence - that might detract from a Starfleet Captain's cultlike awesomeness. What does that leave you?

A wounded apprentice exuding more feminine awesomeness than she can handle. And have her lord it over fanboys by hypnotizing them while holding their attraction in contempt. Thus, setting the hook with perfect unattainable beauty carapiced in cold, domineering logic. But ultimately loyal to the awesome Starfleet captain's awesomeness. Which at least demonstrates how that loyalty was earned for at least one character.

 

[Refuge]

Random thoughts here.. I just read through what I wrote and there is no line of anything that flows.

As a female I kind of felt uncomfortable watching Seven at first, her look was full on and confronting. It took me a while to get passed how she looked, rather than admiring it. In fact I resented the the in your face boldness of Seven being cast. Now it doesn't phase me but her personality was blunt, arrogant, and the logic sometimes immature. If I were to interchange the dialogue with Tuvok saying the lines, mostly I could do that, UNTIL you place Seven in the role of an inexperienced individual. The only episode of Voyager I will never rewatch is not Fury or Threshold it is a star episode for Seven and Janeway, but a cruel one. I won't watch 'Prey' again because I loathed Seven in it with her bitter faux logic. She did challenge Janeway and said the words - you will fail, however Janeway prevailed. Janeway was not resentful or jealous of Seven's budding individuality. There was a command structure and Seven was like a teenager throwing another creature to the wolves because she was Borg. Not a human who had been Borg but a human who favored the Borg way not the Voyager way.

Seven was virtually trained to be part of a collective with a Queen. Janeway fitted the role perfectly, she was part Queen, part mother and part 'establishment'. I thought Seven got away with far more than anyone else did on the crew. She also added to the technology dialogue, which sits right with me. I never had a problem with it pre-Seven and post-Seven. In fact I thought the cast was also pretty good! It did make me wonder though about the 'Outsider' as you put it, or the 'Observer'. One would think they would cancel each other out - the Doctor, Seven, and Tuvok. Though thinking further I'm reminded of the episode with Seven and Tuvok on an away mission having not spoken for said amount of time and 'feeling' perfectly fine about it. They kind of got on well. Both strong, logical and practical. In fact in 'Year of Hell' Seven was positively devoted to Tuvok.

Seven's loyalty to Janeway was when she was in the presence of her father as a drone and it was Janeway's voice that touched her. Janeway's loyalty back, was in Endgame.

 

[DamarsKanar]

I think that Seven of Nine is much more the outsider figure than either the Doctor or Tuvok. Firstly, I think Tuvok is not Spock: by the time we the viewer watch Voyager (and given that we're further along in ST history in the 24th century), Vulcans are not really outsiders anymore. We know Vulcans, Vulcans know humans. There is no struggle for Tuvok - he is comfortable with who he is.
As for the Doctor, in a way he is also just too comfortable to truly be that figure. As much as he is less human in many ways than Spock, Data or Odo (he's not even corporeal!) he is actually programmed in such an advanced way as to essentially imitate all the feelings and actions of humans. It isn't really a struggle for the Doctor for the most part, besides the part of initially not being able to leave sickbay and the occasional holographic malfunction. But he doesn't have such a true journey because all of the human traits come to him so easily, being programmed into him or very very easily assimilated into his programming.
Seven, on the other hand, has an arc of struggle as an outsider. That's not to say the writers really 'failed' or anything with Tuvok and the Doctor, it's just that Seven did bring something new because she had a unique journey towards personhood. It wasn't just that she was the 'logical' 'sciencey' one - she had to deal with the concept of individuality and the terror of loneliness, then she had to deal with the limits of individuality within a command structure, as well as the difficulty of balancing the distance and intimacy required of human relationships. These things gave her what the writers viewed as a 'raised by wolves' quality. She had to re-assimilate into human society, something that Tuvok and the Doctor didn't really have to do. So although yeah, technically you could distribute technobabble out amongst the three and it wouldn't make a massive difference, the core of the character Seven does seem to bring something more forceful and conflict-driven than we had previously seen on Voyager.
And the catsuits.

 

[MacLeod]

What makes Seven saying the same lines Tuvok could say so special? It's the silver suit, right??

In terms of lines if anything she might have taken them from Kim, look at DSN when Jadzia left, many of the lines she might have had likely went to the Chief.

 

[A Chimpanzee & 2 Trainees]

In short, she takes lines from many different characters who collectively could or should have been able to pick up the slack if she were never there. I wouldn't say just the Doctor and Tuvok, but also Harry, B'Elanna, and Chakotay.

I don't think she was useless or shouldn't have been there, but as you allude to, the building blocks for all of her personality traits were present among all these characters, if some different decisions had been made up front in the course of the series. By the time she was introduced mid-way through the series, the horse was already out of the barn, however, so you needed a new character introduced - or have some characters do complete reversals in their behavior.

In particular -

Seven seems like what I imagine a Vulcan child would be like - possessing a high affinity for order, structure, and logic, but emotionally suppressed and immature, without the life experience to recognize when her logic is clouded by emotion. She rebels against authority as a way to test her boundaries and discover for herself how she fits as an individual into the world around her.

As such, she possesses a few core behavioral traits that are used repeatedly by the writers -

• Arrogance that she knows better than anyone else the right thing to do
• A suppression of emotion (in her case, by necessity where Vulcans practice it by choice)
• A willingness to openly flout the command structure.
• Easily manipulated on an emotional level.
• A student of, rather than a member of, human sociological tendencies and norms.

Some of these have overlap with Tuvok and Doc. Obviously, the emotional suppression is shared with Tuvok, as is being a commentator (along with Neelix) on human social structure. I would say that in contrast to Tuvok and the Doctor, who should already have an understanding of the more complex aspects of humanity, Seven's journey is just beginning. She was assimilated as a young child, so that's really the frame of reference she's coming from when analyzing human society as an individual.

I think Harry should have been the emotionally manipulated one - as the most junior member of the crew, he should have the least life experience, and if the writers had done that, it would have been a bit more palatable that the guy didn't get promoted in seven years. He could also have been Janeway's "problem teenager."

Neelix should have been the one to be naive about humanity. He should have tried hard, but had difficulty figuring out the basics of how humanity operates - and consequently had a difficult time forming social bonds with the crew, instead of just becoming basically cook and ship's counselor by episode 3 (OK, I kid to some degree there, but not by much.) Nobody really likes him much as a friend, but they NEED him because he's a local who knows more about what's out there than they do.

There's plenty of time over the course of the series for him to assimilate into the crew and become what he became, but like so many characters it was too soon, too fast. I like Voyager, I really do, but I think that was a general problem with the start of the series. Tensions and problems between the crew should have slowly simmered, built up to a head, then been resolved over the course of seasons, were resolved within a few episodes, which shortly turned it into TNG because once they resolved those issues, they didn't give themselves the opportunity to build a truly different kind of Trek show the way DS9 did.

The role of anti-authoritarian should have been Chakotay's. I'd have liked to see Janeway keep him at arm's length for a lot longer. From her perspective, he is a terrorist traitor and not to be trusted, regardless of whether he used to be in Starfleet. He should have been challenging her every decision - standing up for his Maquis crew, and treating himself less as a first officer and more like their representative. It would be an open secret among the crew that the two of them don't particularly care for one another, but there isn't whole lot of choice, so they need to "make the best of it."

It could have been a wonderfully contentious relationship that eventually comes to a head when the Maquis crew nearly split from Voyager, before realizing just how interdependent they had managed to become.

(Apologies for writing a book. If you made it this far, thanks! )

 

[Six of Twelve]

I thought they had Seven adopt Voyager as her collective much too quickly. I think they should have kept her only reluctantly adapting to her new circumstances for much longer than they did, and of dreaming of returning to the Borg at such time as Janeway deemed her capable of making her own decisions. I also thought some episodes where she was afraid of being around the Borg, as in Dark Frontier, to be less than believable. After all, she'd spent 18 years with them getting along just fine and had at first resisted being separated from the collective and refusing to adapt.

 

[DamarsKanar]

I thought they had Seven adopt Voyager as her collective much too quickly. I think they should have kept her only reluctantly adapting to her new circumstances for much longer than they did, and of dreaming of returning to the Borg at such time as Janeway deemed her capable of making her own decisions. I also thought some episodes where she was afraid of being around the Borg, as in Dark Frontier, to be less than believable. After all, she'd spent 18 years with them getting along just fine and had at first resisted being separated from the collective and refusing to adapt.

It probably came across a little messy or wasn't that obvious, but I know that some way through her first season both Jeri Ryan and the writers decided that her character had 'advanced' too quickly and tried to pull back her human development to be more difficult and gradual.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Seven wasn't really getting along with the Borg though, she was their slave. She didn't have the free will not to get along with them. By Dark Frontier she's afraid to go back to that.

Seven took the full season to acclimate to Federation values. By Prey she was still ignoring orders and doing what she felt like. It seems like a shorter time on Netflix but watching it week to week it felt like longer.

Some of Seven's lines could come from Tuvok as they have similar attitude toward emotional drama. I don't think they could come from Janeway and the big difference between Tuvok and Seven at that point is Tuvok has a fully realized sense of self and Seven is trying to find hers.

 

[Prax]

I think only Seven is the outsider here. She doesn't struggle to suppress emotions. She struggles to experience them, and express them. Tuvok is a SF vet, and works well with humans. The Doctor is nothing like Data or Spock. He's not trying to be more human he is trying to be more independent.

And Seven may come off arrogant, but she isn't trying to. She's just trying to fit in and be accepted.

 

[Six of Twelve]

What I found ironic was that Torres told Seven that she was "rude" and commented on her lack of social niceties (Please, thank you, etc) more than once. But what did she expect of someone who'd spent 18 years as a Borg drone? And, it's really rich coming from Torres, who could be downright obnoxious and rude on a regular basis herself. Do as I say, not as I do is apparently what she was thinking.

 

[Voth commando1]

They aren't interchangeable beyond surface observation.

Tuvok isn't human and doesn't really have an arc, besides being loyal to Janeway and so on.

The Doctor when he is first brought online is not even sentient and doesn't really achieve that until he had to deal with consequences of saving Harry over Jetal.

Seven is human but her story is really being reintegrated into human society and adopting the values Janeway seeks to instill in her.

 

[Greg Cox]

They aren't interchangeable beyond surface observation.

Tuvok isn't human and doesn't really have an arc, besides being loyal to Janeway and so on.
.

Exactly. Tuvok was much less likely to challenge Janeway or Starfleet values than Seven, who was a very different character.

 

[Six of Twelve]

Exactly. Tuvok was much less likely to challenge Janeway or Starfleet values than Seven, who was a very different character.

I think Seven often resisted Janeway's expectations to "be like everyone else", as she saw this as a way of asserting her own individuality; that as a part of acquiring her humanity, she had a right to be different.

 

[Voth commando1]

I think Seven often resisted Janeway's expectations to "be like everyone else", as she saw this as a way of asserting her own individuality; that as a part of acquiring her humanity, she had a right to be different.

Primary example to this-Prey

 

[Refuge]

I think a little differently. Seven often chose to keep her 'Borgness', it was her default and preferred fall back. She often fought her individuality in the early days and only explored it when forced. Seven liked aspects of being Borg and identified as one. In Prey she thought she knew best and carried over a Borg bias against the creature. In some ways she was acting out as an individual against the command structure of Janeway - like a know-it-all teenager but she had foot in each camp when it suited her. There was a Borg lack of humanity in how she behaved at times.

 

[Six of Twelve]

I think a little differently. Seven often chose to keep her 'Borgness', it was her default and preferred fall back. She often fought her individuality in the early days and only explored it when forced. Seven liked aspects of being Borg and identified as one. In Prey she thought she knew best and carried over a Borg bias against the creature. In some ways she was acting out as an individual against the command structure of Janeway - like a know-it-all teenager but she had foot in each camp when it suited her. There was a Borg lack of humanity in how she behaved at times.

Actually, you don't think differently. The individuality I spoke of that she asserted in resistance to Janeway's (and the Doctor's) idea that she'd become like "everyone else" was in retaining the parts of her Borgness that she found efficient, useful, comfortable, and familiar. As in Collective, when she told Janeway how the Borg had altered her mind into order while in the maturation chamber and that she drew strength from that order. Her individuality was in acknowledging and appreciating the parts of her Borg upbringing that she could adapt into her life as an individual among humans. That's one reason why I found the story line with her and Chakotay so OOC for her and not very believable.

 

[Prax]

Because Chakotay doesn't have a Borg brain?

 

[Six of Twelve]

Because Chakotay doesn't have a Borg brain?

No, because being in a collective that is merely a dyad would be insufficient to her. And, of course, to her emotions are irrelevant and sex is merely a biological function.

 

[Voth commando1]

No because he isn't the type to understand or appreciate the benefits of having that mental order.

In any case I don't think she had matured enough for romantic involvements anyway.