Listening to the Delta Flyers Patreon podcast. He says he'll address the rumors he was almost fired (instead of Jennifer Lien) but was spared due to his being in People's Most Beautiful issue. He implies it's a false narrative. Says he'll address it on a later podcast. Looking forward to that.
Drop a character to make room for an ex-Borg character. They're obviously not going to drop Janeway, Chakotay, or Tuvok. The Doctor is safe, because of the brilliant Picardo. B'Elanna and Tom were pretty well developed, safe. Neelix was the "alien" looking alien and goofy space MacGyver. He's safe too. I feel like this is what went down in the producers brainstorm sessions. Drop Harry or Kes? Was it specifically a desire to drop Garret Wang, or more a flip of the coin between Harry and Kes? I wish Jennifer Lein had been kept on as a recurring guest star instead of a single "Kes returns" episode.
It'll be interesting to hear his side of this story. Just as it would be to hear Jen Lien's. My thinking is that the writers wrote themselves into a corner with Kes. They gave her an interesting enough backstory and some nice bits of development over her three years on the show, but ultimately they never gave her character a good reason to be on the ship. If you think about it, every other character is a head of their respective department or has a specific reason to feature as the focus of an episode; even if it's just Harry who is Tom's best friend. Kes on the other hand is merely a nurse, so episodes with a medical focus wouldn't feature her but the doctor. They tried a couple of things with her, but most of the time she was just standing around in the background and handing the doctor some tools. And even though her relationship with Neelix didn't really work, it at least gave her a little more screentime than being just the nurse. All of this resulted in an underused character and actress. So I guess when it came to eliminating one of the characters to include a new one, Kes was just the natural choice. Personally I would have preferred that they kept her, Harry and Seven on the show. But if I had to make the decision to get rid of one of the characters, I would have picked Harry, because his character never went anywhere. I love Harry, but he hadn't half of the potential Kes had.
If they'd kept the EMH confined to sickbay then Kes' role would be more substantial, as she would have to be the one dealing with medical emergencies in the field, so they could've started to train her up to be another doctor rather than nurse of medical assistant. Its such a waste as once they got rid of the creepy relationship with Neelix she started to really come into her own, coupled with some serious mental abilities she would have been a serious asset to the ship. Even if they had kept her as a recurring character. Or better yet, have her leave the ship in a flash of light and then have her reappear on DS9--they knew how to handle recurring characters and make them as interesting as the main cast
I like that idea re: the EMH. The only problem with it is that Picardo would never have gotten the chance to break out and into his role.
Kes had no creepy detector. She was always surrounded by creepy men with impure thoughts. I don't think there are any ocampan pedophiles. Childhood? Trying to get a bead on that is like hitting whomprats from a t16. They look like kids for about 6 weeks. Also Ocampa are still basically children when they are infirm, brittle and ready to move on into the light. Meanwhile taboos against sex would be almost non existent since its almost impossible for an Ocampa to get pregnant by accident. Sigh. Wang was punished for unprofessional behaviour. He was kicked out of the scripts for Fair Trade and Blood Fever. That's nearly 50 thousand dollars docked from his sallary. Not enough. The producers wanted him gone.
I'd have been happier. The EMH became insufferable once he got the mobile emitter. When he was stuck in sickbay he was at least a sympathetic character, but then his ego just became greater and greater and he just lost a part of what made him watchable (for me anyway).
The plan with Kes was to have a character age over the course of the show akin to a human lifespan but in the space of seven years. When the show started I remember fans saying it was probably intentional that Kes would be elderly in the seventh season and would probably die in the series finale and be involved with getting Voyager home. I guess it would have been an interesting take on the human condition of maturity and nostalgia and how time slips away so easily...
I'm not sure she really needed to have a clear cut reason. She was young, she acted impulsively joining the crew, and she found herself in a situation that was familiar and safe. Morevoer, he character found complex, emotional ways of connecting with the crew, which Kim did not. In the bigger picture, I am not sure how the writers could claim that they had nowhere to go with the character. Her stories were better and more imaginative than those written for Harry Kim. Not all of them were great, but a story about her emerging psychic powers were better than explorations of Kim's naivete.
The podcast is really good btw the drama thing was just a minor thing in one episode. I was more surprised that they didnt care for the episode Learning Curve I'm a fan of that one. I like Harry and I'm doing a rewatch, I felt like Non-Sequitor is one of the best episodes so far. Tom also doesn't work that well without Harry. I like Kes as well would rather keep both characters.
If they had expanded more on Kes’ mind abilities they could have used her much more. Also bear in mind Ocampans can learn in a year what takes humans a decade. They could have fit her into any department.
They do? When was that stated or shown? Lein was 21 when VOY first debuted. I never got the impression that the character she played aged in maturity ten years for every one human year. She stayed pretty much the same for the entire time she was on the ship. And as someone stated above, if the original intent was that she age-accelerate over the course of the show, that was pretty much dropped, as she looked exactly the same for the entire time she was there (not counting the last time we saw her with old-age makeup when she returned to the ship for one episode.) Not to derail the thread, but her character was pretty much going nowhere. She had zero chemistry with Neelix, and the one guy she did have chemistry with (Tom) was paired with Belanna instead. So she ended up being the Doctor's nurse, but if she were to have stayed on, her relationship with the Doctor would have been overshadowed by 7 of 9. I don't know Garrett Wang personally, but everything I've heard seems to indicate that during VOY's production, he was a fuckup who was problematic to work with. Now with that said, I also think that it was a better idea to get rid of Lein than him, for the reasons I stated. It's not like Harry Kim got a lot of character development anyway, but Kes would have been a character who would have had literally nothing to do, just like Chakotay. And then they would have paired those two together because there would have been nothing else they could do, even though they would have had even less chemistry than Kes and Neelix.
Very early in her stay in sickbay, Kes started that Ocampa were fast learners and that’s why she was able to come up to speed as nurse so quick. Also, if it weren’t the case Ocampa could pick up skills really fast the 9 year old thing wouldn’t allow for a functioning adult society. Wang didn’t only have little chemistry with anyone except as Paris’ foil, he had no personality traits except “Average dull Starfleet guy”.
The thing about the 9-year lifespan was that it really wasn't ever logically thought out. From what we saw, it seems to imply that as soon as an Ocampan is born, it grows to a fully functioning adult 20-something in less than a year, then stays as a 20-something for at least the next several years, then ages to about 40-something at some point (since that seemed to be the human equivalent age of Kes's parents), and then at another point they hit old age. But Kes seemed to be completely fully developed mentally to a 20-something human in less than a year. How the heck does an Ocampan learn to be part of a functioning technologically advanced society that isn't just based in instinctual knowledge in less than a year of being born?
She was right there in the first post. Any post about Wang’s bullet dodging is going to include Lien’s fate as well. We will never know the whole story. For me personally, Kim had served his usefulness and could easily have been axed. Kes was just starting to grow and had potential. Admittedly, Chakotay could’ve been gotten rid of as well and it wouldn’t have made much odds (Tuvok as new XO then make Ayala the new Security Chief, the strong, silent type).
Because it's tragic. She gave her life, so that he could make something of his. Like Jesus, but on a much smaller scale.