Edit: okay there are quite a few typos in here. But I'm leaving them, because some of them are hilarious. As a "Voyager" fan, I like all ten of our regular characters as they are, because that's what we're used to. But reading reading about how the writers struggled with creating the cast got me thinking. One main problem from the start was that 9 regulars at once was more than any previous "Star Trek" had had up to that point, and the large cast put a strain on the writers. This led me to questioning why they didn't just combine the traits they wanted into fewer characters. They wanted this show to habe the first female captain of a "Star Trek" show, and the first Native American regular; why not a Native American woman as the captain? They wanted an exotic alien guide for the crew, bit also wanted to up the female count; why not just make said alien guide a female? Of course I know the real reason; 90s TV, and stereotypes. They probably thought they took a risk with a non-white captain and now a female captain; both in one, in 1995? Oh the world just isn't ready! More importantly, they HAD to habe their magical 90s Indian stereotype. And female characters in mainstream 90s TV could be strong, but not too quirky or weird, so Neelix had to be a man. But suppose the writers had been willing to take more risks. How might the main cast of this new Star Trek series look if we combined some characters, to make the main cast more manageable? Just as an experiment, here are a few ideas: - Harry Kim/Chakotay: Make the innocent dweeb Ensign, who represents the purity of future-Earth, be Native American. If they really want the wise Indian stereotype, this can add another dimension to the ensign, making him a n00b in Starfleet, but in other ways have a wisdom behind his years. (Jim Chee from Tony Hillerman's books comes to mind.) Plus, hell...communications officer...Native American translator trope....there ya go! - Chakotay/Janeway: Alternatively, just put your first-woman-captain and first-Native-American-reg into the protagonist. Torn between her love and loyalty for her Earth-bound culture, and her drive to boldly explore space. Her heritage would make her especially wary of not letting "exploration" veer into conquest. - Neelix/Kes: when lost, Voyager fubds a friend in an eccentric alien woman, seemingly working as a lowly trader. But she has a secret. Her people cast her out for daring to rebel against the Caretaker, and experiment with her powers. She fled her homework to explore the galaxy. She's eager to be Voyager's guide, and gain an opportunity to explore. As a self-sufficient runaway, she's also a self-taught chef, and moonlights as the ship's chef. Female EMH: I wouldn't replace Robert Picardo for ANYTHING, but if we're not at the casting process yet...and we want to up the female count, and don't want our EMH to be too simmilar to Data from TNG, this seems like an easy fix. Chakotay/Tuvok: You want a magical, made up space religion, better to use an alien than a real culture. You want the first Vulcan regular since Spock, but don't want to copy Spock too much, give this new Vulcan a polar opposite backstory. Chakovok is a Vulcan who has abandoned logic to defend his home colony from the Cardassians. Once on Voyager, he realizes he must rein in his tenoer if he's to help Janeway keep this crew together, and begins attempting to re-teach logic and discipline to himself, much to his friend B'Elanna's chargrin. Other ideas?
I'm rewatching Voyager and have a new respect for Neelix. He's basically this homeless space hobo that bullshits his way onto Voyager for free room and board. Janeway doesn't know any better but keeps him around because he's good for a laugh. Basically the ship's mascot.
> Native American translator trope ouch I don't think I'd go for a female EMH because both doctors on the USS Enterprise-D were female. Besides, Picardo, right ?
Tuvok and Neelix, in a freak transporter accident or something. Then we get this new replacement character for the rest of the series. Kor
Nah, that's too farfetched, even for Voyager. It would be like them having an endless supply of shuttlecraft! I voted for Chakotay, because he had no votes and Harry/Kes had some, but it's actually a three-way tie. You could smush all of them into one character: a Delta Quadrant native, played by a Native American actor. Their character is originally short-lived, so he begins as a civilian. When the EMH figures out a way to alter his metabolism and slow his aging, he joins Starfleet as a crewman, kind of like when Neelix wore a uniform. Janeway field promotes him to ensign late in the series: he finishes it as an ensign, but it makes sense.
Actually, TNG had 9 regulars for their first season, so VOYAGER was not the only one to do this. DS9 had 8, and went to 9 with Worf in season 4 (which ran concurrently with VOYAGER season 2) and stayed with 9 main cast members for the duration of the show. (Though you can argue they had another 10 'main cast' members, given their importance, number of appearances, growth, etc., and was still able to give them ALL great scenes and arcs. But that's another conversation altogether...) I don't buy the excuse that it couldn't be done. Seasons were 26 episodes each back then, with only a couple exceptions. Two focus episodes for each character, then use the remaining 8 for duos, trios, or whole ensemble episodes. Let's use Chakotay as an example. He was fairly well utilized in seasons 1-3. But once season 4 hit, it kind of stopped. "SCORPION" showed that he could stand up to Janeway. But Seven ended up becoming that person, while Chakotay ended up being a 'yes man'. Except for the Equinox incident, that's what he was. While I would never trade Seven for anything because the idea of her character was superb... and they truly struck gold and got supremely lucky in getting Jeri Ryan to be cast... it did mark the end of the writers trying to do more with him and a couple others. There's always going to be a few characters that are more easily written for and easier to create ideas for than the rest of a show, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. As Chakotay and Kim are the most common talked about with this in mind, compare them to, say... Rom and Nog of DS9. They both had very clear growth and development from season 1 to the series finale. I do fault the VOYAGER writers for not spreading the wealth of character stories more equally, but I don't give them the full blame. I know network and executive interference was a big issue for that show, and it did hurt it more than helped it.
Given that DS9 developed 20+ characters, Voyager could have easily developed their full complement of 10.
While I understand prioritizing certain characters over others, I do think the writers got lazy with Chakotay and Kim. Chakotay especially should've had some interesting interactions with Seven, as the most un-Borg person on the ship--not to mention the one that liberated her! And I fault not only the writers, but Robert Beltran, for antagonizing his bosses over the matter, instead of offering them ideas for his character, like Picardo did with the EMH. (I know C7 was Beltran's idea, but he could've suggested it a little bit earlier and got them the proper development that relationship deserved.) And Kim at the very least should have gotten a promotion. The writers deliberately kept his character an ensign against all logic, purely to punish the actor for being a boob. Screwing the story for petty behind-the-scenes crap was really low.
I agree, that was one of Voyager's most appalling missteps, and one of it's most universally hated. And to make matters worse, I still maintain they were actually taunting the audience members who had written in complaints on that subject, by having the subject of Harry's ridiculous rank come up in "Unimatrix Zero" and "Nightingale", but not be addressed. I firmly ship J/C, personally. Those two had loads of chemistry, while C/7 had very little. Another reason why Voyager should have had an episode set after they got home.
I don't believe that the problem is that there were TOO MANY characters. After all, while the opening credits characters on DS9 might not have exceeded Voyager's, when you add the recurring characters, many of whom went through the kind of development and growth that could have actually gotten them justifiably bumped up to the main credits, DS9 handled WAY more characters on the regular than Voyager did. Rather, the problem was that the show just... didn't DO anything for the characters. The problem when Seven came in was that the other characters started to fade in to the background, giving her their time and attention in the course of the series. But the truth is this kind of failure... wasn't just due to Seven's arrival. Voyager is the rare Star Trek series (to date, the only) that actually has tie-in novels actually written by the Executive Producer and a co-creator, Mosaic (centered on Janeway) and Pathways (centered on everyone else) were both written by Jeri Taylor, and they detail the character pasts and background, the people they were prior to stepping on Voyager. This is... A Choice™. Because what it ends up doing is shunting the characters' history and development into the side content. It becomes something that just... doesn't matter, because the series will continue on without acknowledging these things. In fact, after she stepped down as the show's Executive Producer, the later showrunners contradicted some elements. Like, on a show sold on the idea of two crews, forced together by circumstance... Very little is done to explore who these characters were before the pilot. Very few flashbacks take place to the pre-Delta Quadrant times and exploring things like WHY these characters ended up where they are - no Maquis episode to show what brought them together, no episode that speaks of why Tuvok was inserted into Chakotay's cell in particular, no episode about the accident that Tom covered up or his imprisonment, no episode that makes the audience feel for Janeway and Mark's relationship, no episode showing Neelix as a scavenger - or his time as draft dodger - prior to Voyager's arrival, not even something that explored the Ocampa through Kes's eyes... The few episodes that involve a flashback element are generally ones that take place far enough back that the flashbacks are featuring child/teen actors of the characters, rather than exploring the events that define the characters in ways beyond the needs of a given episode. Voyager is a plot-focused show that utilizes guest characters for most of its character development, much in the same vein as TOS. And the end result is that the only characters who really GET developed are the ones who were blank slates when they arrived - the Doctor and Seven. These were the characters who had no particular emotional baggage from prior to the show, so anything that happened on the show is all there is to their development. The sky's were the limit with those characters, so they were something that could be played with by anyone and everyone. On a show where there wasn't a lot of room to do story arcs, these were the characters who were able to be the most dynamic. Characters who had a history, a background, a development that was dependent on events in the past, on characters a galaxy away from the characters... This becomes complicated to deal with. And as the show became more able to focus on the spectacle over the characters (with CGI developing to the point that space battles could happen every episode and be more than superimposing a visual effect on a static stock shot right around the end of season three), the show shifted over its focus to being very focused on basically being an hour long movie each week. (Not to mention there were edicts from on high that the human characters were actually supposed to be subdued in comparison to alien characters...) While the "hour long movie" descriptor is not a condemnation on its own, and there are several solid episodes of the show that do actually have a character focus, even episodes that aren't focused on Seven and/or the Doctor, this is what really did the most damage to characters who were harder to design episodes around - the Maquis distinction stopped being a thing early on, and the characters were all disconnected from their roots and origins in the Alpha Quadrant (and, as the series goes on, Neelix from his in Talaxian space), so the end result ends up being that it takes more time and effort to build up a character, because you can't introduce like this old friend or this family member or this longstanding obligation to spark this character development. It was never "what characters are unnecessary". It's more "why didn't they EVEN ATTEMPT to do more with these characters". Because really, when the plot is the first priority, to the point that the characters all end up more of a "plug and play" style of swapping in and out whoever is believed to fit well based on their skills, not their characters and personality, it really doesn't matter how many - or how few - characters are in the cast. There's a reason that you can trace the problems of early Enterprise back to Voyager's ongoing writer inertia. The things that Enterprise's first two seasons did were frequently just the same kind of anomaly of the week episode of mid-to-late Voyager, which were just... "Things HAPPEN for an hour, but there is no longstanding effects as a result."
Sometimes being a blank slate wasn't enough, though. Kes and Harry were also essentially blank slates, two wide eyed innocents who could have taken the ride of their lives... and instead didn't really go anywhere. Harry wasn't even played as such most of the time, except when they needed someone to get plucked by Quark, or have a childish meltdown on the bridge.
Oh, even then, Kes and Harry had an existence that shaped who they were before joining Voyager - Harry was a Starfleet officer, and we never learn what motivated him TO join Starfleet, why didn't he become a member of an orchestra or something, for example? Or Libby - he had someone back home who he meant to be getting back to. Meanwhile Kes had been one of the few Ocampa to look beyond the subterranean compound they lived in, plus had been taken captive by the Kazon - that much right there seems like the kind of event that should have shaped her A LOT and yet never came up again. They had a past, had things that were important to their development. For the Doctor and Seven, their development really doesn't start until they come on screen in their respective first episodes. They could do anything with Seven's past as a child because she was built as a character with that trauma, meant to be mined. Kes has that trauma and yet got played as the wide-eyed innocent, despite what that same kind of trauma should have done to her.
I always thought Chakotay and Tuvok should've been just one character. Chakotay was the first officer, but Tuvok seems to be the most appropriate for the job. Since Chakotay has almost nothing useful to work with, why not combine the two? Combine both and you could have a more interesting dynamic, specially if this character could still be related to Janeway, assuming that the show would take the Maquis seriously. They wasted all of their time setting up the Maquis story on DS9 just to do nothing with it. In the end, I think DS9 made better episodes about the Maquis than Voyager ever did.
Reportedly, that was Rick Berman's mandate. The guy did a great deal for Trek as a whole, but Voyager suffered greatly due to decisions he made. Better to give Chakotay something useful to work with, or just eliminate him (to raise the stakes). But on the other hand, a Vulcan Maquis leader who did what he did because he felt that logic demanded it would be an intriguing character, and Tim Russ could certainly have pulled it off.
Sounds a little too ironic/incongruous, that is kind of what was tried with Mayweather and quickly abandoned. While Tuvok and Janeway's bond was interesting and contributed somewhat, a Vulcan (even him with the background with Starfleet and Janeway) actually becoming a Maquis rebel (and then rebuilding the relationship) could have felt quite intriguing, show the Maquis were more widespread in the Federation.
Torres/Chakotay – female half-Klingon maquis leader. Skilled engineer who is made first officer instead, allowing Joe Carey to be chief engineer. In touch with both Klingon and Native American heritage. As skilled with the boxing glove as she is with Klingon combat. Regularly butts head with Janeway from both Maquis and Klingon perspectives. Neelix/Kim – Talaxian who joins Starfleet. Cares more about crew morale over a promotion and this is content with being an ensign. Takes interest in both Earth music, sports, art, Vulcan game kal-toh, and being ship’s chef as a result. Kes/Kim – Ocampan ensign and is content with rank knowing her lifespan is short. Operates as assistant to all of the senior staff. While underrated and underestimated, this balances out once she is revealed to be telekinetic in addition to being telepathic. Kim/Paris – studious pilot that was expelled from Starfleet and thrown in a Starfleet penal colony for joining the Maquis. Leaves a girlfriend behind back home, and is his own best friend.
And of course, "Parry", "Keskim", and "Harrix" all get promoted over the course of the series, despite their laid back attitudes about advancement.
I disagree, at least for two out of three (not as sure about Parry), those are roles and character bios that actually justify the low rank (just enough to give limited authority) and staying there because they're inherently assistant roles, whereas Harry doesn't make sense because he's supposed to be the Department Head.
Harry didn't lose out on promotion because of any inherent limits on his role. He lost out on promotion because Voyager's showrunners were too clueless to understand that an ensign is supposed to make lieutenant.