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Poll: Janeway & Gender

Do you like Janeway?


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I'm female and did not like Janeway.

I never warmed to Kate Mulgrew's portrayal of Janeway - she always came across to me at least as too brittle. I've often pondered whether Captain "Nicole" Janeway might have produced a different response from me had Genevieve Bujold lasted more than a day and a half on set.

There's a clip of Bujold's performance on the first season's dvds and it may even be on youtube if you're curious. I have to wonder if viewing it would change your opinion. ;)
 
^ I like Bujold as an actress, but I've seen that clip, and...nah. Let's just say I think she was better off moving on to other things.
 
10 seconds of Genevieve Bujold and I would have decided Voyager and Janeway were not for me. I was shocked when I saw that clip with her as Janeway. I can't imagine Voyager being a hit with her in the captain's chair. She just didn't show any passion.
 
Chances are if Janeway had gone the other way and kept Tuvix alive at the expense of Tuvok and Neelix there would be just as many people, if not more complaining about how unethical she was.

Exactly. She was in a no-win scenario.

And, as I said earlier, the choice seems (a little) less risky for the "Tuvix must live!" supporters because neither side had "regular" (human) loved ones. Tuvok's family were 70 years away from discovering what happened, and would perhaps accept Janeway's logic in saving Tuvix. Neelix had no family left whatsoever. (I can't recall whether Kes, another alien, was leaning towards saving her lover, Neelix, and mentor, Tuvok, or the new entity, Tuvix.)

Had the episode been about saving "Tomnaomi", a creature created by an accidental joining of Tom Paris and Naomi Wildman, Janeway and the viewers - and Samantha Wildman (who would be travelling with her loved one's child-killer for up to 70 years) - would have had an even more agonizing decision.

The decision in the episode was supposed to be agonizing because its an ethics question with no correct answer.

Every day, human women of the 21st century make the agonizing decision to abort their unborn child, a person with untapped potential, to save their own lives, and the "right to life" movement say that they're wrong to do so. The question is only made (relatively) easier because the child hasn't actually arrived yet to speak for itself, which Tuvix was able to do, and medical science is a littler cleverer than it was in the 20th century.
 
^ I like Bujold as an actress, but I've seen that clip, and...nah. Let's just say I think she was better off moving on to other things.

It was... bizarre. I loved her work in "Earthquake" and "Coma", and was initially very excited to see what kind of actress she'd developed into.
 
^ "Bizarre" is the mot juste. I don't know if she was told to play it that way or thought that up on her own or...what. Maybe the Voyager captain was supposed to be radically different from other other captains in other ways than hormonal makeup? Maybe it isn't a fair sampling - maybe this was take 1 and take 17 was a lot better. But maybe not. Guess we'll never know.
 
^ "Bizarre" is the mot juste. I don't know if she was told to play it that way or thought that up on her own or...what. Maybe the Voyager captain was supposed to be radically different from other other captains in other ways than hormonal makeup? Maybe it isn't a fair sampling - maybe this was take 1 and take 17 was a lot better. But maybe not. Guess we'll never know.

In many interviews they say the interpretation was mostly hers. Bujold was supposedly internalizing the captain's emotions and allowing the dialogue to flow as it needed to, or some such wacko thing. I seem to recall she was also acting differently because it was set in the future?

Bujold had signed on, more on a whim to do television at last, rather than film, and they spent several days before the signing trying to explain what television production pace would be like, and when she got out on set she realized she'd been too impulsive about signing.

Have you seen this snippet from IMDb?
Genevieve Bujold spent her first twelve school years in Montreal's oppressive Hochelaga Convent where opportunities for self-expression were limited to making welcoming speeches for visiting clerics. As a child she felt 'as if I were in a long dark tunnel trying to convince myself that if I could ever get out there was light ahead'. Caught reading a forbidden novel, she was handed her ticket out of the convent and she then enrolled in Montreal's free Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique.

VOY must have been another tunnel for her. As was the legal tunnel that saw her end up in "Earthquake" to pacify Universal about another broken contract!
 
It would have definitely been a different show with Bujold as Janeway. Whether it would have been better or worse... we'll never know. But I do think Bujold was capable of growing into the role.
 
watching the version of the Bujold scene I found on YT (cleverly edited with the FX and sound), Bujold comes across as a French android. she's got less emotion and warmth in her voice than Brent Spiner as Data. she's barely more human than Arnie playing the T-800!
 
watching the version of the Bujold scene I found on YT (cleverly edited with the FX and sound), Bujold comes across as a French android. she's got less emotion and warmth in her voice than Brent Spiner as Data. she's barely more human than Arnie playing the T-800!

Oh my hell!!! For once you and I actually agree. :lol: Bujold would have been my one and only experience with Star Trek. I would have left in a hurry or fallen asleep and not gone back.

I can only be thankful that she left.
 
I'm female and did not like Janeway.

I never warmed to Kate Mulgrew's portrayal of Janeway - she always came across to me at least as too brittle. I've often pondered whether Captain "Nicole" Janeway might have produced a different response from me had Genevieve Bujold lasted more than a day and a half on set.

There's a clip of Bujold's performance on the first season's dvds and it may even be on youtube if you're curious. I have to wonder if viewing it would change your opinion. ;)

You throw my point into relief - winking smiley face notwithstanding. I'm talking about a process, a creative process involving actor, writers, directors etc. Logic dictates that this takes time; hence my reference to season 3 of TNG, which is when I - as viewer - thought that everyone was on the same page as far as Picard was concerned. Never happened with Janeway's character, in my opinion. And, that's a shame.
 
But we wouldn't have made it to the third season with her in the lead or at least I wouldn't.
 
But we wouldn't have made it to the third season with her in the lead or at least I wouldn't.

Thank you Gorf; that's exactly the point I am making here. From "my" opinion, it never did gel.

To each his/her own; just my two cents worth.
 
Tuvix was a living, breathing, sentient individual. He was genetically different from any of the entities that symbiotically went into his creation. He was there. Tuvok and Neelix weren't.

So, Neelix and Tuvok not being there made them expendable? That might work in a conventional setting, but, the facts was, they could be brought back. If Neelix and Tuvok were dead as doornails, there wouldn't have been an issue.

The argument was that because Tuvix was an "accident," he was expendable to save the lives of what were essentially his parents.

Only if you strech the term "parents." I know of no creatures who's offspring depend on the death of their parents, nor would I blame said parents for not wanting to create said offspring. In my mind, Tuvix was more akin to a parasite than a "baby."

Well, so was I an "accident." Does that mean I'm expendable to save the life of my mother?

Unless your mother was raped, and I dearly hope she wasn't, she still consented to have sex. Neelix and Tuvok never consented to anything.

And there's no inherent difference in "worth" between Neelix, Tuvok, or Tuvix that I can see. I don't believe in "souls" or in the "sanctity" of life. Life only has the value we choose to assign to it, and, since there was no qualitative difference betwixt the three, it's not surprising that Janeway looked to the quantitative. It's usually considered a good thing when you can save more lives, so I can hardly fault her for trying to save the most lives at the least expense.

I doubt most people would question her if she had to abandon an away team in order to save the entire ship.
 
Getting back on the original topic, has anyone noticed that more men like Janeway than women, more women like Janeway than men dislike her, and more men dislike her than women dislike her? I wonder why?

Makes for a right purty bar graph in any case. :p
 
^ To the first point at least, you have to consider that this board, and Trek fans generally, skew towards a male demographic. Proportionally, more males than females may dislike Janeway (this is what the current numbers of our admittedly small and unrepresentative sample indicates), but there are more males indicating their preference for her than there are females, quantitatively, because there are simply that many more males on this board than there are females.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
 
Proportionately only one out of three males do not like Janeway compared to one out of every four women. I think when this thread was started it was expected that most men would not like Janeway as a captain and so thus that theory was laid to rest. I also think that it was expected that women would overwhelmingly support Janeway as a captain and that is simply not true either, but percentage wise more women are pro-Janeway than men are for what it's worth.

Kevin
 
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