Ron Moore's Voyager

Have you seen the DS9 episodes that dealt with the Maquis? Episodes like "For the Cause" and "For the Uniform?"

Of course there was animosity between the Maquis and the Federation. The Maquis believed that the Federation sold them out to the Cardassians -- that the Federation took their property and homes, stole them from its own citizens, and handed them over to the enemy.

And then, the Federation Starfleet began actively hunting the Maquis down, seeking engagements with them in order to capture Maquis forces. The Federation didn't just "refuse to join their side."

Michael Eddington had a great speech at the end of "For the Cause" that summed up the Maquis' opinions of the UFP:

The Maquis are separatists who genuinely hate the Federation. In their eyes, it betrayed them -- it betrayed them by turning their homes over to the enemy, by not protecting them from the Cardassians, and by turning against them and actively charging them with treason.

It's not an exaggeration at all to say that they would no more get along with Starfleet officers aboard Voyager than Minutemen would get along with Redcoats.

Sure, they'd cooperate... to a point. But they'd never wear a Starfleet uniform, and they'd probably demand greater influence over the ship than simply allowing their commander to be the first officer.

Think about it. The Maquis made up one-third of Voyager's crew. The Starfleeters needed the Maquis to operate the ship, just like the Maquis needed the ship to get home. So, yeah, they both had to cooperate -- but they both also would have demanded concessions from the other. The way the show did it, the Maquis only ever gave concessions to the Starfleet crew, and the Starfleet crew never gave any concessions to them.

At the very least, realistically, they would have demanded that Chakotay be given veto power over Janeway's major decisions. And that's assuming that they wouldn't demand that she share command with Chaoktay, forcing a sort of pseudo-democracy upon the ship.

It is to the Maquis.

 

That speech came from a traitor who had delusions of grandeur and heroism, and who ultimately gave his followers false hope and resulted in their mass deaths. Eddington was an exception to the standard Maquis, not the example.

Plus, the Maquis knew the situation from day one. They knew all along that the worlds weren't 100% Fed controlled to begin with and settled them despite that, and they insisted on remaining when the Feds told them it would get bad. They agreed to the Fed withdrawal, not because they hated the Feds but because they just wanted to stay on their worlds even if it meant leaving the Federation.

The Feds let them know beforehand they'd be on their own, and they accepted that. And then THEY went back on the agreement and went to the Feds for help when there was no official proof that would've allowed the Feds to intervene. Then when the Feds got the Cardassians to back off and even got them to agree to a peace settlement, it was the Maquis who rejected it in favor of continued war. Then they started attacking the Feds even though they had earlier rejected their help.

In short, the Maquis have no moral high ground and brought their problems on themselves. And their main reason for fighting the Feds (the DMZ) wasn't around anymore so why bother?

 

Not to mention that not all Voyager fans watched DS9. The start of "Caretaker" gives some history of the Maquis that naturally doesn't inlucde the DS9 events. It wouldn't be for a few years when the crew started getting letters from home that Chakotay, B'Elanna, etc. would find out the final fate of the Maquis. There is a B'Elanna episode that deals with the fallout from that knowledge but that was more of a survivor guilt thing than animousity towards the Starfleet crew. After all, the Starfleet crew were just as trapped and had the same problems as the Maquis at that point.

 

Eddington was also the leader of the Maquis, so his attitudes towards the UFP would necessarily be those of most Maquis. And he would no doubt argue that the Federation had betrayed its own colonists, not the other way around.

Um, yes they were. They were Federation worlds in Federation territory that the Cardassians tried to claim and were beaten away from during the Federation-Cardassian Border Wars. Then suddenly the UFP just handed it over to them. Whether or not you think the Maquis were right to go up in arms against the UFP and the Cardassians, they were initially innocent colonists.

You are confusing the situation on Dorvan V with the situation in the rest of the DMZ and its nearby areas. The colonists on Dorvan V consented to the UFP's handing their world over to the Cardassians and agreed to live as Cardassian citizens. There is no indication at all that any of the other Federation colonial governments agreed to their worlds being handed over to the Cardassian Union.

On the contrary, the indications are that the Federation handed over their worlds without their consent, and that those colonists did not want to be Cardassian citizens, and therefore chose to become independent -- taking up arms against the Cardassians and the Federation.

Welcome to the world of moral ambiguity, where both sides to a conflict see the same events very differently. A Maquis-POV of that same sequence of events might be:

"The Federation handed over our worlds to the Cardassians without our consent. We tried to stay on our worlds, but the Cardassians began attacking us. When we went to the Federation for help, it refused to do so, claiming there was "no official proof." Instead of defending people whom they insisted were Federation citizens, they decided to negotiate with the enemy -- more appeasement of an enemy that was known to violate treaties all the time. And then they started attacking us and charging us with terrorism. Well, screw that, we're declaring independence."

Whether or not they had the moral high ground is besides the point. The point is that they don't identify with the UFP anymore and would never agree to wear Starfleet uniforms. Whether or not you think their reasons for no longer identifying with the UFP are valid is irrelevant; those reasons exist.

Have you ever actually studied world conflicts? Most Serbs don't live in Kosovo anymore, but they were still willing to fight a war over retaining control of it until NATO bombed them. If the State of Palestine were to be declared tomorrow, the Palestinians would have gotten their primary goal, but I promise you there would still be Palestinian militants who would want to attack Israel. Israel exists today, but that hasn't stopped the IDF from engaging in human rights violations. Etc.

Bottom line: The Maquis felt betrayed by the Federation, and they would never have agreed to wear Starfleet uniforms or abide by Starfleet regulations, even if they needed the ship to get home.

 

Yes, the Maquis felt betrayed by the Federation but they were also very loyal to Chakotay. He sacrificed their ship because he believed it was the morally correct thing to do. He would not have tried to take Janeway's ship unless she gave him a good reason. After all, as a former Starfleet office he knew the rules she was working under.

Sure, some of the Maquis had trouble adjusting to Starfleet and that as addressed in "Learning Curve" but the Federation was still their home even if they felt betrayed by it.

 

Eddington was a leader who grew to further prominence once the Cardassians got weaker and organized them with his delusional ideals, and I doubt they all felt the way he did. He was just the most boisterous of them with his irrational hatred of the Feds.

Yes, the DMZ area was always contested. Nechayev said so in "Journey's End", which would apply to all the DMZ worlds and not just Dorvan V. Likely the colonists were just a bunch of wannabe frontier adventurist types who didn't think the consequences of their actions through.

And the worlds weren't "handed over", they and several Cardassian worlds were used to make a buffer zone. It didn't make them Cardassian territory, it made them Fed worlds not patrolled by Starfleet just like their Cardassian counterparts were the same without their military protecting them.

They didn't bother telling the Feds about what was happening, choosing to make the DMZ a warzone of their own actions and then when the Feds found out and tried to make sure things didn't escalate into an all-out war that would be good for NO ONE (ESPECIALLY the DMZ worlds) the Maquis rejected them for continued dath and violence even though they stopped the Cardassian attacks. Then they started attacking the Feds, the Maquis PROVOKED the Feds into hunting them down.

And besides, the Maquis on VOY weren't all DMZ colonists anyways. Some were just mercenaries in it for money and not ideals, and Chakotay himself was ex-fleet. He wasn't even a traitor like Eddington, he officially resigned and THEN joined the Maquis. And he didn't steal from Starfleet or use illegal information or anything. He had no deep hatred of the Feds, he'd be one of the first to realize they had to cooperate.

 

Seriously, this happened on the West Wing once. Donna was at a state dinner party in the white house, enjoying herself when suddenly she's surrounded by the secret service who drag her down to an interrogation room to question her loyalty and assure her that all her security privileges had been rescinded and destroyed utterly.

This happened. Honest.

It seems that because of the change of some waterway or some minor deal between politicians that the Canadian border had harmlessly moved a few miles south... Over and past the spot on the planet where Donna had been born retroactively relabelling the girl instantly as Canadian.

The Federation sold these peoples homes.

Land and space for peace.

It gets gray after that.

But here's the rub, if the Marquis were mostly farmers that wanted to be left alone without huge Empire dictating terms about where they should live and who they should be beholden to, exactly why were they going to, not home, but the contested and lost battleground that used to be their home and the home of the bastards who stole their home and gave it away?

In all seriousness, unless it was about a lack of compatible and diverse gene stock to put into future generations, they should have colonized the first planet they found and said TTFN to the Feds.

 

And I'm not saying they would have tried to take the ship. I'm just saying that the way the show portrayed their relationship -- the Maquis always making concessions to the Starfleeters, the Starfleeters never making concessions to the Maquis -- was unrealistic.

No, it wasn't. That's the point of the Maquis. The Federation was no longer their home. They had all rejected the Federation. They were separatists. The Federation was no more still their home than Britain was still the Minutemen's country.

Again, whether or not the Maquis were right in rebelling and declaring independence is irrelevant. The point is that all Maquis, everywhere, felt fundamentally alienated from and betrayed by the UFP, and that therefore Chakotay and the crew of his ship would never, if the show was being written realistically, have consented to wear Starfleet uniforms and operate as provisional Starfleet officers.

I'm not saying they would have tried to take the ship, or that they would have been at the Starfleeters' throats. But by the same token, they would not have submitted to Starfleet rule. The Voyager crew needed the Val Jean crew just as badly as the Val Jean crew needed the Voyager crew.

Of course they did. He outlined their fundamental reason for leaving the Federation.

He wasn't irrational. Whether you think he was right doesn't mean he wasn't irrational. This was a guy who'd been in Starfleet, who'd seen how Federation politics operated. And in his view, the UFP had a government that was willing to sell out its own people in the hopes of eventually assimilating hostile foreign states into the UFP. Given the Federation's stated goal of continual exploration and expansion, I don't think it's unreasonable to extrapolate from that a Federation desire to assimilate foreign states into the UFP -- or to extrapolate from that behavior the idea that the Federation would therefore be furious if anyone decided to leave paradise.

The fact that the Cardassians contested some of the worlds does not mean that they were not Federation worlds under Federation law and Federation control when those worlds were settled. If the Cardassians simultaneously laid claim to, say, Frendak II, but the Federation assured its citizens that Frendak II was Federation territory and that they could settle there, does that make it okay for the Federation to turn around, change its mind, and hand it over afterwords?

I don't know. You could argue persuasively either way. But whatever your stance might be on that issue, that doesn't change the fact that those settlers would feel very fundamentally betrayed.

You are confusing the Demilitarized Zone with planetary ownership and fundamentally mis-remembering the events of several episodes.

This is how it went down, from Memory Alpha:

In other words, to try to end the border wars, the Federation and Cardassian Union established the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), an area of space from which military assets and arms would be prohibited. Simultaneously, they transferred ownership of a number of different planets to one-another. Some of the worlds the Federation transferred to the Cardassian Union had Federation colonists on them who refused to leave their homes.

Which means they'd be even less likely to adopt Starfleet/UFP ideals, since it wasn't like they were fighting for any higher cause in the first place.

I'm not even saying that every Maquis would hate the Federation. But every last one of them would by definition feel betrayed and alienated from them. I'm sure there were plenty of American Revolutionaries who didn't hate the Kingdom of Great Britain -- but they were never going to go back to saluting the Union Jack, either.

 

No, Eddington outlined his reason for deciding he was some great hero and thus his enemies had to be demonized to protect his sense of self. Thus he spread this dogma to the others who otherwise would've been "Let's defend ourselves from the Cardassians".

The Feds hadn't sold them out without consent, the colonies knew what they were getting into from Day One. Then when the troubles started they militarized and rejected Fed help, and then turned on the Feds not caring over who they killed to do so. And then when the Feds decided to play by their rules they folded quite fast.

Sure they would accept Starfleet, since they had no reason to have anything against them to begin with and for all intents and purposes they just switched employers.

And seeing how there were plenty of Maquis who weren't even from the DMZ and were just looking for a reason to fight the Cardies, no they wouldn't feel betrayed and alienated seeing how they were the ones who left to begin with.

 

You're certainly right that Eddington had invested a significant portion of his ego into rejecting and demonizing the Federation. Indeed, most Maquis would have done so. After all, you're talking about people who took up arms against their own government. All the more reason to think that the Val Jean crew would not have willingly worn Starfleet uniforms and submitted to the Starfleet way of running Voyager in a realistically-written VOY.

Yes, it did. At no point is the Federation depicted as seeking the consent of those who lived on the worlds it traded to the Cardassians. We even saw Starfleet officers trying to forcibly re-locate Federation citizens on colony worlds that the UFP had traded to the Cardassian Union in "Journey's End."

There is absolutely no evidence that the colonists had any expectation that their worlds could be traded to the Cardassian Union prior to their settling those worlds.

More like, they militarized because Starfleet refused to protect them from Cardassian "colonists" who were attacking them. (Indeed, could not protect them, since it couldn't put military assets into the DMZ.)

That's one interpretation. Another is that they decided that by seeking to thwart the Maquis, the Federation had made itself a hostile foreign power that was as much their enemy as the Cardassian Union.

What the hell are you talking about? The Maquis were destroyed when the Cardassian Union allowed itself to be annexed by the Dominion. The Dominion fleet destroyed the Maquis -- massacred them, really.

You are definitely not seeing anything from the Maquis' POV. Of course they have reasons to have anything against Starfleet to begin with. In their eyes, Starfleet refused to protect them from the enemy, and attacked them for defending themselves.

Is that an accurate perception of Starfleet? Depends on your value system. But by the value system that someone by definition must have to be a Maquis, they would definitely have something against Starfleet and would definitely refuse to wear the uniform.

There were certainly some who were like that -- Lon Suder comes to mind -- but there's no indication that there were "plenty" of Maquis like that. Most of the Maquis we encountered were colonists trying to hold onto their homes.

 

The Maquis didn't all "take arms against their government", most just fashioned their own weapons to fight back against the Cardassian colonists. Then the Feds found out what was happening, stopped the Cardassian arms shipments and negotiated peace in the DMZ. Peace the Maquis rejected even though it would've meant they could live in peace without further attacks.

The colonists knew all along from the day they settled the worlds that they were contested space. They didn't care and further escalated the situation just by being there. A more cynical me would be saying "What did you think, it would all be peaches and cream you morons?!".

The Feds did stop the Cardassian colonists by exposing the arm shipments and stopping them, effectively ending the Cardassian DMZ attacks. The Maquis, in thanks for this, said "Thanks, now F off so we can keep fighting."

The Feds hadn't done anything to harm the Maquis when the Maquis began attacking them, and as such the Maquis brought Starfleet upon them for their clearly criminal actions.

I'm talking about how Eddington got all self-righteous and balthered about how bad Sisko was for doing to the Maquis for what the Maquis did to the Cardassians. It was okay as long as they did it to THEIR enemies, but once Sisko decided to play by their rules and do it to them to stop their criminal actions he lost his spine.

Starfleet didn't refuse them anything, they DID help and got rejected for their troubles. And then they defended themselves from criminals/terrorists who were launching unprovoked attacks on them.

Most Maquis would just see the Cardassians as the true enemy, and the Feds as the guys they were running from since they were stealing from them. Also, Eddington was full of BS. The Federation is not worse than the Borg, you delusional twat. Does the Federation go around destroying whole civilizations?

 

All of which is besides the point -- whether or not what the Maquis feel and believe is valid, it's still what they feel and believe. They were a group of people who rejected the Federation and its Starfleet. They would never willingly wear a Starfleet uniform, or run the ship according to Starfleet rules, if the series was written realistically.

 

Which is something utterly that the people looking for Voyager back in the AQ assumed too, since Barclay's holoprogram of the lost ship seemed to believe that the maquis would still be in civvies since honestly? If you believe that janeway will just be handing out uniforms to any one if only just because she's in a bind for labourpower, then you might believe that the federation would invite and ratify member ship for a species who'd only discovered warp drive a year earlier because their community chest was bone dry from putting their shoulder to the wheel to win the Dominon War.

 

Most of the Maquis in VOY WEREN'T rabid Fed-Haters, Chakotay himself was an ex-fleeter who WASN'T a traitor and probably realized working together was for the best from day one (and he probably had his own cell working closer to Fleet rules to begin with since it was how he was trained). This talk of "realistic writing" is just excuses for the crew to all hate each other when truthfully they really had no reason to.

You want the kind of "realistic" crew tensions, then they should have made the other crew be Cardassians, not Maquis.

 

I always thought it might have been better if less starfleet personnel were killed off initially and the Maquis were actually on board as prisoners. However, given that Chakotay sacrificed his ship, they wouldn't be in the brig necessarily. Then after a few episodes, perhaps a war with the Kazon, more Starfleet officers perish and the prisoners must become the crew. That could have dragged out the conflict a little more and the Maquis could have spoken their mind.

There should also have been conflicts that they encountered where the Maquis had a different perspective, such as a race that's beeing overthrown by another race, such similar to the Maquis/Cardassian conflict, where the Maquis want to help, but Janeway refuses due to the Prime Directive.

When Voyager first aired, I caught a few episodes in the later seasons. I never realized that they were lost and that there were Maquis on board, until I later saw Caretaker in reruns. The fact that something like that could happen proves that the show lost its vision, imo.

 

Even if they weren't rabid Federation-haters, most Maquis did feel fundamentally alienated from and betrayed by the Federation -- and would never wear a UFP uniform.

No, it's not. I wouldn't have wanted the crews to just hate each other, either. I don't know why it is that you think that only two extremes are possible (Maquis hating Starfleeters or Maquis willingly becoming part of Starfleet). I'm arguing that realistic writing would have the Maquis cooperating with the Starfleeters but not becoming part of Starfleet, and demanding some concessions on how the ship was run.

And, yes, I think it's important to have some conflict between the crews -- not at their throats, but some. After all, the reason they created the Maquis was to introduce some interpersonal conflict aboard Voyager, according to numerous interviews. What's the point of creating a faction that's opposed to Starfleet if they're never actually in conflict with Starfleet? What, really, was the point of making Chakotay and company Maquis if it never led to a meaningful plot point?

 

What annoys me most is the fact that the Maquis were created on TNG and DS9 so that they could be used on Voyager as a conflicting cast, so the writing staff on two other tv shows were forced to take the time to create this new entity that the Voyager writing staff would hardly ever use. Luckily DS9 managed to get a few good stories out of them to make the whole concept worthwhile, but the Voyager writers should be ashamed of themselves for dropping the ball the way they did.

 

Hmmmm......I don't want to question your statement but I find it hard to believe that they created the Maquis only because they planned to use them on Voyager. Didn't the Maquis show up in TNG long before Voyager was planned?