I did one. Look carefully... 
The Official: What do Niners Feel About Enterprise
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I'm in doubt between "niners will eat you" and "double standard".I did one. Look carefully...
What are you actually basing that on? In the absence of an episode were they are the true villains and there's no personal touch, how can any of us know whether it would work or not? Doesn't that rather depend on the skill of the writer?
All the episodes that the VOY Haters hate that had the Borg in them as an actual antagonist. They even started hating the ones with the personal touch (the Queen episodes) so even THAT was a limited option.
The Borg just aren't good as a true enemy unless you have an actual character or another antagonist to play them off of, and since the VOY Haters rejected every single antagonist (and damn near ever single Alien in VOY regardless of antagonism or not) the Borg were alone and suffered for it.
The Borg just aren't good as a true enemy unless you have an actual character or another antagonist to play them off of, and since the VOY Haters rejected every single antagonist (and damn near ever single Alien in VOY regardless of antagonism or not) the Borg were alone and suffered for it.
I'm in doubt between "niners will eat you" and "double standard".I did one. Look carefully...
Correct on the second try!
They were just a plot device antagonist Q was using to teach Picard a lesson in "Q Who?", any random super-power race would have worked out in that role with any kind of gimmick.
An actual individual the characters interact with is the selling point. What would the Dominion be like if we never had a talking Founder, a talking Vorta or a talking Jem'Hadar and just had everything about them just be shooting at the Ds9 cast while getting simple verbal messages?
Which still shows that the Borg work when you play them off another enemy (the 8472 in this case).
"Faceless Force" only works once or twice, and since "Regeneration" WAS the second time they were truly used as a faceless force that's why it worked. It wouldn't go a third time.
And yet neither of them died. None of the secondary characters (or characters at all) that really mattered died until the end if they died at all.
Double Standard.
The Maquis would just have their "I hate the Feds/Janeway" flimsy justification, and any reason for rebelling against Janeway that would be justified would just be based on contrived actions she took to piss them off in the first place, not "natural organic characterization".
I never liked the characters very much so it fell flat for me, so I was extra disappointed with the lame plot resolution.
Good gods...
Amazing what talking with you can do to a person, hm?
Good, now YOU'RE doing some needed "growing up".
And you'll just do something obnoxious and insulting again prompting me to post again to shut the smug out of here.
Voyager's big Borg episodes, Scorpion, Dark Frontier, Unimatrix Zero and Endgame all have the personal touch according to your definition, so it seems to me that the Borg as an impersonal force never really got given much of a chance to shine.
Because the writers knew ahead of time that it wouldn't work out, unless you have someone to play them off of. Since every attempt at making their own villains was rejected they had to have the Borg also be the personal foe at the same time, which only led to further hatred.
Like ENT in its' entirety, VOY had itself a no-win scenario with the Borg.
And to think how it would be different if the audience hadn't hated every single last one of their aliens 20 minutes into their premiere episodes...
Like ENT in its' entirety, VOY had itself a no-win scenario with the Borg.
And to think how it would be different if the audience hadn't hated every single last one of their aliens 20 minutes into their premiere episodes...
I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the idea those two weren't main castmembers. Especially Tigh, being the motherfrakking heart and soul of this show and all that.
However, BSG was able to kill off characters more regularly than VOY basically because it had a class of characters that mostly didn't exist on VOY: Recurring minor characters. Most of the people offed during the course of the show fall into this category; and the only equivalents VOY have would be bit players like Hogan, Jonas, Carey, Seska, Vorik and Samantha Wildman. Of which only the last two survived, and Sam was seriously considered for the axe at one point.
So while BSG has a broad ensemble with different layers of importance, VOY has a static ensemble of seven mains and a sea of faceless redshirts. What BSG did can't be done here, I's afraid.
Doesn't mean this criticism isn't valid, it's just that VOY hadn't developed a supporting cast to the point it could really do what BSG did here - and with a limited crew confined to a single ship it arguably should have. BSG gave a good sense of a rather restricted pool of humanity to call upon and at least it had the excuse of other ships in the fleet (and the Pegasus) as a device to introduce new bit players.
Yeah, like how O'Brien confused the hell out of people on TNG.
...or not. Having a broader ensemble really just means there'd be more secondary characters. That might cost more but it wouldn't necessarily confuse people.
If he's the guy in engineering working with Torres? Does this need to be explained?
Who the hell is Kim, then? And Chakotay? Someone who's never seen an episode of the show would deduce fairly quickly from any random episode that they are guys who do jobs on the ship. They may not catch their names but they won't be confused as to their purpose.
Likewise, O'Brien is the guy who works the Transporter on TNG. We know that's who he is because that's what he does in pretty much all of his appearances, even if he does other stuff like have martial difficulties or struggle with his past as a Cardassian war veteran.
Kim and Chakotay are the ones with their names in the opening credits 
O'Brien became a regular on another show that didn't require you to watch all the past episodes of TNG with him in it since DS9 referenced his War exploits as well.
But there's some guy who plays an important role in the plot due to something he did in the prior episodes and they feature him then the audience would be "who is this guy? Why's he so important?" and turn off the TV.
O'Brien became a regular on another show that didn't require you to watch all the past episodes of TNG with him in it since DS9 referenced his War exploits as well.
But there's some guy who plays an important role in the plot due to something he did in the prior episodes and they feature him then the audience would be "who is this guy? Why's he so important?" and turn off the TV.
Skip the credits. They'd still know that the guy with the tattoo was a guy who worked on the ship.Kim and Chakotay are the ones with their names in the opening credits
Not talking about that. I'm talking about O'Brien on TNG. While on TNG, O'Brien was exactly the sort of secondary character we're discussing here, so he's a pretty good example of how to execute it in a highly episodic series.
That he was made a main character on DS9 was in recognition of his popularity and his success as what was initially a very, very minor role.
Your capacity for omniscience never ceases to astound. TNG's ratings did rather better than VOY's and episodes like "The Wounded" were pretty well recieved. People liked the 'why's he so important' character.
Because he's the XO, has his name in the credits and appears in a prominent role in most of the series. That's different from some random guy who shows up in the middle of the 1st season or whatever.
And again, until "The Wounded" he was basically just some extra who could've been played by anyone. And even then the Wounded stuff could've been done by any random guest star and no one would've complained, like Stiles in TOS' "Balance of Terror".
...Who could've been played by any set of different background characters without affecting much.
In an episode where Chakotay does very little (there are more than a few of these), the hypothetical viewer may not know that he's the XO or that he's a prominent member of the cast. It's very unlikely he'd know that Chuckles is a Maquis.
What they would be, however, is not confused as to his function. He may not seem important, but he's a guy who is working on the ship. A minor character on VOY would be a guy who's working on the ship, and as such they would not be confused about him.
Could have but wasn't. And O'Brien wasn't always an extra prior to this point - he sat in on the poker game in "The Measure of a Man", for example, and had a few bits and bobs of dialogue. It meant something, though, that he was a guy who was there.
And subsequently the series did build on O'Brien's role as a recurring character. He got married, and as a consequence his wife too was also a recurring character on TNG. He was used as a colleague of Geordi and Data; made one of three crewmembers posessed by aliens in one episode and a guy working alongside perennial guest star Barclay in another episode (who proved to the most helpeful with Barclay's issues of transporter psychosis), and had a daughter in still another episode. O'Brien was a recurring minor character with continuity, and it worked.
If VOY had similar supporting characters - a transporter chief is an obvious example, since even TOS had Lt. Kyle - it could have milked a little more value from their deaths. The thing is, VOY did toy with this idea. Hogan was introduced well before he was killed off, and Carey had more than a few episodes to his credit before being basically forgotten about until the final season, where it did the BSG thing and offed him. Even just having Carey appear more often in the seasons prior would have made that more meaningful.
And would it have meant anything to the people who missed his prior episodes or were confused by his appearance? No, because it's just the same to them as having some random redshirt die off. All those prior appearances and all that money sunk for nothing. So it was either sink the money with no real return value, confusing the audience in the process, or just not have recurring background characters.
Point is, until O'Brien became a regular on DS9 he didn't really become a real character. You'd have missed all his prior appearances and nothing would have changed for the viewer. Everything about his regular position on DS9 worked without him ever being a recurring character from TNG, stuff like Keiko and Molly could have been introduced as they were in the show and you'd never know they were from TNG.
Point is, until O'Brien became a regular on DS9 he didn't really become a real character. You'd have missed all his prior appearances and nothing would have changed for the viewer. Everything about his regular position on DS9 worked without him ever being a recurring character from TNG, stuff like Keiko and Molly could have been introduced as they were in the show and you'd never know they were from TNG.
It'd have some value for those who regularly watched the show. Which was the whole point of bringing Carey back for "Friendship One" - if you actually had to have seen VOY in its earliest seasons for his appearance here to be relevant at all. Having Carey guest for a couple of episodes each season as one of the engineers would never have confused casual viewers and would have been a nice continuity nod for VOY's weekly watchers. It was something VOY did do, just rather erratically - Vorik is another example, disappearing for years at a time before popping in to remind people he's not dead. Chell would be another one - one appearance in the first season, and then again... in the seventh.
So, for some people it's a redshirt, and for other viewers it's a familiar face. The same is true of O'Brien - a viewer may be seeing him for the first time in one of his more prominent roles, but that would not necessarily be a problem.
Yeah, I'd dispute that. I'd concede he wasn't a character until S4 despite appearing as early as S2 (and retconned into S1), but "The Wounded" alone makes him a 'real character', as does his key supporting role in many TNG episodes. He may not be as developed as the TNG regulars, but that was never what I was talking about - just as the BSG minor characters are nowhere as near well developed as the main regulars. Dualla and Billy aren't Adama and Roslin.
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