Braga simply did not watch the show

[DevilEyes]

Beltran was wooden even when he did have something to do. Equinox part 2 comes to mind, I remember thinking that he looked indifferent and bored during the scene of confrontation between him and Janeway.

The Equinox crew were being punished and are all accessories to mass murder. I'd lock them away the darkest, deepest depths of Voyager, never to be seen again too for what they did.

Sorry, but that's not what happened, and they were not being punished. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't see them again.

And if they had been punished, which they hadn't, then the lack of follow-up would have been unexcusable, rather than just lame. In that case, we definitely should have at the very least heard about where they were and what had happened to them, if not seen the ongoing story of their fate on the Voyager. Voyager didn't normally have prisoners, Suder is the last/only I can think of (not counting people being in the brig for a limited amount of time, like Tom in Thirty Days). So, you've just provided another example of VOY's failings.

Ummm, no.
....and being discipline and being a prisoner aren't even close to being the same thing. So you're already impling an askewed point of view.

You said you'd "lock them away the darkest, deepest depths of Voyager, never to be seen again too for what they did." Right?

At the end of the ep. Janeway strips them of rank and sends them to work in the lower decks and tells them they must earn their privliages back. There is no reason to see them again.

Yes, there is. It would be interesting and could provide good stories about recurring characters, instead of another alien-of-the-week or silly holodeck fantasy episode.

 

[exodus]

Beltran was wooden even when he did have something to do. Equinox part 2 comes to mind, I remember thinking that he looked indifferent and bored during the scene of confrontation between him and Janeway.


Sorry, but that's not what happened, and they were not being punished. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't see them again.

And if they had been punished, which they hadn't, then the lack of follow-up would have been unexcusable, rather than just lame. In that case, we definitely should have at the very least heard about where they were and what had happened to them, if not seen the ongoing story of their fate on the Voyager. Voyager didn't normally have prisoners, Suder is the last/only I can think of (not counting people being in the brig for a limited amount of time, like Tom in Thirty Days). So, you've just provided another example of VOY's failings.

Ummm, no.
....and being discipline and being a prisoner aren't even close to being the same thing. So you're already impling an askewed point of view.

You said you'd "lock them away the darkest, deepest depths of Voyager, never to be seen again too for what they did." Right?

Yeah, I did.

I don't understand the issue you're having with that.

Why give more development to reaccuring characters if you can't do justice to the 9 main cast members you already have? Doing so just pushes good characters like Tuvok, Tom & Be'Lanna further into the back ground. I personally would much rather see Tuvok get more scene time than Ensign Equinox Nobody.

However, thanks for showing why the writers didn't bother developing many of the main cast and why the show needed Seven and focused on just the 3. The interests seems to be on other minor characters than that of the main cast.

 

[CoveTom]

I wouldn't take the time to continue writing for two cast members that weren't taking their jobs seriously. Wang was a goof off & Beltran refused to learn his lines. I can only image how much production time and money those two wasted on retakes just because they wouldn't do their jobs.

I have my doubts that Beltran and Wang were really as unprofessional as they are being made out to be.

However, if you truly do encounter a situation where one or two of your actors are unprofessional and are not doing their job, then you get rid of those actors. You don't let the show suffer for seven years because of it.

Chakotay and/or Kim could have been written out of the show without much difficulty, were there a valid reason to do so. There are 150+ people on Voyager. You could have a new first officer or a new operations officer. And you could wring some really good drama out of the fact that one of your main characters among such a closeknit group of people had died, chosen to leave, or whatever.

Beltran not doing his job is his fault. But saying "well, Beltran won't do his job, so we're going to ignore his character" and then letting the show suffer as a result is the fault of the writers and producers.

 

[exodus]

I wouldn't take the time to continue writing for two cast members that weren't taking their jobs seriously. Wang was a goof off & Beltran refused to learn his lines. I can only image how much production time and money those two wasted on retakes just because they wouldn't do their jobs.

I have my doubts that Beltran and Wang were really as unprofessional as they are being made out to be.

Beltran not doing his job is his fault.

Sounds like a contradiction.
Beltran has openly confessed to not learning his lines and not having much interest anymore after s4.
There are tons of transscripts & recorded interviews with him saying so.
The entire cast of Voyager have gone on record about Wang being late to the set all the time & being the class clown while they filmed.
I don't know what's to doubt, these facts have never been hidden from the public.


Getting rid of two minority characters on a show that promotes diversity can be a difficult subject. Wang is already claiming Berman is a racist for not allowing him to direct. How do you know Paramount and B&B didn't fire them for fear of racial discrimination issues? Wang & Beltran were already considered sex symbols by People mag. and women veiwers, wouldn't firing them cost the show loosing bigger precent of their audience? Due to that, you can't just fire actors without weighing all the consequences. Theres at least one actor on nearly every show that a problem to work with.(David Caruso & David Duchovny spring to mind) These are things producers & directors have learned to tolerate. Considering you already said there was nothing on Voyager that shined, getting rid of two actors wouldn't have solved anything.

 

[TheGodBen]

Sounds like a contradiction.
Beltran has openly confessed to not learning his lines and not having much interest anymore after s4.
There are tons of transscripts & recorded interviews with him saying so.

At that point Chakotay's character had already been neutered by the presence of Seven and he was getting annoyed by the lack of development being given towards his character. I even read once that he asked the producers to write him off the show because he just wasn't interested anymore, but they refused to do so. And remember, the original story for One Small Step focused heavily on Chakotay and Robert Beltran mentioned that he was really excited about it in an interview, but the writers instead focused the plot on Seven. It seems to me as though his behaviour was based out of not being utilised correctly rather than the other way around.

Getting rid of two minority characters on a show that promotes diversity can be a difficult subject. Wang is already claiming Berman is a racist for not allowing him to direct.

And nobody believes that. Show me the posts of people on this board who believe that Berman is a racist for not letting Wang direct and I'll concede that you may have a point, but the only person I have ever seen say that is Wang himself, and I don't believe Wang because of his reputation as given by everyone else. Also, Wang was going to be written off the show, they even set it up for him to die at the hands of the 8472 infection at the end of season 3, but then that ridiculous magazine article saved him. The producers had no problem firing him then, this whole "They couldn't fire him because he's Asian" defence just doesn't make any sense in the light of that fact. They could fire him, they were going to fire him, they ended up not firing him because he's pretty.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Show me the posts of people on this board who believe that Berman is a racist for not letting Wang direct and I'll concede that you may have a point, but the only person I have ever seen say that is Wang himself, and I don't believe Wang because of his reputation as given by everyone else.

I seem to recall a Berman rebuttal that Wang - unlike Frakes, Stewart, McFadden, Burton, Biggs-Dawson, etc - regularly refused to attend Paramount's "Directors' School", an informal internship which allowed the budding future-director actors to shadow the show's regular directors and hone their new craft.

 

[DevilEyes]

Ummm, no.
....and being discipline and being a prisoner aren't even close to being the same thing. So you're already impling an askewed point of view.

You said you'd "lock them away the darkest, deepest depths of Voyager, never to be seen again too for what they did." Right?

Yeah, I did.

I don't understand the issue you're having with that.

I don't have an issue I took that as a serious suggestion how you would continue their storyline and commented on that. What is unclear?

Why give more development to reaccuring characters if you can't do justice to the 9 main cast members you already have? Doing so just pushes good characters like Tuvok, Tom & Be'Lanna further into the back ground. I personally would much rather see Tuvok get more scene time than Ensign Equinox Nobody.

However, thanks for showing why the writers didn't bother developing many of the main cast and why the show needed Seven and focused on just the 3. The interests seems to be on other minor characters than that of the main cast.

VOY was certainly able to give development and screentime to all the main characters, and others. It's not like it lasted for one half-season. It lasted for 7 seasons, 170+ episodes. The reasons why some characters, like Chakotay or Kim, didn't get proper development, is not for lack of screentime - in fact, they got plenty of that - it's because the writers didn't seem to know what to do with them (and might not even have cared). Screentime doesn't equal character development, and a character can be fleshed out and get meaningful storylines in a very limited amount of screentime. Guest characters and characters in miniseries/TV films as well as feature films are a testament to that. DS9 didn't have many more episodes than VOY, but it didn't have a problem with giving every main character something meaningful to do, and fleshing out a bunch of recurring characters.

You seem to be working under the assumption that character development is something that comes in quantifiable amounts that can be distributed among characters, and if you give more to one character, you have to take away from another. Or, in other words, that characters exist in isolation, that they can't share screentime or storylines, and no character development comes from interaction with other characters. In fact, it's from interaction with the other characters that the development usually comes. The attention given to the character of Garak on DS9 didn't hurt the development of the character of Bashir; Dukat, Winn and Ziyal didn't hurt the development of Kira; Eddington wasn't detrimental to the development of Sisko, Martok didn't hurt Worf's storylines, and Female Founder didn't push Odo into the background. In fact, it was the opposite. On VOY, the best Tuvok's episode involved interaction with Lon Suder. There's no reason why the existence of a few recurring characters from Equinox would harm the development of the main characters; quite the opposite, the issues that they would have faced and brought in could have been a nice opportunity to give crewmembers such as Chakotay, Kim, Paris... something to do, other than agree with the captain and fool around on the holodeck. We could have seen them helping the new crewmembers adjust, getting into conflict with them, having moral debates with them about what they did on Equinox, exchanging experiences (for instance, Chakotay and Torres could talk to them about how the Maquis adjusted to the VOy Starfleet crew, etc.).

 

[Anwar]

DS9 didn't have many more episodes than VOY, but it didn't have a problem with giving every main character something meaningful to do, and fleshing out a bunch of recurring characters.

It also didn't have UPN breathing down its neck to keep things static, it was allowed more serialized continued storytelling (even outside of its arcs), and it was allowed to have cast tensions and the like while VOY was directly ordered NOT to. Plus its recurring cast were all part of that greater arc in the first place so naturally they had more to do than some random irredeemably evil ensign whose point in the show had ended and thus was unnecessary.

Frankly, they should've just killed EVERYONE from Equinox and be done with it.

 

[CoveTom]

Sounds like a contradiction.

Not at all. I was expressing my opinion on their supposed lack of professionalism, but then continuing to discuss the subject of how it should be dealt with if it did, indeed, exist. No contradiction at all.

Getting rid of two minority characters on a show that promotes diversity can be a difficult subject.

Robert Beltran and Garrett Wang are hardly the only two minority actors out there, and I doubt they were the only two officers from their respective races on the ship. You could easily replace them with characters of similar racial backgrounds and completely undercut the argument that it was done for racial reasons. So that's a red herring.

Wang & Beltran were already considered sex symbols by People mag. and women veiwers, wouldn't firing them cost the show loosing bigger precent of their audience?

If it managed to actually improve the quality of the show in the process? No, not at all.

Considering you already said there was nothing on Voyager that shined, getting rid of two actors wouldn't have solved anything.

I said that? When did I say that?

 

[exodus]

Getting rid of two minority characters on a show that promotes diversity can be a difficult subject. Wang is already claiming Berman is a racist for not allowing him to direct.

And nobody believes that. Show me the posts of people on this board who believe that Berman is a racist for not letting Wang direct and I'll concede that you may have a point, but the only person I have ever seen say that is Wang himself, and I don't believe Wang because of his reputation as given by everyone else. Also, Wang was going to be written off the show, they even set it up for him to die at the hands of the 8472 infection at the end of season 3, but then that ridiculous magazine article saved him. The producers had no problem firing him then, this whole "They couldn't fire him because he's Asian" defence just doesn't make any sense in the light of that fact. They could fire him, they were going to fire him, they ended up not firing him because he's pretty.

I didn't say Wangs claims had any merit or were factual, only that letting go two minorities from a show that promotoes diversity is a touchy subject.

 

[exodus]

You said you'd "lock them away the darkest, deepest depths of Voyager, never to be seen again too for what they did." Right?

Yeah, I did.

I don't understand the issue you're having with that.

I don't have an issue I took that as a serious suggestion how you would continue their storyline and commented on that. What is unclear?

Why give more development to reaccuring characters if you can't do justice to the 9 main cast members you already have? Doing so just pushes good characters like Tuvok, Tom & Be'Lanna further into the back ground. I personally would much rather see Tuvok get more scene time than Ensign Equinox Nobody.

However, thanks for showing why the writers didn't bother developing many of the main cast and why the show needed Seven and focused on just the 3. The interests seems to be on other minor characters than that of the main cast.

VOY was certainly able to give development and screentime to all the main characters, and others. It's not like it lasted for one half-season. It lasted for 7 seasons, 170+ episodes. The reasons why some characters, like Chakotay or Kim, didn't get proper development, is not for lack of screentime - in fact, they got plenty of that - it's because the writers didn't seem to know what to do with them (and might not even have cared). Screentime doesn't equal character development, and a character can be fleshed out and get meaningful storylines in a very limited amount of screentime. Guest characters and characters in miniseries/TV films as well as feature films are a testament to that. DS9 didn't have many more episodes than VOY, but it didn't have a problem with giving every main character something meaningful to do, and fleshing out a bunch of recurring characters.

You seem to be working under the assumption that character development is something that comes in quantifiable amounts that can be distributed among characters, and if you give more to one character, you have to take away from another. Or, in other words, that characters exist in isolation, that they can't share screentime or storylines, and no character development comes from interaction with other characters. In fact, it's from interaction with the other characters that the development usually comes. The attention given to the character of Garak on DS9 didn't hurt the development of the character of Bashir; Dukat, Winn and Ziyal didn't hurt the development of Kira; Eddington wasn't detrimental to the development of Sisko, Martok didn't hurt Worf's storylines, and Female Founder didn't push Odo into the background. In fact, it was the opposite. On VOY, the best Tuvok's episode involved interaction with Lon Suder. There's no reason why the existence of a few recurring characters from Equinox would harm the development of the main characters; quite the opposite, the issues that they would have faced and brought in could have been a nice opportunity to give crewmembers such as Chakotay, Kim, Paris... something to do, other than agree with the captain and fool around on the holodeck. We could have seen them helping the new crewmembers adjust, getting into conflict with them, having moral debates with them about what they did on Equinox, exchanging experiences (for instance, Chakotay and Torres could talk to them about how the Maquis adjusted to the VOy Starfleet crew, etc.).

Ummm, sorry but yes it's very unclear because all of this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You appear to be taking what I say and adding you're own elements to it. I didn't saying anything about sceentime being equal to character development. I don't think I even mentioned the word "sceentime" in this context of the converstation at all?

My comment basically was, why give character development to a minor character if they haven't given it to the actors that are already in the starring roles? Why develope Joe Equinox No_Name when a character like Tuvok is barely getting one story a year written for him? The Equinox crew couldn't even save their own ship, what would bringing them back provide Voyager? Why aren't Niomi & Icheb enough?

 

[crouteru]

Yeah, I did.

I don't understand the issue you're having with that.

I don't have an issue I took that as a serious suggestion how you would continue their storyline and commented on that. What is unclear?

Why give more development to reaccuring characters if you can't do justice to the 9 main cast members you already have? Doing so just pushes good characters like Tuvok, Tom & Be'Lanna further into the back ground. I personally would much rather see Tuvok get more scene time than Ensign Equinox Nobody.

However, thanks for showing why the writers didn't bother developing many of the main cast and why the show needed Seven and focused on just the 3. The interests seems to be on other minor characters than that of the main cast.

VOY was certainly able to give development and screentime to all the main characters, and others. It's not like it lasted for one half-season. It lasted for 7 seasons, 170+ episodes. The reasons why some characters, like Chakotay or Kim, didn't get proper development, is not for lack of screentime - in fact, they got plenty of that - it's because the writers didn't seem to know what to do with them (and might not even have cared). Screentime doesn't equal character development, and a character can be fleshed out and get meaningful storylines in a very limited amount of screentime. Guest characters and characters in miniseries/TV films as well as feature films are a testament to that. DS9 didn't have many more episodes than VOY, but it didn't have a problem with giving every main character something meaningful to do, and fleshing out a bunch of recurring characters.

You seem to be working under the assumption that character development is something that comes in quantifiable amounts that can be distributed among characters, and if you give more to one character, you have to take away from another. Or, in other words, that characters exist in isolation, that they can't share screentime or storylines, and no character development comes from interaction with other characters. In fact, it's from interaction with the other characters that the development usually comes. The attention given to the character of Garak on DS9 didn't hurt the development of the character of Bashir; Dukat, Winn and Ziyal didn't hurt the development of Kira; Eddington wasn't detrimental to the development of Sisko, Martok didn't hurt Worf's storylines, and Female Founder didn't push Odo into the background. In fact, it was the opposite. On VOY, the best Tuvok's episode involved interaction with Lon Suder. There's no reason why the existence of a few recurring characters from Equinox would harm the development of the main characters; quite the opposite, the issues that they would have faced and brought in could have been a nice opportunity to give crewmembers such as Chakotay, Kim, Paris... something to do, other than agree with the captain and fool around on the holodeck. We could have seen them helping the new crewmembers adjust, getting into conflict with them, having moral debates with them about what they did on Equinox, exchanging experiences (for instance, Chakotay and Torres could talk to them about how the Maquis adjusted to the VOy Starfleet crew, etc.).

Ummm, sorry but yes it's very unclear because all of this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You appear to be taking what I say and adding you're own elements to it. I didn't saying anything about sceentime being equal to character development. I don't think I even mentioned the word "sceentime" in this context of the converstation at all?

My comment basically was, why give character development to a minor character if they haven't given it to the actors that are already in the starring roles? Why develope Joe Equinox No_Name when a character like Tuvok is barely getting one story a year written for him? The Equinox crew couldn't even save their own ship, what would bringing them back provide Voyager? Why aren't Niomi & Icheb enough?

I think you're missing the point that DevilEyes is making. A secondary character can enhance the role of a main character. As mentioned, one of Tuvok's best episodes was "Meld" because of his interactions with Lon Suder.

The Equinox crew should have returned in later episodes, but they became lost in the lower decks of the ship. This to me was just sloppy writing. Some of those characters already had some relationship with the Voyager crew.

For example, Marla Gilmore had several scenes with Chakotay, whereby he sympathised with her plight, but then felt betrayed by her after the revelation that she had assisted in killing the aliens. A later episode could have followed that up by having her redeem herself to Chakotay and earn his trust.

This would have given Chakotay some worthwhile material instead of his usual background role. Voyager did do his kind of thing with, as you mentioned, Naomi and Icheb, helping out with Seven of Nine's development in some way. I just don't understand why you think secondary characters are a bad thing when they worked so well in DS9...

 

[Anwar]

I just don't understand why you think secondary characters are a bad thing when they worked so well in DS9...

They worked better in DS9 because DS9's story about the Dominion allowed for better sage of recurring outside characters, whilst VOY was never in any kind of plot position for similar usage of recurring characters.

VOY didn't have a series arc, it didn't have access to an entire Universe of characters whom could drop in and out and easily return all the time because VOY wasn't stationary, nor did it have a rag-tag fleet for tons and tons of characters to just appear from (or get killed off to drive a story while leaving the main characters untouched). It just didn't have those advantages.

 

[Pemmer Harge]

I just don't understand why you think secondary characters are a bad thing when they worked so well in DS9...

They worked better in DS9 because DS9's story about the Dominion allowed for better sage of recurring outside characters, whilst VOY was never in any kind of plot position for similar usage of recurring characters.

VOY didn't have a series arc, it didn't have access to an entire Universe of characters whom could drop in and out and easily return all the time because VOY wasn't stationary, nor did it have a rag-tag fleet for tons and tons of characters to just appear from (or get killed off to drive a story while leaving the main characters untouched). It just didn't have those advantages.

TNG didn't have any of those things and they still gave us O'Brien, Ro, Guinan etc.

 

[crouteru]

I just don't understand why you think secondary characters are a bad thing when they worked so well in DS9...

They worked better in DS9 because DS9's story about the Dominion allowed for better sage of recurring outside characters, whilst VOY was never in any kind of plot position for similar usage of recurring characters.

VOY didn't have a series arc, it didn't have access to an entire Universe of characters whom could drop in and out and easily return all the time because VOY wasn't stationary, nor did it have a rag-tag fleet for tons and tons of characters to just appear from (or get killed off to drive a story while leaving the main characters untouched). It just didn't have those advantages.

TNG didn't have any of those things and they still gave us O'Brien, Ro, Guinan etc.

Exactly, Voyager did try early on with characters like Seska, Joe Carey and Hogan, but most of these were either killed off (Hogan) or forgotten about (Joe Carey, although he was brought back in season 7, only to be killed off...)

 

[TheGodBen]

I didn't say Wangs claims had any merit or were factual, only that letting go two minorities from a show that promotoes diversity is a touchy subject.

Not if the actors aren't performing their jobs satisfactorily. Nobody believes Wang when he says that Berman is racist for not letting him direct (if he has actually said such a thing, I've never read it personally) so why would anyone believe it if he was fired? Though I will sometimes claim otherwise, most people aren't idiots, they're not going to call racism in a case where an actor or a character clearly isn't working out.

 

[brcarthey]

I didn't say Wangs claims had any merit or were factual, only that letting go two minorities from a show that promotoes diversity is a touchy subject.

Not if the actors aren't performing their jobs satisfactorily. Nobody believes Wang when he says that Berman is racist for not letting him direct (if he has actually said such a thing, I've never read it personally) so why would anyone believe it if he was fired? Though I will sometimes claim otherwise, most people aren't idiots, they're not going to call racism in a case where an actor or a character clearly isn't working out.

if i'm not mistaken, go to geekson.com and listen to his interview from (i believe) nov. '08. during that interview i believe he alludes to it while saying he was angry that he wasn't allowed to direct.

 

[Anwar]

And Berman earlier countered that Wang hadn't gone through the same directing courses all the other actors BERMAN ALLOWED TO DIRECT did. It's just another case of Wang being a lazy ass.

 

[Withers]

They worked better in DS9 because DS9's story about the Dominion allowed for better sage of recurring outside characters, whilst VOY was never in any kind of plot position for similar usage of recurring characters.

VOY didn't have a series arc, it didn't have access to an entire Universe of characters whom could drop in and out and easily return all the time because VOY wasn't stationary, nor did it have a rag-tag fleet for tons and tons of characters to just appear from (or get killed off to drive a story while leaving the main characters untouched). It just didn't have those advantages.

Except that they did- the problem wasn't that they couldn't have recurring characters because of the nature of the show. They were there they just never used them. It's like buying gas but putting it in a bottle and never using it to drive the car. They had characters they could have used but they opted not to ever do so in a lot of cases.

-Withers-​

 

[Anwar]

No they didn't. Any outsider aliens encountered couldn't show up more than a few times because VOY would just leave them behind on their way home. And amongst the crew themselves, the senior crew WERE the most important characters so there was little reason to focus so much on lower-level nobodies.

If VOY was a mish-mash of several different cultures and NOT a predominantly Starfleet ship with a confirmed leadership then there'd be more reason for dozens of recurring characters, but it wasn't.