Why is the Trek community so negative about Voyager?

[sonak]

And the award for "first post in a thread criticizing Voyager to bring up the argument that anyone who didn't LOVE the show couldn't handle a female captain" goes to.....


Kimc! A well-deserved congratulations. It never ceases to amaze me that in a thread FULL OF SOUND ARGUMENTS about where Voyager fell short, some member is going to stick their fingers in their ears and yell "la-la-la You just can't handle a captain with a vagina!"


Seriously, a strong female character as a lead in a series wasn't even groundbreaking in 1995, so this is a ludicrous argument.

 

[exodus]

..because most keep comparing every Trek to DS9?
That seems to be the conclusion of nearly every issue you read about Voy. here.

"Voyager just was as good compared to DS9 because Ds9 did it this way......"

I think when we stop comparing the two or wishing for Voy. to be something it wasn't, Voy. ends up being a really good show in of itself that's very entertaining and that's all I've ever expected it too be.

Voyager is good enough for me & mine and that's all the really matters.

 

[Michael]

Well, there are members of the Trek Community who hate Voyager for the fact that it existed. Mainly these are Niners though ...

Not this shit again.

 

[AuntKate]

In defense of KimC, I have to say that the reasons given now for Voyager's mediocrity make sense in retrospect, but they don't hold water for the attitude that was expressed at the time the show first aired. How did anyone know in 1995 whether the show would live up to its potential or produce as many good programs as the previous Star Trek series did?

When the show first appeared there was an outcry against Voyager and a huge reaction to the female captain--both positive and negative. There was tremendous resentment from the DS9 fans, because Voyager was aired at the same time and was seen as competition. It's generally agreed that DS9 was and is a different animal from the usual Star Trek format. That's good for some; others were ready for a return to the episodic series. The problem is that many fans view the DS9 format as a step forward and Voyager as the status quo--but that is just their opinion.

Whether you want to believe it or not, Janeway's gender played an important role in how some fans reacted to the series. Some were thrilled to finally see a woman in charge. Others complainted about her "maternal" attitude toward her crew. Some saw her more as a bossy woman than a woman boss (even though she is the captain!). More importanly, if someone mentioned admiring her or saying she was a good role model for girls, they were immediately labeled as feminists (gasp), and that was sufficient reason to disregard their opinon.

I guess my point is that reasons given now, fifteen years after Voyager premiered, sound pretty fair because they are based on a view of the program as a whole and pick out the flaws that were there. But for those of us who go way waaaay back, like KimC, we know that there were other reasons for the negativity--and we suspect that many of those attitudes still exist, lurking beneath the surface.

 

[exodus]

Well, there are members of the Trek Community who hate Voyager for the fact that it existed. Mainly these are Niners though ...

Not this shit again.

The OP asked for our opinions.
If that's his opinion, then that's his opinion.
We don't have to agree but we can't change the way he feels.

 

[flemm]

I want to be enthusiastic about Voyager the way I am about TOS, TNG and especially DS9, but I just can't be. There is nothing there that holds my interest.

The production is good, the actors are good, or at least the potential was there for the cast to be as good as in previous Trek shows. The problem is that the writing is hackneyed, uninspired, repetitive and at times blatantly insulting to the viewer's intelligence. No risks are taken. No attempt is made to make convincing use of the show's premise. In a word, the writing is bad, consistently so, on a number of different levels.

This is a shame because Voyager could have been a great show. This is not a question of ratings or any tangible measurement of success. DS9 is a great show imo, but it participated in the same ratings decline that started with TNG season 6/DS9 season 1 and engulfed all of modern Trek. So, Voyager's ratings would probably have changed little, or not at all, if the writers had relied less on the same stale formulas and clichés. The catsuit undoubtedly did more for ratings than good writing would have. But that doesn't matter: the show's ratings were good enough to keep it on the air anyway. What matters is that it could have been a great show, one that I enjoy re-watching, discussing, sharing with friends, etc. And it isn't. There's just nothing there I can get excited about.

As for the female Captain thing, I would love to be able to get excited about Trek's first and only female Captain who is a star of her own series. Kira, for example, is one of my favorite DS9 characters, not because she is a female character, but because she is a great character. The writing in Janeway's case is simply not good enough for me to be able to muster any enthusiasm for this particular character. Mulgrew's performances are a bit of a mixed bag, but she keeps getting better as the series moves along, and for the most part I think she does what she can with some very mediocre, bland and inconsistent material. The same can be said for a lot of the Voyager cast.

Now, obviously that is just my opinion, and I don't often post in this forum because people who enjoy the show have a right to hang out and discuss it without constantly reading my negative opinions on the subject. But anyway, there you have it. I'm negative on Voyager because the writers on the show never came up with much of anything that I personally could get excited about.

 

[You_Will_Fail]

I don't think I look like the typical Trekkie because I don't wear glasses, I'm not obese or sickly thin, but I'm muscular, with large arms and a large chest as I'm a competitive weight lifter.

Was that a joke or are you being outrageously insulting?
Stereotyping has no place here.

In answer to the question. I loved Voyager, its 90s trek and has a ton of good episodes and the best character evar - Seven of Nine.
BUT when I look at the show as a whole its frankly just disturbing. Considering its premise, it was episodic to the extreme and it wasted its potential to be a truly great and fresh show. I get very frustrated at the constant use of the replicators and the reset button.

Nevertheless Voyager is very popular among casual fans because they don't see the big picture, they just see a show which has a lot of entertaining episodes and don't even notice that its "episodic" when its plot meant it should have been semi-serialized, they just like entertainment.

 

[sonak]

AuntKate, it's not that you don't make some good points, but look at this thread: Did ANYBODY bring up the gender issue before KimC brought it up? No, and I don't think Janeway as a character was even brought up, just general criticisms of the show. So what's the motivation of basically accusing people who criticize Voyager of being sexists? Also, if these attitudes are "below the surface," they're kind of hard to prove, which just leads to a witch hunt attitude in looking for sexism. After all, if you don't even need EVIDENCE FOR YOUR CLAIM, because it's all "beneath the surface," how does one defend themselves against the accusation?


Plus I think the whole point's b.s. Kira, as was pointed out above, is frequently regarded as a great character, and she was the first regular female first officer in Star Trek.

 

[indolover]

Voyager was good, but not great as TNG and DS9 were.

I like it, a lot. But it was wasted potential. it had the means to be as good as TNG and DS9.

 

[Anwar]

Not really, Paramount never would have let them serialize the show or have the crew disagree. Nor would they let them damage the ship or change the interior sets.

 

[TheGodBen]

..because most keep comparing every Trek to DS9?
That seems to be the conclusion of nearly every issue you read about Voy. here.

"Voyager just was as good compared to DS9 because Ds9 did it this way......"

I think when we stop comparing the two or wishing for Voy. to be something it wasn't, Voy. ends up being a really good show in of itself that's very entertaining and that's all I've ever expected it too be.

Voyager is good enough for me & mine and that's all the really matters.

You may have a point there if the DS9 fans that dislike Voyager later went back to TNG anthology-style shows, such as CSI or... heck, I don't know. Obviously, I can't speak for everyone here, but I never did, all the drama shows I watch these days have serialisation including story and character arcs. The West Wing, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, BSG and Lost: those are the shows in my DVD collection, and all of them use serialisation to some degree. DS9 wasn't the first serialised show on TV, but it was the first that I watched, I liked that style of TV, and I never went back.

I'm not saying that Voyager is bad, but my tastes changed because of DS9, and Voyager didn't change along with them. Voyager was under no obligation to follow my changing tastes, but that doesn't mean I have to like what it was.

The OP asked for our opinions.
If that's his opinion, then that's his opinion.
We don't have to agree but we can't change the way he feels.

This has gone well beyond opinions and you're a smart enough person to know that. Anwar has been trolling on this issue for years, and he does not have the right to insult an entire fan-group, as explained last year:

Anwar, I agree 100% with everything Akiraprise and Biggles said. I do not see how you have made a legitimate case for your behavior, and from now on, any further whining about DS9 fans WILL be considered trolling of an entire fan group and WILL be warned. Akiraprise and I have discussed it, and that goes for both the DS9 and VOY forums.

You want to complain about DS9 itself? Knock yourself out. But you are DONE with the constant whining about DS9 fans on this board.

In this case, Anwar took the opportunity to make yet another swipe at Niners, which is something that he was been warned not to do.

Plus I think the whole point's b.s. Kira, as was pointed out above, is frequently regarded as a great character, and she was the first regular female first officer in Star Trek.

Not to mention her fantastic ass!

I'm not helping the case that we're not sexists, am I?

 

[Anwar]

This has gone well beyond opinions and you're a smart enough person to know that. Anwar has been trolling on this issue for years, and he does not have the right to insult an entire fan-group, as explained last year:

In this case, Anwar took the opportunity to make yet another swipe at Niners, which is something that he was been warned not to do.

And, if you ask around about the people who say VOY was their least favorite show, most of the time when asked what they favorite was they'll say DS9. The correlation is clear.

 

[flemm]

..because most keep comparing every Trek to DS9?
That seems to be the conclusion of nearly every issue you read about Voy. here.

"Voyager just was as good compared to DS9 because Ds9 did it this way......"

I don't think most people who are negative about Voyager would have liked to see it try to imitate DS9 per se. The reason why DS9 is brought up is that it is an example of a Trek show that took some risks, did things differently and broke with established dogma about what a Trek show could and could not do, could or could not be about. Not everything DS9 tried worked out in the end, far from it, but there was creative energy at work on this show: the writers tried hard to make something out of all the regular cast members and many supporting characters, they tried to do some ambitious storylines and deal with some challenging ideas. They could have coasted along on "TNG-standing still" episodes and basically survived on backwash from a more popular show for much longer than they did. Instead, the writers broke the mold a bit and tried to give the show its own identity.

That is what Voyager needed to do imo. Not try to imitate TNG or DS9, but find its own identity. If that meant fighting a bit harder with the network, then fine. If that meant working within certain constraints, then fine. DS9 didn't get to do everything the writers wanted to do either. I understand that Voyager had less freedom as a network show, but not all the blame can be laid at the door of some nameless executives. Try something. Anything. If the studio won't let you damage the ship, work on the characters. If the studio refuses to let you do any serialized storylines, make a plan for individual episodes that makes them feel like a coherent progression and gives them a sense of momentum. DS9's Season 5, often considered the show's best season, is not serialized in the traditional sense. There is a two-parter in the middle of the season. Beyond that, everything is built around individual episodes, but it feels like a coherent whole because a lot of thought was given to how the pieces fit together.

Doubtless the studio played a role in Voyager's creative struggles, but the bottomline, from my point of view, is that the show's creators were on auto-pilot. They had a formula that worked okay and simply had no interest in making the effort to do anything else, even if that meant producing a mediocre show instead of a great one.

 

[Anwar]

The studio also wouldn't let them have there be crew tensions either. That pretty much put the kibosh on major character development, at least the way the characters were set up in VOY.

The way you're suggesting they do their individual episodes wouldn't work either: They were ordered to write the episodes in a manner that would allow for them to be aired out of order and nothing would be different than if aired in serial progression.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Plus I think the whole point's b.s. Kira, as was pointed out above, is frequently regarded as a great character, and she was the first regular female first officer in Star Trek.

Not to mention her fantastic ass!

She did have a great ass. But then again, so did Janeway.

In fact, when has any main cast female Trek character not?

 

[indolover]

The studio also wouldn't let them have there be crew tensions either. That pretty much put the kibosh on major character development, at least the way the characters were set up in VOY.

The way you're suggesting they do their individual episodes wouldn't work either: They were ordered to write the episodes in a manner that would allow for them to be aired out of order and nothing would be different than if aired in serial progression.

Which members of the DS9 senior staff were enemies? The tension argument never made any sense.

 

[flemm]

Which members of the DS9 senior staff were enemies? The tension argument never made any sense.

Not to mention that there was frequently tension between Seven and Janeway in particular in the later seasons of Voyager, and these were the show's two main characters at that stage! So, a certain amount of tension was clearly tolerable to the studio. Beyond that, character development does not require constant disagreement between main cast members. Recurring characters will do nicely, and main cast members can develop other types of meaningful relationships. Voyager was able to do some of this on occasion, but the show needed to do a lot more of this kind of thing and spread it more evenly throughout the cast.

As for the mandate that every episode must be filmed so that there is no notion of chronological order, i.e. so that nothing ever happens, this is also blatantly contradicted by the show itself as it was actually produced: on occasion in the later seasons, when the show's writers awoke from their creative stupor, an actual plot point would arise. For example, sub-space contact is eventually established with Earth. This is good because for once it actually feels like *gasp* progress has been made and something has actually happened.

Voyager's creators were lazy. They were undoubtedly hamstrung by the studio to a certain extent, but they were themselves largely responsible for the show's overall lack of direction and tendency to reproduce the same tired story ideas over and over. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in their reliance on TNG's recurring characters, such as Q and Barclay, rather than creating their own.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Voyager's good points-they were more comfortable with late 20th century pop culture a little than the other series ever were.

The holedeck recreations, time travel, episodes seem to show it in a more coherent way.

Being a product of the 90's as someone else pointed our, they were willing to take risks which set it apart from TNG for example.

The characters, from hairstyles to speech, were individuals--tjhey didn't follow a mold like some of the other Treks (TNG, TOS)

Then again it had the habit of airing some really good episodes, then sandwiching them between some pretty lame episodes afterwards.

Some of them are episodes that have some analogy to them that you just don't get.

Like the dinosaurs "are our original ancestors" who somehow ended up in the Delta quadrant and just happened to encounter Voyager's crew.

Other than that, I find myself liking Voyager pretty well...

 

[omgahitsbritt08]

I dk I just never got into this series, like I could with the others.

 

[Jax]

I am a fan of Voyager but theres no doubt the producers/writers made too many mistakes and the way the show was wrapped up was simply poor. A story like Voyager demanded planning and a fresh way of thinking but B&B were incapable of that and forced out others who were.

The biggest problem for Voyager IMO is it lacks a defining episode, episode Arc or season that all other TREK shows posses.