Why is the Trek community so negative about Voyager?

Enterprise would have lasted longer if they had gotten that new blood sooner (Berman even admitted it) and Heroes started to fall apart within its first season, never recovering.

 

If there's a zombi, shouldn't there be brains?

I think this bbs (mostly) hates Voyager because

1.Voyager wasn't serialized.
2. Voyager wasn't DS9.
3. Ron Moore did a hatchet job on Voyager and his admirers fell for it.
4. Woman captain.

Working backwards,
4. Complaints about schizophrenic Janeway were nonsense, given that most complaints center upon decisions that had no right answer possible, or depend upon peculiar interpretations of nonexistent things like the Prime Directive. It also shows a shocking ignorance of real schizophrenia or other mental disorders. Besides, it was Seven of Nine who really had two different personalities, depending on what the episode was about. The closely related complaint that Janeway was written always to be right is so silly, it irresistibly suggests a personal problem with female authority figures.

3. The insistence that Voyager had to be about survival in space (defying all logic about replicators,) and had to be about criticizing, er, testing, Federation values et cetera was propagated by Ron D. Moore in his insane rant about Voyager. It is possible I believe for a self interested party on the internet to aim at tearing down someone or something, and succeed, despite being a minority, because this is a virtual community. It's all appearances, not reality.

2. Sisko becomes a God; Odo saves the entire Federation and redeems the Gamma Quadrant; Major Kira's lovers get progressively more and more high status; even snotty Bashir gets a makeover into a genetic superhero. The ordinary people on Voyager weren't nearly as cool as that!

1. Please, it's a bbs cliche that serialization is better for drama.

PS The ranking is in my estimated order of importance.

 

Hahah, oh wow.

4. Uh...no. It has to do with Janeway being written consistently. I don't care what direction they went in, I just wanted them to pick one. And for the record, I thought a female captain was awesome, and Kira is my favorite XO. Yep, sure do have huge issues with female authority figures there.

3. "BBS hates VOY because it isn't DS9" AHAHAHAHAHAhaa....no. If I want DS9...I'll go watch DS9. Big shocker, huh? And I have no idea what Ron Moore's "insane rants" are, but I think most people just wanted Voyager to do more things with its premise that only it could do (things like Scorpion or Living Witness).

2. It...really has nothing whatsoever to do with DS9. I just didn't find most of the cast as interesting. You DO realize that most rational people don't rate characters solely on their achievements, right? By that logic, Broik is undisputably the most reviled Star Trek character ever.

1. No rational person holds that as a hard and fast rule. It's not that everyone wanted everything to be serialized. It's that we wanted for there to be SOME serialization and fewer "lol reset button" fixes. A good example of serialization IN MODERATION (those two words are important) is the episode Hope and Fear that used the events from Scorpion in an interesting way. There weren't enough things that were interesting that should've been revisited or things that seemed like they should have SOME or ANY repercussions and didn't.

I honestly can't tell if I'm replying to a joke post or not.

 

I wouldn't go that far with ENT. That show had more than it's fair share of flaws, but once they sorted them out, they were producing episodes which were superior to VOY, IMO.

4.) Just because some people criticize the way Janeway was written, as I do, it doesn't mean they have a problem with female authority figures. That argument is a non-sequitur.

3.) Some struggling for survival would have been nice, like in the episode Demon, where they are running out of deutrium and have to operate in Grey Mode. More episodes with plotlines like that would have been welcome. Or how about some follow-up to episodes like Deadlock, where Voyager is utterly trashed at the end of the episode, but is factory-spec new in the very next one. Even ENT did a better job in an area like that. When the NX-01 was damaged in the episode Minefield, the next episode (Dead Stop) dealt with them having to fix things.

2.) It really has nothing to do with DS9. In fact, I watched all of VOY before I watched all of DS9 and I still thought some more serialization was needed.

1.) Please, nobody is asking for it to be nothing but serialized stories. All people wanted was serialization in moderation. If Babylon 5 taught be anything, it's that too much serialization can, in fact, be bad.

 

yeah, drawing sweeping conclusions about a fanbase from a conversation with one fan leaves you on shaky ground.


And bragging about how awesome and muscular you are just makes you sound insecure.

 

Voyager had some great episodes... and a lot of crappy ones. There were some talented actors, and some mediocre ones. Special effects were terrific. The main issue as I see it was... WRITING.

I'm not negative about Voyager. Quite frankly, I think it filled an interesting niche. I just don't think it had as many favorable episodes as DS9 and TNG. But I wouldn't give up the enjoyable episodes. I'm very glad they made it.

 

ENT. didn't have replicators or the ability to land.
ENT. was to show what the lack of such technology caused.
It would be hard to have much struggle when in the very first ep. they'd implied Voyager was semi-self sustaining more advanced ship than anything we've seen before.
They had implied all though the series that such struggle just wasn't going to happen.

Serialized even in moderation is still serialized.
So yeah, you are still asking for a serialized show.
Being that DS9 is only Trek to fit that discription, you are subtilely asking for Voy. to be closer to it.

 

The whole of ENT's third season is serialized. The fourth season contains quite a few 2 and 3 parters which do advance storiylines from the first and second seasons, really it's about as serialized as chunks of DS9 are (think sporadic Ferengi storylines). People always think DS9 is the only serialized Trek but I realize many didn't bother getting to season 3 ENT.

VOY managed to serialize through areas of space.. you had the Kazon/Seska story line, Species 8472, the Borg.. in order to make it more serialized you would have to make it more about the relationships because they were not static like DS9, or even in a position to get called home to a war like ENT. If it was all about the relationships and their dramas I'm sure it would be mocked for it, the woman led ship, General Voyager blah blah..

It was more serialized than TOS which no one bemoans not being serialized.

 

In the pilot episode, Janeway was written as ignoring the PD to help the Ocampa. And at the same time she admitted the Maquis as crew she reaffirmed commitment to Starfleet principles. Janeway pretty consistently limited her bending the rules to situtation where it would help people. She was a fly by the seat of your pants captain so far as these ethical dilemmas went, from first to last.

But when people ignore this rather obvious consistency, wildly exaggerate her wild and wooly ways that put helping people above the letter of the regs into schizophrenia, they quite obviously have some issue clouding their judgment. It's particularly obvious in the really nutty posts that start raving above dictators and ruling the ship and psychopaths. No wonder Braga mocked these people with the captains in Living Witness and Author, Author!

It is even more certain when a main character like Seven of Nine who really did have two different personalities, and which one was being expressed depended upon the week's story, but no one objects to the inconsistency that no one has a genuine problem with Janeway's inconsistency or schizophrenia or psychopathy. They may genuinely imagine so (maybe,) but something has got these people too hot and bothered to think straight.

Sorry, but nobody who thinks the XO, whether it's Riker, Chakotay, Kira or even Spock is an authority figure like the captain really has much insight in the issues.

The 37s established that every single crew member was aboard Voyager voluntarily. The multitude of posts solemnly deciding Voyager didn't live up to its potential, i.e., fulfil the promise inherent in the premise, can't even see what the premises on screen are!

Aristotle said of The Odyssey that the story is that Odysseus is lost and at the end he gets home, and that everything that happens along the way is merely incident. The show shouts out a reference to The Odyssey and the geniuses criticizing the show don't even get it! Why? Because that was in an episode that also criticized the Jem H'adar and the Vorta?

 

Janeway was more like Kirk than any other captain. She was a lateral thinker who operated outside the box--she often relied on Chakotay to haul her back into the box, or to try, though that usually just reinforced for her that taking a more creative way round a problem was the right one.

Janeway wasn't any where near as "wild and wooly" as Kirk was yet she gets flack for every deviation from Starfleet regs as though she's some dangerous cowboy. Now Kirk.. he was a cowboy and Janeway is a captain cut from the same cloth, only tempered by a great heart.

 

I'm glad this thread was revived so we could all continue to rehash the same points for another twenty-three pages.

But, as long as it continues, I might as well say one thing. We can go back and forth over serialization, but what I miss the most when I re-watch Star Trek: Voyager aren't serialized narratives. What I miss the most is a properly developed cast of secondary players in the ship's crew.

If one wants to talk about failing the premise, then here you go. Voyager was supposed to be stranded in the Delta Quadrant, unable to replace its crew. And yet, for seven years, out of less than 150 people we barely got to know anyone outside of the main cast. Hell, we barely got to know some of the main cast.

Despite all the reference to Voyager becoming a "family" in dialogue, it always seemed like there was yet another security officer who had never been seen before and would never be seen again that could take a phaser blast to the chest when dramatic tension was needed. So much for "family."

 

when is it mentioned that the ship is self-sustaining?

 

^ I don't remember it ever being stated.

 

That was "semi" self-sustaining.

"Innocence"
They explain how the warp drive recycles itself to last twice as long than all previous warp drives, allowing Voyager to maintain itself longer.

 

This is what I mean when I say that the premise of the show was flawed and needed to be refined more before being put to TV:

- Making Voyager a small scout ship, it would've worked out better if it was a Cruiser (or an older Heavy Cruiser). They could get away with saying "We can make new shuttles and torpedoes" since the audience would more readily accept a larger type vessel doing that stuff. The whole "We can't make torpedoes and shuttles" thing never made much sense to me.

- This also gives them a bigger crew so the audience would also accept that "Well, we can't expect them to show us all 750 members of the crew." and they could kill off more of them without seriously impeding the ship's functions.

- They should have made the central cast smaller. Janeway, Chakotay, Paris, The Doctor and Tuvok should've been the core cast with Neelix, Kes, Torres and Kim as secondary characters. That also quiets the "There's no secondaries" complaints while allowing more focus on the central cast's development.

 

Then we'd be complaining how it makes no sense to send a old battle cruiser and a crew of 750 after one small Maquis ship.

I would have made Torres a core character over Paris.
Dawson is a way better actor and Be'Lanna as a character is more dramatic and has more depth.
Between her heritage, personality & job skills. You can probably do twice as many storys for Torres than Paris. The troubled young man with daddy issues gets boring really quick.

 

DS9 had them send an even older vessel (An Excelsior class) after Eddington and he was much more dangerous than Chakotay.

Or hell, I also think the Maquis were a poor choice for the second crew. I'd have made the Cruiser be helping an investigation of missing vessels in the Neutral Zone and have them be forced to team up with a Romulan vessel when they both get pulled away by the Caretaker. And I certainly wouldn't let them know where they were right off the bat!

I don't know if I'd keep the Romulan ship or not, but if I did I'd have the Warp Drive be crippled so it has to rely on Voyager for warp travel via tractor beam to explain why they don't fly off somewhere on their own. In return they'd give VOY a spare cloaking device so they can both cloak which would explain why enemy aliens wouldn't be able to track them.

Torres, well in this set-up maybe I'd make her a Klingon-Romulan hybrid.

 

I think people are negative about it because it's basically like TNG but not as good, whereas people were expecting that a show set on the other side of the galaxy would be more distinctive.

TNG was an amazing series, but it came from an earlier time. By the time Voyager started, Babylon 5 was on the air - compared to that Voyager was hopelessly staid and conservative. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad show to watch - it had some good characters and some of the episodes are really strong, but it didn't feel like essential viewing.

 

Voyager could not go traipsing across the Delta quadrant meeting completely unknown and potentially hostile species looking like a wreck. Their first intro to the Delta quadrant was the Kazon and it was obvious they weren't in a Federation Police State any more. There be pirates in the Delta quadrant. Voyager could not look vulnerable and an easy target. She was a mystery to her opponents and if Janeaway was going to bluff her way across the quadrant the ship had to look strong and potentially lethal.

It was for their own safety that they had to keep that ship from looking vulnerable.

As to the inside of it, I'd imagine Janeway understood the morale issue of not spending decades trying to get home in a trashed ship.

 

when it comes down to it, torres also had daddy issues. it just manifested itself differently since she was bi-racial whereas paris was more or less a rich kid throwing a decade long tantrum. thankfully, they had him get over it halfway through the series (more or less). i would've just made neelix, kes, and harry the minor characters.