Instead of DQ, should Voyager have been in another galaxy?

[JirinPanthosa]

There are several things about putting the crew in the DQ that limited them. Besides the fact that they had already established that travel across the galaxy did not take 70 full years in various TOS and TNG episodes. The DQ gave them the major production issue that they shouldn't have ever seen the same aliens more than once of make detours to people's home worlds just because they would never be in the same area of space twice.

What if they were in another galaxy though, knowing that if they wanted to fly home in a straight line it would force them to travel through the uninhabited space between galaxies, which they know they can't do without refueling?

Then they wouldn't be able to assign a distance and divide by 1000 to get the number of years it would take to get home. They would have been forced to nest, to learn how to play local politics and adjust. Their hope to get home is finding a new technology that is better than warp or a spatial phenomenon, something unlikely enough to make crewmembers despair more and consider just quitting.

One of the reasons The Void is one of my favorite Voyager episodes is because it is the kind of situation this premise would have had to force them into. And they could have still done Borg stuff. The Borg weren't definitively established as being from the DQ until Scorpion, the Borg could have just been in that galaxy instead.

 

[Taylirious]

I forget but I would say Andromeda but ST had visitors from there?

ETA: I Know the idea was for them to get home but what if they didn't and found somewhere that was better?

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

And they could have still done Borg stuff. The Borg weren't definitively established as being from the DQ until Scorpion, the Borg could have just been in that galaxy instead.

The Borg were established as being native to the DQ in FC.

--Sran

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

But a tachyon sucking nebula could have transported a cube to the other galaxy and they would have just started afresh.

How long a distance can they communicate within the Collective?

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

One problem with moving to another galaxy is that their alien makeup/effects bill would go through the roof. Thanks to the Progenitors, the sentient species of the Milky Way is predominantly bipedal humanoids which wouldn't be the same for other galaxies, where humanoids would be very much in the minority.

 

[Dukhat]

I honestly don't think it would have mattered or changed anything, even distance-wise. Another galaxy, another universe, the stories would have been the same: Voyager meets aliens-of-the-week and eventually gets back to Earth via some spacial anomaly.

 

[Gov Kodos]

There are several things about putting the crew in the DQ that limited them. Besides the fact that they had already established that travel across the galaxy did not take 70 full years in various TOS and TNG episodes. The DQ gave them the major production issue that they shouldn't have ever seen the same aliens more than once of make detours to people's home worlds just because they would never be in the same area of space twice.

They didn't have to see the same species twice in the DQ either and for the most part they never did.

What if they were in another galaxy though, knowing that if they wanted to fly home in a straight line it would force them to travel through the uninhabited space between galaxies, which they know they can't do without refueling?

To paraphrase The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, space is mind bogglingly big. A quarter of the galaxy is more than enough for such concern. TNG era Trek has been especially bad at portraying the scale of the galaxy. For the most part, they made tooling around a quarter of the galaxy seem no worse than going out of the way for a quart of milk. That's a problem of the show runners not grasping how big space is.

Then they wouldn't be able to assign a distance and divide by 1000 to get the number of years it would take to get home. They would have been forced to nest, to learn how to play local politics and adjust. Their hope to get home is finding a new technology that is better than warp or a spatial phenomenon, something unlikely enough to make crewmembers despair more and consider just quitting.

Your opening paragraph makes it sound like you didn't want them coming across the same species all the time, yet here that's what you envision them doing? I'm confused. Besides, there's that pesky Prime Directive that goes through TNG era Trek that makes such horse trading pretty much a no-no. That aside, a lot of these ideas floated around Voyager's first year or two then were dropped for the most part for TNG-lite.

One of the reasons The Void is one of my favorite Voyager episodes is because it is the kind of situation this premise would have had to force them into. And they could have still done Borg stuff. The Borg weren't definitively established as being from the DQ until Scorpion, the Borg could have just been in that galaxy instead.

I liked The Void as well, it would have been better without the aliens they added and made a bottle episode of ship board conflict dealing with everything. Unfortunately, Voyager wanted its characters to be more or less back to square one with the next episode. Given its premise, Voyager was probably the most timid for utilizing the idea of a ship stranded and on its own. Being in another galaxy isn't what the show runners needed to work from, embracing their premise was.

 

[Anwar]

There are several things about putting the crew in the DQ that limited them. Besides the fact that they had already established that travel across the galaxy did not take 70 full years in various TOS and TNG episodes. The DQ gave them the major production issue that they shouldn't have ever seen the same aliens more than once of make detours to people's home worlds just because they would never be in the same area of space twice.

What if they were in another galaxy though, knowing that if they wanted to fly home in a straight line it would force them to travel through the uninhabited space between galaxies, which they know they can't do without refueling?

Then they wouldn't be able to assign a distance and divide by 1000 to get the number of years it would take to get home. They would have been forced to nest, to learn how to play local politics and adjust. Their hope to get home is finding a new technology that is better than warp or a spatial phenomenon, something unlikely enough to make crewmembers despair more and consider just quitting.

One of the reasons The Void is one of my favorite Voyager episodes is because it is the kind of situation this premise would have had to force them into. And they could have still done Borg stuff. The Borg weren't definitively established as being from the DQ until Scorpion, the Borg could have just been in that galaxy instead.

I agree actually. Having them know exactly where they were and how to get home kind of limited what they could do.

Having them be truly lost would justify them flying around in circles a bit and fleshing out the area better.

Course, they really should incorporate more Natives of the area into their crew. That would create more connection with the local area and justify them being involved with the local aliens, because being all from the Alpha Quadrant they HAD no connection to anything.

But it was actually TNG that said the Borg were from the DQ, it was on a graphic seen in "Descent".

 

[JirinPanthosa]

And they could have still done Borg stuff. The Borg weren't definitively established as being from the DQ until Scorpion, the Borg could have just been in that galaxy instead.

The Borg were established as being native to the DQ in FC.

--Sran

First Contact: November 22, 1996
Unity, first Voyager appearance of the Borg: February 12, 1997

Two and a half months apart, Berman and Braga involved in both. You think that the idea to put the Borg in the DQ wasn't related to the desire to do Borg stories on Voyager?

@Gov Kodos

In seasons 1 and 2 the Kazon kept showing up when they shouldn't have been remotely able to keep up with Voyager's pace. Seasons 4 and 7 were separated by about 30,000 ly, yet somehow the Hirogen holograms acquired in one season were present in the other.

This wouldn't have been a problem if Voyager weren't traveling in a straight line. I think it would have been better if they had more aliens with recurring interaction with Voyager.

So to address your perceived contradiction. I would have liked to see more recurring aliens on Voyager, but it made no sense that these aliens were able to keep up with their pace.

And the Prime Directive does not prevent them from trading with other cultures, only from forcing their political will on them. If they were forced to stay somewhere and nest they would have tried to build local alliances like they did in The Void and been faced with tougher decisions than the ones in Alliances. And they could have even ended up sticking to their guns and creating an alliance of equals.

They could have also still done alien of the week stories if they wanted, they just could have also done more meaningful arcs without the issue of Voyager's pace.

 

[JarodRussell]

I honestly don't think it would have mattered or changed anything, even distance-wise. Another galaxy, another universe, the stories would have been the same: Voyager meets aliens-of-the-week and eventually gets back to Earth via some spacial anomaly.

It would have changed that warp speed issue everyone here is always bitching about.
And no Borg.

 

[Drone]

Would it be too nasty to say that the vastly greater gulf in distance that you are suggesting have been put in a Federation vessel's way, would have been inversely proportionate to the ability of the show runners to conceive of, much less execute? Moving out of the realm of the tendentious, I would just say that such a plan would be too far removed from the familiarity of references and just plain regular idiom that our galaxy, even as far removed as the DQ, provided for the ST paradigm as it developed.


I doubt that the producers would have been foolish enought to trivialize the reality that such a prospect would have truly represented, but at the same time I don't think that sculpting out a plausible dynamic that would come to grips with the redefinition of ship processes, command hierarchy, crew expectations and so much more was up the alley of what ST was designed and, more significantly, relied on to offer. This is too alien, with no recognizable touchstones to acknowledge every now and then and, the sudsy factor notwithstanding, the existential angst of an SGU-type direction is just not what the brand had in its DNA.


Now, if there is a future for a new series with an innovative creative team that did not feel the need to be seriously anchored in the ancien regime, well that might be another story.....

 

[Guy Gardener]

If there is a next series, it's a TNG reboot in the Abrams Universe on Picard's Enterprise.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Fuck that. GAH.

 

[Guy Gardener]

You know what isn't impossible... A Young Captain Sulu TV series.

John Cho totally does TV.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

That would be great. NEW but tied with the old. Get to have Quinto dropping in etc..

A new captain would be awesome. Also, swords.

 

[Guy Gardener]

As a child I thought that Sulu was shirtless with a sword in every episode.

Kept wondering why week after week, how is it that I always happened to watch the one episode where he wasn't.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

THREE MORE EPISODES TO GO.

Oh and yes (amazingly) I forgot that JJ in his infinite fanwank wisdom WILL GIVE US shirtless Cho Sulu when he gives us Captain Sulu of the USS Excelsior. With swords. And I will be very happy.

:: hits play ::

 

[Guy Gardener]

Voyager can't survive the galactic void.

Centuries of nothing.

No natural resources to mine/harvest, and no people to trade with.

It's not almost impossible, it's completely impossible.

Kathryn would need a new ship with a different sort of engine to cross between galaxies, and that's even if in this supposition that the Galaxy they have flung Voyager too is next door to the Milkyway.

 

[Anwar]

Would it be too nasty to say that the vastly greater gulf in distance that you are suggesting have been put in a Federation vessel's way, would have been inversely proportionate to the ability of the show runners to conceive of, much less execute? Moving out of the realm of the tendentious, I would just say that such a plan would be too far removed from the familiarity of references and just plain regular idiom that our galaxy, even as far removed as the DQ, provided for the ST paradigm as it developed.


I doubt that the producers would have been foolish enought to trivialize the reality that such a prospect would have truly represented, but at the same time I don't think that sculpting out a plausible dynamic that would come to grips with the redefinition of ship processes, command hierarchy, crew expectations and so much more was up the alley of what ST was designed and, more significantly, relied on to offer. This is too alien, with no recognizable touchstones to acknowledge every now and then and, the sudsy factor notwithstanding, the existential angst of an SGU-type direction is just not what the brand had in its DNA.

It's not like it would've been anything new. Kirk and Picard both left the Galaxy as well in their shows.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I never really liked them being in the Delta Quadrant at all. I thought it was overkill as it was and a bit too much of copying the idea of DS9's Gamma Quadrant (in the sense of a place on the other side of the Galaxy).

IMO, the series still could have worked if the ship was just a few thousand light-years from the edge of Federation space in unexplored and sometimes hostile territory. We would have lost the notion of them trying to find a way home ala Gilligan's Island, but every other aspect of the series would have remained the same as there would still be a question of "if" they get home during their several-year unsupported voyage through unfamiliar space.