Trek’s biggest missed opportunities

What about a Mirror Mirror event with TNG crew... Maybe have the Mirror Picard and his crew be the most feared starship in the Terran Empire. The Federation Picard maybe with another of his crew contact the Mirror Borg as they return the the Federation universe...

 

You don't think it would've been interesting to see Soran in the heart of the destruction of his world as the Borg rips its foundation from the ground as he successfully saves his family; his fantasy in the Nexus? I'm just guessing he would've like an opportunity to save his family.

 

the h, I don't know. It could work. Make both Voyager's CO and XO women ala DISCO. Make Janeway a brand new first officer and recently transferred to Voyager. Kill off the captain and suddenly this green first officer is now in command of a ship she barely knows, a crew she's only just met and a situation with the Maquis she has no solid understanding of. This could allow for /explain why she makes some of the mistakes she makes in her attempt to get Voyager home. Making the captain and first officer women still allows the first female captain (since Captain Sinclair in ST:TVH) to have impact as it's not an accident or quirk of fate.

 

I think making Janeway a first officer with a female captain definitely could've complicated things in a good way, but I feel like it wasn't the right time for it. I remember DS9's writers being annoyed that Sisko was being left out of magazine articles about the Star Trek captains (or something), because he was only a commander, and there'd be no one to promote first officer Janeway but herself. It was probably best to make Star Trek's first female lead a full captain from the start, an undisputable equal to Kirk and Picard.

 

I don't think of it as a missed opportunity because I always liked the casting of Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran, but a couple of alternate ideas I liked was to have Janeway as the younger XO who takes over when Voyager's original captain is killed and Chakotay as an older veteran, or to not have Maquis at all and instead replace them with an alien crew, which has to work with Voyager when their ship is destroyed. In that idea I thought the aliens could be Cardassians and then you might as well have Richard Poe as Gul Evek replace Chakotay.
But an actual missed opportunity I thought was to bring back Gul Evek into Voyager as a guest star with his ship prowling around the Delta Quadrant. I know everybody and his dog from the Alpha Quadrant turned up in Delta anyway but I just loved that character. I think he would have been a good foil for Janeway.

 

An obvious one but Voyager a hundred times over. So much unrealised potential for a series that had such a fantastic premise - stranded on the other side of the galaxy, a mongrel crew, all alone fighting to survive and get home.

I think this unrealised potential is one of the things that fascinates me most about Voyager - I love the cast and I think they slotted into their roles faster than any of the other casts before or after, but there was so much room to explore the conflicts/teething problems of meshing the two crews together rather than them all being in Starfleet uniforms at the end of day one.

Beat the ship up a bit. Modify the ship as you go. Keep track of crew deaths etc.

Huge wasted opportunity.

 

I know that there was probably no chance of the other crew on Voyager being Cardassians because of all the problems that come along with the makeup, but I feel like it might have been a better show. At least until things settled down and it became identical to the Voyager we got.

Plus they totally should've had the Cardassian ship as a recurring ally/antagonist for a while! They could've even brought up the point that Voyager hasn't gotten ahead of them, despite its faster warp drive, due to all the time it spends screwing around on weekly adventures. Having another ship around from time to time would've given us a look at what Voyager's trip home could've been like if it wasn't bound by Starfleet morality, the good and the bad. Plus they could've teamed up against the Kazon, teamed up with the Kazon, all kinds of stuff!

This would've also complicated Seska's presence in the show, if there was a Cardassian ship she could've bailed to... and she chose not to. Seska was a big missed opportunity herself I reckon, as she was far more interesting before she joined the Kazon and became their evil mastermind. Though that's something they later made up for with Seven to a degree.

Speaking of Martha Hackett, Deep Space Nine also wasted an opportunity by not doing anything with her Romulan character. They had a recurring Cardassian and a recurring Klingon general, but they threw away their chance of giving us a recurring Romulan.

 

Oh yes, this idea very much so. I think T'Rul reoccurring every so often would have been cool. She could be like Dukat or Garak where at times her agenda aligns with the station and she's friendly with the crew enough but she also is playing her own game. Someone else had the idea that at the extreme she could have been used instead of Cretak and even suffered the same fate, but that might have been too much to do to a reoccurring character.

I think Ron Moore not staying on Voyager and implementing the changes he wanted to is is a missed opportunity of sorts but not really because I don't think he'd be able to go as far as he wanted, it might have felt like it was coming too late in the show's run, and then we'd miss out on his other projects like BSG.

This is a minor one but I think the Sao Paulo being renamed to Defiant goes against the DS9 ethos that there is no status quo/reset button. I get the fact of it being due to SFX and it's no big deal but I sorta wish it hadn't happened.

 

Yeah, the Sao Paulo feels like a bit of a mistep in general to me (even if it was nice seeing it kick ass in the finale and I like the purple carpet). I'm not sure what I would've wanted them to do instead though, or if there was an opportunity there for them to do something more interesting that they wasted.

 

They really had no other option with the Sao Paulo, given the majority of the battle in WYLB consists of reused footage that has USS Defiant NX-74205 very clearly visible, they had to address why there would be such a ship at that battle.

 

Give both B'Elanna and Harry real character journeys.

B'Elanna busts Carey's schnoz. For this action, she is tossed in the brig and relieved of duty. "Parralax" has her gaining Janeway's favor, enough to be reinstated, but she's still second fiddle in engineering, and still has to learn to work with others. In the start of Season 2, Carey (who's seen some time on screen) and a handful of Maquis jump ship at Planet 37's. By this point, B'Elanna has calmed down and learned to be an effective Starfleet engineer, and she takes over.

Benefits:
1. B'Elanna develops further.
2. Carey's character is used better.
3. No "Janeway Koolaid Cult" vibe from nobody leaving.

Harry, meanwhile... he's supposed to be second fiddle at ops, Voyager was supposed to pick up his superior after the Maquis milk run. Oops, doesn't happen. Now, he has to handle leadership issues that a green ensign who just last week was sitting in an exobiology class and dreaming about flying through space isn't ready for. He makes mistakes. He has a meltdown or two. But he gets the hang of it over time. He learns to make tough decisions, becomes more seasoned. When he gets that promotion (and he does get it), he unquestionably deserves it. And when the trip's over, he's not a captain yet... but he will be.
Benefit: instead of being one of the show's weakest and most forgettable characters, he's one of the strongest.

 

I have an easy counter argument for that.

There seemed to be no friction when starfleet officers joined the maquis.

There seemed to be no friction with people like kira who were ex terrorist.

In an enlightened world, it seems perfectly logical that this came a trivial difference in just a few months.

Also it's important to remember there was a symbiosis, the Maquis had way way more space faring experience. Most of the starfleet folk were juniors.

The whole idea of the maquis was to invent a scenario where neither side was right or wrong. They both could nod at the idea that they had to be on their team as long as the dmz was an issue.

Being in another quadrant the conflict of over the DMZ was irrelevant.

This wasn't some intergenerational conflict. This was a group at odds with senior officials with starfleets HQ. This group had many ex fleet officers who were embraced once they had experience life on the frontier.

I'd argue they could both could agree that the ship was neither truly starfleet nor was it truly maquis. It was a fresh start for both sides.

The maquis saw starfleet crewman as being largely made of innocent kids who had no appreciate for life in the DMZ and had no idea what was going on at Starfleet HQ.

Starfleet saw the maquis as a group of people who would ultimately join the federation if the border issues could be resolved.

Just the same it made perfect sense that Voyager was a luxury cruise. These ships were built to be self sustaining. At the same time they had an entire federations worth of intellectual property to trade off. Just imagine if you went to an alternate earth and were able to sell every song every written? Now imagine you have a thousand planets worth of technical designs.

Keep in mind I'm generally a voyager hater, but I don't think some of the claims necessarily hold up so well.

My main gripe is how the show got hijacked by 7of9/the doctor. They were great characters in small doeses, but it went overboard by the end of it.

For me the doctor was far more Quark than Odo. And 7of9 was far more ensign ro laren than data.

 

One thing about the Maquis that should be considered is that a lot of them weren't in it because they were fighting for their homes. Many of them were mercenaries, or psychopaths that were looking for an outlet for their rage and issues. This alone should have provided some friction for at least part of the first season... instead, we get basically only a couple episodes.

One other thing about VOYAGER that can't really be defended is the quick fix of the ship by the next episode. On TNG or DS9, this can easily be explained because they are IN or close to Federation territory, so repair ports were easy to get to. Voyager was the ONLY Starfleet ship around, and it was clearly stated in the beginning that resources were finite. At the very least, a few scratches on the hull should have been seen. Instead, we get scenarios like "DEADLOCK" where the ship is battered VERY badly, but its pristine the very next episode.

 

I am in total agreement. The producers and the writers were creatively bankrupt at the end of TNG. Look at the subsequent shows and movies. They should have brought in a new team.

 

I have no idea where you're getting that from. Yes there were the anti social types no doubt, and we saw a few of them being weeded out within the first 2 seasons, seska being an obvious example.

But there were 70ish maquis members, the majority appeared to be more loyal to their group than antisocial.

Most of them were slackers/rebellious people/idealists etc. Their main conflict with starfleet was keeping pace and being professional. It was shown that the simple thing to do was to bury them down on deck 15 and forget about them. They got to have their fun on the holadeck and maquis members who wanted to contribute like Torres became integral to the operation of the ship.

They were far closer to BLM protestors than criminals. Yes a few wanted to burn down entire neighborhoods, but most were just following their disorganized hearts. Starfleet represented the 22 year old cops who had no interest in hurting people and simply wanted to do the right thing. They weren't the legacy of their parents they wanted to do what was right. Keep in mind we know the majority of the starfleet crew would of resigned from starfleet by the 7th season. Not everyone goes into pseudo military life to be a career officer. We were shown that a solid number were there to do a short 2-3 tour of duty and move into civilian life.


Part of what made this work is there was no promotion on Voyager, everyone more or less kept and stayed at their rank. Ambition wasn't rewarded, everyone being equal was.

Keeping in mind Maquis members still had a hierarchy it wasn't voluntary once you were in you couldn't just walk away and leave. So it's very natural that their senses of loyalty focused on cohesion with the rest of the crew.

As I said they had boatloads of intellectual property that could be traded for small fortunes. This was shown to be a regular theme of the show.

Imagine being able to sell the entire Beatles catalog every time you moved 6 months down the road.

The regions of space they visited often had more primitive technologies, it was shown quite regularly that technologies were traded.

EDIT:

I hate voyager for the record, but the premise of a cruise ship far away from earth was the best part of it.

A top of the line federation ship is built to be self sustaining.

The biggest flaw in traditional trek was that a society of explorers stayed so incredibly close to home.

Imagine if Columbus treated sailing between Italy and Spain as traveling the globe? That's what you get in TNG.

 

Or what about a Mirror Mirror event with TNG crew... Maybe have the Mirror Picard and his crew be the most feared starship in the Terran Empire. Mirror Picard and crew are fighting the Borg and Federation Picard saves the day.. The Mirror Picard realizes the Terran Empire has to change to survive the next encounter with the Borg...

 

Except by that point in the MU timeline, the Empire had been crushed by the Klingon-Cardassian alliance. Picard was probably a slave somewhere.

 

actually a mean picard might have prevented that crushing and singlehandedly saved the empire.

an already aired mirror episode kinda pulls the rug under something yet to be written - through the looking glass aired roughly a year after the tng finale, didn't it?

 

Well, take heart. The oh-so-heroic Terran rebellion might ultimately bring back the Terran Empire.

 

Regarding the Maquis, in "MELD", Tuvok told Chakotay that considering his crew were full of malcontents, mercenaries, and such, he should have put in his bad feeling about Suder in his initial evaluation of the Maquis aboard.

While I agree that overall the Maquis were simply less professional than the Starfleet crew, there were enough bad apples to raise a few eyebrows. Suder and Jonas being two obvious examples.


Regarding the intellectual property of the ship, keep in mind Janeway was dead set against giving out their technology to less advanced cultures. Especially in the early seasons, where finite resources actually WERE a thing.

And in the end, with all the damage they took, they needed material and solid resources to do repairs. I don't see any culture trading starship material for songs and stories from the Federation. (The only exception to this would be the Sikarians from "PRIME FACTORS", and even then it wasn't a trade done with the actual government or legitimate group.)

And even self sustaining ships need solid material to patch up hull breaches, exploded conduits, etc. Voyager took a pounding quite often. There's no way they had enough spare parts and pieces to make the ship look brand new EVERY SINGLE WEEK.