A Semi-Hater Revisits Voyager

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

TNG was invented by Roddenberry who was old as dirt and still using the same program model he'd managed TOS with 20 years earlier. TNG was a good do-over.

DS9 built on that.

3 years of TOS, 1 year of TAS, 7 movies, 7 years of TNG, 2 years of DS9 and Voyager thinks that using a now thirty year old program model of TOS will see them right when the market was being bludgeoned by so much interesting sci fi at that time, that were more based on the soap with rolling plot and continuity... So how was it that it was completely feasible from Voyagers Producers perspective that every single Voyager episode could exist with impunity inside a bubble ignoring the goings on of the previous 500 hours of film?

Voyager should have been more complex than ds9, not exactly the same as TOS. By saying "exactly" the same, you do understand that I am being extraordinary generous, because Kim is no Chekov and Paris is no Sulu. Hell No.

You wouldn't give 7th graders 5th grade math books? Then When they become 8th graders move them onto the 4th grade math books?

TPTB thunk that their audience was getting stupider and facilitated for these implied degenerative limitations, which bored people of a reasonable intellect wondering why their tv was keeping an inverse pace with their own development?

And that's why the Octopus said that Star Trek is dead.

 

[Lynx]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

TNG was invented by Roddenberry who was old as dirt and still using the same program model he'd managed TOS with 20 years earlier. TNG was a good do-over.

DS9 built on that.

3 years of TOS, 1 year of TAS, 7 movies, 7 years of TNG, 2 years of DS9 and Voyager thinks that using a now thirty year old program model of TOS will see them right when the market was being bludgeoned by so much interesting sci fi at that time, that were more based on the soap with rolling plot and continuity... So how was it that it was completely feasible from Voyagers Producers perspective that every single Voyager episode could exist with impunity inside a bubble ignoring the goings on of the previous 500 hours of film?

Voyager should have been more complex than ds9, not exactly the same as TOS. By saying "exactly" the same, you do understand that I am being extraordinary generous, because Kim is no Chekov and Paris is no Sulu. Hell No.

You wouldn't give 7th graders 5th grade math books? Then When they become 8th graders move them onto the 4th grade math books?

TPTB thunk that their audience was getting stupider and facilitated for these implied degenerative limitations, which bored people of a reasonable intellect wondering why their tv was keeping an inverse pace with their own development?

And that's why the Octopus said that Star Trek is dead.

Hmm, I have to disagree on some points here.

I didn't find any "interesting sci-fi" going on at that time when Voyager was on air, just some depressing doom rubbish of which most are forgotten now.

However, I have to agree that Voyager could have been done better. They had excellent characters and a great premise which was never really used due to uninspired writing.

As for Star Trek, it isn't dead. It has been somewhat damaged by narrow-minded people in charge who have managed to annoy many loyal fans with stupid decisions and character destruction but it isn't dead. It will live on as a fan-project until some smart person show up and makes something watchable out of it again, just like what happened when TNG started.

If Star Trek was dead, none of us would be here discussing it!

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

It's called a wake.

Samuel L Jackson said it was dead in a recent movie. Do you think it wise to argue with that man? His wallet says bad Ass Motherfucker, and that's just the finest tip of the world of hurt that comes from contending with such a personality.

You haven't seen the Spirit?

 

[Lynx]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

The first uh-oh moment came when Shmullus informs Seska that the baby isn't Chakotay's, it is apparently Cullah's even though he doesn't look Kazon at all. This is the first sign that this episode has a huge reset-button at the end. Why not let the baby be Chakotay's and force him to raise it? Because that would involve character development, I suppose.

This was disappointing as well for me. Only did I later read in a Q&A with Michael Piller that he originally was going to let it be Chakotay's baby but he was leaving to focus on his UPN series Legend at the time and Jeri Taylor felt that a large part of why season two wasn't successful were the Kazon, Seska, the mini-arc so she wanted to leave all of it behind so she re-wrote that it wasn't Chakotay's. It is also why she killed off Seska, Suder and said that the crew were now leaving behind Kazon and Vidiian territory. She wanted to only do fun episodic adventure stories.

I like Jeri Taylor as a person but I wasn't all that impressed by her writing or the two times that she oversaw a season(TNG-7 and VOY-3). I wasn't overly crazy about season two and I think Michael Piller overly praised it but season three was an awful year for VOY in my opinion. It was campy, silly. There was a stretch of really poor outings--Coda, Rise, Favorite Son, Darkling, Sacred Ground, The Q and the Grey, Blood Fever etc.

I could definitely understand why they felt they had to do something to save the show hence the late decision to scrap the original season finale and do a big BOrg cliffhanger, write out Kes and bring on a Borg character. It didn't transform the series as much as I would have liked but it certainly helped right some of the wrongs.

As for "Basics, part 2" I find it good and entertaining. OK, I can agree that some of the events happened too quick and that we all did know that everything would be back to normal at the end of the episode.

Maybe they should have stretched out the events on three episodes instead of two, that would have given more time to develope certain events, such as the crew trying to survive on the planet, The Doctor's and Suder's resistance actions on the ship and so on.

I also think that they should have kept Seska alive and taken her as prisoner. Later on in the series, a situation could have occurred where she could create some more trouble.

But still, it's a great episode with lots of good action and character inter-action, especially between The Doctor and Suder. The scenes with that giant lizard was great too.

I'll give it 5 points out of 5

As for Jeri Taylor, I don't know her as a person so I can't pass any judgements on that but her hypocrisy when it comes to "the changes in season 4" in which she was heavily involved still annoys me.

As for her writing, I think she is a good writer and I really enjoyed to read "Mosaic" and "Pathways" but when it comes to those books, I dislike the fact that she has an annoying habit of soothing over all personal conflicts, like those between Tom and his father, Chakotay and his father, B'Elanna and her parents and so on. In the sseries we learned that Chakotay wasn't on good terms with his father when he died, in "Pathways" it seems like they were the best of friends and all problems were solved. The same for Tom Paris whose relationship to his father was lousy, to say the least. But "Pathways" gives no explanation why Tom disliked him that much. The same for B'Elanna constantly seem to be thinking about her father, in the series she didn't care for him at all, he left when she was 5 years old or so and that's it. The message in "Mosaic" and "Pathways" seem to be that if you have a nice and caring family, everything will be OK which is not the truth in all cases.

Not to mention the silly plot where Kes saves Jabin's life after he treated her like s**t and continued to do that until she was saved by Neelix and the Voyager crew. Oh, come on!

When it comes to books, Greg Cox, Christie Golden and Michael Jan Friedman writes better stories.

As for the episodes, Taylor have done some real good ones but people like Ken Biller and Michael Piller were as good and even better.

 

[Lynx]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

It's called a wake.

Samuel L Jackson said it was dead in a recent movie. Do you think it wise to argue with that man? His wallet says bad Ass Motherfucker, and that's just the finest tip of the world of hurt that comes from contending with such a personality.

You haven't seen the Spirit?

If Samuel L Jackson says that Star Trek is dead, then I strongly disagree with him because then he's wrong.

What was the name of that man who claimed that there would only be a need for 2-3 computers in the foreseeable future? He was obviously an important person but he was wrong too.

Not to mention Chruschev who stated that the living standard in the USSR would be higher than in the US in the 70's. I guess he was wrong too.

As for the Spirit, I haven't seen that one.

If it's something similar to "The 4000000000000000000000000000000000000" or whatever the name was, or "Heroes" or similar stuff, then I rather watch "Threshold".

 

[apenpaap]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I don't think Star Trek's dead: there's a new movie coming out in May, and they're already discussing a 12th one, each month books are published and people on this board discuss it. As for Samuel Jackson: he may be badass, but he's still wrong.

 

[Tomalak]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Another difference is that the Enterprise-D was simply strolling around the Federation and its borders..
Voyager on the other hand was alone in the Delta Quadrant, with no access to Starfleet, surrounded by enemies...and with antagonistic crewmembers...

Even if Voyager had no arcs, this issues should have been seriously adressed...

Exactly. TNG was a ship in touch with the Federation, doing missions, stopping off at Starbases, and changing crewmembers. There isn't as much need for arcs. Even so, there was the long-running Worf/Duras/Gowron thread, which was very successful. They also had quite a few recurring characters on the Enterprise, like Guinan, O'Brien, Keiko, Barclay, Ro, Alexander, Ogawa, and some of the helmsmen.

You don't even need arcs, but some sense of continuity and an acknowledgement of their limited resources would have been nice. They made a big thing of replicator rations and the need for Neelix's cooking, and the lack of photon torpedos early on, but that fell by the wayside. Voyager had 150 people from the outset, with no opportunity to replace them. Every single death should have been painful for the crew, and Janeway in particular, but they never really acknowledged the consequences. More redshirts came out of the woodwork to be gunned down by the alien of the week.

Like DS9, recurring characters should have been important, but there were only a handful. There was an episode early on where Tuvok put a few Maquis strugglers through their paces, and I thought they might become quite interesting people to have around, as we would actually care when one of them died, but I don't think they were ever seen again. Carey was in a few season one episodes, but then disappeared for the next six years, only to come back in time to die. I actually didn't mind that, but it would have made more sense if he'd been shown on the ship more recently. There were a few others, like the mute Ayala, the Vulcan (Vorik?), and the Wildmans (Wildmen?), but it would have been nice to have built up a sense that these people knew each other very well, and were like a family.

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I don't think Star Trek's dead: there's a new movie coming out in May, and they're already discussing a 12th one, each month books are published and people on this board discuss it. As for Samuel Jackson: he may be badass, but he's still wrong.

But is the new movie still Star Trek as we know it? Lets be perfectly honest here, no matter what the producers say about diverging timelines and parallel universes, Trek XI is a reboot of the franchise. Nobody considers oldBSG and nuBSG to be the same thing anymore, they are completely separate entities, the same is true for the new Batman film franchise. Trek XI may be a reboot which is very much in tone with the Star Trek we all know and love, but until we actually see it we're not going to know if this new Star Trek is the same as old Star Trek.

The Star Trek that has been around for 40 years is probably never going to put into production as a movie or tv series again, so in a way it is dead. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, I have to see the movie before I can judge.

There were a few others, like the mute Ayala...

He wasn't mute, I nearly cheered when he said "Yeah" in Basics Part 2.

I never noticed Ayala when I saw Voyager before, but last year I was browsing Memory Alpha and came across the list of recurring characters. He seems to have appeared in more episodes of Star Trek than any other recurring character with a total of 119 episodes, and I was utterly shocked because I had no idea who he was. Now that I'm rewatching it I see him all the time!

 

[Brit]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I never noticed Ayala when I saw Voyager before, but last year I was browsing Memory Alpha and came across the list of recurring characters. He seems to have appeared in more episodes of Star Trek than any other recurring character with a total of 119 episodes, and I was utterly shocked because I had no idea who he was. Now that I'm rewatching it I see him all the time!

You may not have noticed him but I can assure you that a lot of women did lol. There is a lot of fic out there about him and a considerable amount of Janeway/Ayala fic.

Brit

 

[Jaespol]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

@Brit, wtf is that in your avatar!?

 

[Brit]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

@Brit, wtf is that in your avatar!?

The Death Glare. I don't think she would like the Continuum very much.

One of the first things she noticed about the Continuum was that the Q didn’t communicate, they talked. In fact they talked all the time, round and round in circles, incessant conversations that solved nothing. They were polite, they never raised their voices and they never actually agreed on anything.

If the Continuum had a sound track, it would have been some kind demented twentieth century elevator music, with a slightly out of tune electronic flute and damned wind chimes. It was a subliminal but intrusive sound and never hearing wind chimes again would be way too soon. That sound could drive a human being insane and one thing was sure, Kathryn Janeway was a human being right down to the bottom of her consciousness.

Now being in the Borg collective was exactly the opposite of the Continuum, Kathryn knew that for a fact, she had been both. The Borg did nothing but communicate, their existence was all about being the one cell in the all powerful hive mind, they didn’t talk at all. There was no music there, the silence was a heavy weighted presence and of course argument for the sake of hearing your words wasn’t a consideration at all.

The Borg had no individuality, the Q however were super individuals, it wasn’t any wonder a few of them had to get out among the “little” people. She hadn’t met one yet that didn’t rub her the wrong way in some manner and from simple observation she knew that everyone of them had the same effect on the others.

Brit

The avatar is actually a Poser render. Who needs fiddles any longer, and just wait until my aged, grey hair Janeway is finished.

 

[Gotham Central]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I don't think Star Trek's dead: there's a new movie coming out in May, and they're already discussing a 12th one, each month books are published and people on this board discuss it. As for Samuel Jackson: he may be badass, but he's still wrong.

But is the new movie still Star Trek as we know it? Lets be perfectly honest here, no matter what the producers say about diverging timelines and parallel universes, Trek XI is a reboot of the franchise. Nobody considers oldBSG and nuBSG to be the same thing anymore, they are completely separate entities, the same is true for the new Batman film franchise. Trek XI may be a reboot which is very much in tone with the Star Trek we all know and love, but until we actually see it we're not going to know if this new Star Trek is the same as old Star Trek.

The Star Trek that has been around for 40 years is probably never going to put into production as a movie or tv series again, so in a way it is dead. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, I have to see the movie before I can judge.

There were a few others, like the mute Ayala...

He wasn't mute, I nearly cheered when he said "Yeah" in Basics Part 2.

I never noticed Ayala when I saw Voyager before, but last year I was browsing Memory Alpha and came across the list of recurring characters. He seems to have appeared in more episodes of Star Trek than any other recurring character with a total of 119 episodes, and I was utterly shocked because I had no idea who he was. Now that I'm rewatching it I see him all the time!

Funny thing about Ayala...

When Enterprise was being launched either Berman or Braga mentioned that viewers could expect to see recurring characters in the new series. This in turn got fans excited thinking back to all of the recurring characters on DS9. The he clarified his response by saying that they would be less like the ones on DS9 and more like Ayala on Voyager. The overwhelming response to this was...WHO! After 7 years on the air, most people had no idea who they were talking about.

Lets just say that that turned out to be an ominous portent of the sort of planing that went into that show.

 

[Gary7]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I think it accurate to surmise that "old Star Trek" is about to die... you can't fight the fact that the actors have aged and not all will be available for subsequent movies. I think Stewart has had just about enough, although you know Sirtis and Frakes would jump at the chance because the lifeblood of their careers is Star Trek. Frakes does not have the skill to pull off a leading character in a movie. I would have liked to see Avery Brooks do a Star Trek movie at some point, but I don't think any of the producers/directors would want to take the chance. Although Mulgrew would probably be up for it, we've seen Janeway become a Vice Admiral... a grounded Starfleet position. And after that hyper extended tour in the Delta quadrant, her character is really done with exploring.

The question is... after enough time has gone by, will we find a producer and/or director in the Hollywood ether ready to take on "new voyages" based on the old Star Trek themes and be as loyal as possible to the universe that has been created? Maybe...

Actually, I have a funny feeling after watching James Cawley's "Star Trek Phase II" operation gain momentum over the past couple of years (enough to get Takei and Koenig to volunteer for the cause), that someone is going to infuse that venue with some $$ to make a "Star Trek indie movie". We'll then see the "old Star Trek" survive via dedicated fans with the money and connections to make it happen... probably more true to form than anything the Hollywood production houses would ever come up with. Just look at how far Greg Schnitzer has gone for accuracy... really impressive. Of course, Cawley and the existing crew would either have to improve on their acting skills for mainstream movie making or step aside for sufficiently talented career actors. Don't get me wrong--I think they're doing a great job considering it is a fan made movie, but there are too many rough edges for mainstream movie material.

 

[kimc]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

You may not have noticed him but I can assure you that a lot of women did lol. There is a lot of fic out there about him and a considerable amount of Janeway/Ayala fic.

Indeed. In fact I can tell you he first appeared in Caretaker when he beamed onto the bridge with Chakotay and Tuvok. I was so distracted I almost didn't follow what was happening in the scene.

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

As for Jeri Taylor, I don't know her as a person so I can't pass any judgements on that but her hypocrisy when it comes to "the changes in season 4" in which she was heavily involved still annoys me.

As for her writing, I think she is a good writer and I really enjoyed to read "Mosaic" and "Pathways" but when it comes to those books, I dislike the fact that she has an annoying habit of soothing over all personal conflicts, like those between Tom and his father, Chakotay and his father, B'Elanna and her parents and so on. In the sseries we learned that Chakotay wasn't on good terms with his father when he died, in "Pathways" it seems like they were the best of friends and all problems were solved. The same for Tom Paris whose relationship to his father was lousy, to say the least. But "Pathways" gives no explanation why Tom disliked him that much. The same for B'Elanna constantly seem to be thinking about her father, in the series she didn't care for him at all, he left when she was 5 years old or so and that's it. The message in "Mosaic" and "Pathways" seem to be that if you have a nice and caring family, everything will be OK which is not the truth in all cases.

And as we know, everyone being happy generally makes for poor drama.

Another difference is that the Enterprise-D was simply strolling around the Federation and its borders..
Voyager on the other hand was alone in the Delta Quadrant, with no access to Starfleet, surrounded by enemies...and with antagonistic crewmembers...

Even if Voyager had no arcs, this issues should have been seriously adressed...

Exactly. TNG was a ship in touch with the Federation, doing missions, stopping off at Starbases, and changing crewmembers. There isn't as much need for arcs. Even so, there was the long-running Worf/Duras/Gowron thread, which was very successful. They also had quite a few recurring characters on the Enterprise, like Guinan, O'Brien, Keiko, Barclay, Ro, Alexander, Ogawa, and some of the helmsmen.

You don't even need arcs, but some sense of continuity and an acknowledgement of their limited resources would have been nice. They made a big thing of replicator rations and the need for Neelix's cooking, and the lack of photon torpedos early on, but that fell by the wayside. Voyager had 150 people from the outset, with no opportunity to replace them. Every single death should have been painful for the crew, and Janeway in particular, but they never really acknowledged the consequences. More redshirts came out of the woodwork to be gunned down by the alien of the week.

Like DS9, recurring characters should have been important, but there were only a handful. There was an episode early on where Tuvok put a few Maquis strugglers through their paces, and I thought they might become quite interesting people to have around, as we would actually care when one of them died, but I don't think they were ever seen again. Carey was in a few season one episodes, but then disappeared for the next six years, only to come back in time to die. I actually didn't mind that, but it would have made more sense if he'd been shown on the ship more recently. There were a few others, like the mute Ayala, the Vulcan (Vorik?), and the Wildmans (Wildmen?), but it would have been nice to have built up a sense that these people knew each other very well, and were like a family.

Right - essentially the show needed at the least a heightened sense of continuity proportionate to the nature of the premise, and yet here we seemed to get continuity letdown after continuity letdown...

 

[TheGodBen]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Flashback (*)

Why does Brannon Braga try to place his episodes inside good Star Trek? Flashback takes place on the Excelsior during the events of TUC, TATV took place during TNG's The Pegasus... stop ruining the legacy of good Trek!

I have a number of issues with this episode which I shall now list because I'm too lazy to form paragraphs around them.

1) Tuvok was not in The Undiscovered Country. He just wasn't.
2) Sulu did not send the Excelsior across the border to rescue Kirk in The Undiscovered Country. He just didn't.
3) I've seen the opening scene of TUC two dozen times, I can nit-pick the re-shoot of the scene to death.
4) Tuvok has a lot of character moments and back-story, but they are mainly exposition. Show, don't tell.
5) Something goes wrong with the mind meld and JANEWAY COULD DIE!!!
6) Something goes wrong with Tuvok's memories and suddenly Sulu and everyone else can see Janeway. Memories.
7) The falling girl was a memory virus? So it was completely unimportant? Well that was well worth 40 minutes of my time.
8) The montage of the falling girl seen by various different children was unintentionally comedic.
9) The resolution to the problem was technobabble, this is one episode where the resolution needed to stem from the character.

TUC is my favourite Trek film because I love the political element of it, so this episode earned a star based purely on seeing the Excelsior in action under Sulu. But there must have been a better way than this to do a tribute to TOS. Oh wait, there was.

 

[apenpaap]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I'm surprised you don't like Flashback. I love it, even though I agree with point 8 and 9. (Some of the children in the montage looked really silly)

 

[Gotham Central]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Flashback (*)

Why does Brannon Braga try to place his episodes inside good Star Trek? Flashback takes place on the Excelsior during the events of TUC, TATV took place during TNG's The Pegasus... stop ruining the legacy of good Trek!

I have a number of issues with this episode which I shall now list because I'm too lazy to form paragraphs around them.

1) Tuvok was not in The Undiscovered Country. He just wasn't.
2) Sulu did not send the Excelsior across the border to rescue Kirk in The Undiscovered Country. He just didn't.
3) I've seen the opening scene of TUC two dozen times, I can nit-pick the re-shoot of the scene to death.
4) Tuvok has a lot of character moments and back-story, but they are mainly exposition. Show, don't tell.
5) Something goes wrong with the mind meld and JANEWAY COULD DIE!!!
6) Something goes wrong with Tuvok's memories and suddenly Sulu and everyone else can see Janeway. Memories.
7) The falling girl was a memory virus? So it was completely unimportant? Well that was well worth 40 minutes of my time.
8) The montage of the falling girl seen by various different children was unintentionally comedic.
9) The resolution to the problem was technobabble, this is one episode where the resolution needed to stem from the character.

TUC is my favourite Trek film because I love the political element of it, so this episode earned a star based purely on seeing the Excelsior in action under Sulu. But there must have been a better way than this to do a tribute to TOS. Oh wait, there was.

The mere fact that this was Voyager's contribution to the 30th Anniversary celebration, that they had a head start over DS9 (as the DS9 producers were not even sure that they wanted to do one), and yet DS9 blew them out of the water with "Trials and Tribbleations" shows how creatively bankrupt the creative team was on Voyager.

 

[Praetorian]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

I can understand why someone would like Flashback, at first I also enjoyed it alot.

However I must agree with GodBen. The episode just doesn't make much sense..if any at all. Nevermind that it doesn't even give some insight of Tuvok, because it's a damn silly disease causing his problems, instead of an actual relevant trauma...

Lame...

 

[Praetor]

Re: A Hater Revisits Voyager

Flashback (*)

Why does Brannon Braga try to place his episodes inside good Star Trek? Flashback takes place on the Excelsior during the events of TUC, TATV took place during TNG's The Pegasus... stop ruining the legacy of good Trek!

I agree. I find it watchable (mostly because I was a fan of the Sulu/Excelsior series concept as a way to explore the TOS-TNG interim period) but the episode is still only single-star worthy due to its poor concept.

I have a number of issues with this episode which I shall now list because I'm too lazy to form paragraphs around them.

1) Tuvok was not in The Undiscovered Country. He just wasn't.
2) Sulu did not send the Excelsior across the border to rescue Kirk in The Undiscovered Country. He just didn't.
3) I've seen the opening scene of TUC two dozen times, I can nit-pick the re-shoot of the scene to death.

These three actually didn't bother me.

These did:

4) Tuvok has a lot of character moments and back-story, but they are mainly exposition. Show, don't tell.
5) Something goes wrong with the mind meld and JANEWAY COULD DIE!!!
6) Something goes wrong with Tuvok's memories and suddenly Sulu and everyone else can see Janeway. Memories.
7) The falling girl was a memory virus? So it was completely unimportant? Well that was well worth 40 minutes of my time.
8) The montage of the falling girl seen by various different children was unintentionally comedic.
9) The resolution to the problem was technobabble, this is one episode where the resolution needed to stem from the character.

That really shows how crappy the premise of the episode actually was. A nostalgic story of Tuvok talking about how his lookalike father served on the TOS Enterprise or something might have been more entertaining. Hell, a flashback version of this story would have been a better tribute without all the memory virus crap.