Chakotay's previous Starfleet career

[CobraCommander]

I've been rewatching some episodes of Voyager. I've noticed a pattern where it is Chakotay who is the stable and cautious one. He doesn't like to gamble with the fate of the ship. In "Timeless" he didn't want to go through with the slipstream jump due to the phase variance risk. In "Scorpion" he knew the Borg would not hold up their end of the agreement. He never wanted to ally himself with the Borg since they were a threat to the Federation. In the episode with the ex-Borg colony, he was the final word in rejecting their plea to restart the Borg interphase link on the planet. He himself felt bliss but was afraid of a new collective.
This is a flip to the behavior of an angry Maquis terrorist. Could the Commander Chakotay that we saw have been the officer he truly was before he joined the Maquis? Cobra

 

[firecrackerrrr]

The way this character was written + Beltran's tedious and dull as dishwater performance/character were the main reasons why I never bought Chakotay as a former maquis member...

 

[Shatnertage]

How about when he punched Dolby in "Learning Curve?" He could do stuff the Maquis way--he had just mellowed by the time we saw him.

Maybe realizing that he'd had not one, but two spies on his ship (including one that he had fallen in love with) took the wind out of his sails a bit.

 

[HoneyBLilly]

Do we really have to talk about how pathetic he became?

I could almost pity Beltran, ALMOST.

Chakotay could have been a great character. A great first officer. But here's what happened: they went with the stereotypical Native American arc for him rather than making him the bad ass Maquis he had almost been in Caretaker.

If Jeri Taylor hadn't wanted to live in fantasy world where the Maquis, who had been betrayed by the Federation and Starfleet, were easily assimilated(forgive the pun) into the Starfleet crew members aboard Voyager. That is why Michael Piller left, partly.

Maneuvers is one of the best Chakotay episodes because you see what a wonderful character he could have been, the only thing I wish is that they had kept that attitude for the whole show, but Braga isn't a character writer he's a plot writer so when he took over the show suffered from lack of character development during the fifth and sixth seasons and Chakotay's character bore the brunt of the it all. And Miss Barbie of Borg got it all; how good it must be to sleep with the head writers.

 

[Guy Gardener]

We didn't see MOST of what happened on the Resolutions planet.

Maybe Janeway was the Angry Warrior in the Chakotay's seeming consolation speech and it was he who was telling his captain to stop pretending she doesn't sneak over into his billet every night and then ignore him in the morning pretending noting had ever happened?

(You gotta squint really hard to reread that speech upsidedown but it is possible.)

 

[CobraCommander]

I guess he wasn't in any rush to end up in a Federation prison. I could understand how the Maquis would accept the fact that they were stuck on Federation ship with no where to go. Even if they took it over, their goal would be to return to their comrades (after the Dominion killed them all, there was nothing to return to). They weren't necessarily cut throat renegades. The Maquis were mostly a bunch of farmers, former Starfleet personnel, and others who joined for other reasons ( Souter). They were bummed out that the Feds made a crappy treaty and gave their planets to the Cardassians.

In regards to Chakotay, I wished they would have explored his revious Starfleet career. For example (in Scorpion), he could have been an officer on the Endeavour (that could explain how he knew Janeway was doing an impression of him). I think his character was stereotyped and too Fed PC'ed. The same thing happened with Tom Paris. Without knowing his full backround, it is hard to gauge him. At least we understood Cal Hudson and Michael Eddington (as much as one could).