Could minor changes to the premise make the show better?
- Thread starter Anwar
- Start date
sigh. We were so close to having an actual discussion, too...
You base this on nothing, man. Wanting any explanation and wanting an explanation constantly beaten over the head are not the same thing. It's the middle ground thing again. You may not like it, but the vast majority of people who use fiction as entertainment (Star Trek shows being a part of that) do.
Ragnar Anchorage was huge. It completely dwarfed the already-huge Galactica. There's every indication that they could have stocked the ship to the gills with weapons from there that would have lasted them four years. And later, although they were running out of fighters, they never commented about running out of weapons.
Also, Galactica was a dedicated warship. Voyager was not. There'd be plenty of room on a battlestar for weapons storage, unlike a tiny Intrepid class starship whose primary function was basically a science vessel.
Sorry, but no. The problem with Voyager was that there was not one explanation as to why they had so many shuttles, why they never ran out of weapons, why the ship always looked pristine at the start of every episode when it got the shit beat out of it in the previous one, why they seemed to have all kinds of energy to burn running silly holodeck programs, or where they got the raw materials to build not one, but two Delta Flyers. Not a single explanation at all. Even if they had one episode later in the series just to try to explain all this nonsense, the viewers probably wouldn't have cared because by that time their suspension of disbelief about the show would have been total.
Now compare that to BSG, where there were many episodes dealing with such things as loss of food, loss of water, loss of Vipers and pilots, ships falling into disrepair, and shitty crew morale. But one thing they didn't seem to have a problem with was weaponry, and that's because they addressed that in the very first episode.
Well, considering they barely made use of their original premise, I doubt it would make a difference
See, RyuRoots?
Replicators man, they'd been a part of Trek for 8 years or so by that time. Did they REALLY need to continuously mention them throughout the show?
Where did they get energy? Empty space is full of the kind of energy Trek ships run on. I guess they really did need to spoon feed the audience.
Hell, in Farscape they never gave any explanation for how Moya never had any maintenance problems the entire show except for the times it was necessary to the plot like when they had to take her to that Doctor's world.
The show that rarely every had anyone sit down and think "My God, our civilization is gone!", instead wasting time on their silly personal problems with one another? The show that had them make booze out of algae? The show that turned out to be utterly MADE of deus ex machina?
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Replicators? Since when do people replicate whole shuttles? And out of what, thin air? I would think that there'd need to already be some kind of matter in the replicator buffers that is converted into whatever you decide to replicate. That matter has to come from somewhere.
And when did we ever see Voyager collect this "energy?" Never. And it has nothing to do with spoonfeeding the audience. It has to do with the original premise of the show: The travails of a ship lost in space. I'm just saying that it would have been nice to see them do some of the nitty-gritty work to survive, that, say, the Enterprise-D never had to do.
I've never seen Farscape, so I can't comment on that.
Would you rather have had them moping around in self-pity for the whole show? They were the last humans in the galaxy for all they knew, stuck on a run-down ship, being attacked left and right from the Cylons, and living every tension-filled day in close quarters with one another. Of course personal problems are going to happen in that situation, unlike what we got in Voyager.
The shipyards in Trek operate by using big replicators to replicate entire ship parts, then they assemble the things. I'd assume that Starfleet vessels, ranging from deep-space research ships to Battleships, would have similar capacity for their own shuttles.
I always assumed that replicators took pure energy and converted it to whatever matter the replicator ordered it to. But they never explained how they worked (and I hope they never try, it should be just an element of the show and not need an explanation).
So if they spent an episode where Janeway worked with Torres to turn, say, the deflector dish into an energy collector for them to absorb ambient power from nearby suns/nebulae/random space energies, you'd be okay with that?
That's pretty much what happened, only not for the right reasons.
In Voyager they knew they weren't the sole survivors of civilization, their situation wasn't unique and had happened at least twice before with happy endings, and the groups on-board weren't really enemies to begin with unlike in Galactica where the Colonies had true differences.
So yeah, they didn't have as much reason to fall to pieces.
And I'm saying that it would have been nice if they'd actually given this as a reason as to why they had so many shuttles, instead of glossing over it entirely. As I'm sure you're aware, I'm hardly the only person who's ever brought this up.
No. What I'm saying is that if your premise is that the ship is lost and the crew have to scrabble to survive, then have them scrabble. Don't give them some easy way out with technobabble and the use of technology they would have used if they had the resources of Starfleet at their disposal.
And yet after 6.9 years, they were still stuck in the Delta Quadrant, and yet nobody was going bonkers or wondering why they were weren't home yet, or if they were ever getting home.
Sorry, you've lost me here. When in BSG was there ever conflict between different Colonials based on which planet they belonged to, other than that one episode where that doctor was killing Sagittarons because of his own personal prejudice?
Sorry, I don't mean to derail your topic by talking about BSG.
I agree, it would have been nice to see it on-screen. But I rationalized it to myself so I decided not to let it get to me, which is why I give it an easier time than most others who just can't get over it when all they had to do was remember past Trek.
But the replicators ARE a part of their essential tech on the ship, and I'm starting to think this "scrabble to survive" is way over-blown by the audience. They DO have the resources of Starfleet, they're an equipped Starfleet ship not some random unarmed freighter!
I mean really, if NuBSG got away with one episode about acquiring weapon supplies then I don't see why VOY couldn't do one episode that explained how they replenished power.
In those 6.9 years they managed to shave decades off their trip and had long since been in contact with home, plus a lot of them had signed on for long-term missions that would've kept them from home for years anyways. They knew that at the rate they were going they'd be home not too much long after their original mission would've kept them out in space anyways.
Granted, it wasn't much of an issue, but the Colonials still had better reasons than the Fleeter/Maquis groups did for being hostile to one another.
The whole point of the series premise was to get away from the universe that had already been thoroughly explored in three TV series and seven films up to that point.
Imagine how much faster the series premise would've evaporated with groups of known species running around. Without them they were already using the Romulans six episodes in.
Except this way, it would come off as less contrived and make the story be about more than just Voyager. Now it also features several opposing groups all stranded far from home running around the place, running into one another either as neutrals, allies or enemies. Since they're all stranded and are on the move, it makes perfect sense these guys would either eventually join with Voyager into a flotilla or be recurring villains all the way to the end of the show.
And like I said, it makes it easier to introduce new aliens by intertwining their stories with the older better-accepted Trek aliens. Like how DS9 got the Dominion to work by involving them in stories with the Klingons/Cardassians/Romulans/Ferengi.
For example, introduce the Hirogen with them hunting the Klingons to show off how bad these guys are. Have Seska team up with her Cardassian kinsmen to take over the Kazon and use them to make a new Cardassian Empire built on slavery in the Delta Quadrant that the crew have to find a way of stopping, etc.
One of the complaints about the series regardless of the writing and execution was that the older aliens wouldn't be featured as prominently. This solves that problem and makes it easier to write new aliens, and give Voyager reasons to stay in one spot for more than one episode.
And like I said, it makes it easier to introduce new aliens by intertwining their stories with the older better-accepted Trek aliens. Like how DS9 got the Dominion to work by involving them in stories with the Klingons/Cardassians/Romulans/Ferengi.
For example, introduce the Hirogen with them hunting the Klingons to show off how bad these guys are. Have Seska team up with her Cardassian kinsmen to take over the Kazon and use them to make a new Cardassian Empire built on slavery in the Delta Quadrant that the crew have to find a way of stopping, etc.
One of the complaints about the series regardless of the writing and execution was that the older aliens wouldn't be featured as prominently. This solves that problem and makes it easier to write new aliens, and give Voyager reasons to stay in one spot for more than one episode.
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