Garrett Wang

Well, she was a main cast member for over 40% of VOY's run. It's just that Seven was the "breakout" character.

Influence and vindictiveness are a dangerous combination.

What's disturbing is that a completely different set of showrunners have decided to carry on with it. Mr. Wang's offenses, whatever they were, were not against Kurtzman or his staff.

Watch his treatise on "The Disease". Harry gets quite the pasting.

As I've often said, if Harry had been on DS9, he'd have ended the show a full lieutenant, married, with a kid and a pet, and gone through several events that changed him significantly.

If Nog had been on Voyager, he'd have been brigged for petty theft in Season 1. And Season 2. And Season 3. And so on.

Torres was almost as bad as Harry. She had enormous potential for character growth. Problem was, she went through most of it in "Parallax", and spent the next seven years on the "endlessly struggling to accept her Klingon side" treadmill.

Indeed. Imagine if Voyager had (1) kept Carey on as chief engineer for a season, forcing B'Elanna to really spend some time getting her s*** together, and (2) had Durst be the original chief of operations, then be killed by the Vidiians, forcing his lower decker assistant Harry to step up and do a job he maybe wasn't quite ready for.

 

Exactly. The drama practically writes itself with Voyager.

 

I wasn't the biggest Harry fan, but it is kinda weird that his character hasn't been in any of the spin offs.

Outside of Garrett turning up late for filming & criticising the writers/ producers did he do something else to piss off TPTB. Robert Beltran was very outspoken & continues to be outspoken yet he is on Prodigy & was offered a role on Picard.

 

Yes, but they did all they could to make us forget Kes in seasons 4 and 5 until they decided to bring back the character in that episode, only to humiliate and destroy her.

Still a bit odd that a character who was a main character in the series for 40% of the whole series only shows up on 2 of 13 photos of the cast, the third was a Photoshopped picture with all characters.

Which makes the whole thing even more weird.

I can see only two optione here:

1. After Voyagers seven seasons, everyone involved with Star Trek has been so used to see Harry as total loser and "whipping boy" of the whole Star Trek so they can't even think about developing him into something better. Note that "slavery to canon" is common in Star Trek. It's the same when it comes to Kes, no one (except me of course) can even dare or bother to skip the mumbo-jumbo from The Gift and the insulting crap from that episode in season 6 and restore her to normal again, neither in some TV series, cartoon or book.

2. Those who were in charge of Voyager have a long-time grudge against Garret Wang for some reason and ar using their long tentacles and pulling strings to make him persona non grata in the Star Trek business. One of their metods is toruin the character Harry Kim.

I will take a look at it but I do think I know what will come. I've seen some stuff on Youtube and they are all very down-putting when it comes to Harry

So true!

Not to mention that she became superfluous when Seven arrived and could fix everything with her Borg knowledge and Borg technology, from the warp drive to Janeway's malfunctioning hair-dryer. They had to come up with that romance with paris just to show that she was still in the series.

Which was a pity. As you have stated, Torres had great potential and she's also one of the characters who comes out better in the books.

Indeed. Imagine if Voyager had (1) kept Carey on as chief engineer for a season, forcing B'Elanna to really spend some time getting her s*** together, and (2) had Durst be the original chief of operations, then be killed by the Vidiians, forcing his lower decker assistant Harry to step up and do a job he maybe wasn't quite ready for.[/QUOTE]

Torres development from hot-headed Maquis to exceptional Starfleet officer should have taken at least 4-5 episodes, not only the events in Parallax.

And she should never had hit Carey in that episode. That scene was totally unnecessary, not to mention that an action like that was totally unacceptable by Starfleet standards or any Navy standard.

I wasn't actually a fan of him either. I had nothing against him but found him the weakest character in the series.
But all the ridicule directed at him have made me like him.

It was the same with Wesley Crusher. I wasn't too fond of him back then, the whole "wonder kid saves the ship" became a bit annoying. But when I got an Internet connection and found out about the hate directed towards him, I started to like him and defend him!

And as you write, it's weird that he hasn't been in the spin-offs and also the non-promotion thing and the constant labeling of him as a loser.

 

He's not a standout for me, either. I like him, because I like most of the VOY cast (yes, even Neelix). I guess that seeing him get abused and humiliated grates on my sense of justice and fair play, which has gotten me in trouble before on this site.

Plus, I really don't like it when the bullies win.

I never watched "that" episode, and don't intend to. My head canon is that Kes ascended to a higher plane of existence in "The Gift", and periodically rubs shoulders with Wes, Q, Sisko, and their assorted comrades.

Odd, but not unexpected. For reasons we both agree on.

I think you have it about right, and both those scenarios are plausible. Whether they're indulging Mr. Wang's detractors or taking over for them, it's rotten either way.

Indeed, yes. Of the five Youtubers I remember most vividly, one fiercely advocates for him (even declaring that Janeway's refusal to promote him was her worst action on the show), one ignores him, one thinks he deserved better but still laughs at him, and two abuse him relentlessly.

You have a point there. A lot of characters got shuffled to the background when Seven arrived. Harry was simply always there.

I'd have had her develop over the first season, then have Carey and a few problem Maquis jump ship in "The 37's". By this time, B'Elanna's rough edges are a fair bit smoother, and she's ready to lead the engineering team.

I would have still had it happen... but Janeway would have lowered the boom on her. Then, Chakotay has some harsh words with her as well, and she realizes that she has to straighten herself out and quick.

If they weren't going to do that, you're right. The punching incident should not have happened. And the fact that she was rewarded for it may be part of why B'Elanna's my least favorite VOY character.

Same. I hate it when someone gets abuse they didn't deserve.

Agreed about Wes. His early heroics were a disastrous miscalculation on the showrunners' part, an attempt to appeal to the kids' demographic. But he was still a likable character, and seeing him get promoted to full ensign remains one of my favorite TNG moments of all time.

There was a plan to include him in "Picard", that was derailed for "financial reasons". And then, Mr. Wang mentions at a convention that his character has been "assigned" to PRO... a few days before the show goes down the tubes. And note that it was not known at the time that Netflix would rescue it.

The whole thing stinks of lashing someone to a sinking ship, doesn't it?

 

How many times does it have to be posted that Garrett was booked for an appearance on Picard and it just didn't work out? Also, he's involved in convention direction and planning at the highest levels and interacts with Trek producers regularly in that role. Moreover, he co-hosts a very popular and enduring podcast that calls positive attention to and publicizes the franchise. There's absolutely no evidence of continuing bad blood.

 

Yes, it would be nice if people stopped being quite so eager to assume bad-faith motivations. Being fond of a character is fine, but when that fondness biases you to any actions impacting the character that you perceive as negative, maybe it's time to take a step back?

As I've said before, given the way Kim was handled during VOY's run, including the meta-commentary, I do think there's evidence that TPTB knew it looked...anomalous...and weren't interested in resolving the problem. However, I've seen nothing to support any beliefs that there's been an ongoing and intentional lack of interest in revisiting Kim.

Even the events of "Fury", as damaging as they were to the character of Kes (and let's not forget that in the end she is just a character on a TV show here), it's really being kind of awful to the writers to assume they all wrote the episode wringing their hands in malevolent glee.

 

What? Since when? I thought the writers and producers of Trek only made it for malevolent glee! That's what the Internet told me!*



*tongue in cheek in case not obvious.

 

Neither do I.

And I have reacted in the same way due to the fact that I don't like bullies either.

Be happy that you didn't watch it. It's a horrible piece of s**t!

My "head canon" is very different but at least Q is involved in a very positive way.

Yes indeed!

I agree on that.

I don't remember the names of the videos I watched but they were all very abusive. I haven't watched the one in which someone actually supported him.

When Seven took over the show, it was all about her, The Doctor and Janeway. The others were shoved in the background and became nothing more than moving images in the background, just like all those people we see walking around the Promenade at Deep Space Nine. There, but still not there.

I don't want to dump Carey who is a good character. I could go for a scenario in 6-7 episodes where B'Elanna and carey are working together due to Janeway and Chakotay disagreeing on who would be the Chief engineer. In the long run, B'Elanna overcome her dislike of Starfleet, learn to work with Carey and got Janeway's acceptance too.

those who would have liked to see more resistance from the maquis members to be involved in Starfleet may have liked such a solution which could have had some of the tension for a couple of episodes without the whole thing becoming a long boring bickering like it was in Stargate Universe.

I like that scene too.

As for Wesley, I found it sad when they dumped him in season 4. He should have stayed on a s a main character.

One of the TNG episodes I don't like and never have liked is Journey's End when Wesley is turned into a spoiled brat, acted like an idiot and finally went away with the slimy Traveler in some mumbo-jumbo super-being adventure. However, the plot with the Native American planet Gul Evek and Picard is OK.

I can live with what happened to Wesley in The First Duty. OK, he screwed up there but we all make mistakes in life. I would have liked to see him in some scenario more like what we had with Tom Paris, about someone who made a mistake but worked hard to correct it instead of what we had in Journey's End.

Yes, it does.

Gibbs' Rule #39: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

But there are a lot of weird things which has happened in this case with Wang/Kim.
Gibbs' Rule #39: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

I strongly suspect that tere was foul play involved in the Kes case.

For more than two years after they dumped her, they did everything to make people forget that she ever was on the show.

Then all of a sudden, they bring her back-only to destroy her!

I see no other reason than that they did it to "show the finger" to those fans who wanted her back.

At that time, there was a letter campaign going to have Kes re-instated as a main character.
No, i didn't start that campaign but I promoted it on The kes Website and did actually send in a very polite letter to those in charge. I can be nice if I want.

Anyway, the campaign did have some impact, I know about that due to some contacts I had then. I'm pretty sure that it was noticed by those in charge.

So they had two options when it came to that:

Option 1. Bring back the character to the series.
Option 2: Ignore those fans who want her back.

They did choose Option 3 which was to humiliate and destoy the character. The original plan was to kill her off but Jennifer Lien had some objections to that so they obviously changed the end of the story.

As I see it, it was nothing more than "showing the finger" to those who had participated in that letter campaign, like:

You want your little favorite back? Well, eat this your scumbags and never ever question our divine decisions again. We are in charge here and we decides what will happen or not!

And what about Endgame and the Chakotay/Seven relationship whic came out of nowere?

Wasn't that a similar "finger" to the annoying J/C-ers who hade been pestering the divine ones with rants about a "happy ending" between Janeway and Chakotay?

No, I don't trust those people. They lied twice when it came to the question why Kes had to be dumped and I have my suspicions about a more recent story they have told about it.

Add to that the whole Harry Kim controversy. Too many coincidents here.
Gibbs' Rule #39: There is no such thing as a coincidence.
Gibbs' Rule #3: Never believe what you are told. Double check.


OK, it may have been "just a character in a TV show" but a good character who deserved more than being dumped first, then brought back to be destroyed. Not to mention that a person actually was fired as a result of all this.

 

Exactly. I don't know why this is hard to comprehend. I won't want series long conflict. Just acknowledge the conflict in a meaningful way, including clashes with Starfleet officers until they learn to work together and over come their differences, and...*gasp* actually change. I know, in Star Trek, it's nuts...

No, they don't. Characters are there as entertainment vehicles first. While I would hope for a good ending to a character, I do not always get it.

Examples from classical literature:
Romeo and Juliet: painfully obvious but its an example.
Robin Hood: dies at the end.
Man in the Iron Mask: D'Artagnan dies at the end.
Beowulf: dies at the end.
Hunchback of Notre Dame: guess what?
Lord of the RIngs: Frodo has to leave Middle Earth and the Shire due to his wound and never fully healing.

On it goes. Characters don't deserve anything but to follow were the story goes.

 

Zero, since I was already aware. But why did it not work out? So many other actors were brought back after all.

Part of my point. They went out and convinced an ex-actress who had stopped acting half a lifetime ago to reprise her role... but couldn't bring back a guy who was right there and eager to return?

I really hope you're right. Perhaps time will tell. Or, if the opportunity to bring back the character never comes up, it might remain a mystery forever.

Incompetence can be just as destructive as malevolence. And yes, my conspiracy theories about nu trek are more for my amusement than because I actually believe them. But the VOY showrunners were incompetent as .

I read your head canon... even though I didn't have your problem with "The Gift", I think your resolution was better.

It was bad enough that 130 of Voyager's crew were already nobodies. We didn't need or want more.

Can you imagine if VOY had been like DS9, with a cornucopia of recurring characters? It was even more perfect for that than a space station!

Well, sometimes there is. But Gibbs wisely assumes otherwise.

I admit I doubt that... I think "Fury" was disastrously misguided attempt at fan service. But, given that they gave the "promote Harry already" letter writers a vicious slap across the face in "Nightingale", I guess anything is possible.

 

I don't want to ascribe bad motives to people unnecessarily... but I still find it somehow hard to believe they would honestly have thought 'let's please the Kes fans out there! By telling a story that brings her back as the evil, deluded traitor that sells them out to organ harvesters, only to repent at the last possible instant!'

I might buy they simply used her as a 'tool' to tell a story they wanted to tell, without stopping to consider the effect it would have on Kes fans (i.e. I could buy indifference, but not misguided fan service).

Just watched it. And despite spending much more time on Kim, I still think his commentary on Janeway is more damaging/damning.

 

Sadly, you have a point.

If she does, she deserves it.
Under alien influence, he did the horizontal mambo with a female alien.
Under alien influence, she killed 30 or so people (who admittedly deserved it) and almost obliterated Voyager by making a kamikaze run at some pulsars.
Sensing the hypocrisy yet?

 

TATV and every episode of Trek that ended up inadvertently making Our Heroes look bad has entered the chat. Examples available upon request.

If you write frequently enough, you're going to find yourself in a place where something you wrote isn't perceived the way you hoped it would be. As a sometimes-writer myself, I can only imagine how I'd feel if I wrote something with the best of intentions only to find myself being pilloried for it.

 

In my view he mainly comes off as a hapless victim. I mostly feel sympathy for that, not derision. The hypocrisy of condemning him while having done worse herself is on the part of the Janeway character, damaging her in my view.

As for The Captain can do no wrong (or: actions that actually were dubious but are justified because 'the hero' does them) that's a more general Trek trope I have issues with.

 

In general, I'm willing to believe you. In this particular case, I still find it hard to believe. But I'm no writer.

Then again, I've made lapses in judgement myself the memories of which can still embarrass me. So let's give it the benefit of the doubt.

 

Speaking of "THE DISEASE", Tom Paris predicted this would happen to Harry all the way back in season 1, "EX POST FACTO".

In the shuttle, Harry says he would have stayed as far away from Lidell as possible, then Tom tells him someday it will be him and that he'll know it's wrong from the start but that he wouldn't be able to help himself.

 

I remember that. It's too bad they didn't revisit that conversation in "The Disease".

 

Weird, isn't it.

That's true. But I'm sure that they knew exactly what they were doing in the "Kes case" and the "Harry Kim case".

Lynxverse rules!
I have restored Kes and I will restore Garak and Gowron as well!
Plus correct some other things too, like a certain character who got stranded on an asteroid in the middle of nowhere.

Exactly my point.

Voyager would have been perfect for a bunch of recurring character due to what the series was about, a ship lost in space where the crew became a community where they had to trust each other and cooperate.

There were a lot of characters who could have been perfect as recurring characters: Carey, Rollins, Dalby, Henley, Chell, Gerron, Hogan, Tal Celes, Samantha Wildman.... They could have created some more too. After all, they had 130 people to use for such purposes.

Gibbs' rules have become my rules.

And I still have to give NCIS some credit. The series is a weak copy of what it was when Gibbs was in charge but it's still watchable. Not to mention that they never killed off Gibbs.

OK, they had their fair share of character destruction, some examples which I really didn't like. But they mostly came up with good explanations why this character here and that character there was out of the series.

I know that there are many who disagree with me when I state that they did what they did on purpose to "show the finger" to certain fans. But I do believe that they did just that and I will stick to that theory until someone convince me to 100% that i'm wrong.

I mean, they spent almost three episodes to make everyone forget that Kes was even in the show. She was hardly mentioned and all evidence of her existance were "gone", like the Hydroponics Bay and her importance as The Doctor's assistant and no one ever menyioned her.

Then all of a sudden they bring her back, an event which just happen to occur at the same time as people were sending in letters and mails in which they stated that they wanted her back.

And then they destroy her in the worst possible way, by making her look like a total moron who want to kill of the whole crew. Because of............what?

And then they make her leave like a pathetic, miserable old wreck with some wish to return to a place to where the real Kes had no intent at all to return to and no chance to get there either, due to a combination of old age and whoknowshowmany lightyears through Kazon and Vidiians space she'd had to travel.

Only a true sadist would come up with such a scenario for a character they want to get rid off.

What I've been told, they were actually planning to kill off the character in the original script. But Obviously Jennifer Lien didn't like that and made them change that and that's the reason why she sometimes is labeled as "co-writer" or whatever it was.

As I see it, when it came to that letter campaign, they had two optionst:

Option 1. Bring back the character to the series.
Option 2: Ignore those fans who want her back.

They did choose Option 3 which was to humiliate and destoy the character.

And I think they knew exactly what they were doing.

I mean, were they so stupid that they really believed that the fans of Kes will be filled with joy when they watched that horrible episode? I find it totally impossible!

They can be accused for many things but they weren't stupid. I mean, people who can come up with so many good stories and scenarios as they actually did in TNG, DS9 and VOY aren't stupid. I have to give them that.

But they weren't and aren'tthe nicest people around either.

And they haven't been honest either.

But if you do something wrong in your writing, there are always possibilities to correct that by writing yourself out of that scenario. I have managed to do that myself.

Although I have to admit that despite labeling my first kes story as the best Voyager episode never made, I'm not that happy with some details in the story.

The main villain in the story comes out pretty bad which the character was supposed to be. But when I wrote the story, I based the character on some historical person but also on a person which I had a serious conflict with back then. However, some years later, the conflict was solved and we actually became friends. When that guy died a couple of years later, I felt real bad over making him one of the role models for the villain in the story so I altered a few things when it came to certain characteristics and looks but I couldn't change the character totally because it would have ruined the story.

The same with the ending of the story which doesn't fit together with the beginning of the follow-up story which I wrote later. But I simply can't go in ad start poking in all that, it would be wring in some way.

Sometimes I've been thinking of re-writing the whole story. But that would be wrong too. After all, it was my first Star Trek story and I'm proud of it, flaws or not.

So I took some ques from Berman and Braga who sometimes created scenarios in one episode which were totally gone in the next episode or never even discussed again.

After all, there are Voyager-related stories I write!

 

Garret can redeem Garret.

Garret is not Harry.

Harry is a loser and that is his story.

Fixing Harry is betraying the essential Harriness of Harry.

If Garret doesn't want to play a loser, then he can glue some rubber to his forehead and be some one else.

It's great to see Harry lose in new and spectacular ways, and maybe he leveled up eventually, but I doubt that that happened before he started going gray.