In Defense of Janeway as a Captain
- Thread starter starlitegirl
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I'm still wondering the source of all these negative reactions you speak of. Most people that I know that have problems with the series usually point the inconsistent quality of the writing.
It's simple:
If the Vidiians were a TOS race, and it turned out that Spock's Vulcan/Human hybrid nature gave him an immunity to the Phage that could be used as a cure, the reaction would be positive.
But since the Vidiians are a VOY race, and it's Torres' Klingon nature that gave her an immunity that could be used as a cure, the reaction was negative.
And all I can ask is...WHY?!
If the Vidiians were a TOS race, and it turned out that Spock's Vulcan/Human hybrid nature gave him an immunity to the Phage that could be used as a cure, the reaction would be positive.
But since the Vidiians are a VOY race, and it's Torres' Klingon nature that gave her an immunity that could be used as a cure, the reaction was negative.
And all I can ask is...WHY?!
Even if we granted your silly claim that everything interesting that happened in VOY was met with a negative audience reaction, it would have no bearing on what you just replied to.
It's because he bases all of his defenses of VOY on things that people have stated "in the past" (supposedly, since anyone debating him has no way to verify or not - how convenient, no?) and always attempts to move the debate to those hypothetical criticisms, rather than focusing on the ones that are actually stated in any given thread. He essentially creates an entirely alternate reality in which to debate with him, and you simply cannot have a productive conversation when one does something like that.Honestly... I've never seen this criticism you keep alluding to.
If folks hated it then, then they hate it now until they say otherwise.
Are you saying you WOULDN'T have any problems with VOY having a big impact on the Delta Quadrant, the Borg, etc? One ship on its lonesome?
You DON'T think it was bad writing for them to have a cure for the Vidiians?
You DON'T think they were too important to the Borg/8472 war?
You DON'T think they were too important in getting the Kazon leaders together for a peaceful resolution
If you're okay with ALL of that, then we're finally getting somewhere.
Are you saying you WOULDN'T have any problems with VOY having a big impact on the Delta Quadrant, the Borg, etc? One ship on its lonesome?
You DON'T think it was bad writing for them to have a cure for the Vidiians?
You DON'T think they were too important to the Borg/8472 war?
You DON'T think they were too important in getting the Kazon leaders together for a peaceful resolution
If you're okay with ALL of that, then we're finally getting somewhere.
Like anything in life, there's the idea then there's the execution of it. Some of the things you point to above worked, others simply didn't.
The challenge for the writers was to have a 'right amount' of impact from Voyager's adventures in the Delta Quadrant. The Viidians? I don't have a problem with, they introduced something they hadn't seen before. Sometimes one simply gets lucky. The Borg? Yes and no. I simply saw Voyager as a subtle amusement for the Borg Queen. Something she could've simply ripped the head right off of if she had been so inclined. The Kazon? Janeway went about spouting about the Federation's sophisticated ideas. So I'm not surprised that they would attempt to heal the rift and in the process ease their passage through Kazon territory.
Were the ideas bad? Not necessarily, but the execution was lacking in many cases.
Such as?
Which would make the VOY crew utter incompetents and losers, compared to Kirk/Picard/Sisko since none of them ever were in that situation. Janeway and co should've been fully capable of retaliating against the Borg like those guys always retaliated against their enemies.
I've been hearing this for years, and no one EVER tries to back themselves up beyond this. I'm inclined to think that it's all hot air because they themselves can't think of anything better.
Not sure I even understand what your trying to get at here but... Have you ever read an episode blurb and thought "that's gonna be awesome" only to be let down? Or read an episode blurb and thought "that sounds pretty bad" only to be surprised by the quality of the episode?
I guess you missed those times where Kirk needed Dehner's help in Where No Man... or Picard's "I need you!" from Q, Who? Not being physically equal to an adversary doesn't make you incompetent or a loser. It only means that the universe is a weird place and that all things are not equal.
Once again... not even sure what your trying to imply here. The thing about Voyager was that it was a show with a lot of good ideas. If they had been able to pull off those ideas I really think we'd be talking about it as the best Star Trek right now.
You're still conveniently being unspecific. Those nameless folks aren't me, and they obviously aren't any of the people who've said they don't know what you're talking about. So they're irrelevant to the conversation of the moment.
We'd be finally getting somewhere if you'd stop veering the subject off to all the alleged complaints that have been swimming around in your head for who knows how long.
Your biggest problem seems to be your assumption that correlation equals causation. If someone complains about one aspect of a story, you infer that everything associated with the story causes complaints. Here's a caricature of your reasoning: "In TNG they could break the warp barrier like in Q Who or Where No One Has Gone Before and nobody complained, but when VOY tried it in Threshold everybody hated it. Screwed either way."
It's this whole "execution needed to be better" spiel I keep hearing over and over and over again, with no examples of what "good execution" is in relation to VOY's failures. After not ONE person ever gave me a SINGLE example of what a bad idea in VOY would be like if "better executed" and still fit the premise of the show, I came to think that they were all full of it and had no idea what "good execution" really meant and that they just were being polite in saying "I hate everything in this show".
If you think you know what a bad VOY idea better executed would've been, I'm all ears.
But I will say that in accordance to what you said about the Borg, those were just one-shots and none of those guys had to rescued by a constant enemy they'd be running into a lot. Which VOY would've done with the Borg; somehow I don't think Trek fans would've been happy tuning in to watch a show where the heroes were utterly incapable of doing anything to an enemy that showed up all the time and had to be deus ex machinaed away every week.
It does, do you ever hear "VOY did something new by showing there was someone who could fight the Borg"?
No, you hear "VOY ruined the Borg by showing they could be beaten".
If you think you know what a bad VOY idea better executed would've been, I'm all ears.
But I will say that in accordance to what you said about the Borg, those were just one-shots and none of those guys had to rescued by a constant enemy they'd be running into a lot. Which VOY would've done with the Borg; somehow I don't think Trek fans would've been happy tuning in to watch a show where the heroes were utterly incapable of doing anything to an enemy that showed up all the time and had to be deus ex machinaed away every week.
It does, do you ever hear "VOY did something new by showing there was someone who could fight the Borg"?
No, you hear "VOY ruined the Borg by showing they could be beaten".
then we'd be writing for TV instead of just talking about it on a forum.
No we don't hear that, you just infer that people believe that. Thank you for proving my point.
Not going to do the work for you, but let's take a look at the Borg. Q, Who?, The Best of Both Worlds, Unity and Regeneration are all excellent Borg episodes. Because the Borg aren't mindless zombies looking for brains, the episodes all add something to the Borg myth. Dark Frontier is just dreadful, an excuse to spend some money in the make-up department without a solid script. But it looked like a kick-ass episode when you read the blurb in TV Guide.
What exactly do you want then? You said no one ever needed saving, I show you evidence to the contrary and so you change the rules of the discussion. Hard to debate a moving target of standards.
Sorry. First Contact ruined the Borg by turning them from a 'force of nature' into mustache-twirling bad guys. Voyager was just playing follow the leader.
So it's okay for Sisko to be some prophecy guy, but not Janeway?
Q, Who? and BOBW get passes for being TNG episodes and not VOY episodes (if Q Who? was a VOY episode all we'd hear is how the whole episode was contrived, not that the Borg were any good as a concept). "Unity" gets slammed constantly for the idea that somehow Wolf 359 folks got assimilated and wound up in the DQ without anyone commenting on how the idea of a Collective mind could be used for good, and "Regeneration" is an ENT episode so no one liked it to begin with.
I notice how you left Scorpion out, I suppose this has to do with VOY's heresy by showing that there was at least one species out there that could fight off the Borg?
TNG itself did that starting with "I, Borg" and "Descent".
And frankly, "Forces of nature" villains are just bad ideas if you intend to use them more than once or twice. That's why all of TOS' "Forces of nature" enemies like the Space Amoeba or Doomsday Machine were one-shots.
Literally everything in the above quote is in reply to someone other than zar or BillJ -- some mysterious person who has yet to be named, hasn't participated in this conversation, and may very well be a figment of your imagination.
I think the problem with Dark Frontier was they decided to have a Borg Queen try her hand a psychology. Who the frack's brilliant idea that was we'll never know. Some genius probably looked at how well First Contact was received and decided it would be great to do again in Voy, this time with a HUMAN!!! It might have worked better if we saw the whole plan in motion... having sucked the brains of a world made primarily of psychologists the Queen decides to put what she assimilated to the test with Seven.
Moral of the story? Borgs suck at psychology.
I've been thinking this every time the issue comes up here. Clearly, this is where the Queen first tries her hand at psychology. Why she decided to use it on an android (emotional chip or not) one can only imagine. You'd think she would have learned from this disaster, but sadly for the Borg, she did not. I suspect that's when she began searching for a species of psychologists and comes up with a new strategy to let Seven return to human form. How the heck a Queen Borg could even imagine this would be the end result, I'll never know. Maybe they brain sucked a psychic species somewhere between First Contact and Caretaker?
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