Is Voyager really Star Trek?

[brandnewfan]

While it's not my favorite Trek, it does have it's moments. Year of Hell is still some one of the best Trek two-parters out there.

I do think that it's "Trek-lite" at times so to speak, but I wouldn't say it's not Trek at all; it is.

 

[exodus]

Nerys Myk said:

Sisu said:
*Sisu points you in the direction of The Omega Glory *

So true and its not the only one!!!!

Exactly, even TNG has GR quirky style in the first 3 seasons. The Naked Now or Code of Honor anyone? Not to mention Troi being nothing more than cleavage and an emotional train wreck.

 

[DarthTom]

mahler5 said:
Which episodes would you suggest capture the spirit of star trek the most accurate?
Thanks again for your replies

There are several, but Blink of and Eye as well as Living Witness are to great episodes to start with.

 

[exodus]

DarthTom said:

mahler5 said:
Which episodes would you suggest capture the spirit of star trek the most accurate?
Thanks again for your replies

There are several, but Blink of and Eye as well as Living Witness are to great episodes to start with.

I would go even deeper and list more thought & emotion provoking eps. like: Real Life , Latent Image , Deathwish , The Thaw , Infinate Regress , Tuvix, Distant Origin & Counterpoint too name a few.

I think what makes Trek great and excells is when it tackles issues to make us think and envoke an emotion that allows us question ourselves and the world around us. Voyager is very much Trek because when it touched upon topics like that, it did it well.

 

[DarthTom]

exodus said:
I would go even deeper and list more thought & emotion provoking eps. like: Real Life , Latent Image , Deathwish , The Thaw , Infinate Regress , Tuvix, Distant Origin & Counterpoint too name a few.

I think what makes Trek great and excells is when it tackles issues to make us think and envoke an emotion that allows us question ourselves and the world around us. Voyager is very much Trek because when it touched upon topics like that, it did it well.

Agreed, however I found Tuvix to be kind of lame and over the top. Whomever played the Tuvix character was at best an average actor.

 

[DarthTom]

You know Exodus now that I think about it what I use as a gage to whether any of the Trek episodes were good period is when a non-Trek fan can be pulled into the story.

When Ronald, my partner, can actually get into the story - any of the series or movies - I think they're onto something above average.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Brutal Strudel said:

Starship Polaris said:

Sharr Khan said:

Having the skeleton of Star Trek isn't enough. Voyager was drifting from Star Trek, sort of inbetween being faithful and "just TV".

Star Trek, in whatever form is "just tv", or in some cases, "just a movie" - Star Trek in and of itself is nothing special often being less then special - particularly when GR remade it in a new image. But in the end Trek is just television and like all shows can have highs and lows.

Sharr

"Star Trek" itself is barely science fiction.

I wanted to agree with this but I can't. Surely, Trek was never hard SF but TOS thru TMP was SF in the Vonnegut/Bradbury/Ellison/Dick vein, where scientific accuracy took a back seat to moral and philosophical musings and story telling.

Yes and no.

Trek has moments - episodes - which are pretty science fictional. Not surprisingly, a lot of those were written by folks who'd written sf before either for TV or in other media. That said, an average episode of the series was basically action-adventure set in outer space with a little gloss of Importance from time to time.

One can always argue this, of course, because one of the constants in skiffy circles is the endless discussion of what is and isn't "science fiction" and how it's defined. I think that there are certain sf tropes - such as FTL spacecraft or computers with minds of their own - that were so well-established by the 1960s that they really didn't represent speculation so much as appropriation for use as part of the setting.

To take a literary example, using Dick, look at his story "The Electric Ant." If it were just a story about a guy finding out he's a robot it would have made a reasonable entry in "The Twilight Zone" (something similar did) but would have had very little interest as science fiction at the time it was published. Such conceits were thrice-told tales by then. Dick got that revelation out of the way early in the story and then started playing around with the title character's experimentation with altering and creating his own perceptions of reality.

 

[exodus]

DarthTom said:
You know Exodus now that I think about it what I use as a gage to whether any of the Trek episodes were good period is when a non-Trek fan can be pulled into the story.

When Ronald, my partner, can actually get into the story - any of the series or movies - I think they're onto something above average.

If that is true, then I know ALOT of non-Trek fans that got into Trek because of Voyager.

However, with 5 different Trek shows wouldn't it be boring if they were all the same? TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY & ENT are all different takes on Trek and because of that they all appeal to a different type of sci-fi fan. Many liked DS9 for the action & drama, while others like TNG for the intelligent debate topics and so on. Voyager's task was to broaden the Trek fan base by trying to grabbing an audience that didn't watch Trek before. That concept alone is very Trek IMO.

 

[DumbDumb2007]

Yes it was real trek in a way. they explored outer space and visited different species and races in almost every show. the other shows reused the same villains. Voyager did rely on the Borg too much. but they had the right intention : just keep on going !

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Starship Polaris said:

Brutal Strudel said:

Starship Polaris said:

Sharr Khan said:

Having the skeleton of Star Trek isn't enough. Voyager was drifting from Star Trek, sort of inbetween being faithful and "just TV".

Star Trek, in whatever form is "just tv", or in some cases, "just a movie" - Star Trek in and of itself is nothing special often being less then special - particularly when GR remade it in a new image. But in the end Trek is just television and like all shows can have highs and lows.

Sharr

"Star Trek" itself is barely science fiction.

I wanted to agree with this but I can't. Surely, Trek was never hard SF but TOS thru TMP was SF in the Vonnegut/Bradbury/Ellison/Dick vein, where scientific accuracy took a back seat to moral and philosophical musings and story telling.

Yes and no.

Trek has moments - episodes - which are pretty science fictional. Not surprisingly, a lot of those were written by folks who'd written sf before either for TV or in other media. That said, an average episode of the series was basically action-adventure set in outer space with a little gloss of Importance from time to time.

One can always argue this, of course, because one of the constants in skiffy circles is the endless discussion of what is and isn't "science fiction" and how it's defined. I think that there are certain sf tropes - such as FTL spacecraft or computers with minds of their own - that were so well-established by the 1960s that they really didn't represent speculation so much as appropriation for use as part of the setting.

To take a literary example, using Dick, look at his story "The Electric Ant." If it were just a story about a guy finding out he's a robot it would have made a reasonable entry in "The Twilight Zone" (something similar did) but would have had very little interest as science fiction at the time it was published. Such conceits were thrice-told tales by then. Dick got that revelation out of the way early in the story and then started playing around with the title character's experimentation with altering and creating his own perceptions of reality.

Good point--and you really soften me up by invoking Saint Phil of the Pink Laserbeam. I view Trek and its thrice told tales as entry-level SF--most of us Trekkies became such at early ages, I'd hazrd--for me, it was in 1979, when I was 9 and TMP was soon to hit theatres. A lot of the SF ideas that were later revealed to be just "part of the iconography," as Tom Disch put it, were new and wondrous, especially to one coming out of more simple-minded scifi like Star Wars.

Trek is SF 101, I'd say.

 

[mraig]

It seems to me that one of Voyager's biggest downfalls is actually one of the things that ties it most to the original "Star Trek"--the format. Like the original Star Trek, Voyager put out scores of one-hour episodes that were sometimes silly and lighthearted, sometimes serious and heartbreaking, sometimes formulaic and obnoxious, sometimes intelligent and thought-provoking, but almost always self-contained and self-resetting.

My number one complaint with Voyager is that, even though the premise of the show practically begged for it to be made up of numerous ongoing storylines in which the events of each episode affected the next, and in which the characters' relationships continued to evolve and change (the model for just about every drama today), Voyager stubbornly insisted on making each episode so self-contained that this kind of storytelling was impossible.

The time that it experimented the most with ongoing continuity (the very end of Season 3 and the first half or so of Season 4) is, I think, generally acknowledged as the series's best run, but the majority of the show before and after consists of episodes in which some artificial dilemma is created which we all know will be resolved by the end of the hour, leaving no lasting effects for anyone (even if Janeway makes an "I trusted you and you let me down" speech, it's all forgotten by the next week).

But this format, I think, is quintessentially Star Trek. Star Trek (excluding DS9, which seems to me the most different in tone from the rest of the series) has almost always been about the self-contained, one-hour story.

It's the show where one week you have Kirk deciding if it's right to let one woman die to protect the proper course of human history, and the next he's trapped in a haunted castle with a giant cat; where one week Janeway is questioning whether it is possible to give Seven of Nine back her individual freedom of choice while at the same time ignoring her request not to be severed from the Borg Collective, and another Harry Kim and Tuvok are arguing over who can date a holographic character who lives in Sandals (tm) Beach Resort. That's Star Trek!

 

[Kegek]

Starship Polaris said:
Yes and no.

Trek has moments - episodes - which are pretty science fictional. Not surprisingly, a lot of those were written by folks who'd written sf before either for TV or in other media. That said, an average episode of the series was basically action-adventure set in outer space with a little gloss of Importance from time to time.

One can always argue this, of course, because one of the constants in skiffy circles is the endless discussion of what is and isn't "science fiction" and how it's defined. I think that there are certain sf tropes - such as FTL spacecraft or computers with minds of their own - that were so well-established by the 1960s that they really didn't represent speculation so much as appropriation for use as part of the setting.

Which is why one could call much of it unoriginal or derivative sci-fi. Which does not negate it being sci-fi in the first place; just as a cliched Western is still a Western. The question of Data's sentience and humanity is a science fiction concern, if an unoriginal one, the Voyager's Doctor also, even if that is most obviously a rehash of Data's problem.

Plus, the trappings of sci-fi also amount to sci-fi. Vapid action-adventure space opera is science fiction. As is stories with aliens from other planets. It's not science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke defined it (by his reckoning, most of the genre would fall under 'science fantasy'), it may not be science fiction as it should be... but it's science ficton as it is.

To quote a movie I like quoting: "The theatre, the theatre - what book of rules says the theatre exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris, or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the theatre is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band - all theatre. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience - there's theatre. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and the Lone Ranger. Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse, Eleanora Duse - they're all theatre. You don't understand them, you don't like them all - why should you? The theatre's for everybody - you included, but not exclusively - so don't approve or disapprove. It may not be your theatre, but it's theatre for somebody, somewhere..."

The same, in essence, applies to science fiction. Sure, it's Philip K. Dick and Stalinslaw Lem, but it's also Plan 9 from Outer Space and Star Wars.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Brutal Strudel said:

Starship Polaris said:

Brutal Strudel said:

Starship Polaris said:

Sharr Khan said:

Having the skeleton of Star Trek isn't enough. Voyager was drifting from Star Trek, sort of inbetween being faithful and "just TV".

Star Trek, in whatever form is "just tv", or in some cases, "just a movie" - Star Trek in and of itself is nothing special often being less then special - particularly when GR remade it in a new image. But in the end Trek is just television and like all shows can have highs and lows.

Sharr

"Star Trek" itself is barely science fiction.

I wanted to agree with this but I can't. Surely, Trek was never hard SF but TOS thru TMP was SF in the Vonnegut/Bradbury/Ellison/Dick vein, where scientific accuracy took a back seat to moral and philosophical musings and story telling.

Yes and no.

Trek has moments - episodes - which are pretty science fictional. Not surprisingly, a lot of those were written by folks who'd written sf before either for TV or in other media. That said, an average episode of the series was basically action-adventure set in outer space with a little gloss of Importance from time to time.

One can always argue this, of course, because one of the constants in skiffy circles is the endless discussion of what is and isn't "science fiction" and how it's defined. I think that there are certain sf tropes - such as FTL spacecraft or computers with minds of their own - that were so well-established by the 1960s that they really didn't represent speculation so much as appropriation for use as part of the setting.

To take a literary example, using Dick, look at his story "The Electric Ant." If it were just a story about a guy finding out he's a robot it would have made a reasonable entry in "The Twilight Zone" (something similar did) but would have had very little interest as science fiction at the time it was published. Such conceits were thrice-told tales by then. Dick got that revelation out of the way early in the story and then started playing around with the title character's experimentation with altering and creating his own perceptions of reality.

Good point--and you really soften me up by invoking Saint Phil of the Pink Laserbeam. I view Trek and its thrice told tales as entry-level SF--most of us Trekkies became such at early ages, I'd hazrd--for me, it was in 1979, when I was 9 and TMP was soon to hit theatres. A lot of the SF ideas that were later revealed to be just "part of the iconography," as Tom Disch put it, were new and wondrous, especially to one coming out of more simple-minded scifi like Star Wars.

Trek is SF 101, I'd say.

So Star Wars is Bonehead SF?

 

[Brutal Strudel]

It's a fun, simple fable which I enjoy and appreciate a great deal.

 

[FordSVT]

Nightcreature said:
I will say I prefer TOS, DS9 and TNG to Voyager but if you want to talk about inconsistencies and story quality, then Enterprise takes a dump on established Trek chronology and completely goes off on its own. I would say Enterprise is much worse then Voyager.

I'm no Enterprise mega-fan, and I don't mean to derail the thread but I've heard people complain about the show "taking a dump" on continuity for ages now and I've yet to see a really good example. They usually manage to thread the loop-holes quite well, and I think most people complain about things that contradict what THEY imagined happened pre-TOS, not what the canon actually shows.

And yes, Voyager is Trek. It's not great Trek, though it did have a few amazing episodes and it's production quality was top-notch for TV. Also, some of my favorite Trek characters of all time were on Voyager (Doctor and Tuvok) and I think they did more for character development on Voyager than any other Trek show except perhaps DS9. So it did some things right, some things wrong, and it did waste a lot of it's initial potential, but all in all I find a lot of it enjoyable to watch, as I find a lot of Trek in general enjoyable to watch.

It's just a TV show.

 

[exodus]

Brutal Strudel said:
It's a fun, simple fable which I enjoy and appreciate a great deal.

The Force is strong with this one.

 

[FordSVT]

Starship Polaris said:

Sharr Khan said:

Having the skeleton of Star Trek isn't enough. Voyager was drifting from Star Trek, sort of inbetween being faithful and "just TV".

Star Trek, in whatever form is "just tv", or in some cases, "just a movie" - Star Trek in and of itself is nothing special often being less then special - particularly when GR remade it in a new image. But in the end Trek is just television and like all shows can have highs and lows.

Sharr

"Star Trek" itself is barely science fiction.

Sure, if you're limiting your definition of science fiction to include only stories that uses technology for it's core subject matter. Fortunately, most science fiction fans have a much broader definition than you do.

 

[Danoz]

Star Trek in general is a socio-political story and not realistic science fiction at virtually any level. Certainly there are "ideas" and technologies someday conceivable... but they are used to create various ethical dilemmas otherwise impossible without those technologies. Star Trek is about character development and ideas, not science.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Yeah, but most science fiction--eevn some called hard science fiction--fudges the science in service of theme and plot. And most SF isn't hard and it isn't really about science, either.

 

[kipron]

Starship Polaris said:
"Star Trek" itself is barely science fiction.

Science fiction?! It's barely fiction to begin with.