Just What Was Up With The Treatment of Travis Mayweather?
- Thread starter sonak
- Start date
Boringly have to agree with pretty much everything written so far: conception vs execution, personality issues, etc. The only episodes I thought he got anyway near interesting were the mirror ones, so as someone else said upthread maybe he would have been better served in security/MACOs...
For my money, I'd bet it's that last possibility. Anthony Montgomery is not a good actor. He has no screen presence, his line delivery is stilted and awkward, and he has no ability to convey deeper emotions. I'm really at a loss as to why he was even cast in the first place. He really should have been replaced.
ETA:
That's one of the many problems with ENT, really -- they should have ditched the "Star Trek style" of dialogue. The characters of ENT did not grow up in the Federation -- hell, they didn't grow up with a United Earth. They're only a hundred years away from a nuclear war that almost threw humanity back into the dark ages. They shouldn't be formal! They should be much more -- if not contemporary, then much more informal, much looser, in their speech. Joss Whedon did a good job of developing an informal speech cadence for Firefly; while they probably shouldn't have patterned it so strongly on the American Southern accent as Whedon did for his show, they certainly should have been thinking along lines similar to Whedon's by recognizing the need for a looser cadence, the need to throw the Star Trek restrictions on how people "ought" to act out the window.
Isn't that a bit like saying that if people landed on the Moon in 1969, Mars landings should be common by 2019?
Technology doesn't always develop in a straightforward, consistent, linear style. Often it progresses in fits and starts.
Also, part of that point there was that the Vulcans' decision to withhold the technology to reach Warp 2 was part of a larger pattern of using their greater technological and economic resources to dominate Earth as part of Vulcan neo-imperialism. Help Earth out just enough that it would be deferential to Vulcan, but not enough to genuinely empower Earth so that it would be Vulcan's equal in terms of power and influence.
Last edited:
He was an okay actor -- I don't think he's as bad as some people here are making him out to be, but he certainly didn't have the range of more talented actors in the cast.
I think, in the end, the writers just didn't know what to do with his character, but didn't want to deal with the backlash of cutting the only African-American in the cast, either. The end result was that they left him around in a role that was secondary at best, and usually much more of a tertiary character -- an act of pure racial tokenism, honestly.
I think, in the end, the writers just didn't know what to do with his character, but didn't want to deal with the backlash of cutting the only African-American in the cast, either. The end result was that they left him around in a role that was secondary at best, and usually much more of a tertiary character -- an act of pure racial tokenism, honestly.
What makes you think that formal speech would necessarily come from being in the Federation? It could very well be that the speech pattern comes from the fact that most of the crew would have gone through Starfleet training, with its military hierarchy. Or maybe it's a legacy of having aliens -- including Vulcans -- on Earth and people using translation matrices. Or maybe after the big war the various languages were combined to make a lingua franca that used little slang rather than a whole lot of it. Who knows?
And Firefly's gimmick of using pseudo-western slang mixed with Chinese would have been lot more interesting if there had been any Chinese people anywhere in the show.
I don't even remember that scene. *shrugs* Every episode I ever saw him in, including the Travis-centric episodes, only stuck out in my memory because I never once believed I was watching anyone other than Anthony Montgomery.
Well, my quote above doesn't specifically attribute "Star Trek"-style cadence and formality to the Federation per se. What I was pointing out was how fundamentally different the cultures the characters of ENT grew up in should have been, and how this should have produced a different style of speech. I do think that if we look at various characters from throughout the Federation in the TNG era (not just Starfleet officers), it seems pretty clear that formality in speech is a common trait of Federation culture.
Isn't that basically the same thing as saying, "It's because they're in the Federation?" Massively increased cultural syncretism with aliens is inherent to being in the Federation, after all.
The exact reason for Trekkian formality doesn't matter by itself. What matters is that the characters from ENT grew up in a very different, much less unified and homogenized, culture, and centuries earlier to boot. Their speech should have been different.
I absolutely agree that Firefly should have had a stronger Chinese presence in its casting, but I don't know what that has to do with the argument that the speech style of ENT should not have been "Star Trek formality." I cited Firefly as one example of how a creator can develop new cadences and styles of dialogue, suggesting linguistic evolution without delving into over-formality. (And Firefly could be surprisingly formal at points in its speech, too, which was part of what made its dialogue interesting.)
Actually, it does. You said:
I'm saying there are many other in-universe reasons why the crew would speak in a more formal way.
Well, no, because, as you point out, they aren't in the Federation. There is no Federation yet. Maybe the influence of the Vulcans (to us) kind of stilted speech was copied by humans, especially in Starfleet. Maybe because it fits the particular environment, and other people not in that environment would be less formal. (In court, I would say, "Objection, Your Honor, assuming facts not in evidence," whereas in other conversation, I'd say, "Okay, I call bullshit." Context.)
I just don't buy the premise that these professionals, who are a cross between military and scientist, would not use formal language, similar to TNG era.
To do otherwise, to shoehorn some post-Eugenics War slangese to differentiate ENT from TOS or TNG would sound as gimmicky and selfconscious as Firefly did with its "we're not Chinese but we use Chinese words".
To get back on topic, Anthony Montgomery has a very GenY-ish vibe about him -- and that works well in contemporary films like White Girls. They could have written for his style and attributed it to his isolated Boomer upbringing, but as it was it, sounded stilted. You could absolutely tell he wanted to say "gonna" instead of "going to." Other members of the cast did not seem to have the same difficulty.
They ate chinese food though.. with chopsticks.
I do find the portrayal of human civilization as being so superior and advanced only 100 years after world wide war unbelievable. It would work better if there were still pockets of folk not living the mainstream dream, problem areas etc.. if earth was still had a first world/second world structure. And I guess Firefly did that with their portrayal of core worlds vs outer worlds.
I wonder though if the camp Cochrane lives in in First Contact is a normal standard of living for that time or if some groups just preferred to live simple and rural and stayed put even after the war. What did San Francisco look like in Cochrane's era?
Yeah, we may not like to admit it, but I think a lot of acting "talent" can come from an interesting face. Say we had Jamie Foxx mind-control Montgomery. Would the resulting performance be better? Probably, yeah, but as good as Foxx in his own skin? I can't imagine so. Thing is, like Mitt Romney and Paul Walker, Montgomery just looked like a Barbie doll:
I have no info about behind-the-scenes stuff, but I just wanted to throw my own speculations in. I think Trek has long had an issue with actually developing their non-white characters (with some notable exceptions), and Mayweather is no exception, and in fact, perhaps a regression. That being said, I think ENT did a bad job across the board with character development, and as others have pointed out, the focus seemed to be on creating an ENT big three of Archer-T'Pol-Tucker, and the scraps were left for Reed, Hoshi, Phlox, and Mayweather.
The few attempts to do something with Mayweather were so haphazard that it rarely if ever felt organic. Montgomery might not have been the best actor, however he wasn't given much to work with, to test or flex his acting chops either. Plus, great acting wasn't a trait among the ENT ensemble.
I think Mayweather's stunted development came from a general lack of focus on non-white characters in Trek and also from the poor character development endemic in the ENT series itself. I can't get why Mayweather was conceived as such a dynamic character, yet it was downgraded once Montgomery was chosen. That begs the question, why was Montgomery chosen then? They didn't have to cast him if his acting was that bad. And also if they wanted to get rid of him, and were afraid of any backlash, they could've replaced him with another black actor or character. There might have been some criticism of that move as well, but it's all about how it's done and if that character would be an improvement over Mayweather. As for Montgomery being too contemporary, I thought part of what ENT was originally supposed to be about was portraying humans more closer to our time, so being 21st century should've been a good thing.
I think Mayweather wound up being what they wanted him to be; they got points for diversity but Mayweather stayed in a box; a pleasant, non-threatening, largely uninteresting character, even though there was potential with his backstory to turn him into something much different.
Looking back, I liked him best in the Mirror Universe episodes; perhaps they should've made Mayweather the security officer from jump.
Right. In other words, I argued that they come from a very different culture and that as such, their language should not resemble the language of people who grow up in Federation culture.
It's the equivalent of arguing that someone who is 40 years old in the United States of 1911 and grew up in the 1870s to 1880s should have a very different style of speaking than someone who is a similar age in the Virginia Colony of 1611 and grew up in the 1570s to 1580s.
It's not that Federation culture intrinsically leads to any particular way of speaking, it's just that the cultures ought to be so different that whatever manner of speaking they may have should be distinct when they're separated by three centuries' of cultural evolution.
We're getting confused over our pronouns, because when you said "they," I thought you were referring to 24th Century Federates, not 22nd Century United Earthers.
Why would they, though? We are talking about massive cultural changes over three centuries. The idea that there wouldn't be major evolution in speech between 22nd Century Earth and 24th Century Federation just doesn't make sense.
Yes, they are highly-trained professionals, but even professionals in the military and scientific fields today speak a lot more informally than 24th Century Federation Starfleet officers. So the idea that the institutions intrinsically lead to high levels of formality in speech is just not supported by real-world evidence.
You're fixating on only one aspect of the language instead of paying attention to other aspects of Firefly's language. Listen to their cadences, to their sentence structures. It's Southern but it's not; it's poetic but it's not; there's a lot of formality that we lack today but a lot of informality that we lack today.
ETA:
I think this is a completely fair criticism. In particular, Trek has had a history of depicting demasculinized ethnic male characters who get little development.
Disagree here. I think that Connor Trinneer, John Billingsley, and Linda Park were wonderful actors -- especially John Billingsley.
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.
Last edited:
Brannon Braga doesn't care about black people. 
Brannon Braga doesn't care about black people.
Frankly.
Though I am inclined to agree that the writing for ENT in general was subpar, I think it's too easy to say they couldn't write for anyone. I thought they did a decent job fleshing out Trip's character. He became the heart and soul of the show. That's why I think B&B selected him to die in TATV because they knew his death would have, or should have, the biggest impact. ENT became his journey, especially after "The Expanse".
I also think that once they decided to finally really hook up him with T'Pol that her character development got a little steadier, because Blalock and Trineer could play off each other more.
Right.
Many of the plots could be(and were)found in past Treks. The dialog too. Carefull how broad a brush you use to fling this stuff, it might hit few unintended targets. 
Right.
Right. I'm watching Ent for the first time sine the original airings and I'm quite surprised at just how many of the plots are recycled from previous treks, at least in seasons 1 and 2. I remember enjoying season 3 a lot more so I'm optimistic about it but 1 & 2 really can be coloured with a broad brush of recycle & reuse.
As for Travis, as bland as a character as he was, at least I can say he has yet to make me grimace and roll my eyes at something he's said or done like I have numerous times with Archer, Tucker and Reed.
Right.
Right. I'm watching Ent for the first time sine the original airings and I'm quite surprised at just how many of the plots are recycled from previous treks, at least in seasons 1 and 2. I remember enjoying season 3 a lot more so I'm optimistic about it but 1 & 2 really can be coloured with a broad brush of recycle & reuse.
As for Travis, as bland as a character as he was, at least I can say he has yet to make me grimace and roll my eyes at something he's said or done like I have numerous times with Archer, Tucker and Reed.
well that's because he gets little screen time and few lines, and the ones he does get are functional like "ahead full impulse, aye."
Easy not to annoy when he doesn't have the opportunity to.
Similar threads
