Mayweather and Kim, the biggest slouches in the galaxy?

[Tallis Rhul]

I see quite a few threads in Voyager aboout Harry Kim not doing anything for 7 years...

Apart from flying the ship every now and again and making the odd naive comment... what did Mayweather do?

 

[Mach5]

I see quite a few threads in Voyager aboout Harry Kim not doing anything for 7 years.

Kim bashing is one of the reasons I avoid VOY forum. Harry did more than Travis, Malcolm and Hoshi combined.

 

[JustKate]

Harry did a lot, actually. He just wasn't that interesting as he did that stuff - and I say that as a fan of VOY. What Harry didn't do was grow and change.

 

[SFRabid]

I never understood the Harry Kim bashing, plus, I like the actor. The Mayweather spot was handled much like the helmsman in TOS. Acknowledge orders and once a season get to do something.

 

[Skywalker]

Those poor guys need their own Harold and Kumar-esque story or something.

 

[Tallis Rhul]

Harry did a lot, actually. He just wasn't that interesting as he did that stuff - and I say that as a fan of VOY. What Harry didn't do was grow and change.

I agree with you JustKate, I was just observing that there are people in the Voyager forum with that opinion. I actually like Mayweather as well, but they so should have used him as a bridge to the fans - his enthusiasm for being on the Enterprise comes across too little for my liking. More lines!

 

[Skywalker]

They should have stuck to their original plan and made Mayweather a little older and a little less naive. He was originally supposed to be a lieutenant, IIRC. A boomer like him should have been more ho-hum about interstellar travel, with a kind of "been there, done that" sort of vibe to offset all the wide-eyed enthusiasm we saw from most of the rest of the crew.

 

[JiNX-01]

^ what he said.

 

[Tallis Rhul]

He does seem to be on the brink of having an accident whenever they discover something new - you raise an extremely good point, as he should have seen some of those things before! And Archer never really asks him for advice.

 

[Kirby]

I liked Travis, and I blame the writers for never giving him anything to do. We never really got to know how Anthony Montgomery was as an actor. Harry on the other hand, had plenty to do, but Garrent Wang was just a bad actor and I never cared for his performance.

 

[Count Zero]

I think the problem was that in the beginning, they tried to give him scenes and b-plots (Fortunate Son comes to mind) but the actor wasn't really up to the task. Some of those scenes are almost painful to watch, not to mention his scenes in Demons/Terra Prime. So I think that's why he didn't get that much time in the spotlight later on.

 

[Cuhl]

My impression from the pre-publicity for Enterprise was that Travis was going to be the only member of the crew (other than T'Pol) who knew his way around off-planet. Did they ever refer to his greater experience -- other than in the first episode, when he knew how to find the "sweet spot" in the ship?

 

[Count Zero]

Well, in Fortunate Son they did. Archer asks for his opinion specifically because he's a Boomer, too. But other than that, I don't think they did. And since they got the Vulcan Star Charts and didn't seem to travel any place Travis was already familiar with, his experience didn't turn out to be that important.

 

[Tallis Rhul]

It would have been quite interesting having a subordinate to Archer know a region of space better than he did actually...

 

[DWF]

It would have been quite interesting having a subordinate to Archer know a region of space better than he did actually...

You mean like T'Pol did in the beginning?

 

[Danny99]

I would have liked to see more Tucker, Reed, and Mayweather stories, like in "The Breach"

It seems like they had a great dynamic that would have been worth more A stories.

 

[bluedana]

I don't know enough about Kim, since I'm only 5 or 6 episodes into VOY, but I think part of the problem with Mayweather was the actor. I used to think that Montgomery just wasn't very good - but I don't think that's the case anymore. I saw his indy movie I'm Through With White Girls, and really, he's very funny and not stiff at all. I'm reminded of a commentary on the DVD I think for Similitude. Coto (again, I think) talks about how difficult it is to write dialogue for Trek because it's formal and not very colloquial at all. Even though ENT wasn't as stagey as, say, TNG, it still had a very formal cadence to it. It didn't fit Montgomery's Gen Y style.

So I think there's some truth to the idea that the actor turned out not to be a good fit for Trek, and so he was used less and less (because writing a comfortable style for him wouldn't fit with the series). You do get some flashes of naturalness, like off-duty scenes in the Mess ("You'd like [the movie], Malcolm; things blow up") and his wonderful "sweet spot" scene in Horizon.

As a character, though, it's clear that he was wildly talented as a pilot, so I don't think Mayweather was useless.

 

[cylkoth]

So I think there's some truth to the idea that the actor turned out not to be a good fit for Trek, and so he was used less and less (because writing a comfortable style for him wouldn't fit with the series). You do get some flashes of naturalness, like off-duty scenes in the Mess ("You'd like [the movie], Malcolm; things blow up") and his wonderful "sweet spot" scene in Horizon.

That's part of your job as producer though, to take care of your cast. If all it takes to make one of your actors more comfortable in their performance is to write more casual dialogue for them, you do it. You don't slavishly adhere to something that is detrimental to the show. The head writers chose not to alter how they wrote him.
I've seen him elsewhere too, It is shocking how natural and fun he can be after seeing how stiff he was made on the show.

 

[bluedana]

I think writing Mayweather in a different style after the series began would have made him stick out even more. Perhaps if they'd concocted a signature style from the pilot, given that Mayweather was not raised on Earth, it might have worked in-universe. But I think I, at least, would not have given them the benefit of the doubt if the only black main character started sounding significantly different from everyone else without a good reason.

 

[Count Zero]

Then again, ENT is the most colloquial sounding Trek series of all. So I'm not sure that really was the problem. It's true that Mayweather's lines often come across as somewhat stilted but I think that's his fault, he's not very good at delievering them.