Outspoken Marina Sirtis Interview

[Allyn Gibson]

Voyager in particular always saddened me, as I felt it should have been the first Trek show to start out completely serialized. The conflict between Janeway and Chakotay would have been ripe. You could even have members of the starfleet crew consider joining the Maquis. I would have had Janeway be the XO initially, and have the CAPTAIN die. Before leaving Starfleet Chakotay would have been a commander, and that way the two would be butting heads over who should really be running things. They harmonized the situation way too fast in the pitifully small number of episodes dealing with all that.

There are many other layers to consider there too. The acquisition and decline of resources, some members of the crew literally losing their mental stability from being so far from home.

Instead of Neelix, I would have had some of the Maquis fill in his role, being as they were all about fighting for survival and such they would be invaluable and coming up with new ways to feed the crew, and deal with the hostile threats of the delta quadrant in new and interesting ways. There's many other things that they could have done to really use what they had, and make the show about something. In this case, two different methodologies, and ideologies forced to come together, and the resulting conflicts and harmonies that would arise in having to make do with a pants-fillingly dangerous and unknown corner of the galaxy. An ongoing struggle, nothing pat or easy. No reset button.

That's radical. I like it.

My redesign of Voyager would have been somewhat more radical. For me, "Caretaker" should have been the first season cliffhanger/finale. In the first season, Voyager would be essentially TNG-lite in the Alpha Quadrant, though with the ship pursuing Chakotay's Maquis cell and coming into conflict with him from time to time. Essentially, we would get to meet the characters who die in "Caretaker" (maybe the helmsman and the XO get their special spotlight episodes), while Chakotay and his crew are a recurring villain throughout the first season. Then, at the season finale, half of the main cast is killed and Janeway is forced to ally with characters who have been portrayed as the antagonists all season long.

 

[Marsden]

That's radical. I like it.

My redesign of Voyager would have been somewhat more radical. For me, "Caretaker" should have been the first season cliffhanger/finale. In the first season, Voyager would be essentially TNG-lite in the Alpha Quadrant, though with the ship pursuing Chakotay's Maquis cell and coming into conflict with him from time to time. Essentially, we would get to meet the characters who die in "Caretaker" (maybe the helmsman and the XO get their special spotlight episodes), while Chakotay and his crew are a recurring villain throughout the first season. Then, at the season finale, half of the main cast is killed and Janeway is forced to ally with characters who have been portrayed as the antagonists all season long.

That would have been great. Far too good to expect from a Star Trek show on UPN.

 

[Phantom]

Pretty much; why the first two seasons of DS9 and VOY were wildly inconsistent, and not in a good way, has always been a mystery.

Creatively? I think both team leads pretty much made it clear in some of the interviews. They were fumbling around with no real idea what to do with what they had. They were throwing ideas at the wall until something came together. Even the Dominion stuff was basically cobbled together between seasons from disparate stuff.

Voyager in particular always saddened me, as I felt it should have been the first Trek show to start out completely serialized. The conflict between Janeway and Chakotay would have been ripe. You could even have members of the starfleet crew consider joining the Maquis. I would have had Janeway be the XO initially, and have the CAPTAIN die. Before leaving Starfleet Chakotay would have been a commander, and that way the two would be butting heads over who should really be running things. They harmonized the situation way too fast in the pitifully small number of episodes dealing with all that.

There are many other layers to consider there too. The acquisition and decline of resources, some members of the crew literally losing their mental stability from being so far from home.

Instead of Neelix, I would have had some of the Maquis fill in his role, being as they were all about fighting for survival and such they would be invaluable and coming up with new ways to feed the crew, and deal with the hostile threats of the delta quadrant in new and interesting ways. There's many other things that they could have done to really use what they had, and make the show about something. In this case, two different methodologies, and ideologies forced to come together, and the resulting conflicts and harmonies that would arise in having to make do with a pants-fillingly dangerous and unknown corner of the galaxy. An ongoing struggle, nothing pat or easy. No reset button.

Voyager was conceived from the very beginning to be a TNG-rehash with cheaper actors, nothing more.

Not really. If you look at the production materials produced pre-Season 1, Voyager was really intended to look and feel more like the Galactica remake: fractious crew, far from home, cut off from supplies and if you break it, it's broke.

If they'd stayed true to that, it would have been a radical departure, but they didn't.

 

[Squiggy]

UPN didn't want to rock the boat. They were a new network and they wanted something that worked.

TNG worked.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Nothing to see here.

 

[Amaris]

And it's happening again. Got a Roku mainly so I and the kid (17-year-old female crazed Trekkie -- a Niner btw) could watch through ENT. It's been months and we're not through S1. Not. That. Compelling.

I hear everybody say it gets better (after three years!). We'll see.

Why are you slogging through a season you don't like? I mean, yes, you want to give it a fair chance since maybe the general consensus doesn't match your opinion. But if everybody says it gets better in the later half of season three and in season four, and you're not grooving on season one, why not just go to the later episodes? It's a fandom, not a homework assignment.

Perhaps plynch is a completist, like me. I don't like watching later seasons of something until I've watched the episodes in-between.

 

[Jonesy]

2. DS9 bored the fuck out of a lot of fans right away (I've spoken to a lot who felt that show was lame in it's first dozen episodes). Since TNG was still on, one could argue there was no compelling reason to give it a try. You rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.

This is an astute observation. And really I find this applicable to not only DS9 but perhaps television shows in general. There really shouldn't be a reason why a show should bore people out of the gate. Most television shows (that actually survive cancellation) strike very strong in their first season. I sometimes see Trek fandom forget this fact in general, with the oft-nentioned reasoning that it seems to be acceptable that a Trek tv series takes 2-3 years to hit its stride. It shouldn't. It never should've happened with TNG (although there were a lot of reasons for that), and it should not have happened with DS9. I agree with the opinion that Enterprise was better in its 3rd and 4th year compared to the first two - but only because some of those early Enterprise episodes were just astoundingly bad.

 

[Phantom]

^Why is it that when it comes to TNG and VOY, it's always "give it a chance, it takes a bit to get it's feet under it but it gets good later", but with DS9 and ENT it's "this didn't grab anyone/bored everyone from the beginning"?

 

[Nebusj]

^Why is it that when it comes to TNG and VOY, it's always "give it a chance, it takes a bit to get it's feet under it but it gets good later", but with DS9 and ENT it's "this didn't grab anyone/bored everyone from the beginning"?

I'll say it about Next Generation and Voyager too. They started out shockingly inept, considering. Next Generation recovered to pretty great; Voyager to tolerable. But it's astounding that all the Modern Trek shows started out with so many stumbles and a handful of episodes showing their promise.

 

[Squiggy]

"Hey! Let's do something drastically different! People want something new!"

*tries something new for one season*

"Hey! I think people need more time to warm up to it! They're so used to the old way of doing things we need to give them more time. Maybe add a kid or take a kid out? Have we thought about killing Miles/Harry/the dog?"

*tries some more*

"Fuck. Let's just do what they did in TNG. Change someone's hair and let's cash the check."

 

[K'Toska]

I did not find the first seasons of DS9 or Voyager to be boring by any means. DS9 hooked me right from the beginning and is the reason I'm on this forum today. The first season of Voyager is probably my favorite.

 

[Jonesy]

^Why is it that when it comes to TNG and VOY, it's always "give it a chance, it takes a bit to get it's feet under it but it gets good later", but with DS9 and ENT it's "this didn't grab anyone/bored everyone from the beginning"?

I have dim views on Yoyager and Enterprise, but I suppose that the argument could be made (yes they get 'better', but that's a relative term).

I don't think that DS9 got a good shake from the public, and I don't think that the studio was particularly interested in the show past a certain point. But it's really true that the first season was rather dull, especially when you consider how far the show went. The same could be said for the first season of TNG compared to the kind of shows they were doing with surprising regularity in the 3rd, 5th, and 6th seasons.

 

[Goji]

The first seasons of Voyager, Enterprise and DS9, though far from the best of their respective series, managed to avoid producing dreck on the level of "Code of Honor", "Justice" or "Angel One", so I find it pretty hard to buy any argument that the later shows failed to achieve a TNG-level of success because their freshman seasons failed to match the dizzying heights of "When the Bough Breaks" and "The Last Outpost".

Nevertheless, I was busy being a toddler during most of TNG's heyday, so maybe you just had to be there.

 

[Orphalesion]

Not really. If you look at the production materials produced pre-Season 1, Voyager was really intended to look and feel more like the Galactica remake: fractious crew, far from home, cut off from supplies and if you break it, it's broke.

If they'd stayed true to that, it would have been a radical departure, but they didn't.

Nope, that was all hype to make it seem like it wasn't a rehash. This was literally a show that was meant to be relatively cost-effective an sticking to the formula, while DS9 as the ambitious series.

Also don't really see any relation to the Galactica remake. For all its faults Voy never had Seven randomly kill an infant to establish how MATURE and EDGY the series is.

 

[Phantom]

Nope, that was all hype to make it seem like it wasn't a rehash. This was literally a show that was meant to be relatively cost-effective an sticking to the formula, while DS9 as the ambitious series.

Source?

Also don't really see any relation to the Galactica remake. For all its faults Voy never had Seven randomly kill an infant to establish how MATURE and EDGY the series is.

I outlined the ways it was like what Ron Moore would later do with nuGalactica already.

 

[Jonesy]

The first seasons of Voyager, Enterprise and DS9, though far from the best of their respective series, managed to avoid producing dreck on the level of "Code of Honor", "Justice" or "Angel One", so I find it pretty hard to buy any argument that the later shows failed to achieve a TNG-level of success because their freshman seasons failed to match the dizzying heights of "When the Bough Breaks" and "The Last Outpost".

Nevertheless, I was busy being a toddler during most of TNG's heyday, so maybe you just had to be there.

While this is my own opinion of course, the level of ineptitude that was on display during the first 2 seasons of Enterprise was really surprising for me. It can be argued whether or not they had a "Code of Honor"-type episode or not (some fans may name the finale of the show as an equivalent). Although I have (thankfully) largely washed my memories of Enterprise, so I can't name any offhand. However, I recall this overall feeling of those first two seasons of Enterprise being one gigantic dull white noise hum. While I agree the TNG episodes you list above were really bad, at least TNG had a few really standout episodes in the first year, and then a few remarkable ones in the second ("The Measure Of A Man", and "Q Who" are easy ones to name). I don't recall Enterprise during its entire run (meaning all 4 seasons) having an episode that was really as engaging and memorable as the two I mentioned above, let alone the kind of shows that TNG certainly had in the books by the conclusion of the fourth year.

 

[Chen]

I thought the Aenar two-parter was standout for Enterprise and could hold its weight against some other good episodes of other trek. That said, I'm an Andorian fan and therefore heavily biased - I appreciate there are things I like about it that other people might not.

I have to agree with the comments about seasons 1 and 2 of Enterprise - some of them were painful. I was pleased they decided focus more on calling it Enterprise than they did Star Trek, because it didn't hugely resemble any of the other Star Trek series I'd seen up to that point, which is a shame!

 

[Marsden]

Just to add my .02 I saw the premier of DS9 and really enjoyed it. I watched the first two or three seasons pretty much straight through, but about then I got bored with it and I haven't seen any of seasons 4 through the end yet.

Voyager, I watched the first season and a half and then gave up on it. I still haven't seen any shows from after that.


I have yet to watch an episode of Enterprise.


So, this it gets better phenomenon you guys mentioned skipped me somehow, at least with DS9 and VOY.

 

[Disco]

Just to add my .02 I saw the premier of DS9 and really enjoyed it. I watched the first two or three seasons pretty much straight through, but about then I got bored with it and I haven't seen any of seasons 4 through the end yet.

Voyager, I watched the first season and a half and then gave up on it. I still haven't seen any shows from after that.


I have yet to watch an episode of Enterprise.


So, this it gets better phenomenon you guys mentioned skipped me somehow, at least with DS9 and VOY.

If you haven't already watched it The Way of The Warrior is a great episode and might change your mind about DS9

 

[Karzak]

Nope, that was all hype to make it seem like it wasn't a rehash. This was literally a show that was meant to be relatively cost-effective an sticking to the formula, while DS9 as the ambitious series.

Source?

Also don't really see any relation to the Galactica remake. For all its faults Voy never had Seven randomly kill an infant to establish how MATURE and EDGY the series is.

I outlined the ways it was like what Ron Moore would later do with nuGalactica already.

I think, Phantom, you are completely ignoring the business side of how TV shows get made, and also perhaps conflating Ron Moore's criticism of Voyager and how it later inspired him to not make the same mistakes with Battlestar Galactica with how and why Voyager was made in the first place.

Let's all keep in mind also that the initial point of Voyager (when it was being created) was to be something new -- exploring the Delta Quadrant, encountering new aliens, and not running into the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians every week. The only way they can do that is if they ground it in the same formula that had worked before - the TNG formula.

We can argue the merit of the relative quality of each series till we're blue in the face, but I think this much is pretty clear.