Earlier into Voyagers run, Ron Moore of BSG fame moved over from DS9 and became an executive producer on Voyager for all but 1 or 2 episodes. He left because it essentially was a false bill of goods. When Voyager was presented it was presented as a crew desperate to get home, lost with limited supplies. There was supposed to have limited shuttle craft... Ron Moore's Voyager would have been darker than the one we got. Instead of the ship looking pristine at the beginning of each episode, it would have continued on a downward slope. Would that have made for a better Voyager?
I think it would have. A Voyager with repercussions from week to week was almost a must given the situation they found themselves in. I wouldn't have wanted it to be as dark as BSG was at times though. For instance I never expected, nor wanted, the crew to be at each other's throats. They're small enough where I think the majority would realize fairly quickly that they need each other to have any hope of getting home. So I was glad that aspect was dropped fairly quickly. Now the supply issues, battle damage, etc should have been very important from episode to episode. That was a missed opportunity. If we saw Voyager sustain a hull breach there needed to be repercussions in the next episode. Whether it be a line of dialogue mentioning the repair, or if we saw some patches on Voyager's outer hull. You just can't white wash all of the stuff that happens from week to week given Voyager's situation. BSG was great at this aspect. Galactica had visible damage from the 1st episode all the way to the end. If the damage was not critical to the operation of the ship it went unfixed. Voyager should have been a battle weary ship by the time it got home after all the stuff it went through. It should have been a battle scarred warrior, not the pristine princess, we got at the end. With Galactica I cringed every time she took a hard hit, because I knew she was not getting repaired anytime soon. Any number of things could go wrong at any time. With Voyager it was almost a given that in the next episode we knew she would be brand new again.
I agree with everything Akiraprise says above. But for me it's not really the visible damaged I missed on the Voyager. It just always felt like they never really were in danger and had to sacrifice anything. Yeah, there was talk about replicator rationing and limiting one's access to the allegedly energy-consuming holodeck, but it was just that: Talk. Battlestar Galactica on the other hand did whole episodes about them trying to find water and dealing with the problems of declining food and medicine supplies. On Galactica everything had consequences. On Voyager you knew that by the end of the episode the status quo had to be retained. For me, that was one of the quintessential faults of Voyager – although I like many single episodes of it.
Incorrect. Moore "moved over" to Voyager for season 6, stayed for a handful of episodes, and left due to his problems with the show. Maybe. Of course, it depends on what one considers "better". Moore would also have to have overcome UPN's resistance to making Voyager "dark", or any other thing that would have deviated from their desire to make the show some sort of "TNG-lite". It was that which made Voyager less "realistic". Not Berman, not Braga (who, for example, wanted a year-long "year of hell" but met with a UPN veto), not the absence of Moore from the producer's slot. He went on to make his own show - without little or no network interference - and good luck to him. As a fan I'm well aware Voyager was a flawed show and some things could have been done differently. Whether it would have been (some people's idea of) better with Moore producing is a moot point.
I guess we could look at it this way. Ron Moore + a UPN network that was a bit edgier could have made for an awesome Trek back to Earth. I like what we got, but it could have been so much more.
*stands up* Hi, my name is GodBen and I'm a RDM boot-licker. I've been clean and sober now since the end of Battlestar Galactica, although I did suffer a relapse last week when I watched the Caprica pilot. My problem first started almost 5 years ago when I purchased DS9 on DVD and noticed that he wrote a lot of my favourite episodes, and I had to buy all of TNG in order to fuel my addiction. I hit rock bottom last year when I was introduced to BSG. I knew it was bad for me, especially the New Caprica arc, but I just couldn't stop myself from loving it. My family keep judging me for it, but they don't realise that it is a disease! Anyway, I mostly agree with Akiraprise, I would not want Voyager to be anywhere near as dark as BSG could get but greater continuity would have been very welcome. Some character and story arcs would also have been great. Personally, I would have loved some more conflict amongst the crew. I don't want them killing one another or flushing mutineers out an airlock, but a greater amount of dissent is something which the show was crying out for. To be perfectly frank, I have a hard time believing that the Maquis and most of the Starfleet crew would have blindly accepted Janeway's decision to stop and investigate everything they came across on their way home. I think most of them would have been highly critical of her for that, but unfortunately that seemed to be completely brushed under the rug in The Cloud only 5 episodes in.
Good points there. Also on a slightly unrelated note did anyone do a double take when you got your first clear view of Galactica in Razor due to the ship not having the New Caprica damage since the telemovie took place during season 2.
You know they have 12-step programs for that, right, GodBen? You don't have to struggle on alooooooone. I agree pretty much 100 percent. Like Orac Zen, I don't know if Ron Moore alone would have been enough to make Voyager more realistic - I very much doubt if he would have. And I am not a big fan of unrelenting darkness in my Trek, or for that matter in my fiction in general. But a more realistic Voyager, a Voyager that had to deal with consequences more consistently, that had better continuity...that I would have loved.
I agree. While I absolutely adore BSG I like my Trek to be closer to Roddenberry's original "hopeful" vision. BTW, you know you have a Ron Moore addition when you watch a BSG episode then immediately re-watch with the commentary. I never knew the world contained so many varieties of scotch!
I generally think most other sci-fi is crap so I've never seen BSE, and though I do like Voyager it did have serious problems: The condition of the ship by the 6th season should have been like it was in Year of Hell. The constant loss of torpedoes and shuttles should have been more of an issue...though it's possible they can slap them together like Ikea furnature given they built the DF from scratch but they should have thrown in a line of dialog to say so. For example they come across an alien starbase battered from a fight and the starbase demands weapons or certain off limits tech as payment, and they have to decide weither to compromise their rules to survive, they say no and solider on, get their ass handed to them in a battle soon after and have to go crawling back to said starbase as hippocrites looking to BUY weapons. I agree mutinies etc would not be very realistic as they would naturally pull together.
I'm not sure if Ron Moore had been the right guy for the job. I would have liked to see some more realism but not something like the depressive BSG. Maybe something between B&B&T:s Voyager and Moore's Voyager. Basically the same as it was but with some more story arcs and some realistic things, like no wasting of torpedoes and shuttles, problems to find food resources (that problem suddenly dissapeared after season 6 despite the "loss" of the Hydroponics Bay), more encounters with new species instead of the Borg. I'm also dissatisfied with how they used the characters, I mean they had the best characters in any Star Trek series when it started and the best premise, why not use that?
I think that there were a number of balls dropped on Voyager, even setting aside the 'Year of Hell' turned into a two hour episode instead of year long arc. I'm not asking for a dark and depressing show all the time, but... when I watch the show, I never get the feeling that this ship is completely cut off from home the way the show wants me to. Yes, they say that they're far from home, but it feels more like they're just too far from Federation space to get instant communication. When I look at the premise of Voyager, it says to me that there is room for this show to be an exploration of people through pushing them to the edge. Instead, though, more often Voyager relied on 'alien (or anomaly) of the week' stories that would have fit in just as easily on TNG, since they don't focus specifically on the crew themselves in more than a surface manner - oh, Chakotay's suddenly a boxing fan? It could just as easily have turned out to have been Riker on TNG who was interested in boxing. The stories would not require a massive rewrite to suit the cast of TNG. Likewise, Harry Kim is the green and naive ensign for seven years. No. Just... no. That is unforgivable. He needed a character arc, but no one bothered with him - the writers for Voyager often get quoted as saying that Doctor and Seven stories are so numerous because they're easier to write for. The problem with that is that if they're focused on these characters they like, there's basically no reason for the other characters to exist and be a part of the story. When you have guest characters who are more interesting than your main cast, you have a problem and you should fix it, not just ignore it and hope no one will notice. *sigh* It'd be nice to find ways to remake Voyager with a tighter focus on the characters and giving it arcs, but going over the missteps is beginning to depress me.
So, while I agree, Star Trek shouldn't be as dark as Nu BSG, Voyager should have been gritier. First The origional Enterprise was sent out on a 5 year deep space mission with limited opportunites for resulpply. So I get that a starship 100 years later, with a deep space mission may not need regular resupply. But the ship, heck all of the ships in the Star Trek Series should show wear as they go on. I mean does the third law of Thermodynamics not exist in the 23rd century? Anyway I think that the stories should have focused more on obtaining and securing supplies. Obtaining passage through systems, and so on and so forth.
I looked into it, but part of the program is that you have to devote yourself to the One True Cylon God, and I refuse to do so because I'm a polytheist godsdammit!
A Voyager that stuck to its premise would have been far better than the one that was made. However, that would not be solely because of Ron Moore. It would be way better irrespective of Moore being there or not simply because stickng to the premise would lead to a show with conflict, grittiness, story development, and character development: all things that were absent from the Voyager that was made, because they made the very bad decisions to abandon the premise and dumb-it-down to exclude all those things.
Voyager should've been exactly as dark as BSG. And there very much should have been a mutiny. The mutiny episodes of BSG was possibly the best arc they did. I've said it before, but Chakotay should've been what Tom Zarek became (if maybe not quite so kill-happy). I'd have been fine with as much Borg as we got, if they'd have distanced themselves from the Queen--a single enemy works fine, even better than multiple ones sometimes. The Cylons remained a tremendously interesting enemy even as late as, well, their Spoiler: Daybreak annihilation. BSG would not have been improved by the addition of aliens all of sudden. Spoiler: Daybreak And as we saw it certainly damn well wasn't. People ought to have been flawed, people ought to have sometimes hated each other, and people ought to have died. The whole last season of the show should've been Chakotay against Janeway, with parochial Maquis Chakotay wanting to just go home and patriotic Starfleet's Janeway wanting to finish the Borg once and for all. And they should have been finished, once and for all, in Voyager. And one or the other, Chakotay or Janeway, should have killed the other. Totally different from the Voyager we know, to be sure. But it's a conflict we can care about, because it's between two people we (are supposed to) like, that we have (theoretically, anyway) become friends with over six years. And there should've been a whole episode, dealing with the fallout of their return. Trials held. Reunions had. Maybe Janeway winds up like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Oh, and beyond darker plots, at least a RMD-helmed Voyager probably would have had generally better writing all around. Now, I'm not saying a VOY overseen by RMD from day one would've been good. I am on record, extensively, proclaiming my loathing of the last hour of BSG and how it subverted every single hour that came before. But I think the general mindset would have improved Voyager by an order of magnitude.
Conflict over what? It would be stupid for the Maquis fighting the Fleeters over every last thing. That would result in everyone being dead in 3 months or so. Grittiness? What, having every last member of the crew hating everyone around them and plotting how they were going to murder everyone? That's just dumb. Story development? It's just "Lost in Space" in that everytime they find a potential way home it won't work because the show would be over. Character development? How does hating and wanting to kill everyone around you make a good character? Dark does not equal "Good Quality", and the premise of the Fleet vs Maquis was dumb from the inception and it was a good thing it was dropped. This "Grimdark is the only way to go" mindset is what's wrong with media these days, and it needs to be discarded. Not giving up and not becoming a savage at the first sign of things not being hunky-dory is NOT a bad thing people.
^ I have to agree with Anwar. Some conflict would have been good - I do think the Federation-Maquis issue went away too quickly - but everybody at each other's throats for seven years? No thanks!