Should Voyager have had more Delta Quadrant characters?

[Anwar]

It's been a while since I posted here, but I'd been rewatching the show and rethinking things.

One of my peeves with the Delta Quadrant was how the show did such a bare bones job trying to show how it was different from the Alpha Quadrant. TOS and TNG showed us how the Alpha Quadrant was defined by the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, etc as the "Civilized" Quadrant (more or less) and DS9 showed us the Gamma Quadrant as a place where everyone lived in fear of the Dominion because of it's vastness and the everpresent fear of Shapeshifters.

The Delta Quadrant by comparison came off as lacking because...well, they were always on the move and couldn't stay in one place too long.

Bringing up other "Lost Ship" shows, NuBSG was able to keep things interesting (for a while) by having it not be one ship but a massive fleet with varied people on different ships so each ship felt like a varied place from the others so they could use that as their way of "fleshing out" the factions.

In the CGI cartoon, Shadow Raiders, the protagonists were the leaders of worlds that had been at War for centuries who had to maintain a shaky alliance when a giant mobile monster planet that ate worlds invaded. They introduced the idea of world engines to make their planets mobile so they could all start moving away from the Beast Planet and stay close enough for the Alliance. Basically a mobile solar system with a varied group of characters from varied places.

In Farscape, most of the characters were aliens from the area of space the show was in with the lone Human being the "alien" among them and this allowed them to know of races and worlds to go to for help.

I think Voyager should've had many more Delta Quadrant Locals as part of the cast right from Day One. The Fleeters should've been almost a minority on the ship by comparison. In fact, I don't even think the Maquis characters should've been from the Alpha Quadrant at all, Chakotay and the others should've been Delta Aliens who knew the area already and knew where Voyager could go for help and supplies, in exchange for the Fleeters helping them with local affairs/missions.

There are other ideas, like how to keep them Human looking if needed, but I wanted opinions first.

 

[BCyphered]

I've been watching/rewatching the show recently, and I have a lot of thoughts similar to yours here. I feel like the Delta Quadrant in Voyager mostly feels like Alpha/Beta Quadrants, but worse. Part of that's because species recurred so little, and part of it's because we only had two main viewpoint characters who were actually from the Delta Quadrant, Neelix and Kes.

The show was also short on new recurring characters outside the main cast, too — in a way that TNG and DS9 arguably weren't. I think a Delta Quadrant local as a major recurring antagonist throughout the series would have been interesting, and could've helped give more of a "Deltan" perspective.

(Arturis, for example, interests me for how his existence frames Voyager's actions in "The Scorpion" — and, by extension, frames the ship and Janeway's decisions in general. I would've liked to see more about how Voyager was affecting the quadrant as they moved through it, but they kept leaving the consequences of their actions behind. We got a little of that in Prodigy, but it would've been nice on Voyager proper.)

Voyager had a weird, "cruise ship" take on the quadrant, where it seemed like we were always just traveling to a new location where we'd only stay the day, then move on. I find it a frustrating creative choice on the writers' parts.

 

[AntonyF]

Agreed Farscape sprung to mind with this topic.

They could have become more Farscape like... with characters joining them for a bit then departing. Farscape was less successful at the 'departing' bit, but it's good idea in theory.

Could have had some nice friction too. Think the Selay/Anticans, but with some different guests.

 

[BCyphered]

Also, Neelix hits a point where his local knowledge runs out, and he can no longer serve as a guide. Guides are obviously useful things to have — Seven ends up being kind of a "guide to the Borg" (and Borg Interpreter), but that's different from someone who has in-depth local knowledge of the route they're taking and the cultures they'll likely encounter.

With the distances the ship goes, each guide is only useful for so long of course — but it's still more useful to have one than not!

The more that I think about it, Voyager had mostly an outsider's perspective on the quadrant, after they left the region that Neelix had detailed knowledge of. That seems an increasingly strange choice to me!

 

[Nerys Myk]

Should have become the crew of Theseus with the crew that arrives in the Alpha Q different from the crew that was stuck in the Delta Q.

 

[BCyphered]

Should have become the crew of Theseus with the crew that arrives in the Alpha Q different from the crew that was stuck in the Delta Q.

I refer to my Voyager analogue as the "USS Ship of Theseus" in my notes for my AU. Though that's partially about the crew, but more about the ship itself (which gets really banged up and pieced back together out of pieces of other ships).

I also like the idea of a nomadic group who're fleeing enemies in the Delta Quadrant, who're like, "Screw it, this Alpha Quadrant sounds nice! Let's go there, too!"

 

[Starflight]

They were probably thinking that if you dilute the Starfleet aspect too much, it stops feeling like Star Trek, and also limits the amount of stories you can tell (the crew has to be coherent and able to act in a crisis, otherwise every plot ends up having to take a backseat to interpersonal drama and people ignoring Janeway's commands).

The other issue is that the ship's tearing through space at a ridiculous speed and passing through lots of different territories, so you probably couldn't have a situation where any given person can act as a Delta Quadrant spokesperson or local expert. Neelix's "trader knowledge" was already hilariously useless after about one season, and if you recruit a Kazon or w/e, they're not gonna be of any unique help by the time of "Scorpion".

It would have been cool to have one or two more Delta aliens on the crew though. Seven works superbly but Neelix and Kes were both sort of wasted. Maybe instead of a Talaxian and an Ocampan, both of whom are pretty conceptually dull as species, a single Vidiian (Pel, perhaps, after "Lifesigns") would have made a cooler addition to the crew.