Should Voyager have had more Delta Quadrant characters?

[Anwar]

Given what we got, I don't think I could trust the VOY folks to pull the Borg out of the toy chest and know when it was time to put them away again.

Sadly there's truth to this....I do wonder why is it that even a CW show like "The Outpost" was able to handle it's villains better and have "Seasonal Enemies".

Season 1: Ambassador Dredd is the overall villain of S1, though we know he takes orders from the Prime Order Leaders.

Season 2: Dredd is killed off a few episodes in and the Prime Order Leaders (the Unholy Three) are the villains, with the majority of the Prime Orders' armies destroyed by end of season.

Season 3: The Blackblood Priestess Yavalla is the main enemy, with some remains of the Prime Order left. She's killed off at the end of the Season and her death revives the main (and final) villains of the series....

Season 4: The Ancient Gods the Prime Order got their powers from are revived by the final battle of Season 3. They wipe out the remnants of the Prime Order and what's left of Yavalla's forces and they're all beaten at the end, whereupon the show ends.

It seems the winning formula is to have one villain per season and then end that season more or less with their destruction so you can move onto something new and not leave them around.

 

[Dee1891]

Well, yes....UPN's stagnation and incompetence is well known around here. I'm just offering ideas of how to make Voyager a show with more of its own identity instead of the TNG wannabe that UPN wanted. Frankly, I'd be more interested in a AQ group that are trapped in a new area of space without any major option to go home and struggle with whether they should just adopt the DQ as their new home, or not.

I had other ideas for external hooks, like making the Equinox crew the first villains of the show.



Because frankly...the whole "Lost in Space" thing is boring. I always felt an external hook beyond that was needed.

The show had sold itself with a "Lost in Space" from the beginning. Also, it wasn't a series with a consistent multi-seasonal arc like "Babylon 5" or "DS9". When the franchise tried to go in that direction with "Discovery", a lot of fans complained about it. What was the point of watching "Voyager" if you don't like the premise in the first place?

 

[somebuddyX]

In a vague sense I would have liked more episodes with Delta Quadrant inhabitants as part of the crew but I could also see why it wasn't done more or even if had been done, maybe it would have been confined to one episode.
So "Shattered" kinda does a bunch of what I would have liked to have donw with Voyager regarding interactions with the past and present of the ship, but I think it would have been interesting to have Janeway and Chakotay actually sit down and talk about what the future of the ship would look like if the ship actually took the 70 years to get home. What would that look like/what are they committing their possible descendents to? And then maybe I would pair that with some look at what that might look like 70 years from now, with Voyager arriving at Earth and everything onboard is changed - whether that's alternate timeline or holodeck illusion or someone's fantasy or parallel universe - who cares. We know the ship is actually going to get back home sometime with that 7 seasons but you still play out that scenario in some way.

And maybe paired with that you could have Voyager take aboard passengers/crew that might be the equivalent of volunteers who maybe are only travelling a couple of sectors over and are just there for an episode or maybe there's people with no homes and just want somewhere to feel part of a family and stay onboard, but we only see them when the story calls for them. One of the things I liked about BSG is that the world felt lived in and when you went to a different area of the ship or fleet there were recognisable people. Voyager could have had a growing DQ community, alongside a Starfleet group, a Maquis group, a larger Equinox survivors group, Seven's Borg group. I just think there was room to have this and use it occasionally. But also, with how Voyager was set up from the beginning, I never expected this to occur.