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.

 

[Lynx]

I don't remember TNG ever mentioning that the Borg were from the Delta Quadrant.

Neither do I.

And they shouldn't have been brought in to VOY. They were finished after being defeated in Best of Both Worlds#2 and further destructed by the introduction of characters like Hugh and The Borg Queen.

 

[Mage]

I could be wrong, but I believe that it was decided to introduce that line in First Contact, to have the Voyager fans get all worked up about Voyager being in the same Quadrant as the Borg, and then they ofcourse introduced them into the show.

 

[somebuddyX]

It was just implied the Borg were from the DQ in "Descent"

 

[Anwar]

Neither do I.

And they shouldn't have been brought in to VOY. They were finished after being defeated in Best of Both Worlds#2 and further destructed by the introduction of characters like Hugh and The Borg Queen.

Really, this is part of the Half-baked pre-production VOY got compared to the proper effort put into DS9 and how much more time and effort was put into putting that show together.

With DS9 the Producers/Staff Writers more or less sat the writers down and said "Look, TNG had its formula and it worked for it but this has a different premise so need to work out the DS9 formula to keep it from being a TNG copy" and made the effort to work out what DS9 formula would be compared to the TNG one.

With VOY, they never bothered doing that and actually went in pretty much treating it like TNG season 8.

Ideally they should've set another rule that VOY couldn't use any characters or species that had been in TNG, but that might have been going too far.

 

[Lynx]

Really, this is part of the Half-baked pre-production VOY got compared to the proper effort put into DS9 and how much more time and effort was put into putting that show together.

With DS9 the Producers/Staff Writers more or less sat the writers down and said "Look, TNG had its formula and it worked for it but this has a different premise so need to work out the DS9 formula to keep it from being a TNG copy" and made the effort to work out what DS9 formula would be compared to the TNG one.

With VOY, they never bothered doing that and actually went in pretty much treating it like TNG season 8.

Ideally they should've set another rule that VOY couldn't use any characters or species that had been in TNG, but that might have been going too far.

In fact, they ruined the whole concept for VOY by making it a weak copy of TNG.

Which is sad because VOY had an excellent premise and great characters which could have been used much better.

 

[Anwar]

In fact, they ruined the whole concept for VOY by making it a weak copy of TNG.

Which is sad because VOY had an excellent premise and great characters which could have been used much better.

Frankly, the premise was antithetical to what Trek is supposed to be about. That's what I mean by it being Hal-Baked.

Trek is supposed to be about Boldly Exploring and trying to not look back....but Voyager's premise is viewed as one of those "Gritty Survival" shows.

You can't "Boldly Explore" and be "Gritty Survival" at the same time, they're opposites.

 

[Dukhat]

I never once felt that Voyager was a gritty survival show. If you have enough power to run Irish Town holodeck program, then your life is just fine.

 

[Farscape One]

I never once felt that Voyager was a gritty survival show. If you have enough power to run Irish Town holodeck program, then your life is just fine.

I have to agree. Life was too comfortable during their journey.

I'm not saying it should have been BSG level gritty survival, but there should have at least been some scars on the ship.

The closest we got was "YEAR OF HELL". (And the brief glimpse in "BEFORE AND AFTER". Unfortunately, both times ended up being completely overwritten and reset.)

 

[Dukhat]

And the audience pretty much knew from the start that Year of Hell would have a reset button, what with the time travel aspect and all.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

If communication with Starfleet Command had been possible all along, though travel was still not, it would have given Voyager a new mission ("as long as you're stuck there, your new mission has become one of exploration, first contact, and discovery" and the tension of "they can't make us because they can't apprehend us" vs duty to Starfleet regardless) - even have a remote liaison admiral character who they frequently contact for updates.

 

[Lynx]

If communication with Starfleet Command had been possible all along, though travel was still not, it would have given Voyager a new mission ("as long as you're stuck there, your new mission has become one of exploration, first contact, and discovery" and the tension of "they can't make us because they can't apprehend us" vs duty to Starfleet regardless) - even have a remote liaison admiral character who they frequently contact for updates.

Personally I think that letting the ship get in touch with Earth as early as in season 4 was another nail in the coffin for Voyager. That really ruined the premise about a ship lost on the other side of the galaxy.

They shouldn't have got in touch with Earth until season 7.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Or at least, it could have been a fluke. Or home, but the wrong reality/time. Imagine having to decide what's more important, getting home at all, or getting back to the right version of home.

 

[Farscape One]

Or at least, it could have been a fluke. Or home, but the wrong reality/time. Imagine having to decide what's more important, getting home at all, or getting back to the right version of home.

SLIDERS did exactly that dilemma in season 2, "POST TRAUMATIC SLIDE SYNDROME". (Well... a few other times were close, but that was one where there was some actual debate on 'close is close enough'.)

 

[Anwar]

I never once felt that Voyager was a gritty survival show. If you have enough power to run Irish Town holodeck program, then your life is just fine.

The closest we got was "YEAR OF HELL". (And the brief glimpse in "BEFORE AND AFTER". Unfortunately, both times ended up being completely overwritten and reset.)

That's what I'm saying, you can't be "Boldly Exploring" while going through a "Year of Hell".

There's little room for heroic exploring in Voyager's very premise, which was "We're out in the unknown...let's spend our entire time here running away from it all to get back to the familiar!"

And without heroic exploration, is it still Star Trek?

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I don't think there's a conflict between gritty survival and boldly exploring, when they need to go out to look for resources. Planets the Enterprise might have just flown past could have food they need, if they go down to look for it. There could be coffee in that nebula.

 

[Farscape One]

You can still explore while home still being the destination.

 

[Anwar]

I don't think there's a conflict between gritty survival and boldly exploring, when they need to go out to look for resources. Planets the Enterprise might have just flown past could have food they need, if they go down to look for it. There could be coffee in that nebula.

You can still explore while home still being the destination.

If the Premise of the show is "We're in the Great Unknown...let's run away from it!"...it kind of undercuts the core of what Trek is supposed to be about