The Caretaker sending ships home?

[Timo]

It's just that random debris fields aren't an established Trek thing. Nothing against them personally, but if it's not related to the plot, then it's unsatisfactory much like "Miri" in the other recent thread: we get an exact duplicate Earth[/quote], and we have to wait till the end credits to find out that this was just a random thing unrelated to anything much.

It's perfectly normal in Trek to have a dense and colorful mini-nebula appear for no particular reason. Or a wormhole. Or a subspace sandbar. But a debris field? That always puts our heroes on alert: "Who had a space battle here? What happened? Why? When? Analysis, Mr Spock! Scan the debris, Mr Worf! Theories, Old Man?"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tighr]

We never see Evek on DS9 after the events of Caretaker, so I don't think it can be confirmed nor denied that he survived or got pulled into the Delta Quadrant.

Probably would have been a much better plotline than the pointless Seksa drivel we got.

 

[Anwar]

It would have been better if there were several Klingon/Romulan/Ferengi/Cardassian ships that had been pulled to the DQ by the Caretaker and had spread over the area before VOY got there (various disappeared ships from all over the AQ are explained as the Caretaker's actions). That way they could use them as recurring characters also on the move and have stories of the DQ aliens interacting with various AQ aliens.

Example, you want to build up the Hirogen to be tough guys? Have the Klingons be hunted by them when they run into VOY? Want to show the Malon as the corporate guys of the DQ, have them interacting with the Ferengi, etc.

 

[tighr]

Eh, if you get toooo many Alpha Quadrant races involved in Voyager, it ends up watering down the show. Including them is just lazy, unless you do it with a really good plotline.

Oh wait! They watered it down, anyway.

 

[JB2005]

Might have been interesting if in addition to Maquis, Voyager had had to rescue Klingons, Ferengi, Romulans etc

 

[MacLeod]

Other than the original disaster in which the Nacene expedition, admittedly, dropped the ball, I don't see that the Caretaker is particularly incompetent.

He seems to have kept things ticking over quite nicely for thousands of years until the onset of death.

but he does appear to be incapable of bringing a ship to his array without killing half the crew...how do we know he can send them back properly?

Well it's not his fault that starfleet vessels have explodium built into their consoles. Are circuit breakers a lost tech.

 

[tighr]

Might have been interesting if in addition to Maquis, Voyager had had to rescue Klingons, Ferengi, Romulans etc

That actually does sound cool, especially if they integrated these rivals into the crew. A Klingon engineer, a Cardassian scientist, a Ferengi could replace Neelix at the mess hall.

But, that would require recurring castmembers, which Voyager was too lazy to do. Those Equinox Five just blended into the background never to be heard from again.

 

[JB2005]

^ A Ferengi would make more sense to conduct trades!

 

[tighr]

Ahh, what Voyager could have been. I smell a reboot.

 

[JB2005]

The problem with Voyager is it wasn't thought through as well as the writers think it was...

They set out some problems in the first season:

The Doctor is stuck in Sickbay
They have 38 photon torpedoes
They have little energy
They have no way of replacing crewmen
They are stuck 70,000 lightyears from home
They have a third of the crew who are maquis

Of these:

The Doctor got a mini-arc which was good (except for the whole "I lost my memory" thing, which got lip service once and was never mentioned again...)
The torpedo problem was never mentioned again
They continued to run the holodecks
They never made a massive deal out of redshirt deaths - by season 7 it should have been becoming an issue...
This was dealt with...sometimes better than other times...after Dark Frontier, they never really make much effort to get home again...
This was always a problem with a short lifespan, by the end of the first season, either there would have been a mutiny or the crew would have integrated. Even though the opening crawl made a point out of how the Federation and the Cardassians both saw the Maquis as terrorists, they didn't have much beef with the Federation really, and taken away from the AQ, the maquis would either be pulling together with the rest of the crew to get back to their families, or want to make a new life in the DQ...certainly the Season 7 mutiny was absurd...

 

[tighr]

Also, the Ocampa having a 9-year lifespan was poorly dealt with in the early seasons. Kes would assuredly die before they ever made it back to the Alpha Quadrant (at least, until the Deus Ex Machina that was Endgame gets them there in 7 years). Probably not a bad idea that they jettisoned her in Season 4.

 

[JB2005]

Personally I've always said I thought it would be interesting if (*whispers so Lynx can't hear*) Kes had died in the finale...after all, giving her a maximum lifespan of somewhere around how long the show would last...it's sort of setting that up...

 

[Anwar]

The problem with Voyager is it wasn't thought through as well as the writers think it was...

They set out some problems in the first season:

The Doctor is stuck in Sickbay
They have 38 photon torpedoes
They have little energy
They have no way of replacing crewmen
They are stuck 70,000 lightyears from home
They have a third of the crew who are maquis

In addition to this:

- They made the ship too small and weak. In nearly every other "Lost Ship" show they always had it be some kind of huge battlecruiser/vessel (NuBSG, LEXX, Farscape, Blakes Seven) with an advantage that no one else had (untraceable jump drive/starburst, super-powerful alien ship)

- They main cast was too big, they could've made it smaller (Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, Paris and the Doctor) with the rest being recurring secondaries (Torres, Kim, Kes, Neelix)

- The Maquis/Fed conflict was never going to be that much of a conflict, nor would it last more than one season or so. They chose poorly for a conflicted crew.

- They already knew how to get home, this undercuts the whole idea of being lost. There was no point in putting them in the DQ if they knew got to leave right away because it gets rid of their impetus to explore. If they were truly lost and HAD to blindly fly around to figure out what to do next, then there's more storytelling potential.

There's more where that came from, but these are my bigger complaints.

 

[tighr]

In addition to this:

- They made the ship too small and weak. In nearly every other "Lost Ship" show they always had it be some kind of huge battlecruiser/vessel (NuBSG, LEXX, Farscape, Blakes Seven) with an advantage that no one else had (untraceable jump drive/starburst, super-powerful alien ship)

The fact that they are small and weak could have been an asset to the show itself, simply because it IS different from those other shows you mentioned. The show should have largely revolved around the difficulties associated with keeping the ship space-worthy against unknown foes.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Besides, in the beginning Voyager was only weak by Federation/AQ standards.

I mean it's like Saddams boys thought they were hotshit until they had to contend with a modern army.

No Replicators and transporters, meant that the DQ was behind the AQ by at least 200 years. That's like sending a wing of Apache Hellicoptors back to 1840 and telling them to pacify the native problem so that white people could build post offices.

Nothing livingon that side of the Galaxy should have been able to get through Voyagers shields.

Voyager to be threatened, would have to be out numbered tenfold by ships dozens of times it's size.

Which it was at least twice by the Kazon.

After 3 or 4 episodes, every singe ship which Voyager met was it's peer in almost every way.

Sad.

 

[Anwar]

In addition to this:

- They made the ship too small and weak. In nearly every other "Lost Ship" show they always had it be some kind of huge battlecruiser/vessel (NuBSG, LEXX, Farscape, Blakes Seven) with an advantage that no one else had (untraceable jump drive/starburst, super-powerful alien ship)

The fact that they are small and weak could have been an asset to the show itself, simply because it IS different from those other shows you mentioned. The show should have largely revolved around the difficulties associated with keeping the ship space-worthy against unknown foes.

Don't agree, those other shows all had their ship be big and powerful because it's intrinsically a part of that type of series. Even Stargate Universe did it with the Destiny.

VOY also had the problem in that it only had half a premise, a "Starter Plot" if you will. "Lost ship" is only good as the central plot for 1 season or so, after that you need another plot to drive the show.

NuBSG was never a "Lost Ship" show because it focused on the entire fleet, so it was a show about a mobile civilization rather than one lost ship.

SGU started a bigger more impressive plot int he second season about exploring the origins of the Universe before it was canceled.

LEXX had a new plot every season, first to stop the Gigashadow/Mantrid, then to escape Satan, etc.

Farscape stopped being about Crichton's quest for home before the first season ended and became about the wormhole tech/Scarran-Peacekeeper War.

VOY had nothing.

 

[Timo]

Agreed that by local standards, USS Voyager really was a supership.

She had transporters; she had weapons that could frighten the Kazon in their city-sized battlewagons; she had shields that could withstand fire from same. And she had replicators and associated technology, making it not only possible but also quite believable and expected that she would be well supplied with everything, once she got over the initial problems of Caretaker-induced damage and unfriendly ports of call.

All of these things set her well above the local average for most of the locations in question, and often even on roughly the same level with the resident top dogs like Vidiians or Hirogen.

Which is why she indeed would have needed harder opposition than just this "stranded far away from home" plight. The Borg were nice. The Kazon were good as long as they lasted, and mostly just because they were such a sorry bunch of villains; it was enjoyably humiliating for our heroes to be at the mercy of such people. But we'll always wonder about the Maquis and the potential for internal dissent as a storyline. It could have been glorious, or it could have been written really badly even in the best of cases...

If they were truly lost and HAD to blindly fly around to figure out what to do next, then there's more storytelling potential.

Don't know about that. Flying straight home was clearly impossible, and stated to be so in the pilot episode. Finding shortcuts was vital. Yet there was no reason not to keep moving towards home while doing the finding, and an impetus to move is good for the story.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Harvey]

Also, the Ocampa having a 9-year lifespan was poorly dealt with in the early seasons.

"Cold Fire" strongly suggested that she could far outlive her initially stated lifespan. If Kes hadn't been jettisoned from the show, I have no doubt that they would have used this as an excuse for her to live for the duration.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Susperia's Ocampa had diverged from the homebound lot hundreds of years ago, and either they had adapted to a longer life span because of something Susperia did to them directly like surgery, genetic modicitacation, or it's because they spent so much of their lives in Thirdspace, which meant third space accidentally altered them, or the whole "older" lark was a cunning jape, since if they don't age in third space, of course they're going to live twice as long if they only spend half their lives aging.

 

[Anwar]

Don't know about that. Flying straight home was clearly impossible, and stated to be so in the pilot episode. Finding shortcuts was vital. Yet there was no reason not to keep moving towards home while doing the finding, and an impetus to move is good for the story.

Timo Saloniemi

If they're always moving and leaving everything behind, then there's no real fleshing out the surrounding area or its aliens (and having it be a large area of space doesn't work either because everytime they tried the audience complained that the space they were in shouldn't take more than 2 episodes to get through) and no decent external storylines to tell. The internal conflict was never going to be very good in the first place so better external stuff was needed.

If they were truly stranded/lost, or cripple to the point that they'd never be able to get home with warp drive, then there's more reasoning to staying in the DQ so the writers can flesh it out as much as the Alpha Quadrant until they find some random contrivance to send them home.