The Continuity and Serialization of Voyager

[Guy Gardener]

Here's the thing. The Kazon have been pirating other species tech and splitting off into factions which requires distance from parent factions for centuries. They are never going to evolve into creators of tech because they aren't designed that way, rather they are they are the master race of appropriation. Use of found (stolen) objects is their skillset. Intineracy and tribal social structures are their culture. So they didn't just start expanding from their homeworld last week when they decided to steal big cars, most of them have never been to their homeworld and they don't give a rats about it. They are FAR FLUNG because that's what makes them Kazon.

The Kazon were Trabe slaves.

Their independence was inside Cullah's lifetime, 25 years before Caretaker acording to "Maneuvers". I'm thinking they were little better than monkeys when the Trabe found them.

As those ships break down, the Kazon arn't smart enough to build new ones, or seem to have the infrastructure to set up their own ship yards, but if they make enough "money" they might be able to buy a new fleet to replace the falling apart one that they have now.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I like my story better.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I'm wondering if they knew where their homeworld is? If the Trabe actually gave a damn enough to register where it was when they harvested the first Kazon slaves. And even if they knew where to go, why would Spacebound kazon want to go there if the free Kazon from "Kazo" still think that it's "relatively" the 8th century?

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

If they go there, it will be to conquer.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Vini vidi vici?

That wouldn't have to go through the motions of actually conquering if the free free Kazon haven't even invented radio.

It's possible that something like the Prime Directive could be in place?

A fleet of Trabe ships piloted by husky Space Kazons in orbit making SURE no one tries to fuck with their cousins ever again.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Yeah, not the Prime Directive so much as a sentimental superstition about the mother world.

Though maybe the Prime Directive isn't much more than sentimental superstition about mankind's wondrous crawl out of the mud, to the stars.

 

[Anwar]

Not at all, "In the Pale Moonlight" was an effect not a cause . The war happened(cause) which led to "In the Pale Moonlight"(effect)

Sisko spends all of "Far Beyond the Stars" blathering on about how "The Dream must never die!" and then he goes and helps destroy the dream himself. And this is never touched upon again. His character didn't change, when it should have.

Yes there was

Behr even said he wished the episode had happened after Bashir's augmentation because his arrogance really was high then. "The Quickening" did nothing for Bashir's character.

Nog had plenty of development before the war started. And VOY could have done a war arc.

Not really, the war was the main catalyst and no Voyager could not do a war arc.

VOY was a FICTIONAL TV show, it had literally everything to work with and was only limited by the writers imaginations.

No, it had the inherent limitations of the premise, a lot which held back the show. DS9 was stationary and had the universe that TOS and TNG spend their runs building up, VOY had to leave all that behind and had nothing it could work with like DS9 did, especially since it's "Always on the Move" thing meant they couldn't build up their own universe.

VOY consistently ignored it's "Always on the move" premise so that excuse doesn't hold any water.

Not really, the "always on the move" thing is what kept them from being able to build up a better setting to do stories with. And whenever they tried to flesh out their surroundings better, all they got were complaints that they shouldn't be doing that. So it's a no-win scenario.

But even if they had stuck to the "Always on the move" premise they still had 150 people on the ship so they had plenty to work with.

That's not much to work with. Internal conflicts would fade away after 1 season or so anyways, unless these were really messed up people. NuBSG got away with it because it had an entire fleet of ships to do stories with and thousands of people so visiting other ships would be like visiting other worlds. Voy was just a tiny scout ship.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Yeah, the Borg are a DQ race, but if they meet the Borg that often they shouldn't meet unassimilated civilizations that often. Any Borg-dominated region of space should be almost exclusively Borg.

It's true, Voyager didn't have story continuity but it did have character development continuity in that they gradually developed characters in a certain trajectory through their behavior in individual episodes, particularly with Seven. But that's not any different than shows like CSI or House have.

@Anwar

Being on the move means they couldn't meet the same people over and over again and deal with the same places over and over again. But they could have established a richer culture aboard the ship, had a strong cast of secondary characters, etc. They used the main cast pretty much exclusively after season two. Any non-main cast crewmembers for the rest of the series who were important in one episode might have showed up and said hi once or twice but basically disappeared. The only exceptions are Naomi and Icheb. Even Sam Wildman basically wasn't a presence in Naomi stories.

 

[DigificWriter]

It's true, Voyager didn't have story continuity

Actually, it's NOT TRUE that Voyager didn't have story continuity.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Maybe we'll believe you finally if you write all in caps?

Being loud is obviously how you change peoples minds.

Joe Carey the most prolific recurring character who proved that Voyager cared about a running story line for all it's lower decks... 7 episodes (But Caretaker counts as two episodes! ...No one cares.).

Two of which were time travel episodes made near the end because they needed to benchmark that the story is set in season one, and then one final episode to kill him because he symbolized the rich tradition of Janeway caring about all the little people that keep her ship running.

Sam Wildman? 8 episodes. And again one of those episodes was Fury set during season one, and they couldn't possibly have her raising her daughter who was in every other episode making Wesley look like Charles Bronson.

In season three when Berman got rid of Seska and Cullah, they got rid of their total budget for recurring third tier characters, and dumped the money into the special effects budget because Voyagers producers decided that it's audience wants more explosions in space, than silly tedious character development for recurring villains and shipmates.

Any growth that happened in/to these characters and the over all plot was purely accidental, or needed to explain a new expensive set like the Delta Flier or Astrometrics.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It's true, Voyager didn't have story continuity

Actually, it's NOT TRUE that Voyager didn't have story continuity.

Other than the Seska/Kazon thing in seasons 1-2, facts established in episodes had a consistent pattern of directly contradicting each other. Call that story continuity?

 

[DigificWriter]

^ Would you mind showing me specific examples of story points (and no, stuff like inconsistent with regards to details concerning things like supply resources, crew compliment, and costuming errors don't count) that were contradicted or ignored as the series went on?

 

[BruntFCA]

^ Would you mind showing me specific examples of story points (and no, stuff like inconsistent with regards to details concerning things like supply resources, crew compliment, and costuming errors don't count) that were contradicted or ignored as the series went on?

Well there was the EMH all of a sudden having a backup copy in "Living Witness" despite having an entire b-plot of a previous episode devoted to explaining that it was impossible to make a copy of the Doctor.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ I wouldn't consider that to represent a story discontinuity, but even if it is, one would have to cite many other instances in order to demonstrate that Voyager constantly ignored or contradicted story points.

 

[Guy Gardener]

My favourite...

Janeway in Future's End "Really I have no idea what my family was up to in the 20th century."

Janeway in 11:59 "Shannon O'Donnel is my favourite 20th century hero relative."

But DW, it's the (almost) zero bleedover into the following weeks adventure no matter how traumatic the event was or how many crewmen died just days or hours earlier.

And your reply is "but that's an episodic story telling format!"

But seriously, there are levels of suspensions of disbbelief and then there are depths of suspension of disbelief.

The killing game lasted a month, the crew with fake memories forced to kill and frakk each other, leaving corpses and unwanted pregnancies everywhere... You don't think there was a game where they hunted Naomi?In the wake of all that... The following week is Vis a Vis about body jumping alien with a holodeck addiction?

3 quarters of the ship had been turned into a hol0odeck, and suddenly then were back down to two again and... After the Killing Game, you would think that Voyager would have got rid of it's holo decks.

Just weird.

 

[Anwar]

^ Would you mind showing me specific examples of story points (and no, stuff like inconsistent with regards to details concerning things like supply resources, crew compliment, and costuming errors don't count) that were contradicted or ignored as the series went on?

Well there was the EMH all of a sudden having a backup copy in "Living Witness" despite having an entire b-plot of a previous episode devoted to explaining that it was impossible to make a copy of the Doctor.

They made a backup of the Doctor in between episodes, and then lost the backup similarly between episodes and couldn't make another one.

Being on the move means they couldn't meet the same people over and over again and deal with the same places over and over again.

Which really limited the show.

But they could have established a richer culture aboard the ship, had a strong cast of secondary characters, etc.

NuBSG only got this to work by having there be tens of thousands of people in the fleet and dozens upon dozens of ships to visit. They didn't need to visit alien worlds because the other ships could stand-in as their alien worlds.

Any non-main cast crewmembers for the rest of the series who were important in one episode might have showed up and said hi once or twice but basically disappeared.

Just like TOS then, only no one ever complains there.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Actually, TOS responded to fanmail, if they got "enough" positive feed back on a character, like Kyle or Kevin Riley, they were invited back... How people were paid back then was different and less punitive to the show runners.

A hundred and 50 people living in the space of a dozen Winnebagos?

It must have been almost impossible for all the off camera characters that were on the ship the whole time every episode to only make an appearance in one single episode...

 

[DigificWriter]

I have a correction to make concerning the episode order I outlined earlier. I inverted Investigations and Lifesigns based on their production numbers without realizing that, despite Investigations being produced prior to Lifesigns, it is actually set after it.

 

[BruntFCA]

They made a backup of the Doctor in between episodes, and then lost the backup similarly between episodes and couldn't make another one.

So your argument is that any continuity errors in VOY aren't really continuity errors because of some theoretical events taking place between episodes? Really? How convenient.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It takes half a brain cell to figure out that mobile emitter technology was used to make the back up module.

Harry couldn't make a Doctor from scratch, but maybe if he had a working model in front of him, he could copy that. Which means that the only reason they never made a copy of the doctor when he was there in front of them was because of some missaffected sense of respect.

The Doctor was also stolen in Critical Care, early in season 7 and Voyager's crew still went to rescue that light bulb, risking their lives rather than fabricating a copy.