Voyager's main problems

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Voyager' started by DS9 Gal AZ, Dec 12, 2011.

  1. CoveTom

    CoveTom Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Even though Paramount and UPN were owned by the same parent company, they were -- as is standard practice -- run and treated as two separate business entities. You can find evidence of this during the discussions of the final season of Enterprise, when the show got to stay on the air because Paramount agreed to accept a reduced licensing fee for the show from UPN. It wasn't all just looked at as one big pile of collective money, or else there would have been no reason for UPN to pay licensing fees to Paramount.

    My point in saying that is that we really don't know whether the syndication packages for TNG and DS9 paid more or less vs. being on UPN. True, Paramount got licensing fees from UPN for the show, but then UPN got all the revenue from selling the commercials. In the syndication format, there weren't those licensing fees coming in, but Paramount sold the commercial time to advertisers directly and received all that income. Which made them more money? I have no idea, because I don't have access to Paramount's books. But it's certainly not just a given that dealing with UPN made them more money.

    Regardless, the notion that has been presented in this thread that TNG and DS9 didn't make Paramount money because they weren't on a major network is simply ludicrous on its face. Paramount is not a charity. They didn't produce Star Trek just because people wanted them to. They did it, from day one, to make money. Had TNG not been profitable, they would not have continued producing it for seven seasons, and they sure as heck wouldn't have then created a spinoff series in the same syndicated arrangement, and run it for an additional seven seasons.
     
  2. exodus

    exodus Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    ^You don't need to see anyones records, all this info is available online. It will also tell you that TNG was the first show in syndiction to pull an audience as large as a major network. How could Paramout be getting paid equal to major network if there was no contract as such available in syndication for such a payout?

    Also, please quote me correctly.
    I never said Paramount didn't make profit. Isaid they weren't making back what they should have. They should have made more if syndication at the time had such a contract available.
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2012
  3. You_Will_Fail

    You_Will_Fail Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Yes everyone knows, don't listen to exodus, he's just a contrarian who'll argue for the sake of arguing. He can't comprehend the possibility of being mistaken or misunderstanding something.
     
  4. exodus

    exodus Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Its sad that you can't understand your trolling makes this post uncomfortable to everybody wishing to participate.
    Trolling is also a volation.


    Have a nice day.
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2012
  5. Anwar

    Anwar Admiral Admiral

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    Come now, it's not trolling what You Will Fail is doing. You're just disagreeing with one another on the issue.
     
  6. exodus

    exodus Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I appreciate the concern. However, I feel no reason other posters here need to be dragged into this and his continued personal comments have nothing to do with anything we're disagreeing on. As you can see because of it, we're already going off topic.
    The MODS have been notified and I'm willing to leave it in their hands.:)

    Trolling:
    In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[4]
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2012
  7. chris of nine

    chris of nine Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Just came across this.

    Explain!
     
  8. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    By cylon, I mean artificial life.

    The gods were generically also Robots, not the same brand/group of Robots that were invented on the colonies thousands of years later.
     
  9. chris of nine

    chris of nine Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Who built the chicken, then?
     
  10. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    8 foot tall lizards if we believe the original series.

    The final five cylons were from the original bombed out version of Earth in season four. Original Earth was a colony of Cobol. Ergo there were Cylons on Cobol.
     
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  11. Butters

    Butters Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    That’s sort of how I read it. Robot cylons develop biological form to supercede the toasters, they go to war, forget their origin, develop AI, go to war, toasters develop a biological firm, forget their origin, develop AI. The cycle continues. The gods are some remnant of an earlier iteration that has recognised the cycle and sought to break it.
     
  12. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Before the final 5 was a thing, merely comments like the gods were immortal or the gods lived side by side with man, back in season one, was enough to have us think that the gods were robots.
     
  13. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Captain Captain

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    What does all of this Cylon crap have to do with STAR TREK VOYAGER, and why is a seven-year-old thread still around?
     
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  14. Lance

    Lance Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Given this thread is seven years old and has been necro-posted in, it won't be long before it's locked. ;) So I'll just quickly make the observation that, to me, there needed to be a greater sense of the odds Voyager had stacked against it. The ship is essentially about the size of a TOS connie, it isn't this huge ass thing like the Enterprise D or E, and the truth is that things like replicator rations and gel packs were great ideas, but the show needed to be consistent in showing those limited resources constantly running out and needing to be replenished. And there shouldn't have been a holodeck. They have a holographic crewmember, I'd like to have seen them having to weigh up the choice of pooling their precious limited energy into keeping the EMH online, and therefore having no holodecks. The holodecks were a crutch that Voyager's writing team leaned on way too often, and which contributed to the overall feeling that the show essentially became TNG-lite (an unfair criticism, I feel, but not without foundation.)
     
  15. chris of nine

    chris of nine Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Connie=what?

    Constellation Class?

    I never have given thought to ship sizes. Except for The Motion Picture. NC-1701-A? What class is that one?

    Is there a poster for them?
     
  16. TigerCat

    TigerCat Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    You know, much as I like Picardo, I do have to wonder why the Doctor was allowed to be on all the time, especially after the season 1 episode where he outgrew his memory parameters and they had to reset him.
    For that matter, if the Doctor was basically an interface for the medical libraries of the ship (which is how he seems to me), why wasn't he easier to backup on a semi-regular basis?

    I like the holodeck episodes. They're an easy way to a new story that doesn't require the ship being in battle, or half the crew dying (and everything being fixed and more people appearing out of thin air being fixed by the time the next episode rolls) or anything so dire. Plus I quite like the idea of photonic aliens existing which we saw in Harry's Beowulf simulation and in Tom's Captain Proton story.
     
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  17. Lance

    Lance Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    @chris of nine Yeah, 1701-A is a connie ('Constitution Class'). Voyager is an Intrepid class, which is larger than a connie but not much larger, I don't think.

    Voyager is a class of ship that isn't designed for particularly long term missions, being commanded by a Captain on her first command, and with half a crew of people who aren't all members of Starfleet, lost and alone in unknown and possibly unfriendly space. Everything about the show's premise should have been them having to make do and survive, but aside from some lip service in early seasons, it was mostly just forgotten about and ignored. I think that really was Voyager's most crippling problem.
     
  18. Lance

    Lance Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I do take the point :) But I also feel like, when you set up the parameters in which the show's fiction exists then it's a cheat to bend those rules for the sake of an easy story (and by the time Voyager came along, the writing staff were so well versed in 'holodeck episodes', it was about as lazy a plot as they could do). I'm not saying the holodeck episodes weren't fun, but I do feel that having a functioning holodeck both stretched credibility within the shows own fictional universe *and* was too easy a story for lazy writing. Why come up with something creative and new when they could just have everyone play in Fairhaven for an episode? :D ;)
     
  19. TigerCat

    TigerCat Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    They had two, as Tom pointed out when he asked to make Fairhaven bigger :whistle:

    I don't disagree by the way. :) You're right both in terms of less creativity needed for a holodeck episode and that it made little sense for a holodeck to be able to run 24/7 when power supply wasn't a lot to begin with, despite that the holodecks ran on a different supply than the rest of the ship. Guess if they must die because they have no air left, at least they go in Sadrine's bar, lol.
    Personally I happen to like such episodes because they allow the crew to relax a bit (basically all Tom's holodeck programs), introduce different storylines (the Nazi episodes), can serve as a character introspection (like the program B'Ellana ran to get beaten up by Klingons for an episode) or as a way to assess a possible problem (Tuvok's possible mutiny scenario in season 2, I think).
     
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  20. Akiraprise

    Akiraprise To Ꝏ & BEYOND! Moderator

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    I don't normally auto lock old threads if there's decent discussion still left to be had. Although 8 years is some time ago. It's at my discretion. This one is iffy. But if the off-topic Cylon discussion ceases we will see where it goes. Thanks.