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When Voyager goes bad...

You people.. Voyager is about the characters and when you love them you enjoy all the subtle and not subtle interactions despite the plot being an utter wank.

So you're a fan of Threshold, then? ;)

I'll admit I liked the episode because of Paris remembering his childhood in Sickbay as his tongue was coming out. Sure the episode was total crap, but it did have a couple of good moments in it
 
You people.. Voyager is about the characters and when you love them you enjoy all the subtle and not subtle interactions despite the plot being an utter wank.

So you're a fan of Threshold, then? ;)

I'll admit I liked the episode because of Paris remembering his childhood in Sickbay as his tongue was coming out. Sure the episode was total crap, but it did have a couple of good moments in it

Seriously, we're gonna evolve into space lizards that can have babies in mere hours! That's tribble like reproductive evolution almost! Heck, maybe that's the next step in the evolutionary process!
 
Threshold was a good episode for Tom fans; Robbie got a lot to do! And he did a good job.
 
I liked VOY up until the beginning of Season 4 when Deus Ex Machina (aka Seven of Nine) arrived and Kes was kicked out. The first three seasons had some interesting episodes, the premise was good, the characters were consistantly written. Granted there were some silly things about (the sheer size of space the kazon and Vidiians occupied) but later seasons just got really dull, as Voyager shot its way through the Delta Quadrant.
 
Season 3 is where it all started going pear-shaped. The first half of the third year was pretty mediocre, in fact everything up to Unity was uninspiring.

Personally, I think the first two seasons are the best, and then after that the show just really struggled to find any real consistency. Every season seemed to be the same; a number of great episodes, a number of terrible episodes, and a number of 'meh' episodes that safely occupied the middle ground.

I think as soon as I heard Voyager was going to be in the Delta Quadrant, I thought, "Hey, aren't the Borg in the Delta Quadrant? Oh sh!t!!"

So I knew their running into the Borg was inevitable. Or at least I figured it would be. And run into them they did.

It kind of did for Voyager what the Dominion did for DS9.

Can't deny Jeri Ryan looked hot. But I would've preferred less emphasis on her.
 
Although I'd had brief exposure to TOS in my childhood it was TNG that really got me into Trek. After that, I dug DS9 as it was something vastly different. Voyager, just seemed like a bit of a backward step, but, the premise did intrigue me to a degree - the two crews, the tension, the central drive to get back home. I envisioned a Trek spin on Homer's odyssey. I never felt that they took full advantage of the premise, or the Maquis situation. In the first couple of seasons, this was harder to realize as the show was still finding its feet. It was all new, and we were just getting to know the DQ. All we'd known before was that it was the home of the Borg. Sadly, by the middle seasons it was becoming increasingly clear, to me at least, that the DQ was a bit on the dull side.

I can appreciate people having fondness for things encountered during their formative years. Some of the sh1t I love, mainly through my nostalgic lens than anything else, is mind-boggling! :lol:

It's easier to do what you know than risk doing something new.

It's also potentially more profitable, and easier to sell to "The Suits."
 
Season 3 is where it all started going pear-shaped. The first half of the third year was pretty mediocre, in fact everything up to Unity was uninspiring.

Personally, I think the first two seasons are the best, and then after that the show just really struggled to find any real consistency. Every season seemed to be the same; a number of great episodes, a number of terrible episodes, and a number of 'meh' episodes that safely occupied the middle ground.

I think as soon as I heard Voyager was going to be in the Delta Quadrant, I thought, "Hey, aren't the Borg in the Delta Quadrant? Oh sh!t!!"

So I knew their running into the Borg was inevitable. Or at least I figured it would be. And run into them they did.

It kind of did for Voyager what the Dominion did for DS9.

Can't deny Jeri Ryan looked hot. But I would've preferred less emphasis on her.

I too knew the Borg were going to be inevitable. Man I lauged at that seen in "Unity" where Chakotay sees those people plugged in and he goes "Wait, what are you Borg?" I remember shouting "BINGO!" at the T.V.

Oh yeah, I also loved "The Killing Game." Fight me.
 
Seven of Nine could have been an amazing character, if only.

I sincerely wish that they had dressed her reasonably, and without the makeup. As a Borg survivor who doesn't even know what it means to be human, it's completely and utterly ludicrous that she would be taking such care to present with makeup like that, or choosing to wear high heeled boots like she did. Or for that matter, I didn't much care for the saran wrap wardrobe. It was really unbelievable and it ruined the character for me.

Also, a recovery of that nature would be very transitional, and that should have been reflected in her appearance, and I mean that two different ways;

First, she should have looked halfway between Borg and Death for a few weeks following her introduction. Seriously, she should have still looked scary and terrible for a while as they gradually removed more of her parts. The way I see it, that would have been a great way to visually depict the prejudice people in the crew initially had towards her for being Borg. Imagine if she actually still looked a little scary, but it was unavoidable because of surgical necessity?

And I think it would have been more effective if we, as an audience, were made to feel sympathetic towards something that still looks like a scarred up cybernetic zombie that you might cut yourself if you tried to hug. But it's much easier to forgive a statuesque blonde with pouty glossy lips and enormous breasts, and I really think they took the cheap and easy way out on that issue. It made for cheaper storytelling, I feel, and not very in line with what Star Trek was always supposed to represent.

Following those first few weeks, when she was finally looking "almost completely" human, she should have spent the rest of the series gradually refining her mannerisms, her hair, her clothes, basically all the forms of her personal expression to gradually be a more comfortable and social human being. Now arguably, they wrote it that way "somewhat," and Jeri Ryan portrayed it that way "a little bit," but I'm saying they really should have gone much further than they did.

Seven is not a Data, or a Spock. Spock has to maintain his logic, because of his adherence to his Vulcan heritage. Data is fundamentally an android, and not human, so there are several limitations he can never overcome. So Data will always act like an Android, and Spock will always act like a super Vulcan, because it's who they are.

That was not the type of character that Seven was supposed to be. She was supposed to make a grand transition from Borg Drone, to Individual Human Being, and then *NO LONGER BE BORG.* Instead, every time some alien noticed her, the other characters were all like "It's cool bro, she's Borg, but she's a good Borg." NO! SHE IS NOT BORG, YOU ASSHOLES!!! Ugh. It's like, they're trying to instill in her this individual sense of human identity, and then they constantly smack her in the face with a denial of that basic identity. It's infuriating.

I think we got cheated out of that whole transitional aspect of the character because the powers that be became distracted by the "let's make her a sex object" bullshit. They lost track of what the original intent was when they figured out they could just keep using her doodads to zap forcefields, and because it was fun to see the Borg Queen crawl out of the jefferies-tubes every two weeks to nab Seven because of some wacky new transmitter it turns out she has in her brain.

I would have liked to have seen her *lose* her Borg superpowers as time went on... Let them have to find *another* solution to getting through Borg forcefields, because Seven's no longer Borg enough. No more magic nanoprobe solutions, because hey, let's say at some point she can't make them anymore... because an actual human can't.

There came a point at which the writers and/or producers actively decided to drop that aspect of the character, and have the Doctor declare "I can't remove anymore stuff," and then it was just like "well, I guess she's still a Borg." And that was it for the character.

I mean, let her sleep in a bed and eat proper food (on a regular ongoing basis), for crying out loud. The producers just kept making her sleep standing up, in a *public room on the ship,* like she's hung up as some freaking decoration or something. Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look to the left, you'll see the secondary backup isolinear processing assembly. And to your right, well this is our hot sexy Borg. No flash photography please, it interferes with her regeneration cycle.

And then, because she is a female character, of course she has to be the mommy to a bunch of borg children. Give me a break. Of all the horrible things to do to sabotage the character even more...

I could go on.

Christin
 
And another thing. That French twist hair style is frakking hard to do. If she's purely interested in efficiency, as it can be demonstrated she is, realistically she would cut her hair short. And not grow it super long just to put it up every day in a style that takes an hour to fix just right. Unless there's some kind of 24th century glowstick that goes woop-woop-woop and suddenly your hair is done... But they never showed anything like that.

I don't hate Seven of Nine. I hate the people that ruined Seven of Nine.
 
I don't hate Seven of Nine. I hate the people that ruined Seven of Nine.

Agreed. Seven had too many stories focused on her and the fact that she was on the show mainly as a visual interest bugged me so much! I agree with the things that you said in your other post as well, that Seven should have had a much slower transition in her human form. I think that would have been very interesting to see her in a sort of transitional limbo as she migrates from being Borg to human. Of course, Voyager never really had many major story arcs, aside from the on-and-off one with the Kazon and the short Hirogen arc of season 4. Character arcs...well, not so much. Seven was a great character and one of the few that actually got developed, but it would have been a whole lot better if they dumped the cat suit.
 
They didn't stick anyone in limbo, other than psychologically. Picard, the other Borg rescued in VOY.. 7 was the one with the most shown problems both physically and psychologically after being de-borged.
 
Psychologically scarred as in Stockholm Syndrome, sure... But in the TNG episode Family after he finished mud wrestling with his brother, Picard all but said "They raped me until I liked it". Add that to his encounter, his lack of an eoucounter with Hugh a year later and it's just chilling.
 
I don't hate Seven of Nine. I hate the people that ruined Seven of Nine.

Agreed. Seven had too many stories focused on her and the fact that she was on the show mainly as a visual interest bugged me so much! I agree with the things that you said in your other post as well, that Seven should have had a much slower transition in her human form. I think that would have been very interesting to see her in a sort of transitional limbo as she migrates from being Borg to human. Of course, Voyager never really had many major story arcs, aside from the on-and-off one with the Kazon and the short Hirogen arc of season 4. Character arcs...well, not so much. Seven was a great character and one of the few that actually got developed, but it would have been a whole lot better if they dumped the cat suit.

Definitely agreed. The catsuit, don't get me wrong Jeri Ryan looked great in it, but it's hard to take a character seriously that's parading around showing the world what she has.

I would have liked it if they left her half-Borgified like in the Gift for awhile. Then they could gradually remove some pieces as the Doctor finds a safe way. This could serve a doubly symbolic purpose of her finding her humanity as the Borg implants start to disapear.

She served the much needed role of a science Spock type and her story arc was interesting if shoved down your throat as if to compensate for her not being there the first three seasons.

This simple sentence sum's up Seven's role on the ship. It could have been better. That sum's up my thoughts on Voyager as a whole too. All the pieces were there to make it great.
 
Human Error was one of the episodes I'd forgotten but watching again thought: way to go, wait until practically end of series to give us some decent Ryan/Seven humanity stuff. And when did she learn to play piano? I love VOY for those random moments ;)
 
I think Voyager peaked in Season 4 with Killing Game, Year of Hell, Concerning Flight, Unforgettable and One in that order. In Season 7 the writers finally fagged out on the script that might have lasted another 2 years. They probably got home on a flunky slipstream set-up.
 
She served the much needed role of a science Spock type and her story arc was interesting if shoved down your throat as if to compensate for her not being there the first three seasons.

This simple sentence sum's up Seven's role on the ship. It could have been better. That sum's up my thoughts on Voyager as a whole too. All the pieces were there to make it great.
But that role wasn't really needed. A big thing was made at the beginning about Janeway being a former Science Officer, before going into Command. Added to her knowledge, Kim and Torres filled in the sciency-techie stuff like Data and Geordi did as well.

Seven's main role was just as a 'sex symbol'.
 
No

She was a Trojan horse of substance surrounded by 122 pounds of sex.

Only a moron wouldn't be able to see through all that sex.

And after a while... You shouldn't be able to see the sex at all.
 
I started this topic as I found the end of season four painful and wondered if it was just going to get worse here on out.

I have to say having ploughed through 11 episodes of season 5, I am changing my opinion and - so far - would rank season 5 above season 4.

Night is good, different and I like it that the crew is doing good. Extreme Risk is not great because it has to pack too much into one episode - you just get over clinical depression - but it tries. Counterpoint is great. And i just watched Latent Image, which I remembered liking but I was just blown away by on a rewatch. Amazing stuff.

Of course I've now got Bride of Chaotica, and I can't start that whole Captain Proton BS so expect me to hate season 5 again shortly. :)

But I'll be interested personally to see if season 5 goes downhill and thus it fulfils my memory of being worse than 4, or whether I'll like it more this time.
 
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