Where did the show go wrong?

[Tenacity]

like the stupid nine-year Ocampa lifespan and the one-child syndrome

Ocampa live as long as typical rabbits and become full grown adults very quickly. Personally I found the short life expectancy a interesting idea.

Were you referring to the one pregnancy thing? While alternate timeline Kes was shown to of had a single baby, multiple babies was probably the norm, with single babies the exception.

But the constant supply of torpedoes and shuttles despite the constant waste and destruction of those were never explained.

Voyager was show to recover (to a large degree) from the damage caused by the Caretaker transporting the ship to the delta quadrant. This would change to early situation that Chakotay spoke of of not being able to build more torpedoes.

And while we didn't see them build more shuttles, we did see them design and build the first delta flyer, and heard of the construction of the second. If they can build a delta flyer, they can build shuttles.

Although probably not immediately after arriving in the delta quadrant.

Chakotay is kind of like Worf. He has idealized his people's culture.

As did Chekov, Spock too.

Some see something similar in Picard, in his arrogance he idealizes own (imperfect?) culture.

 

[Dukhat]

Should they have chosen Moesha instead? I don't follow

That’s not what I meant. Because VOY was their flagship show, UPN exerted more creative control over it than, say, TNG or DS9, which were syndicated and not on a ‘network,’ per se.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I liked the idea of the Ocampa short lifespan. But they clearly didn’t think through the math of “One baby ever”.

In Elogium they could have fixed it by saying “Ocampa can only reproduce once but they have HUGE litters”.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Honestly? From the conception.

"Stranded in the Delta Quadrant" is an inherently flawed premise, along the lines of Gilligan's Island or Lost in Space, in that you know they're never, ever going to find their way home before the very last episode. So automatically, it's not terribly interesting or suspenseful.

Then they threw out the potentially intriguing Starfleet/Maquis conflict by having the Maquis crew members seamlessly integrate themselves into the Starfleet crew almost immediately. They worsened it by choosing to tell subpar TNG-style stories instead of asking themselves, "How can we make this show new and different? What can we do here that we could NEVER do on TNG or DS9?"

Most of the casting was off, with the ensemble never developing the group chemistry that the previous Trek shows had. Some of the characters, like Neelix, were actively annoying. If it were up to me, I would've thrown out most everyone except for Robert Picardo and Robert Duncan McNeill and cast the show over again.

The addition of Seven of Nine was clearly a pretty desperate move, cynically using sex appeal and the popularity of the Borg to try and drum up interest in a rapidly-failing show. Thankfully, the character outgrew her ignoble origins, thanks in no small part to the acting abilities of Jeri Ryan.

But really, the show was a mess for most of its run. It was like a copy of a copy of a copy, losing resolution with each generation.

 

[Prax]

*yawn

Honestly? From the conception.

"Stranded in the Delta Quadrant" is an inherently flawed premise, along the lines of Gilligan's Island or Lost in Space, in that you know they're never, ever going to find their way home before the very last episode. So automatically, it's not terribly interesting or suspenseful.

I don't really understand the criticism. Them being sent far away, while it is part of the overarching story, it's totally not the point. It's the setting. The purpose was to open up a new world to keep telling Trek stories in. I have no idea how this is supposed to affect your suspense or interest, or the entertainment you would get in watching stories from week to week. This is like saying that "Bajor becoming part of the Federation wasn't a good premise, and wasn't very suspenseful or interesting."

Then they threw out the potentially intriguing Starfleet/Maquis conflict by having the Maquis crew members seamlessly integrate themselves into the Starfleet crew almost immediately. They worsened it by choosing to tell subpar TNG-style stories instead of asking themselves, "How can we make this show new and different? What can we do here that we could NEVER do on TNG or DS9?"

They told many stories that would never have been on TNG, and the dynamics between the characters was totally different. Whether they were "sub par" or not is your opinion, and a generalization anyway. Voyager most certainly isn't "Roddenberry Trek"

Most of the casting was off, with the ensemble never developing the group chemistry that the previous Trek shows had. Some of the characters, like Neelix, were actively annoying. If it were up to me, I would've thrown out most everyone except for Robert Picardo and Robert Duncan McNeill and cast the show over again.

Voyager without Mulgrew is like TNG without Patrick Stewart. Can anyone else really be captain of this show besides Janeway? This comment explains a lot about where you're coming from.

The addition of Seven of Nine was clearly a pretty desperate move, cynically using sex appeal and the popularity of the Borg to try and drum up interest in a rapidly-failing show. Thankfully, the character outgrew her ignoble origins, thanks in no small part to the acting abilities of Jeri Ryan.

Besides her costuming, the character was never written as a shallow sex object. They rarely even allude to her looks. This is a vain attempt to continue scolding the producers, as though they just stumbled upon a good actress but were too dumb to realize it, and despite the odds, the actress just made the best of it.
In reality, they obviously were making smart choices by adding her, and began giving her good stories right away. And that was the point, to revitalize the series, so it has new material to work with, and can continue airing. The same thing happened on DS9 with Worf, and for the same reasons, to revitalize the show, and recover lost ratings.

But really, the show was a mess for most of its run. It was like a copy of a copy of a copy, losing resolution with each generation.

If the show was a mess, and struggling, or rapidly failing, you would have seen a far different outcome. It would not hace lasted 7 years. It wouod have continually tried to reinvent itself every season, as was done on enterprise, and now Discovery. The network would not have been demanding a new Star Trek show to replace it before it ended. It instead is just the opposite, and has all the characteristics of a stable series. There were no mass firings, no dramatic desperate changes. The production staff continued to move up the ladder behind the scenes, etc.

It's not a copy. It's a different show, but It's still Star Trek. It's about a ship flying through space and encountering things. That's what Star Trek is generally about.

You might as well pack up now and never watch two movies of a similar story, or two shows of the same genre. No one's criticizing Law & Order SVU for being too similar to Law & Order.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Gosh, you've convinced me. I love everything about the show now. It's utterly flawless.

 

[Prax]

Wow, it's like that comment is a copy of a copy of a could just start quoting my own replies instead of typing out new ones.

I won't be lazy.

So I guess if one disagrees and argues against your negative block of hyperbole, and that the show was an utter mess from conception, then they must feel it was flawless and perfect. Yes, God forbid someone respond to such comments in the Voyager forum. It must be one extreme or the other, apparently. How honest

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I liked the idea of the Ocampa short lifespan. But they clearly didn’t think through the math of “One baby ever”.

In Elogium they could have fixed it by saying “Ocampa can only reproduce once but they have HUGE litters”.

How do we know that the Ocampa were not slowly dying out? In 500 generations since moving underground, they'd lost most of their mental abilities, whose to say the population was starting to dwindle due to their environmental factors, with one child becoming more prevalent. Kes was a single birth but only mentioned having one uncle, which would suggest one of her parents was a single birth as well, whilst she only had a single child in her alternate future.

For all we know, the Ocampa are the DQ version of pandas

 

[gakelly]

I'm watching it and in season 5..the constant time travel shows are really annoying and in almost every instance really awful. We can just reset the show next week...the things that happen to the main characters really aren't important because they never truly happened.
The writers could have tried to develop the actual characters instead of the lame ass gimmick of time travel every 3rd or 4th episode.
And then they woke up and it was all just a dream.

 

[gakelly]

In regards to Janeway, I'll quote Riker.
"You ARE arrogant, and closed-minded. You need to control everything and everyone. You don't provide an atmosphere of trust, and you don't inspire these people to go out of their way for you. You've got everybody wound up so tight, there's no joy in anything. I don't think you're a particularly good captain."

 

[Discofan]

The time travel shows on Voyager don't really matter since there are no consequences to their actions unless the plot demands it. Like the last time they see Braxton on Earth, he is a crazy old man and then he's young again and never experienced the episode!!! I mean in that case, you'd think the whole thing would be canceled and they'd back before the stealing of the time-ship! But NO!!! Everything happened except that Braxton never experienced it!! Yeah!!

 

[cosmic mouse]

*yawn

Welcome back, Prax. There aren't too many VOY fans left on the fora these days, sorry to say...

 

[Kor]

The time travel shows on Voyager don't really matter since there are no consequences to their actions unless the plot demands it. Like the last time they see Braxton on Earth, he is a crazy old man and then he's young again and never experienced the episode!!! I mean in that case, you'd think the whole thing would be canceled and they'd back before the stealing of the time-ship! But NO!!! Everything happened except that Braxton never experienced it!! Yeah!!

Then the next time we see Braxton, he actually did experience those three decades of exile on 20th-century Earth.

And he has a different face.

Kor

 

[Discofan]

Then the next time we see Braxton, he actually did experience those three decades of exile on 20th-century Earth.

And he has a different face.

Kor

I am Ok with the change of face, they can't always get the same actor to play the same role. I mean I don't hold it against them. It's the rest that is avoidable.

 

[XCV330]

The premise was workable, BSG managed it, but the the powers that be knew how to make one show, over and over. They made it once more with Enterprise until they finally got desperate.

You could have slapped a Star Trek sign into 30 minutes of a guy in a colorful jumpsuit milking a cow while talking technobabble back and forth to the cow, and called it Star Trek: Bovine and probably enough people would have watched it in the late 90s to make a go of things for 7 years. MCI, Sprint, and ATT needed somewhere to hawk their competing collect call commercials, and star trek standards were low.

Where it first went wrong? As others said, they immediately dropped the ball with the Maquis turning into regular people. Chakotay went from an interesting character to a bread sandwich.

Then the Kazon happened. And Happened. And Continued to happen. Then the Borg were overused. And then Seven of 9 saved the show with the help of Picardo since the writers and showrunners never seemed to know how to utilize the actors or their characters. Yet there were hints sometimes, like Year of Hell, that it could have been a great show. Greatness kept wanting to emit out of all the garbage they piled over top of it, but it never quite got the chance.

It seldom took risks. There was never any skin in the game because of the reset button. The characters were mostly bland. The plots were tedious. And Warp 10 lizards.

By the time they made it home, well.. let me quote Captain Lorca

 

[Prax]

In regards to Janeway, I'll quote Riker.
"You ARE arrogant, and closed-minded. You need to control everything and everyone. You don't provide an atmosphere of trust, and you don't inspire these people to go out of their way for you. You've got everybody wound up so tight, there's no joy in anything. I don't think you're a particularly good captain."

Apparently you haven't been around long enough to witness all the Jellico appreciation threads. He's quite the popular captain in Trekkie circles.

 

[Unicron]

You could have slapped a Star Trek sign into 30 minutes of a guy in a colorful jumpsuit milking a cow while talking technobabble back and forth to the cow, and called it Star Trek: Bovine and probably enough people would have watched it in the late 90s to make a go of things for 7 years.

Is it wrong that I now want Star Trek: Bovine to be a real series?

 

[gakelly]

My thing with the time travel garbage, if it was always so easy to find a way to go back in time, why didn't they just go back in time before they were thrown into the delta quadrant?

 

[Discofan]

My thing with the time travel garbage, if it was always so easy to find a way to go back in time, why didn't they just go back in time before they were thrown into the delta quadrant?

The problem is that they never managed to make their time travel stories the least bit interesting. "Future's End" which is not as bad as the others is filled with pure nonsense.
The mobile emitter? I mean the idea that they could just use an advanced piece of technology of 400 years in the future without anyone from that future noticing any changes is just stupid!! Don't you think that if someone went back to say the 15th century and taught them how to do cars it would change history a little?

 

[Prax]

The problem is that they never managed to make their time travel stories the least bit interesting. "Future's End" which is not as bad as the others is filled with pure nonsense.
The mobile emitter? I mean the idea that they could just use an advanced piece of technology of 400 years in the future without anyone from that future noticing any changes is just stupid!! Don't you think that if someone went back to say the 15th century and taught them how to do cars it would change history a little?

Nonsense!

And what is the standard here? Future's End is actually Voyager's only typical, traditional, sci fi time travel story, as in- The crew go back in time, to our present or past, where we will see them in settings familiar to us, to save their future.
And the genre/style used in the episode episod is "fun action/adventure." What can we compare it to in Star Trek?

There's TNG's "Time's Arrow," with Mark Twain, also an action/adventure but maybe slightly more serious.

Most of TOS's time travel episodes: There's Tomorrow is Yesterday, where the pick up an air force pilot in the 1960's. There's Assignment: Earth, which is similar; fun action/adventure and traditional type of time travel story. And lastly, there is The City on the Edge of Forever, but while this one is a traditional T.T. story, it is more serious, a drama and a romance.

How about DS9? They did Past Tense, which is more of a serious drama, but traditional nonetheless, and a plot hole greater than any you might find in Future's End. Then there's Little Green Men, a Ferengi Comedy(which is one of my ffavorites, but certainly not made to be plausible, or taken seriously). Then there's Trials & Tribble-ations, which is borderline a traditional time travel story, and is not meant to be taken seriously.

How else did Voyager use Time Travel? I would argue they almost always found a new way to make time travel more interesting, and handled it much better than TNG & DS9.

We have a few semi-time travel stories in the first season. in Parallax, they see a reflection of themselves from an hour or so earlier.

In Time and Again, they come upon a recently destroyed civilization, beam down, and later realize they destroyed the world a day earlier. This is good sci fi.

Then there's Eye of the Needle, where the crew find a wormhole going back near federation space. They communicate with someone on the other side, but later realize they were talking to people 20 years in the past. It's a fantastic early episode. DS9 tried to this in season 6 with The Sound of Her Voice and failed, imo.

Next up is Before & After, where Kes is experiencing history in reverse, and begins as an old woman because of a treatment the doctor tried to extend her life with.

None of these were interesting? And the best are yet to come.

There's Year of Hell, which is a pretty universal favorite of even non Voyager fans, and like some of the others is total a novel take on time travel.

After that is Timeless, another fan favorite, an interesting take, and very well written.

Next is Relativity, a follow up to Future's End, and likewise a fun action/adventure story, and maybe a bit of a thriller It involves the timecops, and we get to see their ship and what what they do.

Then there's Fury, which a lot of people don't care for, but not because it isn't a novel or interesting idea in regards to time travel, and it still has its moments, like Tuvok getting confused and suspicious.

After that is Shattered, which is basically Voyager's very original and interesting version of a clip show, but not a clip show. It's a lighthearted romp through Voyager's past seven years.

Lastly is Endgame, which is essentially like Timeless, but not as good.

Most of these are excellent, and original to Trek, which is saying a lot since Voyager was the fourth series and hand to find ways of being creative when hundreds of Trek episodes had already been made. Even Voyager's borderline "time anomoly" episodes are very good, like Gravity, and Blink of an Eye.

I would say the best time travel episodes of TNG and DS9 are Cause & Effect, Tapestry & All Good Things(which are simply Q causing the time travel), The Visitor, and maybe Trials and Little Green Men(the last two dont do anything interesting with time travel, but are good for other reasons). Voyager definitely did more iinteresting, or at the very least, as interesting things with time travel as their predecessors.