Where did the show go wrong?

[Farscape One]

Personally, I never had a problem with them getting those thousands of light years jumps closer to home. By the end, they were still a couple decades away without those leaps, so that still keeps with the premise of being far away from known space. (It's interesting to note that the seasons where they made those huge jumps home, seasons 4 and 5, are widely considered the best of the series.)

Nor did I have an issue with their messages... it would have beem a good source of emotion and drama, if done right.

My only real complaint on that is I don't they went far enough with the impact of those messages. There could have been some great scenes or episodes on Tuvok actually seeing his first grandchild, Tom talking to his dad, Naomi talking to her dad for the first time, or ANY number of other things. It was a great idea that got used too sparingly.

 

[suarezguy]

I've never believed there was "oversaturation" with Trek, when did the fans ever insist that there was too much Trek on the air? We seem to nicely handle two series at the same time, when that was the case.

Not really at least the audience overall didn't-the ratings of Deep Space Nine and Voyager are interesting in that every year (4th season boosts aside) they either stayed the same or declined and yet even with that stagnation or decline they were both still good, near the top, for syndication and a netlet, respectively. So mixed successes but some significant support for the idea of viewer fatigue and strongly diminishing interest.

 

[HaventGotALife]

What has happened since that point? Who has done a retrospective on the big screen, and who hasn't?

https://medium.com/@achavers23/why-...st-star-trek-series-in-5-reasons-20c7c5c55af8

https://m.ign.com/articles/2018/08/31/how-deep-space-nine-changed-star-trek-for-the-better

What series aged better? This is a relevant question as Star Trek is a fifty-year franchise with fans watching and debating for decades after the show airs.

A bad incarnation is not forgotten, it is debated and discussed in 2019, years after, in a thread saying "what went wrong?"

So, while there was oversaturation, and both received relatively the same ratings, intitially, which one won the posterity question? Why have concepts created in TNG and DS9 been integrated into new Trek while Voyager has never been mentioned, again?

I know this is not the purpose of this post, just driving the point home about why these need to be great stories. We watch them over a lifetime.

 

[pst]

i just read this article in the federalist yesterday: What the Evolution of the Star Trek Franchise Says About The Shifting TV Landscape

unfortunately it never actually proves its thesis and just sort of devolves into "the orville is good" there at the end. but it does talk a little about voyager's failings and i thought this quote was totally right and in need of deeper exploration:

To determine whether “Star Trek Voyager” was a ratings disaster is a complicated question. It was the top-rated show of UPN—but that’s not saying a lot for a network that was floundering and would eventually be sold in 2006. As critic Greg Fuller noted in 1999, it was a chicken-and-egg situation, whereby the show was failing the network but the network was also failing the show...

the quote is preceded by comments about UPN interfering with the show, stifling the creators, and also the creators themselves being less than wholly invested in the series. i find it hard to believe that anyone working 12 hours a day to write a show isn't invested, but the article seems to think this was the case. i've read elsewhere (i can't remember where) that the voyager writers room was fraught with conflict and in-fighting, jockeying for power.

i guess my point is that, from a technical perspective, voyager likely failed because it was a troubled production, both behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera. hard to get a good product when so many of the key players were at loggerheads.

 

[Discofan]

I think it was a mistake to make Janeway run her ship like a tyrant, especially in view of the fact that it was potentially a generational ship and an important part of the crew weren't even Starfleet. They should have at least made it a duumvirate.

 

[Voth commando1]

I would politely disagree with the premise of the OP to start with. I don't believe Voyager ever went wrong.

Janeway made a fourth wall break as much as an in universe declaration when she said, "one crew, one ship" at the end of caretaker.

Also the Starfleet crew outnumbered the Maquis crew heavily(meaning a mutiny was pretty much doomed to fail), and they were 70,000 light years away from home. Did viewers honestly expect they would be constantly at each other's throats when they had more relevant and immediate things to worry about in the DQ? Threats and challenges which would forge unity?

Also some people apparently wanted it to be grim and gritty a la Battle Star Galactica or something. When that was never the intended tone or atmosphere of the show-there were dark and most certainly serious episodes, but Voyager was well within the standard framework for trekkian optimism, and honestly that is how I preferred it.

 

[Discofan]

I would politely disagree with the premise of the OP to start with. I don't believe Voyager ever went wrong.

Janeway made a fourth wall break as much as an in universe declaration when she said, "one crew, one ship" at the end of caretaker.

Also the Starfleet crew outnumbered the Maquis crew heavily(meaning a mutiny was pretty much doomed to fail), and they were 70,000 light years away from home. Did viewers honestly expect they would be constantly at each other's throats when they had more relevant and immediate things to worry about in the DQ? Threats and challenges which would forge unity?

Also some people apparently wanted it to be grim and gritty a la Battle Star Galactica or something. When that was never the intended tone or atmosphere of the show-there were dark and most certainly serious episodes, but Voyager was well within the standard framework for trekkian optimism, and honestly that is how I preferred it.

So basically, your answer to the question "Where did the show go wrong?" is "Nowhere".

 

[STEPhon IT]

According to those in charge, ENT was even intended to be so open ended that, despite the death of a major regular character, they could pick up their adventures for a fifth season if necessary with the plot simply becoming a 'future episode', ie season five would just pick up from Terra Prime and tell the gap of what happened in the interim. Yes it offers some resolution, but could so easily have also just been a quirky episode outside the chonological timeframe. It very carefully tries to leave room for the show to go on afterwards should it be picked up again.

DS9, or VOY, coming back would require a significant change of format as both shows 'closed the door'. To this day ENT never really has.

A possible 5th season could've explored the mystery of Future Guy and pulling a "Prisoner" type moment and reveal Jonathan Archer as the guy. Trying desperately to fix what went wrong, altering the timeline or restoring it.

 

[Discofan]

A possible 5th season could've explored the mystery of Future Guy and pulling a "Prisoner" type moment and reveal Jonathan Archer as the guy. Trying desperately to fix what went wrong, altering the timeline or restoring it.

And genetically enhancing the Sulibans in the process?

 

[Prax]

IMO, time works, or can work good for a single episode, or maybe even an occasional two-parter. It does not work at all for a serialized season long story. The logic of time-travel stories can't handle more than that. It would just unravel and become a mess.

 

[Discofan]

IMO, time works, or can work good for a single episode, or maybe even an occasional two-parter. It does not work at all for a serialized season long story. The logic of time-travel stories can't handle more than that. It would just unravel and become a mess.

Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" is something that I wouldn't mind getting a series of its own. Arguably the best time travel saga ever written.

 

[BigDaveX]

I would politely disagree with the premise of the OP to start with. I don't believe Voyager ever went wrong.

Janeway made a fourth wall break as much as an in universe declaration when she said, "one crew, one ship" at the end of caretaker.

Also the Starfleet crew outnumbered the Maquis crew heavily(meaning a mutiny was pretty much doomed to fail), and they were 70,000 light years away from home. Did viewers honestly expect they would be constantly at each other's throats when they had more relevant and immediate things to worry about in the DQ? Threats and challenges which would forge unity?

The way I view it, Voyager's situation should have been like a hospital where half of the medical staff are radical left-wingers, and the other half are hardcore alt-right supporters. Yes, they're going to knuckle down and actually do their jobs, since anything else would paint them as a bunch of completely unprofessional morons. Heck, they may even be courteous enough around each other during their coffee breaks. But to expect them to never have any serious moral or ethical debates, or for cliques to form, or for nasty words to be exchanged when backs are turned, is just being unrealistic.

The producers, Berman in particular clearly thought it would be inspirational that the crew would always stick to their principles, no matter how desperate the situation got (albeit it never really got very desperate at all, though that's a different problem). Which, in and of itself, isn't necessarily an unworkable idea. The problem was that they needed to come up with something else to keep the audience hooked in the absence of any situational or interpersonal drama, and to me, that's where Voyager really failed.

Also some people apparently wanted it to be grim and gritty a la Battle Star Galactica or something. When that was never the intended tone or atmosphere of the show-there were dark and most certainly serious episodes, but Voyager was well within the standard framework for trekkian optimism, and honestly that is how I preferred it.

The problem was, we'd just had seven years of a show which demonstrated that bright and optimistic air. And for the most part, it was better-written than Voyager. It seemed to me that instead of figuring out what did work about TNG and trying to take it further, the writers doubled down on the parts of that show which didn't work, namely the holier-than-thou attitude the characters demonstrated in the early seasons, and the focus on technobabble-heavy "anomaly of the week" stories from its later years.

 

[Voth commando1]

The way I view it, Voyager's situation should have been like a hospital where half of the medical staff are radical left-wingers, and the other half are hardcore alt-right supporters. Yes, they're going to knuckle down and actually do their jobs, since anything else would paint them as a bunch of completely unprofessional morons. Heck, they may even be courteous enough around each other during their coffee breaks. But to expect them to never have any serious moral or ethical debates, or for cliques to form, or for nasty words to be exchanged when backs are turned, is just being unrealistic.

The producers, Berman in particular clearly thought it would be inspirational that the crew would always stick to their principles, no matter how desperate the situation got (albeit it never really got very desperate at all, though that's a different problem). Which, in and of itself, isn't necessarily an unworkable idea. The problem was that they needed to come up with something else to keep the audience hooked in the absence of any situational or interpersonal drama, and to me, that's where Voyager really failed.


The problem was, we'd just had seven years of a show which demonstrated that bright and optimistic air. And for the most part, it was better-written than Voyager. It seemed to me that instead of figuring out what did work about TNG and trying to take it further, the writers doubled down on the parts of that show which didn't work, namely the holier-than-thou attitude the characters demonstrated in the early seasons, and the focus on technobabble-heavy "anomaly of the week" stories from its later years.

Okay I disagree here, most of the Maquis are not that ideologically motivated, beyond fighting the Cardassians and defending their homes. Quite a few of them were ex Starfleet or at least went to the academy. The ideological and moral gulf is not near as vast as you make it out to be. Also they were all federation citizens, and the federation is overall a pretty unified society, the Maquis broke over what they felt was bad policy. Only Eddington put his discontent into ideological terms.

 

[Prax]

And they actually do highlight the Maquis/Starfleet dynamic many times, and in creative ways. In Prime Factors we see the Maquis crew influencing the Starfleet crew into methods they never would have done.
In Learning Curve we see Maquis crew who just don't have the professionalism and training to cope with the environment.
In Meld we see more of this, and a worst case scenario of the risks of having these guys on board.
Through season 1, we see Seska helping the local warlords
Through season 2, we see that other Maquis guy helping Seska to take over the ship.

None of these scenarios or episodes could have been made for TNG. They simply wouldn't work as they are in that setting.

How long would it realistically take for the two groups to mesh together in this focused, goal oriented, military environment? One where the two people in charge are the leaders of the two groups, where everyone has to work together. a month? 6 months? a year? Surely by two years, they would no longer be two groups, but one, which is how it works in the show's timeline.

 

[Ghost]

A possible 5th season could've explored the mystery of Future Guy and pulling a "Prisoner" type moment and reveal Jonathan Archer as the guy. Trying desperately to fix what went wrong, altering the timeline or restoring it.

That was the premise for an Enterprise fictional season 5 I had in mind. In future Archer's timeline the Romulan Wars ended up in a stalemate rather that driving the Romulans back to their home systems and in the centuries after there was a cold war in which both sides invested a lot in weapons and other technologies and sciences to give themselves an advantage such as genetic engineering and eventually temporal weapons.
It became so bad that at some point the weapons developed became capable of damaging time-space on the interstellar scale.
That is why future Archer wanted to change the past. First by getting rid of the Klingon Empire whose meddling in the Coalition-Romulan Wars weakened the Coalition, and then weakening the Romulan Star Empire from within by organizing a Reman revolt.

Problem is that his actions only caused more problems like suddenly bringing in the Sphere Builders whose recovered technology would be the basis for temporal weapons and genetic engineering which the Remans used to make themselves into the Na'kuhl (would be revealed not to be a name of a species but rather a position of power)
Yeah a little far fetched that I decided to connect the Remans with the Na'kuhl but it worked for me better than having yet another new species thrown in.

namely the holier-than-thou attitude the characters demonstrated in the early seasons, and the focus on technobabble-heavy "anomaly of the week" stories from its later years.

Sadly true.
Oh I loved the high concept stuff in Voyager, in my opinion the Delta Quadrant felt very exotic which is something that I rather missed in TNG and DSN, but so little development was done with a lot of interesting ideas.

 

[TheGoodStuff]

I must say I love Voyager, I don't think it really did too much wrong...I think the 'problem' was more that it wasn't what some fans wanted/expected.

Even the 'controvertial' aspects of Voyager I find myself agreeing with most of the time...

1. I'm glad they got rid of Kes. Ryan is a far better actress and I much preferred the story with Seven.
2. I like Janeway's command style. She is in an exceptionally awkward situation and she feels like she is making it up as she is going along.
3. I'm glad the show wasn't super grim (crew dying, ship half wrecked constantly etc). I like that it maintained Trek's optimism and lightness.
4. I love the use of the Borg (and all the new species). The Delta Quadrant actually felt foreign and new. Plus, the problem with a foe like the Borg is they eventually need to lose. TNG beat them enough.

Of course there are a niggles like some of the cast being weak or misused (Chakotay & Kim) but most of the shows have this issue.

 

[BigDaveX]

Okay I disagree here, most of the Maquis are not that ideologically motivated, beyond fighting the Cardassians and defending their homes. Quite a few of them were ex Starfleet or at least went to the academy. The ideological and moral gulf is not near as vast as you make it out to be. Also they were all federation citizens, and the federation is overall a pretty unified society, the Maquis broke over what they felt was bad policy. Only Eddington put his discontent into ideological terms.

Even if they have a lot of underlying beliefs in common, you'd think that the fact that the Federation seemingly abandoned a bunch of their former colonies to Cardassian control would create a lot of bad blood between the crews, even if it was one-sided from the direction of the Maquis. And to be fair, in the early episodes of the show that actually did seem to be the case - the problem was more that it was abandoned far too quickly.

And they actually do highlight the Maquis/Starfleet dynamic many times, and in creative ways. In Prime Factors we see the Maquis crew influencing the Starfleet crew into methods they never would have done.
In Learning Curve we see Maquis crew who just don't have the professionalism and training to cope with the environment.
In Meld we see more of this, and a worst case scenario of the risks of having these guys on board.
Through season 1, we see Seska helping the local warlords
Through season 2, we see that other Maquis guy helping Seska to take over the ship.

None of these scenarios or episodes could have been made for TNG. They simply wouldn't work as they are in that setting.

How long would it realistically take for the two groups to mesh together in this focused, goal oriented, military environment? One where the two people in charge are the leaders of the two groups, where everyone has to work together. a month? 6 months? a year? Surely by two years, they would no longer be two groups, but one, which is how it works in the show's timeline.

Yeah, the episodes that explored the differences in approach and attitudes between the Starfleet and Maquis crewmembers for the most part actually worked pretty nicely. The problem to me was that they were the exception rather than the rule - a few bright spots in the middle of a sea of message shows and anomaly of the week episodes.

I actually do agree that given enough time the two crews would come together and work as one unit - however, this was only vaguely inferred rather than actually shown. Personally, I think it would have worked better if there were peaks and troughs in the crew relationship over the first two seasons, with "Basics" being the point where the two crews finally came together as one, discovering just how well Starfleet's analytical and problem-solving skills can combine with the Maquis' survival skills.

 

[Sybok Was Wrong]

This whole fan Idea that the Voyager would have been better if the ship was beat up and the passengers fought...
Doesn't sound like a show I want to watch! It doesn't sound appealing. Sounds like an ugly show. Fans have the worst ideas, and couldn't produce a quality TV show or a worthwhile TV show if their lives depended on it. Just look at all those fan-films out there- corny, cheesy, goofy, badly acted and amateurish.

I think most of you that bash Voyager do it because you're not happy in your lives and need a place to put that dissatisfaction. Voyager was just a TV show for crying out loud, and a well produced and acted one at that. It did its job as a piece of entertainment, and you nitpick and come up with notions of "where it went wrong".

The answer is: it didn't go wrong. It did just fine. Maybe there's something wrong with you! So be well, my friends, and don't make Hollywood offerings count for too much in your lives.

 

[Discofan]

It's funny that they killed everyone that hated Tom Paris.

 

[Lynx]

I must say I love Voyager, I don't think it really did too much wrong...I think the 'problem' was more that it wasn't what some fans wanted/expected.

Even the 'controvertial' aspects of Voyager I find myself agreeing with most of the time...

1. I'm glad they got rid of Kes. Ryan is a far better actress and I much preferred the story with Seven.
2. I like Janeway's command style. She is in an exceptionally awkward situation and she feels like she is making it up as she is going along.
3. I'm glad the show wasn't super grim (crew dying, ship half wrecked constantly etc). I like that it maintained Trek's optimism and lightness.
4. I love the use of the Borg (and all the new species). The Delta Quadrant actually felt foreign and new. Plus, the problem with a foe like the Borg is they eventually need to lose. TNG beat them enough.

Of course there are a niggles like some of the cast being weak or misused (Chakotay & Kim) but most of the shows have this issue.

I agree on some points but not on all.

1. I think that it was a terrible mistake to dump kes who is an amazing character. As I see it, Lien was as good as and sometimes even a better actress than Ryan. As for Kes, she is a much better and more interesting character than Seven. She is nice and friendly but also strong-willed, curious, brave and determined. Her personality and her will to learn and explore personified the spirit of Star Trek, a spirit which was lost when she was dumped.

Not to mention that the over-focus on Seven was damaging the other great characters who were shoved into the background, maybe with the exception of Janeway and The Doctor.

2. Janeway was great in the first three season. After that, the4 character suffered from bad writing and being reduced to a second-hand character after Seven.

3. I totally agree on that one. I was happy that Voyager never turned into something like Stargate Universe with its constant bickering and conflicts.

4. They should have left The Borg out of the story. Thjey were done already in TNG. They shoud have conentrated on coming up with more unknown good Delta Quadrant species. It would be interesting if they had encountered the kelvans (from TOS).

There were a lot of things which could have been done better but for me, all the positive in seasons 1, 2 and 3 outweighs the negative aspects.