Why was Mulgrew so polarizing?

[JustKate]

Military yet mom-ish, hmm.

Well, not at the same time. Depending on your definition of "motherly," I guess.

 

[Praetor]

Yes - but regarding the military angle, my suppositions...well, they aren't quite 100 percent guessing, but they've got a fairly significant guessing quotient.

I've never been in the military, though I've been around it a lot, so I've never experienced being commanded by a female officer, and the two people I know best who were in the military served either at a time or in a place (father in WWII; husband in a tank unit) where they didn't have female officers in direct command over them. So unlike some of my other statements about the military, I'm not drawing on direct experience or experience-once-removed. My military guess is based simply on female officers I've met. But "met" isn't at all the same thing as "been under the command of." Hence my calling it a guess.

But yes, I do think it's possible that some people expected Janeway to act more like a civilian boss than a captain - just because that's the sort of leader they are more familiar with. And I think the fact that she's female made those expectations...more complicated, let's say.

Oh, and I also think it's possible that to other people, she might not have seemed military enough - that motherly streak, for example.

See? Complicated.

Okay, so I do get you then. The two realities of 'women in charge' combined rather uniquely with viewer expectation of how a woman in charge should behave to create a rather unique 'actual' perception of Janeway, having nothing to do with the actress and everything to do with the character.

Seems like the best explanation I've heard so far.

 

[JustKate]

Well, thanks. And you said it in about 1/20th of the number of words I used, too. Very nice!

 

[Praetor]

Ironic, since you're the editor.

 

[JustKate]

Yes, but I am also extraordinarily thorough. Besides, everybody needs an editor, including editors.

Edit: Oh, and I tend to think things out by writing them down. So you all get to "benefit" by my thought processes, you lucky devils.

 

[Guy Gardener]

According to a Mulgrew interview the network suits were so nervous about having a woman captain that they didn't give her free reign to play Janeway until the episode "Death Wish" in Season 2.

What does that mean?

I have this vision of everywhere Kate went for the first two seasons, that there was some suit with his hand up her ass following her around.

But then it could mean anything from she got a paper back novel the size of war and peace every day full of notes explaining what she was doing wrong, down to there was a special suit tasked to her like an antilife coach to wring out her estrogen every episode?

if that's even close to a half truth, no wonder Bujold ran?

It's odd that Kate can draw a line in the sand like that so clearly.

O?

Maybe she got to compare and contrast performance in soem sort of wager? if one janeway in Deathlock was Suit network Approved janeway and the other was mulgrew janeway and then there was a decision afterward about who was the superior janeway?

Oh dear!

Deadlock was the episode after Investigations, where Taylor (is that right?) proved that Arcs suck and that they are unworkable and uninteresting and that the suits and fans should stop pestering her to do things their way and that they never inflict an arc on the series ever again.

I wonder if everyone got a monkey off their back after Investigations?

 

[Praetor]

You seem to draw a correlation there, good sir.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Except for the brain fart that had me read deadlock when Kimc wrote death wish, sure, everything is connected.

 

[kimc]

Except for the brain fart that had me read deadlock when Kimc wrote death wish, sure, everything is connected.

Oh, is that what happend? I was really getting onfused there!

 

[Brit]

I've always thought the "momish" part was what turned some people off the Janeway character, especially those that were young and probably straining at the ties to their parents.

About four or five years ago I got into it with a guy on the old Deciper board. He hated "Voyager" and Janeway, but his biggest complaint was that "Voyager" tried to be about "family". It was pretty much at that point that I wrote him off because I can't think of a successful series that wasn't about some core group that were "family" either by the ties of kin or friendship.

Brit

 

[Guy Gardener]

Transference?

Doctor's lose their license for that shite.

TV Producers make their fortunes from leveraging this criminally suggestive state it would seem.

 

[EJA]

So who did she have an affair with?

 

[ltcmmanderdata]

i never found Janeway polarizing always an enjoyable captain

 

[CaptainStoner]

Personally, I thought Voyager was really behind the times. They made a big deal out of a woman captain, like it was some amazing pioneering event in television history, at a time when woman were already CEOs and in other positions of authority. It would have been a big deal in the 60s. It didn't seem relevent in the 90s.

Far from being polarizing to some fans, I think it was the studio and the writers who were hung up on a female captain. They were the ones making a big deal out of it, when it shouldn't have mattered. That would be like Paramount promoting DS9 as having "the first black commander!" You just show it, you don't make a big ass deal about it.

For fans and those involved in the show, it became their crutch. When the show would be criticized, the response would always be, "Oh, those sexist guys just couldn't handle a female captain."

I think you're fairly right. I've just started VOY. My first impressions - best series premiere of them all - I don't see them making a big deal out of Janeway being a woman, but reading about the backstory of what went into casting her, I think there were some issues, some pretty ironic issues. Here we have character named for a feminist writer, and the first choice to play her ended up quitting for, among other things, the producers wanting her to "pad" the uniform for the fanboys. Talk about "behind the times", eh?
That would have been like having Patrick Stewart wear a hairpiece so he wouldn't turn off the younger female viewers.

I originally remember thinking that Mulgrew sounded like she smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes a day. Her voice is equivalently as deep as Avery Brooks'.
But now that I'm beginning the series and catching it in order, I no longer see what was polarizing. Perhaps its just that I'm older. For one thing, I think the photo of her "husband" back home is too old of a dude. She would totally have a guy back home in his 30's.