- Joined
- Aug 1, 2021
Voyager’s strength lied in Seven of Nine, the Doctor, and Janeway character episodes, with occasional episodes like Workforce involving their entire cast getting to shine.
Some problems were always going to be-Garrett Wang was apparently an atrocious actor, Jennifer Lien had criminal problems, and Tuvok is basically a static character. (Albeit a good one).
You can’t really have the crew progress in terms of characterization in ways amenable to the show’s premise. Janeway becomes more jaded over time? We sort of see that but it’s not really clear how you show that.
Harry getting promoted? You need another main cast member to die and someone has to be the ensign. The Maquis plot? They are 70,000 light years from home. Picking a fight over the Cardassian border is silly.
If I were redoing Voyager, I’d try to cut the fluff(there are more forgettable voyager episodes than genuinely bad ones), and involve a larger secondary cast.
One of the biggest issues Voyager had was due to its premise you can’t really have long running antagonists.
It’s always alien enemy of the week, spatial anomaly, or the occasional time travel plot. Sometimes with the above being peripheral to just influencing a character.
Compare that to DS9-where the cardassians, dominion, and Maquis all served as long running antagonists.
On Voyager there’s always a presumption the ship is moving, and any problem they encounter once solved is going to be passed by.
How do you set up stakes with that? The whole grizzled “it should have been BSG” idea doesn’t work if you take the notion they are one-mostly a Starfleet crew, and two it is in fact the 24th century.
Also Voyager trades and searches for raw materials regularly-we even see voyager set down for serious repairs in Nightinggale.
The premise of Voyager, as well as the setting combine to make it difficult to have high stakes long running serialized plots(it’s always on the move, they can find resources and defend themselves), the crew is Starfleet or were mostly from the federation(internal conflict is not going tone a serious problem barring external influences and the ship’s culture isn’t going to dramatically change), character progression is going to hit brick walls-you can have characters go backwards like Tom being demoted, but contracts require the main cast mostly keep their place.
So at best you get some very good character focused episodes on characters that have the most to grow or change, with the rest of the cast at best being secondary, or useable in full cast episodes, at worst just reciting lines otherwise. Plots last only a few episodes stretched out because the assumption again-is the ship is not staying in one place.
*was thinking of the word ensemble. Voyager has a few very good ensemble episodes.
Anyways, point being Voyager runs up against the problem that Star Trek technology itself makes these sorts of high stakes plots harder to have.
But I do like Voyager.
Some problems were always going to be-Garrett Wang was apparently an atrocious actor, Jennifer Lien had criminal problems, and Tuvok is basically a static character. (Albeit a good one).
You can’t really have the crew progress in terms of characterization in ways amenable to the show’s premise. Janeway becomes more jaded over time? We sort of see that but it’s not really clear how you show that.
Harry getting promoted? You need another main cast member to die and someone has to be the ensign. The Maquis plot? They are 70,000 light years from home. Picking a fight over the Cardassian border is silly.
If I were redoing Voyager, I’d try to cut the fluff(there are more forgettable voyager episodes than genuinely bad ones), and involve a larger secondary cast.
One of the biggest issues Voyager had was due to its premise you can’t really have long running antagonists.
It’s always alien enemy of the week, spatial anomaly, or the occasional time travel plot. Sometimes with the above being peripheral to just influencing a character.
Compare that to DS9-where the cardassians, dominion, and Maquis all served as long running antagonists.
On Voyager there’s always a presumption the ship is moving, and any problem they encounter once solved is going to be passed by.
How do you set up stakes with that? The whole grizzled “it should have been BSG” idea doesn’t work if you take the notion they are one-mostly a Starfleet crew, and two it is in fact the 24th century.
Also Voyager trades and searches for raw materials regularly-we even see voyager set down for serious repairs in Nightinggale.
The premise of Voyager, as well as the setting combine to make it difficult to have high stakes long running serialized plots(it’s always on the move, they can find resources and defend themselves), the crew is Starfleet or were mostly from the federation(internal conflict is not going tone a serious problem barring external influences and the ship’s culture isn’t going to dramatically change), character progression is going to hit brick walls-you can have characters go backwards like Tom being demoted, but contracts require the main cast mostly keep their place.
So at best you get some very good character focused episodes on characters that have the most to grow or change, with the rest of the cast at best being secondary, or useable in full cast episodes, at worst just reciting lines otherwise. Plots last only a few episodes stretched out because the assumption again-is the ship is not staying in one place.
*was thinking of the word ensemble. Voyager has a few very good ensemble episodes.
Anyways, point being Voyager runs up against the problem that Star Trek technology itself makes these sorts of high stakes plots harder to have.
But I do like Voyager.
