Voyager vs. Enterprise: the Final Viewing

Pages

I have a lot of time on my hands these days. So between the 1-2 hours of exercise and home maintenance, I'm having to find unique ways to entertain myself. I've never watched a whole lot of Enterprise or Voyager, the two "failures" of the Star Trek universe. So I thought it might be interesting to watch both and write down my thoughts on each in contrast. So these are the scribblings of the dorkship kazooka, it's two week mission, to seek out and watch Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise and mock them or laud them accordingly.

A little bit of background. I was never a huge Star Trek fan growing up. I watched a lot of TNG, and a little bit of DS9, but I never really got deep into it the way that other nerds and geeks of my generation did. Then, when I first started dating my girlfriend, I began to watch old episodes of Deep Space Nine. My girlfriend happened to see the folder open one day and got a strange look on her face before asking to watch a episode with me. I immediately went into high school repressed nerd mode, and assumed that she was indulging a weird hobby of mine. What was actually happening is that she had at least one Star Trek engineering uniform in a closet in her parents house, and some incriminating Seven of Nine cosplay photos. The weird expression was her trying not to repress her own giant geek-out moment. We've been together for four years now. So I have a particular soft spot for Deep Space Nine beyond its own merits. I also feel, rather controversially, that Sisko is the best captain and could possibly take Kirk in a fistfight.

I don't have a deep emotional connection or identification with a lot of Star Trek. It was something I kind of liked and that my friends really liked, but my science fiction was more based in the hard sci-fi books of the 90's. The space in my heart where Star Trek would normally fit is largely occupied by David Brin's Startide Rising universe, a brilliant world that is unlikely to ever make it to Hollywood due to its reliance on talking dolphins and chimpanzees. But I love the idea of Star Trek, I love the optimism of it and the underlying sense of community. It's something I appreciate more and more the older I get, and something I hope to see maintained as a constant in our pop culture now and into the future.

So all that said, let's get down to some Trekking.

Yes. You do have a lot of time on your hands. That being said I try to forget ever watching Voyager. I thought Enterprise was ok. When I think about Star Trek, I'd rather spent my time thinking how good the original series and Deep Space Nine were. For the Next Generation fans, I liked it too, but it was more of a "catch when I can" show than a "I have to see every episode of this" show to me.

Voyager: "Caretaker"
I didn't see a lot of Voyager, but here's what I remember: an even huger amount of technobabble than was usual even for Star Trek, a really annoying alien cook thing, and a general sense of dissatisfaction with Janeway. This episode hasn't quite made me rethink any of that, though I am a bit on the fence with Janeway. One of the reasons I started watching Voyager was because she's so much fun in Orange is The New Black. I think there's a little bit of writer + director sabatoge going on here. You can almost hear the director in the background going: "She's the captain. But she's a woman! But she's a captain! Remember that Mulgrew!" Her expressions also tend towards the cartoonish at times. She's almost mugging for the camera rather than producing natural expressions.

Tuvok is excellent. Tim Russ is able to project presence in a way that almost no one else on the cast can manage. Any scene that he's in automatically feels better, more solid.

I also really appreciate Robert Beltran's performance as Chakotay. It's not great, but it's solid. He always has the proper tone for each scene, and doesn't feel the need to "go big" like his co-workers. As a result, when his character actually gets angry, it feels genuine. There's a lot of anger in this series, but since there's not a lot to contrast it with, much of it comes across as a tantrum. But again, there's self-sabotage from the writing room with his Native American ancestry. It could have been an interesting take on how the Native communities of earth were able to integrate into the Federation without losing their traditions or sense of self. Instead what we get is some bizarro Dances With Wolves bullsh*t. I'm pretty sure I already saw a "vision quest" episode in a Netflix summary.

The guy playing Harry Kim was better than I remembered.

The writing was a little better than I was expecting, sort of on par with a middle-of-the road TNG episode. But I didn't have very high expectations coming in. I liked the concept of the Caretaker, and thematically it was a great way to introduce the show. Voyager integrated the terrorists into their crew a little too readily, but I was willing to accept that conceit, and I imagine there's some future episodes about inter-crew conflict and coming together and all that jazz.

Neelix and telepath girl are obnoxious. There's no getting around it. You can kind of see the initial concept for Neelix: a scrounger/scoundrel, sort of like the old supply sergeant archetype from old World War II movies. What he ends up being is Star Trek's version of Jar Jar Binks. Why did they even bring him along in the first place? Why did telepath girl want to leave her people right at their time of greatest need? What purpose do either one of them serve on this crew? Functionally or narratively? Telepath girl has her moments. She's a decent actress, but it's hard to class up any scenes you're sharing with Jar Jar.

Enterprise: "Broken Bow"
I remember Enterprise kind of fondly. There's this great scene somewhere down this scene where two guys are throwing a football back and forth across a cargo bay in zero gravity. It was that kind grounding that I really appreciated in Enterprise. A lot of the technology based plots and smooth textures of the later series felt a little floaty and untethered from the, uh, "real" world. Part of that is just an increased budget and experience in design, but some of it is actually having to think about how things work in a future world, rather than waving a wand/tri-corder to explain it away. I really liked that about Enterprise. And then OH f*ck, THAT'S RIGHT, TIME TRAVEL. That's why Enterprise didn't work. They had this interesting early space colonization period, where everything was new and humans were inexperienced, and somebody thought that wasn't a good enough hook. Whoever came up with the phrase "temporal Cold War" is both a brilliant man and should be beaten with his own thesaurus. It's not really a "Cold War" if people are shooting at each other.

Overall the pilot was pretty decent. Had the usual pilot weaknesses where the actors haven't quite figured out their characters, and you're having to introduce a whole bunch of people and a premise along with a coherent plotline, but everything came together well enough. There were Vulcans and Klingons and beagles, oh my!

In retrospect, the infamous decontamination scene is really funny. I appreciate that they were gratuitous to all sexual preferences, rather than just a laser focus on T'Pol. We also get a lot of Scott Bakula lounging around the cabin in his underwear while cuddling a beagle. Ladyboners, indeed.

A brief note on Voyager, since we're doing this in contrast: the difference in acting ability is community theatre vs. professional film. Everyone in Enterprise is competent at the very least. I've seen a lot of criticism of Scott Bakula in this role, but whatever his faults, he's average at worst. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to watch a whole lot of Voyager if the cast there doesn't improve. Bad writing can be redeemed with reasonable acting sometimes. I've never felt that the converse was true.

Voyager: "Parallax"
This episode drove me nuts. Look, I don't care what sort of reality or work experience you come from, you don't put the crazy genius with temper issues in charge of anything. The workaday dude with a steady personality, that's the guy you put in charge of the crazy genius. So Chakotay says, "I need another Maquis officer in the command structure," as if putting one terrorist leader in the second highest position wasn't problematic enough. And who does he want in charge of engineering? The half-Klingon who can't have a single conversation without flying off the handle and smashing something. Klingons might have some temper issues, but Torres can't seem to buy a carton of milk without shattering the freezer door, knocking over the beer stand, and stabbing the cashier. Shouldn't being half Klingon make her half as volatile? Couldn't they give her some Rigellian Prozac or something?

So in this episode, Voyager falls into the event horizon of a black hole. Once inside, they can't see anything, can't detect that they are moving, and are all killed by massive doses of radiation before tidal gravitational forces alternatively rip and crush the remants of their ship. Oh, sorry, that's what actually would happen if you found yourself inside the event horizon of a black hole. I give them some Star Trek slack here. Star Trek plays pretty loose with the rules of space and time. I only mention this because I actively lost IQ points when Neelix mansplains to blonde telepath girl that an event horizon is an "energy field" surrounding a black hole. Which I guess, in some convoluted sense is true, much as a man-eating tiger is an energy field surrounding a sharp set of teeth.

In the course of escaping, Belana Torres demonstrates that she can keep her temper under control, and effectively manage junior officers while establishing bonds of loyalty between those self-same officers. Because of this, Janeway realizes that Chakotay is correct and places her in charge of a newly won-over crew. Oh, sorry, no, she techno-babbles her way out of it with very little consultation with the acting chief of engineering nor junior officers. I mentioned something about tantrums above. This is largely what I'm talking about. The actress playing Torres doesn't actually make me think that she is overcome with rage in the sense that a steroid-addled high school football player might. She just looks like she's frustrated, and indulging in anger rather than dealing with it like every other humanoid species seems to. Somebody who treated this as an uncontrollable incapacitating condition might have been an interesting character. Somebody who throws glassware and yells a lot is just an obnoxious brat.

Voyager: "Time and Again"
Can we talk about Tom Paris for a moment? I suspect that from a disinterested studio producer point of view, he's the most important character: the white straight dude who the largely dude audience is supposed to identify with now that the captain is (gasp) a woman. (But she's also the captain, Mulgrew! Remember that!) He's been set up as this carefree Han Solo character with a genuinely interesting backstory. And the actor they chose to play him is abysmal. Now, I don't have particularly high standards for Star Trek acting. Shatner established a certain precedent for camp early on, and I'm not sure Star Trek has ever really escaped it, even in the newer movies. But this guy...holy crap. Surely, there were other straight (or not) white dudes who could have played this role better. The writing's not doing him any favors, but he should never have gotten past the Attractive Ensign #2 phase of casting.

So in this episode, literally nothing happens. That's the problem with time travel, as Enterprise is about to find out. Nothing changes, nothing develops. A good time travel or mirror universe story reveals some facet of the character's personality, and foreshadows changes to that personality. A bad one just goes, "Diddly diddly dee, aren't I clever what with my time machines and such! Oh look, we're all wearing bowler hats!" We come out of this with some sense of Janeway's reverence for the Prime Directive. But the time travel aspect wasn't necessary to demonstrate that.

Enterprise: "Fight or Flight"
I suspect if Enterprise had comprised of episodes largely like this one, it would have been on the air much longer. There's nothing particularly special about the plot or the events of this episode, although Hoshi's slug empathy ended up being charming, if a little on the nose. But this was the feel Enterprise should have shot for: an underpowered Enterprise, unable to fight or tech their way out of most situations, encountering new and strange races and slowly building diplomatic ties and making worthy enemies.

Actually, let me expand on the Hoshi-slug sub-plot a bit. Throughout this episode, Hoshi is clearly uncomfortable with starship life, and her brush with danger rattles her to the point that she begins to question whether she should even be on the ship at all. As she's doing this, she is caring for a biological sample, a slug that they acquired in an off-screen planetary survey. The slug is also having some issues with ship life. Through the course of the episode, Hoshi eventually conquers her insecurities and plays a major role in saving the ship and making first contact with a new, technologically advanced race. It's a nice contrast to Voyager in that we're already seeing some signs of growth from the characters. Hoshi doesn't change instantly, but she makes acknowledgements that she needs to change. She's able to overcome her reservations, if not deal with them completely. And in a weird way, Voyager is doing the same thing, it's just doing a sh*t job of it. In the mirror universe where these series are switched, Hoshi would have ended up in charge of the away teams after a successful translation that had nothing to do with away teams.

I just sum up Voyager in two words "bad writing". I still remember the episode where they killed Harry Kim, then another version of him comes over from another dimension which becomes Harry Kim from then forward on the show, and they never mention it again. Also, Kess was awesome idea that they sh*tted all over. I know they originally wanted the character to grow up and grow old during the lifetime of the show since her species only lived eight years. I actually remember some good moments from Enterprise. One of my favorites is when Tucker was seriously injured, and they created a clone to get the necessary organs to fix him. Captain Archer having to deal with the morality of killing a living, innocent intelligent being to save the life of his friend was written really well.

I like this review format. Can we call them reviews? They lean toward straight up critical analysis, in a good way.

Plus, I think that looking at flawed works can be insightful in itself. Figuring out why something failed (and noting where it succeeded anyway) can, I think, illuminate the fundamental structures, sometimes better than watch a perfect work. And this way, you can watch the painful bits, so I don't have to!

I approve wholeheartedly of this venture, mostly because I couldn't do it. In my mind, Star Trek ended with DS9. That being said, Sisko is totes the best captain.

I like the review idea too, but I don't know any episodes by name where I can directly reference what I am talking about.

big_man_cjs wrote:

I like the review idea too, but I don't know any episodes by name where I can directly reference what I am talking about.

Good point. I'm not really summarizing things very well. I may just link to wikipedia summaries if I don't find the episode interesting enough to bullet point the plot.

My favorite Star Trek series is Voyager. That's right. I said it.

/stares everyone down

And I liked it even more after recently re-watching all of TNG and watching DS9 for the first time.

People's opinions of TNG are tainted by nostalgia. Seriously. Go to IMDb and look at the series' overall rating: 8.5. Battlestar Galactica pulled an 8.7, so TNG must be just as mind-blowingly good.

But then look at the ratings for the individual episodes. Lots of 5s, 6s, and 7s with only the occasional 8. That's because there were maybe one or two good episodes per season and the rest were mediocre at best. And some were frankly terrible.

And I still don't understand everyone's love affair with DS9. Star Trek is all about exploration, meeting new species, and either making out with them or fighting them. It's not about sitting on a space station. Sure, some of the characters were good, but they couldn't make up for the series' shortcomings.

Voyager, on the other hand, was a great fish out of water series. No more Federation. No more ship of the line that could take on any foe. Heck, they didn't know who was friend of foe because they were in the Delta quadrant. It was just one small vessel and it's crew trying to survive and, if possible, make their way home. That set up an awesome dynamic for the show. Toss in some great character arcs--the Doctor carving out a life and rights for holographic entities and Seven of Nine rediscovering what it means to be human--and the show got even better.

And Enterprise holds its own in my books, as well. Considering that it was shoehorned in before the original series, it operated under a slew of restrictions to make sure it didn't violate cannon.

kazooka wrote:

I only mention this because I actively lost IQ points when Neelix mansplains to blonde telepath girl that an event horizon is an "energy field" surrounding a black hole. Which I guess, in some convoluted sense is true, much as a man-eating tiger is an energy field surrounding a sharp set of teeth.

This is the best thing I've read all day.

OG_slinger wrote:

My favorite Star Trek series is Voyager. That's right. I said it.

/stares everyone down

And I liked it even more after recently re-watching all of TNG and watching DS9 for the first time.

People's opinions of TNG are tainted by nostalgia. Seriously. Go to IMDb and look at the series' overall rating: 8.5. Battlestar Galactica pulled an 8.7, so TNG must be just as mind-blowingly good.

But then look at the ratings for the individual episodes. Lots of 5s, 6s, and 7s with only the occasional 8. That's because there were maybe one or two good episodes per season and the rest were mediocre at best. And some were frankly terrible.

And I still don't understand everyone's love affair with DS9. Star Trek is all about exploration, meeting new species, and either making out with them or fighting them. It's not about sitting on a space station. Sure, some of the characters were good, but they couldn't make up for the series' shortcomings.

Voyager, on the other hand, was a great fish out of water series. No more Federation. No more ship of the line that could take on any foe. Heck, they didn't know who was friend of foe because they were in the Delta quadrant. It was just one small vessel and it's crew trying to survive and, if possible, make their way home. That set up an awesome dynamic for the show. Toss in some great character arcs--the Doctor carving out a life and rights for holographic entities and Seven of Nine rediscovering what it means to be human--and the show got even better.

And Enterprise holds its own in my books, as well. Considering that it was shoehorned in before the original series, it operated under a slew of restrictions to make sure it didn't violate cannon.

In Deep Space Nice, they explore an entire quadrant of the galaxy and discover new species while hanging out on a space station. Now that's straight cool right there. Not all Star Trek has to take place on a ship. I like that explore another aspect of the Trek universe.

Excellent. This thread will pass some time at work. Here are some of my unsolicited thoughts.

For Star Trek, I am firmly in Team DS9. That said, it was overshadowed by Babylon 5 for me. I am fairly certain B5 had a positive influence on DS9 as they were both airing at the same time.

Opinions are definitely tainted by nostalgia all around. Whenever I see any of these shows nowadays my reaction typically ranges from "This isn't quite as good as I remember" to "This is downright cringeworthy."

Enterprise is better than Voyager. No contest. I think Enterprise was pretty solid overall and a bit unfairly maligned. The theme of humanity's first, stumbling steps in space exploration was executed fairly well (especially in the first couple of seasons). I particularly liked the interactions with the Vulcans and Andorians. The temporal cold war plotline was mediocre, but not terrible.

Voyager also had a great premise that OG describes: the "fish out of water". The trouble is that it was just executed so poorly. The Federation/Maquis crew integrated with ridiculous seamlessness. And worse, I never really got the sense that Voyager was struggling to survive out there at all. Every problem was solved within an hour by invoking some technobabble. Sure, that's the Star Trek way, but they missed an opportunity there to really set it apart. Later, Stargate Universe took the same exact same themes and handled them so much better (RIP Stargate). In that series, there was a palpable sense of desperation and tension. Every victory they got was hard fought and few characters felt truly safe from danger. If Voyager had been a bit more like that, it would have been substantially better.

I look forward to seeing how my thoughts differ from someone viewing them with a more recent, mature perspective.

edit: Also, David Brin needs to get off his ass and start writing some new Uplift novels.

second edit:

I also feel, rather controversially, that Sisko is the best captain and could possibly take Kirk in a fistfight.

Sisko decked Q. 'Nuff said.

I'm with OG_slinger, Voyager is my favorite as well. Of course, it's not perfect, but then what show is after all? I think part of why I like it most is because of the far more frequent Q and Borg episodes, which were always my favorites on TNG.

gewy wrote:

Excellent. This thread will pass some time at work. Here are some of my unsolicited thoughts.

For Star Trek, I am firmly in Team DS9. That said, it was overshadowed by Babylon 5 for me.
[...]

edit: Also, David Brin needs to get off his ass and start writing some new Uplift novels.

I agree with both, though I will also accept as substitute new Space-Opera-With-Lots-Of-Really-Alien-Aliens. In either medium.

That said, I'm in this thread for the walk through the valley of the shadow of "Threshold".

kazooka wrote:

I only mention this because I actively lost IQ points when Neelix mansplains to blonde telepath girl that an event horizon is an "energy field" surrounding a black hole. Which I guess, in some convoluted sense is true, much as a man-eating tiger is an energy field surrounding a sharp set of teeth.

Is this the same episode where the event horizon was an actual physical barrier, that they had to break open by ramming it with the ship? If so, thats where I lost all interest in Voyager. I was struggling to tolerate it up til then. Never could get into any of the series after TOS.

Well, I liked both Voyager and Enterprise, but only after I watched them the second time around. Out of the two series, though, I thought the best episode was from Voyage and was called "Death Wish," the story of one of the Q that wants to die.

It's really tackles the issue of self determination and Gerrit Graham does an excellent acting job here. His monologue about the right to commit suicide is some outstanding writing, IMO.

Plus, hippies from Woodstock, Sir Issac Newton, and Will Riker.

I liked Voyager the best of Star Trek, and I watched through all the episodes about 3 times already. The first season of Voyager is really rough, and the second season not much better - the 3rd-7th seasons made it better than TNG, IMO. DS9, I never really glommed on. I didn't like the characters enough.

Voyager is essentially retelling The Odyssey, except Janeway is Odysseus and she wants to bring the entire ship home. Just as in The Odyssey, you never really get a sense that the hero is in any danger and he's going to make it back - the only question really is how and how long.

Torres changes as the series progresses. I felt that her initial temper problems were a little overplayed, but necessary to establish the start of her character arc. Paris I never really cared for. He's the WASP that apparently needs to be in every series ever, and the episodes that feature him try too hard to say, "He really the main character!" His lines and attitude speak of an anachronistic sense of privilege that shouldn't even be there.

I liked Janeway the best, with The Doctor and Seven-of-Nine coming in second. Seven's kind of a little too fanservicey for my taste, but I can live with that. Neelix gets, er, "better" as the series progresses, which is just to say that the dialogue and the actor didn't grate quite so much by the third season. Maybe you just get used to him.

All of Star Trek is 50% boring episodes / characters. I can't stand Deanna Troi just as I can't stand Kes and her stupid chef friend.

Phoenix Rev wrote:

Well, I liked both Voyager and Enterprise, but only after I watched them the second time around. Out of the two series, though, I thought the best episode was from Voyage and was called "Death Wish," the story of one of the Q that wants to die.

It's really tackles the issue of self determination and Gerrit Graham does an excellent acting job here. His monologue about the right to commit suicide is some outstanding writing, IMO.

Plus, hippies from Woodstock, Sir Issac Newton, and Will Riker.

As much as I didn't like Voyager, the episode where the Q wants to kill himself was pretty good. The episodes of that series where they dealt with the Q were the best it had to offer. Conversely, their dealings with the Borg and Species 8472 were some of the worst. Though, I did come to like Seven of Nine, even if she was fanservice wrapped in a body suit.

It occurred to me, whilst reading this thread, that Enterprise is the only series that I have only watched once, at broadcast.

TOS occupies a weird special place in my heart, because I watched it when I was a kid. It's like when I order Doctors according to preference. Old Who and new Who are separate (Tom Baker and Matt Smith, if anyone is interested). TOS has no competition.

After that, it is DS9, Voyager, NG and then Enterprise, but I am not sure that I gave Enterprise a fair shake. I would watch it after my current project, but since I am re-re-re-re-watching Firefly right now, that might not be the best idea!

Sisko win the captain's badge, but on,y after he shaves his head, grows a beard, and a massive pair of angry balls. Picard before that.

The thing that makes me saddest about Star Trek is that Worf will never be a captain, because he saved his wife. And the fact that she died shortly thereafter. Harsh.

kazooka, this is a great idea. Good job!

Voyager over DS9, everything over Enterprise.

It's already been stated that Voyager needed a season or two to come into its own, but after that, I thought it was the best embodiment of what Star Trek is to me since TOS. They were somewhere new, and they wandered around basically because they could. "New life and new civilizations" and all that, which is what I found TNG lacked somewhat. Don't get wrong; I really liked TNG once Riker grew a beard, but it was much more genteel than TOS. (Think Roger Moore Bond vs. Sean Connery Bond.)

My big beef with DS9 is that there was no 'Trek'. It was a fine show, just not a good Star Trek show. I liked the different approach in the Star Trek universe, I could just never get over the fact that they called it 'Star Trek' instead of 'Waiting Around By Stars For Cool Things To Come To Us'.

It's possible that Enterprise also needed time to grow, but I just couldn't stand it that long. The first season of Enterprise, at least, felt entirely made of "hey, look at this blatant foreshadowing of something you liked in TOS!", I didn't enjoy the acting, and then I lost interest.

spider_j wrote:

After that, it is DS9, Voyager, NG and then Enterprise, but I am not sure that I gave Enterprise a fair shake. I would watch it after my current project, but since I am re-re-re-re-watching Firefly right now, that might not be the best idea!

It's funny you said that. I've gotten an old buddy of mine back into sci-fi shows. We watched BSG over the summer and now we're watching Firefly. He's also watching Enterprise for the first time because he missed it when it was first broadcast.

He basically came to the same conclusion as you: there's a massive difference in the quality of writing and storytelling between a really good show like Firefly and any of the Star Treks. Sure, those shows are mostly entertaining, but he's not clamouring to watch another episode of Star Trek like he is with Firefly and was with BSG.

I actually enjoyed all the Trek series to various degrees. DS9 is by far my favorite, between a stellar cast and the storyline being more serialized than the other incarnations of Trek. Though the first season of DS9 is possibly the weakest season of any Trek series (though with a few exceptional standout episodes), oddly enough.

I could just never get over the fact that they called it 'Star Trek' instead of 'Waiting Around By Stars For Cool Things To Come To Us

Chumpy, I know that I'm quoting you, but I'm not picking you out!

I never really got that sentiment. Every Trek has had it's share of "stay on board" episodes, and the station gave a broader base for that. The crew travelled very frequently, and to all kinds of places (Earth, Bajor, the Klingon homeworld, Cardassia, Ferenginar and the Founders' world all stand out, as do various trips to the past) and once the Defiant arrived, there were plenty of flying about episodes. They had a honking great wormhole next door to let them go to weird places!

TNG, on the other hand, rarely left explored space. It took Voyager a season to get out of Kazon space, somehow.

That said, I always thought that the abandoned version of Terrak Nor was a bit cheaty!

I haven't watched Voyager in a long time, but I did try watching Enterprise over the last year.

It's just SO DAMN SLOW. It's not like things don't happen or that the characters are 2 dimensional (although the acting is a bit flat at times). It's just that they spend 80% of every episode going through the exact same "I can't quite understand how they/it/we are so different than us/that/what I know" thought process that it just gets mind numbingly boring after a while. I didn't mind the episodes that had the Time War in them, but the entire concept itself is just ridiculous for a series that's taking place chronologically before the others. They didn't establish a good reason early why it wouldn't have been documented somehow.

Also, Enterprise has the worse opening / theme song ever. I couldn't wait to skip it every time. Thank god I was watching on Netflix and not live, it would have killed the show for me.

kazooka wrote:

The writing's not doing [Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris)] any favors, but he should never have gotten past the Attractive Ensign #2 phase of casting.

I believe you mean Cadet Locarno.

IMAGE(http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060722204050/memoryalpha/en/images/thumb/5/5e/Nicholas_Locarno.jpg/292px-Nicholas_Locarno.jpg)

muttonchop wrote:
kazooka wrote:

I only mention this because I actively lost IQ points when Neelix mansplains to blonde telepath girl that an event horizon is an "energy field" surrounding a black hole. Which I guess, in some convoluted sense is true, much as a man-eating tiger is an energy field surrounding a sharp set of teeth.

This is the best thing I've read all day.

I came out of morbid curiosity about the thread title, I stayed for writing like this.

Well I'll be the unimaginative one and declare TNG as my favourite and Picard as the best captain. TOS is without parallel for precedent, or the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, but I feel that TNG took what made TOS "Star Trek" and refined it in every way: the optimism, the futurism, the production, the maturity (some qualities are relative). With three more series since then, I think it can be easy to overlook how much of a risk TNG was: at best it could have been a re-hash of TOS (and season one really was), but no one could reasonably have expected lightning to strike twice. But it did, and in my opinion much more successfully. For what it's worth, I'll also say that no TNG movie was ever as good as the strongest TNG episodes (Best of Both Worlds, and Chain of Command spring immediately to mind). But even that said, my desert island Star Trek (we all have one, don't we?) would be just VI.

Alright, back to Voyager and Enterprise.

Gravey wrote:
kazooka wrote:

The writing's not doing [Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris)] any favors, but he should never have gotten past the Attractive Ensign #2 phase of casting.

I believe you mean Cadet Locarno.

IMAGE(http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060722204050/memoryalpha/en/images/thumb/5/5e/Nicholas_Locarno.jpg/292px-Nicholas_Locarno.jpg)

muttonchop wrote:
kazooka wrote:

I only mention this because I actively lost IQ points when Neelix mansplains to blonde telepath girl that an event horizon is an "energy field" surrounding a black hole. Which I guess, in some convoluted sense is true, much as a man-eating tiger is an energy field surrounding a sharp set of teeth.

This is the best thing I've read all day.

I came out of morbid curiosity about the thread title, I stayed for writing like this.

Well I'll be the unimaginative one and declare TNG as my favourite and Picard as the best captain. TOS is without parallel for precedent, or the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, but I feel that TNG took what made TOS "Star Trek" and refined it in every way: the optimism, the futurism, the production, the maturity (some qualities are relative). With three more series since then, I think it can be easy to overlook how much of a risk TNG was: at best it could have been a re-hash of TOS (and season one really was), but no one could reasonably have expected lightning to strike twice. But it did, and in my opinion much more successfully. For what it's worth, I'll also say that no TNG movie was ever as good as the strongest TNG episodes (Best of Both Worlds, and Chain of Command spring immediately to mind). But even that said, my desert island Star Trek (we all have one, don't we?) would be just VI.

Alright, back to Voyager and Enterprise.

I have to agree that TNG took alot of cool chances that hadn't been done before or after. I think writing like the Locutus saga is what made the series so popular which paved the way for the later series. The writers weren't afraid to turn the captain of the show into a villain, and not backtrack it through some stupid time warp/alternate dimension gag. The character even had to deal with the consequences of what happened to him in later episodes. Heck, they made a movie based off of that storyline.

edit: Anybody familiar with the novels? At least I think it was Star Trek. I'm trying to find one I remember the description talking about some major war between two coalitions of aliens that happened thousands or millions of years ago. Where the first battle was two fleets that ran into each other, 100,000 ships on each side, and even though it turned out one of them was just a scout fleet the war raged on for a long time.

I always thought DS9 was the most maligned.

big_man_cjs wrote:

I just sum up Voyager in two words "bad writing". I still remember the episode where they killed Harry Kim, then another version of him comes over from another dimension which becomes Harry Kim from then forward on the show, and they never mention it again.

Another dimension? It's like you don't even listen to the technobabble. Also, it wasn't just Kim, everybody died.

Spoiler:

And not for the last time, which was a very sad episode.

Can we talk about Tom Paris for a moment?

You mean how awesome a character he is and how much character development he went through over the course of the show? He's not my favorite though, since I don't have one.

Although I liked Voyager, there were two real issues I had with it.

The first was that by around season Five the show basically became, as some described it, "The Seven and Janeway Show". By and large the writers apparently became obsessed with them and their characters. The Doctor also had a bunch of episodes about him, but most of the other actors didn't have a whole lot of stories written about them, especially Chakotay who basically vanished except for brief appearances in each show. It would have been nice if they had given us more of the rest of the crew.

The second was the way it ended. In TOS and TNG, the voyages of the starship Enterprise continued even after the show's run was over, so it wasn't so much an actual ending. That's not how it worked on either DS9 or VOY, though, so let's compare those.

Spoiler:

Deep Space Nine and Voyager both had the same element of finality to the show. At the end of DS9, the Dominion are defeated and the Federation turn control of the station over to the Bajorans, and the crew who have been manning it the entire time go their separate ways. At the end of Voyager, the crew and ship finally manage to make their way back to the Alpha Quadrant and specifically to Earth itself.

But what happens after?

In Deep Space 9, we know what happens to each of the main characters because they tell us. Sisko, Kira, Odo, Bashir, Dax, O'Brien, Worf, Quark... We know their fates and where they are probably going once they leave the station, or why they chose to remain there.

In Voyager, the show ends once the ship reaches Earth. But what happens to the criminals (Tom and the Maquis) who were on the ship and served well? Do they merely get pardons, do they get permanent commissions, do they get a chance to go to the Academy, or what? How does Seven begin to adapt to life on Earth and where does she stay? What's the status of the Doctor? Do they finally make Harry a lieutenant? We don't find out any of these things. The show just abruptly... ends. They needed to use five or ten minutes at the end of the show wrapping things up and give the audience some closure. Instead it was just over, and that was that. The only ones who got any kind of closure were Neelix and the ship itself (and eventually Janeway when she appeared briefly in Nemesis).

(Yes, I spoiler tagged something over ten years old. Get over it.)

I can't speak much for Enterprise because I haven't gotten around to watching it yet, but as I remember there was a lot of annoyance because they were screwing with the continuity. The problem is that Star Trek is a show about exploration and discovery, but they couldn't really "discover" anything or anyone that we didn't already know about by the time the original Star Trek came around without playing games with it.

I loved TNG most around the time it was running alongside DS9. The storylines including Federation/Bajoran resettlement under Cardassian reoccupation was brave TV for its time. Picard was made to look like the bad guy and we were given cause to sympathise with the Maquis (ask me where my /nick came from some time ) The Federation was shown not to be a homogeneous and flawlessly benign entity.

DS9 remains my favourite for consistently interesting writing and excellent performances. Garak and Quark are the 2 best supporting characters in any Trek and Sisko could take any captain Star Fleet produced.

As for Voyager - the only good thing to come from it was BSG.

Keldar:

The first was that by around season Five the show basically became, as some described it, "The Seven and Janeway Show". By and large the writers apparently became obsessed with them and their characters. The Doctor also had a bunch of episodes about him, but most of the other actors didn't have a whole lot of stories written about them, especially Chakotay who basically vanished except for brief appearances in each show. It would have been nice if they had given us more of the rest of the crew.

I'm compelled to voice disagreement on this score. Season 5 itself contains a bunch of episodes focused only on characters who are not Janeway and Seven. Paris, IMO, gets a lot more screentime than a lieutenant of his position deserves. I thought this was purely because he was the resident WASP and we're assumed to identify with him the most (I did not). This annoyed me enough to dislike Paris, but the focus is there. Kim got a bunch of attention as well. By season 6, Kim's gotten kidnapped by so many aliens that he's practically the resident damsel in distress.

I'll broadly agree that Chakotay got less emphasize later on; but since I didn't care for his character at all, I found that something of an improvement.

Pages