“Caretaker”
Written by Rick Berman & Michael Piller & Jeri Taylor
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 101
Original air date: January 16, 1995
Stardate: 48315.6
Captain’s log. A crawl explains the existence of the Maquis, who are rebels against a Federation-Cardassian treaty that ceded disputed territories to each side regardless of who was living there. Gul Evek is chasing a Maquis ship into the Badlands. Maquis engineer B’Elanna Torres takes the weapons offline to add impulse power so Chakotay, the cell’s leader, can get into the Badlands. Tuvok of Vulcan thinks this is a bad idea, but goes along.
Evek follows them into the Badlands, to Chakotay’s surprise, and is damaged. Chakotay avoids a plasma storm, but then is hit by a tetryon beam of unknown origin.
At the New Zealand Penal Colony, Captain Kathryn Janeway approaches a prisoner, Tom Paris. (Janeway served under Paris’s father, now an admiral, on the al-Batani.) A Starfleet washout who hired himself out as a pilot for the Maquis, Janeway offers Paris help with his sentence in exchange for help finding Chakotay’s Maquis ship—Janeway’s chief of security is undercover with his cell, and he hasn’t checked in for a while. They’re in a newly commissioned ship, U.S.S. Voyager, which was designed to better navigate the Badlands—powerful enough to withstand the storms, but maneuverable enough to get out of the way of the ones it can’t withstand.
Paris is flown to Deep Space 9 by Voyager’s conn officer, Lieutenant Stadi, with whom he utterly fails at flirting. At Quark’s Bar on the station, Ensign Harry Kim buys a drink, and then Quark tries to sell him a sounvenir. When Kim begs off, saying they warned them about Ferengi at the Academy, Quark is outraged at slurs against his people being perpetrated by Starfleet. Kim hurriedly agrees to buy some rare gems to make up for it, but then Paris jumps in and points out that the gems are a dime a dozen around these parts.
Kim and Paris exit the bar, leaving behind a dejected Quark, with Paris asking, “Didn’t they warn you about Ferengi at the Academy?”
Paris and Kim report to Voyager and go to sickbay, where the chief medical officer turns out to have history with Paris. They then go to Janeway’s ready room, after which Kim takes his position at ops. Also on the bridge are Stadi at conn and Ensign Rollins at tactical. First Officer Cavit, who is also cold to Paris, takes them out toward the Badlands.
Paris enters the mess hall to see Cavit and the doctor talking to Kim and then leaving. We learn that Paris was responsible for an accident that killed three people, and he would’ve gotten away with it until he confessed out of guilt. After being cashiered out of Starfleet, he joined the Maquis and was captured on his first mission.
They arrive at the Badlands and encounter the exact same tetryon beam as Chakotay’s ship, and sustain tremendous damage. Cavit, Stadi, the chief engineer, and the entire medical staff (at the very least) are all killed. Kim determines that they’re 70,000 light-years from their previous position, in the Delta Quadrant, proximate to a huge array of some kind. Janeway supervises repairs in engineering, leaving Rollins in command of the bridge, while Kim and Paris go to sickbay and activate the Emergency Medical Hologram. The EMH asks when replacements will arrive, a question they can’t really answer.
Then the crew all disappears off the vessel, to the confusion of the EMH.
They rematerialize in a setting that looks like a rural American dwelling, complete with food and socializing. This is an illusion designed to put them at ease (not sure why a mid-20th-century Earth setting would put a multispecies 24th-century crew at ease, but whatever), and they’re actually inside the array. Every attempt to find out what’s going on is stymied, but eventually they penetrate the illusion, and also find other life-signs—likely Chakotay’s crew. One of the farmers, who plays a banjo, refers to “the debt that cannot be repaid.”
Suddenly, they’re rendered unconscious and placed on biobeds and injected. Most of them stay unconscious when injected—the only one who doesn’t is Kim, who screams in agony.
They all wake up on Voyager with only Kim unaccounted for. Chakotay’s ship is nearby, and Janeway contacts him to ask if Kim is there by mistake—he isn’t, but Torres is also missing. Chakotay agrees with Janeway that they should put their differences aside and try to find their missing crewmembers.
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The array is sending pulses of energy to a nearby planet, so they set a course there.
Kim and Torres awaken in a hospital of some sort. They’re both covered in lesions. They’re being cared for by the Ocampa, a telepathic species, who don’t really know why Torres and Kim are there. But the Caretaker wants them to be cared for, just like the others. However, the others all died.
Chakotay, Tuvok, and Ayala beam over to Voyager, at which point we learn that Tuvok is the infiltrator. He and Janeway are old friends and comrades, and Janeway is glad to have him back. Chakotay is less than thrilled, though he forgives Tuvok, as he was only doing his duty as an officer—he’s less happy about seeing Paris, whom he assumes sold them out for latinum.
They head to the fifth planet, encountering a Talaxian salvager named Neelix along the way. Neelix offers to guide them to the Ocampa city on the fifth planet, which is likely where they’ve been taken.
Neelix comes aboard where he is overwhelmed by transporter and replicator technology, especially as it allows him to bathe for the first time, well, ever. Water is apparently hard to come by, er, somehow, in this region of space.
They beam to the planet with crates of water on standby and a bottle of water as an example of the merchandise. Only after they beam down does Neelix reveal that they’re meeting with the Kazon-Ogla, one of many nomadic tribes of the Kazon species. Maje Jabin leads this group on the surface of the Ocampa homeworld. They’ve been trying to get through to the underground where the Ocampa are—as is all the planet’s water—but with no luck. However, the occasional Ocampa has snuck through the surface, including their current prisoner, Kes.
Jabin takes Neelix and the crew hostage. Janeway has the crates of water beamed down and Neelix also offers to take Kes off their hands. Jabin is interrupted in mid-negotiation by Neelix putting a phaser to his neck, and then using it to blast open the water crates. With the Kazon distracted by all that running water, the away team is able to beam back with Neelix and Kes. Only then do we discover that Kes is Neelix’s lover.
Grateful for the rescue, Kes offers to take them to the Ocampa city below the surface. The Caretaker has taken care of the Ocampa for a thousand years, but none of the Ocampa seem to have any idea why the Caretaker keeps kidnapping people and infecting them.
Torres and Kim have escaped, with the help of one of the Ocampa. Janeway, Chakotay, Paris, and Tuvok beam down with Kes and Neelix, where Kes is reunited with her people. Kes herself is gripped by curiosity and the need for exploration, not content with living underground.
The array changes from energy pulses—which have increased in frequency of late—to weapons fire, which is sealing off the conduits. Tuvok theorizes that the Caretaker is dying. The increased energy pulses are to provide the Ocampa with a surplus, and the conduits are being sealed for their protection. The “debt that can never be repaid” is to the Ocampa.
They split up to try to find Kim and Torres. Paris, Neelix, and Kes find them on their way to the surface, and Janeway instructs them to keep going. Janeway, Chakotay, and Tuvok follow.
However, the Caretaker’s weapons fire causes a collapse of a staircase. Paris and Neelix go back for the rest of the team, while Kes beams back to Voyager with Kim and Torres. Neelix gets Tuvok and Janeway to safety while Paris rescues Chakotay, whose leg is broken. Paris asks if there’s some Indian thing where he can change into a bird, and I have no idea what Chakotay said in response, because I ran to the bathroom to throw up. (Paris also says some nonsense about how Chakotay’s life is now Paris’s because he saved his life, showing an understanding of a culture that would make a 1960s American blush, much less an enlightened 24th-century human.)
With everyone back on Voyager, they head back to the array, Chakotay back on his ship. Janeway and Tuvok beam over to see the dying Caretaker. He’s sealing the conduits to protect the Ocampa from the Kazon, though in five years the energy will run out, and they’ll have to go to the surface, and the Kazon will kill them. His people are explorers from another galaxy, and they accidentally rendered the Ocampa homeworld a desert. Two stayed behind, but the Caretaker’s mate grew weary of playing guardian and left. He’s been snagging ships from all over the galaxy trying (and failing) to find someone genetically compatible who can take over the array. Tuvok examines the equipment, and it would take hours to re-set it to send the ships back to the Alpha Quadrant.
Several Kazon ships enter the system and head for the array. Voyager and Chakotay’s ship take them on, with Chakotay ramming his ship into the main Kazon vessel, destroying both (he evacuated his Maquis crew before starting the ramming run and beamed himself out at the last second).
There’s no way to rejigger the array in time, the Caretaker himself is now dead, and they can’t let the Kazon get their hands on the technology of the array. So Janeway destroys the array. Jabin declares that they’ve made an enemy today and buggers off.
Chakotay agrees to become Janeway’s first officer, with the Maquis crew incorporated into Voyager‘s crew to replace those who were killed (though the crew who were killed don’t actually get mentioned or a memorial service or anything). Paris is also given a field commission to lieutenant and made the conn officer.
They set a course for home, hoping they’ll find a wormhole or a spatial rift or the Caretaker’s mate or a being of pure energy or some damn thing to get them back to Federation space.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Caretaker uses a tetryon beam to transport people across the galaxy. Also, somehow, the people in the section of the Delta Quadrant near the array consider water to be a valuable resource, despite the fact that the stuff is literally everywhere. (I mean, seriously, just cut chunks off a comet and melt it…)
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway has a boyfriend back home named Mark Johnson, who takes care of her Irish setter Mollie when it’s discovered she’s pregnant. He sounds like someone who’s used to the chaos of dating a Starfleet captain.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok infiltrated Chakotay’s cell on Janeway’s behalf, but is actually her chief of security. He left a wife and children back home, whom Janeway insists are worried about him despite Tuvok’s objections to so emotional a response.
Half and half. Torres has a tendency toward seat-of-the-pants engineering, and also has trouble keeping her mother’s side of the family’s temper—her father is human, her mother Klingon.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. In the series bible, the EMH was going to be referred to as “Doc Zimmerman,” after the creator of the program. This was changed to having him simply referred to as the Emergency Medical Hologram or, simply, by the title “Doctor.” (Robert Picardo is listed in the opening credits as playing “The Doctor.”) Several early Voyager tie-in novels referred to the doctor by the name Zimmerman, as that was what the series bible said. Lewis Zimmerman himself will later appear in a few episodes of Voyager (as well as an episode of DS9).
Forever an ensign. Kim is almost fleeced by Quark and then gets to snark off Torres when they’re in the Ocampa hospital—Torres bitches that Voyager was sent to capture them, and Kim sardonically says that she’s captured, by way of reminding her that they both have bigger issues.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix offers himself as a guide to the region, and also as a cook.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Neelix and Kes are lovers, and Neelix manipulates the Voyager crew to get her rescued, though he tries to take sole credit for her rescue. He only agrees to help Voyager get to the Ocampa city at Kes’s insistence.
Do it.
“Is the crew always this difficult?”
“I don’t know, Doc, it’s my first mission.”
–The EMH being cranky and Kim not helping.
Welcome aboard. Armin Shimerman wanders over from DS9 to reprise his role as Quark, continuing the tradition of all the Trek spinoffs to date having a star from the previous show in their pilot (DeForest Kelley as McCoy in “Encounter at Farpoint,” Sir Patrick Stewart as Picard in “Emissary“). This is the tradition’s swan song, however, not surprising given that Enterprise took place two hundred years prior to Voyager, Discovery took place a hundred years after Enterprise, and Picard takes place a hundred and forty years after Discovery (or its first two seasons anyway). Cha cha cha. Richard Poe also plays Gul Evek, reprising his role from various episodes of both TNG and DS9.
Two recurring regulars debut here: Josh Clark (last seen as an Enterprise tactical officer in TNG’s “Justice“) as Joe Carey, the deputy chief engineer, though he won’t be named until “Parallax”; and Tarik Ergin, an extra who would very occasionally get a speaking part, as Ayala, one of Chakotay’s Maquis crew, and who is the only non-opening-credits regular to appear in both this episode and the finale, “Endgame.”
Various doomed members of Voyager’s crew include Alicia Coppola as Stadi, Jeff McCarthy as the chief medical officer (never given a name for some strange reason), and Scott Jaeck (uncredited for some strange reason) as Cavit. McCarthy was last seen as Roga Danar in TNG’s “The Hunted,” while Jaeck was last seen as a Kataan administrator in TNG’s “The Inner Light.”
In addition, Scott MacDonald plays Rollins (his only appearance, though the character is mentioned again in the future; MacDonald also appeared as various aliens in DS9’s “Captive Pursuit” and “Hippocratic Oath,” TNG’s “Face of the Enemy,” and throughout Enterprise’s third season), Gavan O’Herilhy plays Maje Jabin, Basil Langton plays the Caretaker, Angela Paton plays Adah, and assorted Ocampa are played by Bruce French, Jennifer Parsons, David Selburg, and Eric David Johnson.
Trivial matters. The first airing of this episode debuted the United Paramount Network. Affiliated with several local independent stations, UPN was an attempt to create a TV network to eventually compete with the venerable CBS, NBC, and ABC, as well as upstart fourth network FOX, which had gone from also-ran in the 1980s to an equal partner with the “big three” by 1995. Warner Bros. started a similar network four days earlier, the WB; neither of the new networks was a complete success, leading to the two merging in 2006 to form the CW. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that UPN’s final collapse, as it were, came after it no longer had a Star Trek show as its flagship, as Voyager and then Enterprise ran from 1995-2005.
The Maquis were created during the seventh season of The Next Generation and the second season of Deep Space Nine to set Voyager up, with a multistory arc that ran through “Journey’s End” and “Preemptive Strike” on the former show and “The Maquis” two-parter and “Tribunal” on the latter show.
Geneviève Bujold was originally cast as Janeway, but the film actor had difficulty with the rigors of television production, with lessened rehearsal time and the need to get things done on a tight schedule, and quit after a couple of days of filming, replaced by Kate Mulgrew.
This episode was novelized by L.A. Graf, continuing the tradition of Simon & Schuster novelizing “event” episodes of shows, including pilots, already done with Encounter at Farpoint by David Gerrold and Emissary by J.M. Dillard.
Co-creator/executive producer Jeri Taylor wrote two novels that provided backstory for the main characters: Mosaic, about Janeway, and Pathways, about the rest of the crew. Those backstories were used while Taylor was show-runner, but ignored after she left the show.
Several works of tie-in fiction gave adventures of Chakotay’s Maquis cell prior to this episode, including your humble rewatcher’s The Brave and the Bold Book 2 (which told how and why Tuvok infiltrated the Maquis), John Vornholt’s Quarantine (part of the Double Helix miniseries), and Susan Wright’s The Badlands Book 2 (which told of the days leading up to “Caretaker”).
With their appearances here, Armin Shimerman and Richard Poe join the ranks of actors who have played the same character on three or more Trek TV series, the others being Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, John deLancie, Michael Ansara, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Brent Spiner.
Set a course for home. “It’s not crunch time yet, Mr. Kim.” As a pilot setting up an ongoing series, this is quite good. The premise is put in place very nicely, with the crew sacrificing their own ability to get home in order to keep the Ocampa safe, a very Star Trek setup.
Kathryn Janeway is a good, strong captain, with her own distinctive personality. She reminds me particularly of the way William Shatner played Jim Kirk in the earliest days of the original series, when it at least hinted at being an ensemble show. Kirk was the leader of the ship, but he also was friendly with the crew, playing chess with his first officer, hanging out in the gym, not at all being above-it-all or aloof (the way Jeffrey Hunter played Pike).
Janeway is similar, but where Kirk was like the uncle you always liked to see, Janeway is more like the nifty Italian matriarch who always made the best Sunday dinner, always ran things, but whose bad side you never wanted to be on. I have a lot of relatives (my great grandmother, several aunts and great aunts, my mother) whom Janeway reminds me favorably of, and this has nothing to do with their age relative to Mulgrew, who was 40 when Voyager debuted, but with their no-nonsense personality that mixed great and loving affection with unquestionable authority.
And she has the same quality that Shatner and Sir Patrick Stewart and Avery Brooks before her all had: the charisma. The moment she walks in the room, you absolutely know that she’s in charge. (As someone who has hated Trek’s tendency toward masculine honorifics for all its personnel regardless of gender, going all the way back to “Mr. Saavik” in The Wrath of Khan, Janeway’s eschewing of “sir,” and also, mostly, of “ma’am,” in favor of the more general “Captain” is greatly appreciated, and also delightfully delivered.)
In general, the cast is pretty strong, starting with Mulgrew, though neither Robert Beltran nor Roxann Dawson nor Jennifer Lien nor Robert Picardo get a hell of a lot to do in this initial outing. Picardo, at least, gives a strong impression of what we’ll get from the EMH, which is tremendous amounts of snark, sarcasm, and impatience, all of which Picardo plays to perfection. Dawson sets up her character nicely in her banter with Kim (they will keep calling each other “Starfleet” and “Maquis” to adorable effect as the show goes on), and at least we get to hear Lien’s great voice.
Tim Russ shines in his debut as Tuvok, giving us a proper Vulcan, to wit, a total snot. Every Vulcan we met on the original series, starting with Spock, was sassy and snotty and arrogant and sarcastic, and Leonard Nimoy in particular did yeoman work in giving us a character who isn’t unemotional, but rather suppresses his very turbulent emotions. Russ takes those lessons to heart. (The line where he recommends Neelix take a bath is a rhapsody in dry wit that still makes me laugh my ass off two and a half decades later.) Garrett Wang does a fine job as the every-ensign, the young officer eager to do well on his first mission, and the bromance between his Kim and Robert Duncan McNeill’s Paris is off to a great start here.
McNeill himself is a bit more problematic, as is Ethan Phillips. The latter’s Neelix is trying a bit too hard to be The Comic Relief Character, and it falls flat. Phillips is a better actor than this, and the character is at his best when he has an edge to him, like when he tricks Voyager into helping him rescue Kes from Jabin.
As for McNeill, he has the same problem here that he had in the similar role of Nicholas Locarno in TNG’s “The First Duty“: he’s too skeevy. Paris is pretty much the same character, which is problematic, as McNeill was unlikable the last time, and isn’t much better here. His flirting with Stadi and with one of the Caretaker’s illusions probably was intended as manly in 1995 but comes across as creepy in 2020 (and honestly, I didn’t much like it in 1995 either, as every time he talked, I felt like I needed a shower). This wouldn’t be so bad if the character was meant to be a shit, but the entire arc of “Caretaker” is Paris’s redemption. Way too much time is spent in this pilot episode on Paris’s redemption arc, and I’d much rather have seen more of almost any other character than watch this dudebro caricature try to turn himself into a good officer. They hedge their bets, too, as the two crewmembers who are most cranky about his being on board are conveniently killed off, the person who does what he does best is also killed off, and the nice young ensign seems to like him. Oh, and the one person who hates him who’s left is Chakotay, whose life he saves.
Speaking of which, we have one of the worst parts of the episode, one that would dog the series: the cringe-worthy portrayal of Chakotay. These complaints were made at the time the show was first aired, and 25 years has only made it look worse. Chakotay’s character is given a hodgepodge of generic Native American stereotypes, with Paris making snarky comments about turning into a bird and blood debts and other stereotypes that wouldn’t have been out of place in a movie made ten years before the original series debuted. At one point, Chakotay says, “Wrong tribe,” which begs the question of what the right tribe is—we never do find out in the episode. (The show will later establish Chakotay as descended from Indigenous Peoples in Mexico/Central America, but bases him within a thus far fictional tribe.) It’s an appalling way to treat the first Indigenous main character in Trek.
But that’s not the worst thing about this episode, and it made me even angrier now than it did two and a half decades ago.
Okay, if there was a TNG episode in which Riker, Ro, La Forge, Crusher, and Ogawa were all killed, it might, y’know, get mentioned once or twice. In fact, it would devastate the crew and have repercussions from which the characters would struggle to recover.
Yet the equivalent characters on Voyager are all killed, and by the second hour nobody seems to give a shit. Janeway’s waxing rhapsodic about talking to Kim’s parents and how he forgot his clarinet, and Kim’s just missing for a bit. What about your first officer who died? What about Stadi? What about the entire medical staff, who aren’t even given the dignity of names, or the chief engineer, who isn’t given the dignity of a name or a face? (And hey, did they just keep all those dead bodies in stasis for seven years?)
Voyager’s journey through the Delta Quadrant has on its foundation an appalling number of deaths, yet those characters are utterly forgotten about by the second hour of the pilot and never even mentioned again over the next seven years, which is despicable and unintentionally makes the characters out to be uncaring shits. There isn’t even a memorial service for those crewmembers. It’s not good when the characters act like they know who has billing. One of the reasons why Discovery’s “The Red Angel” was so powerful is that Airiam wasn’t an important character to the viewer, but she was part of the crew, and was therefore important to the characters, and deserved a memorial service.
The same consideration was not given to Cavit, Stadi, the medical staff, or the chief engineer, and that’s wrong. (Speaking of that, the episode implies pretty heavily that the medical staff consisted of one doctor and one nurse and, um, no. There would have to be at least two doctors on board, preferably three, as you need backup, plus the doctor needs to sleep sometimes, plus a bunch more nurses. The EMH is a useful backup also, but two people is an insufficient medical staff for a ship of 141 people.)
Also: water as a rare resource? It’s possible they could have picked something more ridiculous, but it’s unlikely. Water is frikkin’ everywhere. There’s just no way it would be a rare and precious thing.
Having said all that, while the details are sometimes fudged, this is a good intro to the series, a strong pilot that sets Voyager on its journey through a new quadrant.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido has already done rewatches of Star Trek The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for this site. He’s also reviewed every episode of Star Trek: Discovery and Short Treks to date, and his review of the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard will go up tomorrow.
Nice recap and review. Your point about no one mourning the dead, established crew is a good one that had never occurred to me… but I’ve only seen this once, 25 years ago. I enjoyed it quite a lot at the time, but I think your assessment’s a fair one.
While you are correct that this is the “swan song” of a character from the previous Trek iteration appearing in the new one’s pilot, Enterprise did approximate the tradition by having James Cromwell’s Zefram Cochrane show up at the beginning of “Broken Bow,” if memory serves. I know, not strictly the same kind of torch-passing, but…
While water shouldn’t have been considered a scarcity, it’s too bad VOY didn’t end up considering anything a scarcity past the first few episodes. The only thing they ran out of was bad blood between the Maquis and Starfleet crews thrown together, and that should’ve lasted them most of the way home, certainly at least most of the first season. How many shuttlecraft did VOY lose over the course of it’s voyage home (ha)? When the Delta Flyer gets destroyed down the road and then shows up again a week or two later, no explanations other than “we built a new one” (again, as I recall), it exasperated me no end.
Still, this series had a lot going for it – the EMH, as you point out, and also Tuvok and Torres. And I am in the minority of fans I know who actually liked Kes from the get-go and was sorry to see her go. I expect I would enjoy Janeway a lot more on a rewatch, too.
So what about the Maquis? I haven’t seen “Caretaker” in awhile, but I assume some of the people on Chakotay’s ship also died. At least we saw the fates of Cavit, Stadi, the Unnamed CMO, etc.
I bring this up because at least with respect to the Voyager crew, you could mitigate the lack of reaction by saying the crew had just assembled and didn’t really know one another. Keith asked how we’d react if “Riker, Ro, La Forge, Crusher, and Ogawa were all killed” in an episode, but that’s not necessarily a fair comparison. Certainly by the time we saw Ogawa and Ro, the Enterprise-D crew had been together for several years. Similarly, I would assume Chakotay’s crew was closer, both due to time spent together and the nature of their mission as members of the Maquis. So their lack of reaction is even more noticeable, especially since we later see Chakotay and Torres deal with learning the news that the remaining Maquis in the Alpha Quadrant were wiped out by the Dominion.
Also, what did they do with the dead bodies? Did they all get the Spock-style torpedo into space? Were the remains cremated? Or were they just left sitting in some makeshift morgue until Voyager made it back home?
Good review, KRAD! I’m with you on the lack of reaction to the multiple crew deaths.
I never hated VOY, but in my memory it was a show that squandered a fascinating premise and mostly-good cast in order to play it safe as an imitation of TNG. I doubt I’ll be able to catch every episode with this rewatch, but I hope to catch some and wonder if my opinion will change all these years later.
Maybe how the Caretaker’s people desiccated the planet also did it to the entire region of space? Nah, I can’t even fanwank an explanation.
I did note you were introducing people like they weren’t going to be dead in less than an hour.
Rarity and resupply is forgotten everywhere. Towards the end of Battlestar Galactica’s run, I kept wondering idly where they kept getting all their printout paper with the corners cut off and all the pencils. It’s a big ship, they probably had a storage hold of paper somewhere, but unless there’s a paper making ship in the fleet, or a pen and pencil making ship, they’re going to run out eventually.
My impression of “Caretaker” was reasonably favorable at the time, but looking back at it — as well as the pilot of “Enterprise” (though not DS9) — there is the impression of a stultifying sameness to much of the franchise output of the Berman era, no surprise given that many of the same writers, art directors, composers etc. were employed on all of the Trek shows for those eighteen years, resulting in all of them having the feeling of being TNG-lite. Whatever one’s feelings about Discovery and now Picard, they at least feel very little like the Trek series that preceded them.
@5 Logistics are the second biggest bane of SF, right after the laws of thermodynamics.
I found “Caretaker” the weakest of the pilot episodes up to that time. I wasn’t in love with the premise (I’d rather see Starfleet seeking out the unknown frontier rather than running away from it in favor of familiarity and comfort), I wasn’t hugely impressed by the cast aside from Mulgrew, Lien, and Picardo (who was already a known commodity from his Joe Dante film roles), I never liked Jay Chattaway’s music as much as the other composers’ (it was repetitive even by Berman-era wallpaper-music standards), and the concept was full of logic holes.
Keith mentioned the water issue; what bugged me specifically was the technobabble about why Ocampa had no rainfall. They claimed it was because the atmosphere had no “nucleogenic particles” and thus rain couldn’t form. First, they confused “nucleogenic” (i.e. generated by nuclear reactions) with “nucleation,” the process by which clouds and rain droplets condense around particles in the air. That is a really, really huge error of technobabble. And second, nucleation particles are just… dust. Or clay, or salt, or soot particles, or sulfates from vulcanism. Ocampa was shown as a dry, desert environment — it’s absurd that it wouldn’t have any kind of dust or grit in its atmosphere.
The other big technical issue that bugged me was that in the climactic battle, Voyager and Chakotay’s ship were routinely using transporters while they were being fired upon and had their shields up. That’s Trek tech 101 — you have to lower shields to use transporters. And they completely ignored it, without even an attempt at a handwave.
“Richard Poe also plays Gul Evek, reprising his role from various episodes of both TNG and DS9.”
Worth noting that all of Evek’s appearances under that name (though his “Cardassian Officer” character in “Playing God” was later implied to have been Evek) were in Maquis-centric episodes. In fact, he was in every one of the episodes setting up the Maquis arc that culminated in “Caretaker,” so he was the unifying thread among them all, across three series.
@1/mpoteet: “When the Delta Flyer gets destroyed down the road and then shows up again a week or two later, no explanations other than “we built a new one” (again, as I recall), it exasperated me no end.”
Uh, the episode that debuted the Delta Flyer literally showed us how they built replacement shuttles. And really, why should that even be a question when they have replicators? As it happens, the mentions of replicator rationing to save power were pretty much dropped after the first 2-3 seasons, and there are relatively few shuttle losses until seasons 4-5.
Things VGR should have had:
1, visible grief over the lost comrades both Starfleet and Maquis.
2. Tension between Starfleet and Maquis gradually giving way to an ‘all in this together’ vibe.
3, some exploration of how Voyager is sustaining herself.
@9/roxana: There were a lot of episodes in early seasons in which the crew was surveying the planets they passed for food or resources they could use.
And as I said before, the mere existence of replicators should be the obvious answer to how a Starfleet vessel replenishes itself. As long as it has working replicators, raw materials (which can be mined from asteroids and comets), and power (which can be gathered from any star), then it should be able to manufacture anything it needs, indefinitely. True, in the early episodes they had damage to their power systems and had to ration energy, but once those systems were fully repaired, there was no reason there should ever be shortages again, for the most part.
In fact, the unbelievable episodes were usually the ones that were based on shortages that shouldn’t exist, like “Caretaker” saying that water was scarce in that sector and “Demon” saying that deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe by a gigantic margin) was scarce. The one time it was the other way around was in “Investigations.” The episode established that they needed verterium and cortenum to rebuild their destroyed warp coils, and the place where they were supposed to get them was a Kazon trap, so they never got the repair materials they needed, and at the end of the episode they were still stranded at impulse, years away from the necessary repair materials. Yet this huge, critical problem was left unaddressed, and in “Deadlock” the following week, they magically had warp drive again without a word of explanation. As long as they have replicators, anything can be rebuilt as long as they have the materials. But this was a case where they didn’t have the materials or the means to reach them, so it didn’t make any sense.
@9: I’ll add to your list of things Voyager should’ve had …
4. A Maquis crew member (preferably a senior staffer) who had NO EXPERIENCE Whatsoever as a Starfleet cadet or crewman (aside from Seska)
For me, the episode got off to a bad start with the crawl followed by one ship coming in over the top of the screen being pursued and fired on by another, larger ship. Pretty sure I saw that in 1977 in that other franchise that starts with “Star”.
Other than that, it’s not horrible. It certainly has its problems, as Keith points out, especially the water thing. For me it also sagged in the middle, as though there wasn’t really enough here for the full length given to it. Maybe that’s an artifact of knowing what’s coming, no surprises, no real tension. It’s been too long since I first saw it for me to remember how I felt at first airing.
I also felt that the EMH was a little too emotive right from the get go. Certainly, it gives us a preview of what he’s going to be like, but it seems like most of emotional reaction should have come after his having been constantly on for a while. He ought not to have been able to manage more than a simple request for someone to deactivate the EMH program.
DemetriosX: given how similar the EMH’s personality is to Dr. Lewis Zimmerman’s, I’m fine with him being like that from jump. It’s obvious that Zimmerman programmed the hologram to match his own sparkling personality.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I just watched this last night and seriously can’t remember if they said how long the Caretaker had been there… Does anyone remember? Because I’m thinking it was long enough for him to use his super advanced tech to do some terra forming or at worst case, finding the Ocampa a new planet if their’s is frelled beyond repair…
With TNG ending and DS9 at the halfway mark, Paramount wanted another TV series despite the fact that there were also several movies floating in the ether. Rick Berman and company were rightly wary, as they knew they had exhausted the palette of social commentary on offer within the zeitgeist of the 90s, at least as defined by their personal perspectives as a team of writers. To escape that constraint, at least in appearance, they wanted to create a series that was out of touch with Starfleet, thinking that this shift could open their narrative options and give them carte blanche to explore exotic and fantastical ideas and locations. The results of that intention were predictably nebulous, especially compared with modern television. What more is there to say about any episode of Voyager in 2020?
With the pilot, the writers didn’t want the audience to say “eh, this is just more of the same with unfamiliar faces,” and tune out. So, they eschewed a series of episodes that would establish Voyager within the known Trek universe in favor of jumping right into the stranded crew setting in the first episode. As a result – the crew is 99% red shirts who only existed to be replaced by the Maquis and assorted aliens. As for the lack of reaction to their loss, you have to ask yourself – would Paramount executives circa 1993 greenlight a grief fixated funereal TV series pilot? Of course they wouldn’t. They wanted something fast moving that could hook an audience, which is what the pilot tries to accomplish.
Voyager was supposed to be a fun, quick paced show, with intermittent spurts of relatable drama, and as a result, the scripts feature scant amounts of logic, and a restless and often incoherent style of social commentary that doesn’t dwell on much of anything for more than a single episode. If that’s not what you’re looking for, Voyager is not what you’re looking for.
I tried watching it a couple months back, and I just found myself putting it on in the background while mocking everything and everyone under my breath. Come to think of it, I think it had that effect on me the first time around.
When this debuted, I only knew Kate Mulgrew as Mrs. Columbo. I remember very little about her show, except that there was a lot of shady stuff happening in her neighborhood and Mr. Lt. Columbo never materialized to help.
The ship design didn’t please me at first. It looked too much like a vintage aluminum shoe spreader.
The Neelix/Kes relationship seemed icky at the time. What was the Ocampa lifespan again? She seemed equivalent to a teenager.
Agree that Paris’ comments about Chakotay’s heritage are cringe-inducing.
The Caretaker really should’ve called itself something else. It sounds ironic now, but I think I had trouble with the name then. Zapping ships against their will, while killing sentient life. What a fuck-up. Instead of a duty of care and self-sacrifice, he causes destruction and harm.
Three doctors needed for a ship of 141 people?
One should tell, say, the USN that. Military ships — and Star Fleet is certainly a military service- with crews that small wouldn’t have any MD on board.
KRAD: “They rematerialize in a setting that looks like a rural American dwelling, complete with food and socializing. This is an illusion designed to put them at ease (not sure why a mid-20th-century Earth setting would put a multispecies 24th-century crew at ease)…”
Well, something similar worked in “The Martian Chronicles!” By the way, I have to give you some credit, Keith: Your use of the “Voyager” characters in “The Brave and the Bold” was great. I love the scene where Honigsberg doesn’t want to go into details about a malfunction, and Janeway intimidates him with a smile!
CL Bennett: You raise an interesting point about running from the final frontier, though I’m not completely certain I agree. I understand the contradiction, but under the circumstances, trying to get back to the Alpha Quadrant still is the natural and most sensible thing to do. It occurs to me that there is precedent for this: “Q Who.” The Enterprise-D certainly (and equally unintentionally) fulfilled the “final frontier” mantra, but Picard was right to say what he had to say to Q to get them back. (Granted, Voyager wasn’t being “carved like a roast,” but their circumstances still were dire). It also occurs to me that this also makes the several uses of Q on “Voyager” somewhat problematic (he was willing to get the Enterprise back home, but not Voyager?), but I’ll shelve that point until Keith gets to those episodes.
Also, CLB, you make a good point about the music, though in fairness the only incidental music that really stands out for me is the Borg theme in “Best of Both Worlds.” But I’m curious: what do you think of the title theme? Personally I find it workable with the visuals, but a bit dogged, and not up to Jerry Goldsmith’s TMP work. (I happen to prefer the Deep Space Nine music, but full disclosure: I’m a trumpet player.)
Actresses reported as possible replacements for Bujold included Joanna Cassidy, Susan Gibney, Elizabeth Dennehy, Tracy Scoggins, and Lindsay Crouse.
It always got me that there wasn’t a moment of mourning for the dead crew.
Kate Mulgrew as Janeway was great from the first episode. Also, huge props to Jerry Goldsmith for the main title theme and whichever team members worked on the visuals for the titles.
@17: Ships of that size in the USN are expected to be part of a fleet with larger medical staff or else attached to a naval base in the short term. So the goal then is to stabilize and then evacuate anyone with serious injuries. So I don’t think it’s exactly analogous to how starfleet would run things.
As far as the starfleet example, it really does depend on the expected duration of the mission. I would say Krad might be wrong in this case, they weren’t expected to be out of contact with a starbase for too long, so they wouldn’t need a larger staff. But they were also expected to take some casualties and so the number probably wouldn’t be zero either.
In fact, they probably should have been part of a larger fleet even if Voyager was supposed to be the only ones in the territory. Maybe that wasn’t allowed as it would set of tensions with Cardassia or something, which means they would still need some medical staff. But 2-3 physicians and maybe 10 medical staff overall would probably be too much unless the crew was much larger or was expected to be out of contact for a very long time.
@12/DemetriosX: Why should the Doctor not have shown emotion? Even totally nonsentient holographic characters can be programmed to mimic emotion, as part of the illusion of humanity. The EMH was meant to be a simulated doctor able to care for patients, and thus would surely have been programmed to emulate the appearance of emotional engagement with those patients, even if there was no genuine feeling or sentience underlying it. It’s just that Lewis Zimmerman failed to realize what a poor fit his own personality was for that purpose.
And as I’ve said before, the fictional myth that it’s harder for an AI to achieve genuine emotion than sentient thought is ridiculous. Emotions are just hardwired responses to stimuli. Animals have emotions; they’re basic, straightforward drives that can exist in the absence of sapience. Conscious thought is enormously more complex. It’s our intelligence that makes human emotions complicated, because our goals and beliefs and priorities often stop us from simply acting on our emotions the way an animal would.
@16/Sunspear: Mrs. Columbo was such a terrible idea that the show took a hiatus after just a few episodes, changed its title, and retooled itself to make Kate single. It made no sense as a premise, contradicting almost everything Columbo had established about his wife (for one thing, Mulgrew was less than half Peter Falk’s age and would’ve been in her teens when we first heard Columbo mention his wife), and just wasn’t any good as a show. It’s one of the cheapest, most mercenary, most wrongheaded attempts to capitalize on a hit show in TV history. It’s a relief that Mulgrew eventually found a better role to be associated with.
@18/Don S.: A show about exploration doing the occasional episode about getting lost and finding the way home is one thing. Building a whole series around that premise is another. Voyager‘s premise is the least heroic of any Trek series, because it’s the only show where the characters’ primary goal was about serving their own self-interest, rather than putting themselves in harm’s way on behalf of others (either to protect them or expand their knowledge). Sure, they helped people they met along the way, but that was incidental to the selfish goal that drove the series as a whole.
I think the theme is fine, but I agree it’s not one of Goldsmith’s best.
@18 Don S. :
In “Q Who,” it was Q’s fault they were all the way out there in the first place. Also, the Q of Voyager is at a different stage of his journey where he’s less likely to interfere drastically in the lives of mortals. Though if I recall, Q (or maybe his son, Q) does indeed shave a few years off their journey in a hush hush way out of gratitude.
A little bit of trivia: when Genevieve Bujold was playing Janeway it was “Nicole” Janeway but when she got the boot and was replaced by Kate Mulgrew that character became “Kathryn” Janeway. The producers didn’t have to re-name the character so I thought it was nifty to make the character’s name basically the same as the actress portraying her (which I read was on the advice of Mulgrew). There’s also direct footage as a special feature on the DVD’s and YouTube comparing scenes that both actresses shot. Bujold seems clearly uncomfortable and unnatural in the role while Mulgrew projects warmth and charisma. She seemed to have gotten the character right from the pilot. I remember reading Lindsey Wagner of Bionic Woman-fame was also considered and Susan Gibney who was Leah Brahms on TNG and also had a role on DS9 as a captain, was a leading contender for the role of Janeway but ultimately she was considered too young.
https://youtu.be/sbl3cGQ5vxI
It doesn’t seem very Starfleet or very progressive of humans in the future to stereotype whole races of people but that is exactly what Harry Kim (and Tom Paris) does when he tells Quark to his face that “they were warned about the Ferengi at the Academy”. And repeating that insult to a member of that very race doesn’t seem very politically correct nor diplomatic. A shame we couldn’t get a Sisko-Janeway hand-off in the same way got the baton padded from Picard to Sisko.
I was impressed how Jennifer Lien’s character right off the bat was so bold and assertive and very curious which makes sense for why she would venture above ground and join the Voyager on its adventures.
@16/Sunspear: You say the Kes/Neelix relationship seems icky but if she’s only a couple of years old and she has such a short lifespan then in dog, I mean Ocampa, years wouldn’t she be a full-fledged young adult? So I personally had no problem with it. I just took her to be like the equivalent age based on her appearance to what she’d be if she were human.
When Kes is shown as a prisoner by the head Kazon bad guy he says he used every kind of method of persuasion to get her to talk. She was obviously tortured and who knows if that includes sexual abuse but presumably so, and yet Kes shows no lingering trauma from this captivity and treatment.
The Kazon suffer from the same perception that a lot of “primitive” Star Trek aliens do in that they seem so inept and not exactly science-focused in that you wonder how they even operate starships that go to warp. I believe it’s revealed later on that they overthrew a more technologically advanced race that enslaved them, the Trabe, I believe. I’m not the first to think of the Kazon as low-grade Klingons. I believe Voyager’s problem with creating their own exciting original baddie was why they had to steal from TNG and recycle the Borg.
@16/Sunspear – I never liked the design of the ship either. I think from head on it just looks like a lampshade. I think I’ve heard it described as a toilet before.
@16/Sunspear: Agreed about The Caretaker -he isn’t really much of one because in addition to causing the Ocampa’s original plight, he’s now displacing thousands of other beings from their origins and killing some from the transport of such and infecting others. Speaking of which, when the crew of the Voyager is supposed to be bracing for impact, why does the first officer go running across the bridge like a big dummy instead of gripping onto something like anyone with common sense did? All of the officers killed, senior staff and otherwise, should have been memorialized, if not in the pilot then at some point. I don’t think it was ever ascertained if any of Chakotay’s crew was killed in the displacement of his ship. And another knit is that his crew is put under medical exam by the Caretaker at least days if not weeks before the Voyager got there and yet both Chakotay’s crew and Janeway’s crew are returned to their respective ships at the same time. Shouldn’t Janeway’s crew (which has a bigger compliment) still be unconscious when Chakotay and company are done being analyzed?
@11/Twels: Agreed on having Maquis crew members that had no relevant training/Starfleet background on the ship. It would make more sense for such people to not easily fall in line and continue to cause drama while it makes far more sense for the Maquis who were former Starfleet or at least cadets like Chakotay and Torres to assimilate because they already have or once had that type of disciple. Without having Cardassians and Cardassian oppression around in the Delta Quadrant those particular Maquis no longer really have a reason to quarrel with Starfleet.
I know Ayala was featured all throughout the series as a prominent extra but never knew he had a few speaking lines. That’s neat.
Loved the Voyager main credits theme – I think it’s the last truly great Star Trek theme from any of the TV series anyway but Jerry Goldsmith was pretty amazing. Likewise, the main credit sequence itself was very impressive and majestic. It made the Delta Quadrant seem exciting and wondrous which I felt the series itself never lived up to – often more of the same bumpy forehead aliens of the week speaking English.
A rating of 5 seems a bit low for “a strong pilot”. I know, I know, the ratings are the least important part of the review. :op
Speaking of ratings, this episode premiered to 21.3 million viewers which was huge (especially for today’s fractured TV viewing era) and the series finale ended up with 5.5 million viewers (and even that was a bump up from the final season’s average. That’s quite the attrition! The ratings stunt of bringing on the Borg babe in the 4th season only created a brief upswing in terms of ratings and viewers. But it was a great character and produced some good stories so I think it ended up being a good thing obvious marketing ploy notwithstanding.
Oh, and I forgot to add that Mulgrew was already a finalist when Bujold was cast so it was easy to bring her back since the show-runners already knew and liked her.
@8/CLB – I thought Chattaway was a fine composer based on his amazing score for TNG’s “Tin Man” and to a lesser extent, “Remember Me”. It’s just Berman’s dictates on how the music should be ended up neutering his sound as with all of the other composers post-Ron Jones era.
@krad, this will be a bittersweet rewatch for me for the first season, since Michael and I were watching its broadcast weekly with a dear friend/almost-sister who died in late July of 1995.
Nevertheless, onward.
Thank you for the fair treatment of a pilot episode that had some really excellent ideas and that laid its share of groundwork, but fell short in many ways. It led to many hours of discussion amongst the three of us, and no topic moreso than the unnamed, unsung, unmentioned dead. Joanna, our friend, wondered at the time whether there were deleted scenes that had been cut for running time.
Looking forward to your biweekly rewatch [you did say Mondays and Thursdays?]
Much in the same way Stewart carried early TNG, Mulgrew does a great job here taking this series out of spacedock, as it were. Eventually it would become the Doctor and Seven show, but it was largely Janeway who kept me watching from the start.
Side note, it was Mulgrew’s earlier roles in Throw Momma From The Train and a few episodes of Cheers that I remembered her from. They were small roles but she made them memorable.
Looking forward to this rewatch, Krad! Full speed ahead.
I remain, irrationally and bizarrely, fixated on Lt. Stadi to this day. I was so hoping for an anti-Troi, more of an “action Girl” type character…. all from a momentary scene or two.
It always infuriated me how they were all like “oh well, the medical officer, first officer and engineering crew are all dead. Oh well.”
@24/GarretH: I agree about Kes — she was always meant to be a young adult by her species’ standards, not a child.
Also, once we get to “Elogium” in early season 2 (though it was one of the last 4 episodes shot for season 1 and postponed so UPN could get an early start in the fall), it becomes pretty evident that Neelix and Kes have never actually had sex. (Well, specifically that they haven’t “mated” in a procreative sense, but their dialogue and reactions imply they haven’t mated in any sense.) They were in love, but as far as I can tell, it was a chaste romance.
As for her Kazon captivity, Jeri Taylor’s Pathways tells Kes’s life story including that part, and according to it, Maje Jabin only once attempted to sexually assault her when he was drunk, and lost interest due to her lack of reaction, saying she was “too cold” to be of interest. (Most of that book’s character backstories were contradicted by later episodes after Taylor left the show, but Kes was gone before then, so nothing in the show conflicts with her backstory chapter, as far as I’m aware.)
“I’m not the first to think of the Kazon as low-grade Klingons.”
I tend to describe them as “Klingons having a perpetual bad hair day.”
Really, though, the Kazon were meant to be modeled more on street gangs. Maybe it would’ve come through better if the makeup hadn’t been so Klingon-like, and the name a bit different.
@26/GarretH: You’re right — Chattaway could do excellent work when he had the freedom to. “Tin Man” was terrific, and I liked his work in a 1992 documentary called Space Age. But the style he adopted for most of his Trek work didn’t appeal to me as much as the other composers’ work.
(I was once in a college class where the professor played New Age music before class while the students were gathering, and one day he played an album that I recognized right away as Chattaway’s work, because his style was so distinctive.)
@28/JFWheeler: I once did an article for Star Trek Magazine about Seven of Nine, and to address the myth that she took over the show, I assessed how many focus episodes each character got per season. Janeway was always in the lead every season, with Seven never doing better than a tie with her. So it was more of the Janeway/Seven/Doctor show in the last few seasons.
As I said in the previous thread, I REALLY don’t like how they dealt with Chakotay’s tribal identity throughout the series. But this episode especially makes me angry for Tom Paris’ statements about Chakotay’s “Indian beliefs” somehow including a Wookiee Life Debt and allowing him to transform into a bird.
Also, it’s worth noting that other than Chakotay blowing up his own ship, none of the Maquis characters actually do much of anything. It’s a good thing Beltran was so ably to deliver the line about Janeway being “the Captain” because absolutely nothing in the story really solidified why he’d have that much seeming respect for her. I also found the Tom Paris character to be a little too Han Solo-ish for a guy who was drummed out of the service and then joined up with terrorists.
Honestly, the fact that they gave him almost the exact same backstory as Nick Locarno makes me wonder if there wasn’t a last-minute rewrite to change Tom’s name. I know that Robert Duncan McNeill has suggested that they wanted someone similar to Locarno, but thought that that character was too far gone for the kind of story they wound up telling with Tom. Funny enough though, Paris is still my favorite character from the show.
Also, did the show ever specify exactly how many crew members were regular Starfleet vs. Maquis? Frankly, the size of Chakotay’s ship would make it appear there are less than 40 aboard. Just how many Voyager crew died? Apparently enough to forgive a bunch of terrorists and give them total access to your ship. I guess it’s a good thing they want to get back home to kill more Cardassians or that would seem like a foolish decision. Then again, our perception of terrorism has undergone significant changes since this show initially aired.
I will say I did enjoy rewatching this episode partly because it took me back to my first time watching this show with my best friend who has since passed away. Oh the hours he and I spent gleefully tearing apart Star Trek’s bad episodes and films and relishing the great ones. Good times.
I liked Tom Paris, but I was in my twenties and less than a year sober in AA when the show premiered. I liked the opening credits, with the ship cruising just“under” the surface of the nebula. I’m pretty sure I watched it all the way through, but I also don’t remember much of it 25 years later. I don’t recall any standout episodes like Yesterday’s Enterprise or In the Pale Moonlight.
But I do recall it being fun enough to watch
Well, I did manage to find time to watch this over the weekend and penned an extremely long ramble which I will try and edit into coherency. It’s always been my favourite Star Trek pilot (only “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Broken Bow” come close) and I was worried it would look dated. But whether it’s nostalgia or not, despite my attention wandering a few times, I found myself enjoying it thoroughly, smiling and joining in with lines. So that’s a good start. I’ve seen this so many times in so many different ways that I could probably fill a page with anecdotes but I’ll try and keep it under control.
And I’m afraid I have to start by saying I had completely the opposite reaction to Tom Paris as krad. I think possibly one reason why he seems such a big part of the series to me and why I’ve always liked him is that he’s basically the viewpoint character and protagonist of this pilot. We start off with the Maquis but we don’t see them again for half an hour. Paris is the next one we meet and it’s through him that we encounter Janeway and Voyager. And it’s his character arc that dominates, with only Janeway having as much of an impact. He’s bitter but arrogant in their first meeting, but for me it’s telling how much he changes once he meets Harry Kim and takes on a big brother role. (A fact that will be significant early next season.) From then until when Voyager gets thrown across the galaxy, he’s got a subtle discomfort at being surrounded by people who, Janeway and Harry aside, make their distrust of him obvious. Once they are there and most of the senior staff are dead, he effortlessly slips into the role of Janeway’s right hand man. (Pretty much every day for a week when the VHS first came out, I saw it playing the scenes on the array in a local video shop at lunchtime, and I was convinced he was first officer.) He takes charge during the rescue mission and of Voyager during the battle with the Kazon. Janeway giving him a field commission is the final pay-off but that’s almost immaterial: The moment where she tells him “Mr. Paris, take the conn” is the moment where it’s clear he’s gone from being an unwelcome visitor to being part of the crew. He’s also the one who gets the most involved backstory. (Even if it is a rewrite of “The First Duty”!)
Janeway’s personality changed on a week by week basis in the later seasons, but here we’ve got some stability and the best version of Captain Kathy: Assuredly in command but also oozing compassion. Her small scene with Tuvok after the Caretaker’s death remains my favourite part of the episode. Another captain might have invoked the Prime Directive as a way of withdrawing from an internal dispute, but she knows that they’ve influenced events and also that protecting the Ocampa from the Kazon is the right thing to do. (As Keith indicates, it’s also debatable how easy it would have been to use the array to return home with the Kazon breathing down their necks.) The Janeway we see here is someone who embodies the spirit of Starfleet and the Federation as much as the letter.
I have to disagree with the summary in another way: I always feel watching ths episode that Janeway’s been in command of Voyager for some time and it’s only in later episodes, notably “Relativity”, that it’s suggested this is her first mission and Tuvok has possibly never set foot aboard before. But I guess at least it explains the lack of grief for all those dead senior staffmembers twenty minutes in if she’s only just met them.
Coming up behind Janeway are Chakotay and Tuvok. These two could have been the new Riker and Worf, or maybe a decomposite Spock, but never quite get there. I’ve heard it said, both here and before, that Chakotay’s hardly in this; I’m not sure I agree with this but, while he’s more aggressive here than later on, he does fall into deferring to Janeway very quickly. As soon as he comes aboard, Janeway announces the plan and then checks he agrees almost as an after-thought. We only really see him leading his crew in the pre-credits and in the final battle. Increasingly the feeling that this is Paris’ viewpoint, we don’t see the Maquis’ reaction to being pressganged into Starfleet (we get a bit in the next episode but not much) or Chakotay being made first officer (he’s just suddenly there next to Janeway in uniform, smiling placidly), but instead see Paris being told about it. It took me quite a few viewings to realise first-time viewers don’t know Tuvok is the mole until he beams aboard Voyager. He gets the big ready room chat with Janeway mid-episode and gets to accompany her to the array at the end but for me he doesn’t really make much impact here.
I’ve been surprised in the past at how forthright Kes is in this one. It didn’t jar as much when I watched it this time but I think just a few episodes later a lot of her deliveries would have been softer. I think she gets a different wig quickly too, but as with Kira’s pilot-only hair, this is the one that appears in the early publicity photos. I’m not sure why she changes into a multi-coloured outfit the minute she’s aboard Voyager when all the Ocampa outfits are fairly muted. Maybe it’s Neelix’s influence, since he does much the same thing but that could just be Talaxian fashion. I’m bewildered how these two got together: Did he sneak off for chats with her while visiting the Kazon?
And somewhere in the background there’s the Doctor. My first exposure to Voyager was this and two Season Two episodes, one of which was “Initiations”, in which I think he has less than half the screen time he has here. I was left thinking he’d be the first to be cut out or given a token cameo. I couldn’t have been more wrong of course, but at this point he seems a very limited character: He’s confined to sickbay, so we only see him if characters go to visit him. I heard Robert Picardo only filmed a few days on the pilot so it was life imitating art that he took a long time to get to know the rest of the cast.
The Maquis aren’t set up that well here. It took me at least two viewings to realise the crew wasn’t just Chakotay, Torres and Tuvok, which was a bit short-sighted of me because Ayala’s fairly prominent. Kim reads their life signs as “a Vulcan and several humans”: Presumably Torres could be mistaken for a full human by a simple scan, but we see lots of other species among the Maquis recruits in later episodes.
Janeway fixes her bun while rushing to repair a warp core breach! It made me smile but I suspect the showmakers vowed never to have her hair come loose again…
Given that so much is made over the next two years of Voyager being the most powerful ship in the sector, they and the Kazon seem evenly matched here. I’ve reused Chakotay’s suicide run a lot of times in stories. I have to disagree with the assertion that everyone’s beaming on and off with shields up. Janeway specifically tells Chakotay to keep the Kazon busy while they beam over, and the Maquis ship has almost certainly lost shields by the end. (We’re told it’s breaking up.) In fact, Chakotay outright tells Torres to drop them so the rest of the crew can beam off.
I’d forgotten they used the theme tune in the incidentals sometimes. That stirring version when we see Voyager for the first time is very evocative.
Many of the Ocampa we see here appear elderly or middle-aged. That doesn’t seem surprising at the time, but the show soon had to explain why Kes was aging at the same rate as Jennifer Lien, so it’s implied Ocampa age at human rate for much of their lives, then start aging rapidly near the end. Are all these meant to be near death?
And on the theme of things that haven’t been thought through…water being a scarce commodity, which never comes up again. We get an explanation for why the Ocampa planet’s like that, but what about all the others? Neelix indicates he’s never had a bath before and sees water as valuable payment, but we later learn he’s well-travelled. Of course, Neelix is at this point improvising wildly so Voyager will help him rescue Kes. The Kazon clearly value it, which makes sense if they’re all on the Ocampa planet, not so much when they go off into space at the end. But we’re told they’re just one Kazon sect, and we learn later that they stole most of their technology, so maybe they don’t have access to another water supply. We’re told Neelix stole water from them, but maybe he was just trying to annoy them. And I am probably thinking harder about this than anyone connected with the show did.
And the tension between Starfleet and the Maquis has practically gone already, with Janeway and Chakotay working together without hesitation. But it needs to. It’s summed up in that scene between Torres and Kim where he mocks her suggestion he’s there to capture her. They’re all in the same boat and what they were back in the Alpha Quadrant doesn’t matter. It’s hammered home even harder near the end when Chakotay steps in as Torres continues to object to Janeway’s decision: In one of the episode’s most memorable and quotable moments, Torres asks “Who is she to be making decisions for us?” and Chakotay bluntly replies “She’s the captain.” He gets it: They can’t afford to all be pulling phasers on each other or arguing it out during dangerous situations. They need to decide who’s in charge and do what they say.
I’m afraid I’m culturally ignorant enough to find that Chakotay/Paris exchange amusing. It’s just punching buttons and bantering during a tense situation after all. (I don’t think Paris is actually expecting Chakotay to turn into a bird, and Chakotay’s response, “You’re too heavy”, suggests he’s getting into the spirit of it.)
Things do move at the speed of plot at times: Tuvok in particular seems to know things he’d only know if he was given a verbatim transcript of a conversation he wasn’t there for. As an aside, there’s no mention of Tuvok having a wife and children here: Janeway merely mentions talking to his “family”, which on first viewing I assumed meant his parents. (I think his wife is first mentioned in “Ex Post Facto”, his children possibly not until “Elogium”.) I saw Scott MacDonald at a convention once and he claimed Rollins was dropped because it was felt there were too many male characters.
Anyway, I’m signed up for this and it’s given me an opportunity to revisit the show properly, so thank you for starting us on this ride!
@32/Twels: I’m almost positive the intention of the series creators was for Duncan McNeill to play Nick Locarno for Voyager as its the same actor and essentially the same character but then it was changed to Tom Paris for two reasons, 1) if they used Nick Locarno, they’d have to pay the writer who originally came up with that character (Ron Moore as he wrote “The First Duty” on TNG) every time that character is used which basically be for the entirety of the series, and 2) Nick Locarno was irredeemable. Now I tend to believe reason 1 for sure because it’s easy to imagine the producers being cheap. But regarding reason 2, I think it’s debatable whether Tom Paris is any less redeemable than Nick Locarno. And personally I find it much more compelling anyway to have a character that has done something so irredeemable to do whatever they can to atone for that mistake. Great works of drama have been created out of such characters’ struggles for redemption.
@garreth and CLB: it’s less creepy if we presume Kes’ developmental age relative to humans is about 20. But that still leaves Neelix as an older man (and how many months prior they were together), not to mention different species. Ethan Phillips was 40 at the time (I initially guessed 40, then checked), so she’s half his age. Even today, if a college sophomore announced she was in love with her 40 year old professor, some people would pause.
@1/writermpoteet: Regarding the issue of scarcity, I believe that also applied to the # of crew compliment itself – something of which I was keenly aware of when the series first aired. In fact, I think not too long into the show’s run startrek.com was hosting a chat with I believe Michael Piller in which you could submit questions and some would be chosen for him to answer. Mine was about whether the writers or whomever were keeping track of whenever someone on the crew died, the implication of which is the crew isn’t that big to begin with and can’t be replaced by new officers. That in itself would be an impetus for drama. He answered in the affirmative that they were keeping track of that. However, unlike with material things like shuttles, which you can hand wave away as being replaceable with the replicators, you can’t so easily replace people. I don’t think the show made it a story point that the crew numbers were dwindling to a point or deficient in certain specialities as to create issues aside from a lack of medical staff to supplement the EMH. So I always felt that was a missed opportunity for drama.
@36/Sunspear: What part of that would give some people (or you) pause: that it’s a older teacher/young student relationship or the fact the teacher is 40 and the student is 20, or both. Because I personally have no problem with the 40 and 20 thing on its own but it is problematic when that 20 year old is the student of the 40 year old because their is a power dynamic that is uneven. If it’s a 40 year old that is a teacher and the 20 year old is a student but not HIS student then I say no big deal. For all intents and purposes, that 20 year old is an adult and if she or he wants to pursue a relationship with the 40 year old and the feeling is mutual turn I say go for it. As such, assuming Neelix is equivalent to a 40 year old human and Kes is equivalent to a 20 year old human I see nothing wrong with that either because he doesn’t have a position of power over her nor is influencing her in some unseemly way. They are simply consenting adults who have mutual romantic feelings. When I was younger, but still am adult, I was often attracted to those who were somewhat to significantly older than myself so it’s something I can personally relate to.
@35/GarretH: “I think it’s debatable whether Tom Paris is any less redeemable than Nick Locarno.”
The crucial difference is that Paris confessed when he could’ve gotten off scot-free, whereas Locarno covered up his actions and remained unrepentant even after he was caught.
@36/Sunspear: Different cultures have different standards of age-appropriateness, and that would surely be even more true of alien species that mature at different rates. Relative calendar ages are meaningless when one species has a lifetime of less than a decade and another may live hundreds of years.
I mean, turn it around. T’Pol was twice Trip Tucker’s age when they were involved. Sarek was over 100 when Amanda was probably only in her 60s, and when he was 200 he was married to Perrin, who appeared fiftyish. And was it creepy for the 235-year-old Zefram Cochrane to fall in love with a woman in her early 30s?
A long-lived species like El-Aurians or Denobulans might well see a 20-something human as a child, but we would say that’s wrong, that our maturity should be judged by our standards, not theirs. Well, Kes was an adult by her species’s standards, so we should respect that, rather than trying to impose our standards on species they clearly don’t fit.
@37/GarretH: The consistency of crew numbers suffered as Michael Piller and other staffers left over time. I tried keeping track of it back in the day, and it was consistent for a while and then inexplicably jumped upward at some point.
@garreth: such relationships were almost always seen as power imbalances, even back when I was on college campuses decades ago. Today, in the age of Me Too, even more problematic. You are being far too cavalier and dismissive.
@CLB: After reading the wiki entry on Ocampa, the variable aging rates are a huge mess. They don’t seem like a well-designed or thought out species at all. What’s Kes’ actual age when this series starts? What’s Neelix’s?
Sure, we maybe shouldn’t apply human standards to their relationship. Plenty of other SF and fantasy properties have had age disparities. Doctor Who had Number 10 pining for Rose, a woman in her twenties. He was how many hundreds of years old at the time? We also have something like the Twilight movies, where a hundred and twenty year old vampire was still going to high school sniffing teenage girls.
So let’s apply in universe standards: the wiki says Ocampa lifespans lasted about 9 years, reaching young adult at about one year. However, females didn’t sexually mature till 4 or 5 years old. So yeah, still seems creepy that no matter how “young adult” Kes appears, she’s in a romantic relationship with an older man.
@krad: No Picard review today?
@39 – Those examples all include younger partners who are at least 30 years old, and who have received enough life experience to make adult decisions. Regardless of her intelligence or brain chemistry, even if Kes was experiencing reality at a hyper accelerated pace (approximately 10x the rate of humans), she wouldn’t have amassed enough raw life experience in two years time to form any conclusions on the complexities of interpersonal behavior. The most intelligent humans still require repeated interactions to grasp social concepts – in fact, their intelligence may lead them to require more experience than average, as social logic is an elusive target which does not easily yield to traditional concepts of causality. Given that Kes interacts with other people in real-time, we can eliminate the accelerated experience theory and chalk this up to another Voyager concept that wasn’t submitted to a logic test before implementation. She may realistically have a very advanced childlike intellect, but the complexities of consent and consequence require more nuanced reasoning.
Sunspear: the Picard reviews will go up on Friday mornings.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: ok, thank you. Agoniieee… (hehe)
@40/Sunspear: I’m not being cavalier or dismissive of such relationships at all – where it warrants it. Like I said, I believe it’s inappropriate when anyone in a position of power exerts such over another person in the relationship that doesn’t have equal power. It’s irrelevant as to the ages of the people involved unless one is a minor and the other is an adult; or even if they’re both adults but one is so as young as to be emotionally immature and the older person is taking advantage of that. But none of this is evident in the Kes/Neelix relationship which you’re using as an example. There is an age difference but they are both mature adults. He’s not manipulating her and he is no position of power over her.
@39/CLB: I haven’t watched “The First Duty” in some time but I do clearly recall Wesley staring to Picard that Locarno argued to the tribunal (off-screen) that only he should be booted from the academy and not Wesley and the other squadron members under his command. And it was effective as Wesley and the others such as Sito got to stay but had to repeat a year. So I think that does show some repentance on his part. It was at that point that he finally did the right thing instead of trying to drag the other cadets down with him. If we got Locarno on Voyager I could see him being haunted by his actions still but trying to make amends for it and looking at this opportunity on Voyager as a second chance.
I come into this rewatch from much the same space as KRAD, Voyager being the one televised Trek series that eventually annoyed me enough that I actually stopped watching regularly some 2/3 of the way in. That said, I’m older now too, and find myself approaching the stories I read/watch a bit differently and with — I hope — a bit more respect for the work we’re given versus the work I might have wanted.
This has not stopped me from reading the initial rewatch entry before rewatching the actual episode by way of CBS All Access (that’s as soon as I finish typing this, having just now finished watching the Picard opener). And I find I have a word or two to put in on the conversation to this point:
On Janeway: I very much like Kate Mulgrew as a performer, but my memory coincides with cap-mjb’s at #34 — I felt at the time that the character was written extremely inconsistently over the course of the series. We’ll see how that falls out as the rewatch progresses.
On the worldbuilding: This was my other annoyance from the first, but not just due to the economy-of-scarcity inconsistencies. With benefit of hindsight, I think the real root of the difficulties was that the writers set up a triad of essentially conflicting premises and only realized midway through actually producing the first season that instead of creating a springboard for individual stories, they’d created a bubble that actively hindered their ability to develop individual episodes. The tentpoles as I remember them: (1) Voyager is initially established as (mostly) having more advanced tech than most of the worlds in the entire region (in particular, transporters and replicators, but also more advanced warp drives); (2) at the same time, resource issues — theoretically — prevent them from using that tech to its best effect (per much discussion above), and (3) Prime Directive constraints mean that they are expected to be Very Careful in dealing with local cultures in order to avoid disrupting both local and interstellar civilization as they pass through (thereby limiting their ability to address their resource issues).
On first pass, the essential incompatibility of the underlying logic never stopped annoying me; we’ll see if that changes this time.
The one other point on which I’ll comment: I probably ought to have been more annoyed with the simplistic Native elements of Chakotay’s characterization than I actually was at the time, although I definitely recall thinking that they were sending severely mixed signals (at different times, I remember thinking that the show was making use of localized referents from at least three different regions of North America). It does occur to me that there’s one possible retcon for Paris’ weird remarks here about turning into a bird, et cetera — given Paris’ later known fascination for awful pulp action videos (Captain Proton!!!), the bird remark might refer to a nominally Native character from a pulp story who had that superpower. That doesn’t rescue the moment in the pilot proper, but it would at least make a certain amount of sense if that back story were behind it.
@garreth: “There is an age difference but they are both mature adults.”
They are not. As I stated, which you may have skipped, according to the lore, she is not considered sexually mature in her culture. A well-traveled “man of the world” like Neelix has no business involving her in a romance of any kind.
You may also have skipped this in @Tranceiver’s eloquent post: “She may realistically have a very advanced childlike intellect, but the complexities of consent and consequence require more nuanced reasoning.”
Even applying human standards as you are heavily doing, even if she is intellectually bright, it’s still a “no”.
These fictional relationships are often metaphors for human experience. They are sometimes designed to avoid the creep factor, but if you look, it’s still there. Twilight, for example, is a transformation based on the author’s own experience under her religion being expected to marry an older man while still a teenager. That she managed to romanticize that experience and turn it into millions of book sales and movie royalties is a plus, I guess.
@CLB, Chattaway would do stand-out work here and there post-Ron Jones on TNG, like Chattaway’s work on “Darmok” and “Emergence”. Here on Voyager, he would do stand-out work on “Scorpion” and “Scorpion, part 2.” Thanks to Rick Berman, those are the only examples I can cite post-Ron Jones.
To me, this was the strongest of the Trek pilots. I remember watching it the night it premiered in January 1995. It was smack in the middle of my freshman year of high school. Deep Space Nine and Voyager in particular would get me through those turbulent years.
I’m glad you used the quote from Janeway, “It’s not crunch time yet, Mr. Kim. I’ll let you know,” as that will be forever be the moment I was sold on Kathryn Janeway. “I don’t need anyone to choose my friends for me.” Harry Kim, sold.
It stood out to me even as a not-quite 15-year-old that nobody mourned or mentioned the crew who were killed. I always thought Alicia Coppola’s Lieutenant Stadi had potential to be an interesting character; sadly, Stadi is killed off to make way for Paris. And wow did I cringe at the “Indian trick” comment; that moment was cringeworthy in 1995, and has definitely not aged well.
Still, to me this was the strongest Trek premiere, and it set a good tone for the series. Again I’m glad you’ve decided to reconsider and do this rewatch, Krad. Onward!
There’s a guy reviewing old RPG books on the internet, and he came across a similar situation to Chakotay’s culture in a 1990s RPG supplement. He said he’d cut them a little slack because in the 1990s, you couldn’t just type the name of a culture into your computer and get reliable information about them. Library research takes time and money. Of course this is less of an excuse for Paramount than it is for a shoestring RPG publisher.
I think I need to chime in on the idea that the premise of this series is “less heroic” than other iterations because they’re on their way back to Federation space. It might seem romantic to push out into the frontier in search of new knowledge, but it probably seems less so to the people that are there already and were getting on fine without these Federation types interfering: Witness Kira’s reaction to Bashir’s ethnocentric talk of “frontier mediine” in the DS9 premiere. The Voyager crew are explorers, something that their counterparts in the previous two series very rarely were for all Picard’s attempts to claim otherwise. It’s only human nature that on being thrown out into the wilderness, away from their homes and loved ones, they want to get back instead of all dying of old age on the ship and/or condemning their children to a life of aimless wandering. Even before “Q Who”, we saw that instinct in “Where No One Has Gone Before”: On being flung into an unexplored region of space, Picard ignores the prospect of exploring it and thinks the most important thing is finding out if they can get back. I guess the alternative premise is to do what the Voyager relaunch novels have done and have the Federation develop some super new engine where they can jog back and forth between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants with ease, exploring while still having a way home. That may have been the initial idea of DS9, but that show forgot about exploring the Gamma Quadrant fairly early on, to the point that they never went there for two years.
The Ocampa “sexual maturity” thing established in “Elogium” is something else that we shouldn’t examine too closely in human terms. Janeway tries comparing it to puberty when she first hears of it but it quickly becomes clear that the comparison isn’t exact. It’s less of a transformation to maturity and more of a short stage of life which is the only time they can have a child. (That’s one of many things about the Ocampa that no-one really thought about it, but we’ll get there.) Saying that that’s the only time an Ocampa should be considered an adult is like saying Vulcans only qualify as sexually mature if they’re in pon farr. They presumably have relationships for enjoyment and companionship at other times.
@cap: “Saying that that’s the only time an Ocampa should be considered an adult is like saying Vulcans only qualify as sexually mature if they’re in pon farr.”
No, not a good comparison. Again, I didn’t make this shit up. The convoluted aging process for Ocampa is brainless. Whoever conceived it was bad at worldbuilding. No one would say Vulcans are sexually immature before pon farr, at least not after their first. It’s simply a mating urge. However, the lore says female Ocampas are sexually immature till between age 4 and 5. Trying to smooth out the lack of thought put into it is just post facto excuses.
@52: Well, “the lore” is often simply stuff made up by fans that doesn’t necessarily reflect the intention of the showmakers. There’s no mention on screen of Ocampa being sexually immature before the elogium. Kes simply refers to it as “the time of change when my body prepares for fertilisation.” Suggesting that Ocampa are somehow still children or sexually immature for over half their lives is very simplistic and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
cap-mjb @34
“I am probably thinking harder about this than anyone connected with the show did.”
True of all of us in every reread/rewatch here. Except for the Tolkein ones. Imagine if Star Trek, or any SFF series, put half the effort into on-screen world-building and backstory as Tolkein did.
This premiere is better than I remember from my attempt to watch the series all the way through a few years ago, which I abandoned somewhere in season two. That said, the scene with Quark was the most entertaining few minutes of the two-parter, and I was sorry to see them leave DS-9.
Janeway is a fantastic character. The only jarring moment with her onscreen was when they encounter the caretaker as banjo-player whining about “you don’t have what I need ” and Janeway says she doesn’t know either, nor does she care, because all she wants is her crewman back. I get that, like all beloved Trek captains, she is protective of her crew, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that the caretaker’s need was tied to Kim’s disappearance. Sure enough, within a few sentences she’s asking what the caretaker requires, and even offering to help.
But that of course is a minor quibble. As for the Kes/Neelix thing, I cannot offer any logical insights. All I can say is that in the short time those two were on screen together, and without any context that arrives later in the series, I thought those two were going to be bound by something more like a sibling connection. When I came to understand their relationship was as boyfriend/girlfriend, it definitely registered on my ick-meter.
I think 5 is about right for a rating. I just need to continue to refrain from comparing Voyager to TNG or DS9 and I should be able to enjoy it for what is is.
@40/Sunspear: There’s no reason to expect an alien species’ life cycle to map directly onto humans’, or to be proportional to humans’ at a faster or slower rate. In different species, the various stages of life constitute different percentages of their lifespans. For instance, elephants gestate more than twice as long as humans and their “baby” stage (before being weaned) can last 5-10 years, far longer than ours, but they reach maturity around the same age as us, c. 18., and have about the same overall life expectancy as us, 60-80 years. Parrots reach sexual maturity in just 1-4 years but can live 80-90 years or more. So it’s pointless to even try to make analogies between species’ life cycles.
Indeed, we see this with various Trek species, such as Klingons, who (if Alexander is any indication) grow up 2-3 times as fast as humans but can live twice as long. Which makes sense, actually, since aging is not a single process, it’s a balance between two opposing processes, cell growth and cell decay. In youth, growth dominates; in maturity, they’re about even; in senescence, decay wins out. So it stands to reason that if the balance were shifted more toward growth, you’d have both a shorter childhood and a longer healthy adulthood.
As for Kes’s sexual maturity, I don’t think it’s an issue, because as I said, her relationship with Neelix seems to be chaste. You know, it used to be taken for granted that two people in a romance would not have sex at all until and unless they got married. Romance without sex is a thing that can happen, even for years at a time.
@42/Transceiver: As I’ve said before, I tend to assume that Ocampa learn telepathically from their mothers in the womb; it seems the best way to explain how they can achieve adultlike intellects in just a year, and why Kes seemed to have such an old soul.
I mean, come on — just watching Kes and Neelix for two minutes makes it obvious that he’s the more immature one of the pair.
@46/GarretH: Maybe Locarno belatedly did the right thing, but only after he was caught. Paris had gotten away with it completely but chose to confess anyway. To me, that’s a fundamental difference.
@51/cap-mjb: My issue with the premise is not about whether the characters would reasonably behave that way. Characters are fictional. They only do what the writers decide. My issue is that the writers chose to build the show around a premise that I found a poorer fit to the spirit of Star Trek than the other shows, because it gave the characters a goal that was more about helping themselves than helping others.
And as I already said re: “Q Who,” there is an obvious difference between doing one episode about a given topic and doing an entire series driven by it.
Replicator rationing never made sense because the replicators could only use a fraction of the power of the warp drive.
If the really wanted to have a “shortage arc”, they could easily have said that the replicators must be rationed because some critical component is itself non-replicable. In the first years Voyager teased a shortage arc and the Kazon arc, but they didn’t really commit to it and it fell apart to the point I stopped watching. My guess is that with DS9 on the air, they just didn’t really want to do arcs on Voyager, and the lack of committment shows.
@24/GarretH – Thanks for the link to the Bujold/Mulgrew footage comparison, I hadn’t seen that before. It makes me very glad they went with Mulgrew – I was never a huge fan of her, but she was so much better than the utterly flat Bujold!
@50/garethwilson – Lack of Wikipedia is no excuse at all – plenty of accurate writing went on before computers. The reason Chakotay’s heritage was handled so badly was, to be blunt, racism. This was the mid-1990s, which is just a couple of years after the passing of NAGPRA, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, the Native American Languages Act, etc. White people in the United States, on the whole, weren’t too good at treating American Indians like people in the mid-1990s. (We’re still not, but we’re working on it.) So to have put Chakotay in at all was an achievement – but it was merely tokenism, not an actual attempt to represent an American Indian or First Nations culture.
As for the Kes/Neelix relationship – when I was 19, I started dating a 39-year-old. This was not a particularly healthy relationship. I am now 39 myself, and I cannot imagine dating someone half my age. Adding the “well, Ocampa reach sexual maturity earlier than humans” doesn’t make it much better – humans wrote the show, humans are watching the show, and it’s still creepy.
@krad – one nitpick for you. You say Picard is set 100 years after Discovery‘s second season. According to Memory Alpha, it’s actually 141 years later (2258 vs 2399), which is quite a bit more.
MeredithP: Ack! Good catch on my bad mathing. The post is fixed.
Also this child of librarians thanks you very much for the reminder that research was a thing that existed before the Internet….. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Meredith, I agree with you about pre computer research. I personally researched all kinds of subjects before computers, there were these things called ‘libraries’ and ‘Research Librarians’ back in the olden days – and look! They are still with us! It wouldn’t have been that hard to pick a tribe for Chakotay. But the tendency to treat native Americans as a single culture, rather than the hugely diverse population they are, is still with us.
For the most part, Caretaker is a solid, functional pilot. Kolbe directs the hell out of it, his first directing gig since that stellar TNG finale. It’s better than Farpoint at the very least. It has a rhythm and pace that helps to cover up some of its shortcomings – much of the pilot’s second half is characters going from place to place. But it does show potential by mingling two very different crews (emphasis on potential – we’ll see how little this will last in a week).
Janeway works pretty well in her debut. Motherly, caring, and very much a captain and a leader. Mulgrew nails the role (and having seen Bujold’s scenes, I can’t say I regret the recasting).
But for whatever reason, they decided to frame the story around Paris rather than Janeway. Farpoint was structured around Picard and Riker. Emissary was a Sisko vehicle. Broken Bow is Jonathan Archer’s story. Why in the world would Berman, Piller and Taylor write the main arc around the pilot rather than the captain?
I actually appreciated McNeill quite a bit when he played Locarno. I would have appreciated Paris as much, had they committed to the character’s flaws, but the show tries too hard to make him heroic without giving it the necessary effort. This is a recurring problem with Voyager. The characters never move beyond archetypes, and Paris, much like Janeway, has different passions and goals whenever a writer needs to come up with a new story. There’s little consistency.
Interesting you brought up the deceased officers and crewmen not getting a memorial. That’s something I never stopped to notice. It’s worth noting that Michael Piller’s first Trek episode as head writer was TNG’s The Bonding. If anyone should have noticed this omission, it should have been him, given his penchant for creating starship characters with actual lives, who do give a damn about people. But then again, Voyager is a product of way too many cooks on the kitchen.
One does get the impression that Voyager is meant to be the true torchbearer of the franchise rather than DS9 right upfront. It’s a starship-based show, with all the media attention, and I’d argue this extends even to certain production aspects, most notably cinematography and production design. It’s almost as if they’re giving preferential treatment to making Voyager look better on the screen than DS9 (even though DS9 would soon upstage it with the elaborate battle sequences in Die is Cast, Way of the Warrior and Shattered Mirror).
But it also means that Voyager is stuck recycling TNG plots and functioning more as season 8 rather than a new show (and TNG season 7 was hardly that show’s peak; an epitome of diminishing returns). Putting the ship 70K light years outside Federation Space is a fascinating idea, but it rarely dips into the potential stories this could generate. And these first couple of seasons do enough damage to the show that it’s uphill battle for the subsequent seasons to recover. But for the most part, Caretaker does its job well.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention. I D.E.S.P.I.S.E. the Kazon. Fifth-rate Klingons. Ironically, Caretaker was their best episode. The idea of scavengers with no resources of their own is at least more interesting than the generic, war-mongering gangs we get later on.
@57/Thomas: “My guess is that with DS9 on the air, they just didn’t really want to do arcs on Voyager, and the lack of committment shows.”
It wasn’t because of DS9; it was because Voyager, unlike DS9, was on UPN. A network show is subject to an additional layer of oversight that a syndicated show isn’t, and in this case, UPN wanted an episodic show that would be accessible to casual viewers. I think maybe Rick Berman also preferred a more episodic approach, but Berman tended to leave DS9 in Ira Behr’s hands because he was busy on TNG, the movies, and VGR himself.
I felt you could sometimes tell that the writers were pushing back against the restrictions on arc stories by doing alternate-timeline episodes or the like where they could play with the idea of the ship and crew going through lasting change, while still resetting at the end — “Year of Hell,” “Before and After,” “Course: Oblivion.” It felt like they wanted to do stories like that more often but were prevented from it by the mandated format, so they snuck them in where they could.
@58/MeredithP: To be fair, the idea to genericize Chakotay’s culture was done as a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to avoid racism. They were concerned that if they tried to portray a specific genuine culture, they might get it wrong and inadvertently give offense. So they figured that making it a generic, fictitious Native American culture, they’d avoid insulting any single specific tribe. (Kind of the same principle as using fictitious companies or cities or nations to avoid giving offense to real ones. They’re not Russian spies, they’re from the European People’s Republic/Kasnia/Pottsylvania!) But they didn’t realize that it would pretty much have the opposite result — that not portraying any single real culture at all was worse than portraying one imperfectly.
As for Kes, isn’t there kind of a double standard here? I mean, Kes is maybe about 16 months old as of “Caretaker,” but the EMH is essentially newborn. So the Doctor is younger than Kes, but nobody makes a fuss about him having romantic involvements with adult females. Isn’t that kind of sexist?
It’s not uncommon in SF or fantasy to treat characters as romantically eligible if they’re physically mature, regardless of their chronological age. See also Elizabeth in V: The Series or Liam Kincaid in Earth: Final Conflict, both alien-human hybrids that magically grew to adulthood very shortly after birth (mere seconds in Liam’s case). Or androids or synthetic characters like Rachael and Pris in Blade Runner or the Vision in Avengers.
I see it as a variant on the same principle that romance with humanoid aliens is acceptable and not seen as bestiality. Fantasy/SF characters are ultimately just allegories for regular humans and our feelings, choices, and relationships, so characters that look and act like adult humans are treated as adult humans regardless of their in-story origin or nature. Essentially they’re written based on the actor’s age rather than the character’s. Because we know that the person we’re watching onscreen is actually an adult human, even if they pretend to be a one-year-old alien or a two-week-old AI or a cat magically transformed into a woman, and thus there isn’t really anything to worry about.
@57/Thomas @63/Christopher: Supposedly, Brannon Braga pitched the Year of Hell concept as a season-long story arc. Berman only allowed for the two-parter instead. Braga wouldn’t get to do a story with that scope until the Xindi arc during Enteprise’s 3rd year, at which point the network was willing to allow the show to take more risks in winning back viewers.
@64/Eduardo: Indeed. People have been dumping on Braga as the worst Trek showrunner for a long time, but I’ve come to realize that his main problem was that he was less effective than other showrunners at standing up to Rick Berman. The others, especially Ira Behr, had their own visions that they fought for. But if you look at Braga’s post-Trek career (with things as different as Threshold, 24, FlashForward, Terra Nova, Cosmos, and Salem), the one unifying theme is that there is no unifying theme. Everything he’s done has either been created by or co-created with someone else, and Braga’s strength as a showrunner is that he’s workmanlike and reliable at helping other creators execute their visions.
@61 said: To be fair, the idea to genericize Chakotay’s culture was done as a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to avoid racism.
I think I have a solution (he said, with a warning to switch your sarcasm-o-meter to 11):
Instead of doing some generic tribe from Earth, they could have identified Chakotay as a descendent of Native peoples who were pulled from Earth to a planet far, far away by the Preservers, who worship the spirit of Kirok, the god who bleeds” that visited them a century before. That’d fix it, right …?
@65/Christopher: I’m of two minds. On one hand, of the two Voyager seasons Braga ran, I find season 5 to be Voyager’s absolute best while season 6 represents a major downfall in quality (though still better than s2 and s7).
As a writer though, he was probably the best on Voyager’s staff. While there is Threshold to contend with, both him and Menosky are responsible for some of the show’s best hours (Distant Origin; Year of Hell; Living Witness; Drone; Timeless). The other writers were very hit-and-miss, even early career Bryan Fuller.
@67/Eduardo: I’d say Menosky was the best, but yeah, Braga could do good high-concept standalone episodes. But he’s always been a natural collaborator, usually working in partnership with other writers/producers. His fiercest haters have always had an ironic habit of giving him exclusive credit for all the things he did collaboratively, so in trying to attack him, they’re devaluing his colleagues instead.
KRAD it’s so great to see you are finally doing a Voyager rewatch, I can’t wait to follow along.
I was born in the late 80s so I was too late to catch most of TNG and even DS9 in their first run, but I followed Voyager weekly as a kid. As a teen I was able to watch all of TNG and DS9 and decided Voyager paled in comparison but I never really would say i hated it by any stretch. I recently did a full rewatch (instead of just my favorite 10 episodes which I revisit often) and was actually surprised how many episodes I really loved. I find that Voyager’s biggest issue is that it fails its premise entirely (it very quickly ignores the Starfleet/Maquis conflict, ignores resource scarcity whenever convenient, fails to address continuity/crew losses etc), but if you can accept it for what it is and what it is not (an episodic show in the TNG vein) then there are far more good individual episodes than bad.
@CLB: “As for Kes’s sexual maturity, I don’t think it’s an issue…”
Okay, I retract my support for you doing a rewatch column. I do not agree with your sensibilities. Hehe.
I’m starting to think this particular issue correlates with lived experience. Either you’ve gone thru something similar, as @MeredithP shared, or you have children or grandchildren younger than 18 that you feel protective of. This kind of blase response might suggest why bad shit sometimes happens when predators sniff around. The people who should be on alert are dismissive.
Comparing human behavior (as reflected in metaphorical fictional relationships on screen) to animal species is irrelevant. Maybe imagine your 18-year-old niece bringing home a man twice her age and saying they’re in love, derailing any prior plans she and her parents had for college. Then explain how it’s not an issue.
I once spent a few minutes noodling around trying to sum up the various STAR TREK captains to date (this was before we got to STAR TREK DISCOVERY and I’m not sure ‘The Cage’ had crossed my monitor, as yet) and came up with the following attempt –
Captain Archer – The Everyman
Captain Kirk – The Superman
Captain Picard – The Gentleman
Captain Sisko – The Big Man
Captain Janeway – The Boss.
I think we can all agree that while my take on the others are up for debate, Cap’n Kate remains spot-on. (-;
@C.L. Bennett, two points – Firstly I heartily disagree with the idea that the Voyager crew’s desire to get home is selfish (do their commitments to family, friends and The Federation mean so much less than the complete strangers of the Delta Quadrant?*); in fact one can think of few endeavours MORE Classically Heroic than an Odyssey.
Secondly, Amazon just dropped the cover for THE HIGH FRONTIER on my desktop and it is GORGEOUS … also intriguingly Andorian (and I have a definite soft spot for The Blues; it’s also delightful to see the Kumari-class get a flyby). (-:
One thing that i dislike about the series the most is that I find Janeway to be a very incompetent captain. She relies too much on authority and own decisions and not encouraging leadership behaviours in others. Sisko had somewhat similar tendencies sometimes, but he did involve his senior staff much more – but they both fail miserably behind Picard in this sense I think. And in real life, in a ship lost far from home, this behaviour from a captain could be very dangerous I think…
Funny, I never found the Kes-Neelix romance creepy. I think that’s because Neelix displays such a childlike behaviour, and has all this alien makeup, that it never occurred to me to assign an age to him. I only wondered when they could have met and fallen in love. Before the Kazon captured Kes, or afterwards? I always had the impression that they already know each other well, but is that even possible?
Speaking of romances, I wish they had paired B’Elanna up with Kim instead of Paris. I have a personal dislike of the trope that women prefer bad boys, and they would have made a sweet couple. Just imagine them calling each other “Starfleet” and “Maquis” in bed.
I found it less likeable when Chakotay called Tuvok “Vulcan” after learning that he’s Janeway’s chief of security. You’re angry at him, fine; he still has a name.
So now the Ocampa are safe for five years. What will they do afterwards? It would have been nice if the characters had had a talk about that in one of the final scenes, if only to acknowledge that there’s nothing they can do.
@70/Sunspear: You’re taking fiction too literally. As I said, lots of fantasy/SF stories treat very young characters (like the Doctor, who’s essentially newborn in “Caretaker”) as fully eligible adults. It’s okay because stories are just metaphors, and if the story needs a character to be an adult, then they’re an adult. It’s got nothing to do with real-life ethics, because these are not real people.
Also, you’re quoting me out of context and twisting my words. I said her sexual maturity wasn’t an issue because she and Neelix were not having sex. It was, to all indications, a Platonic love affair. “Elogium” made it pretty clear that “mating” would be a major step forward in their relationship. And then it didn’t actually happen.
@71/ED: ” Captain Kirk – The Superman”
Oh, by no means. That’s not how Kirk was written, that’s the caricature that pop culture has imposed on him. He was meant to be entirely human, with human doubts and vulnerabilities. Other ’60s TV action heroes were often simplistically drawn supermen, but Kirk had far more depth and nuance and was written as far more of a real person.
@74/Jana: Neelix met Kes during her captivity with the Kazon-Ogla. He couldn’t have met her before then, since she was in the Ocampas’ inaccessible underground city before then. According to Pathways, it’s because of his kindness to her during her captivity (while he was trading with the Ogla) that she fell in love with him.
As for Tom and B’Elanna, I’d say that by the time their romance started, he’d long since outgrown being a “bad boy” except in the most superficial ways. Heck, she was more “bad” than he was.
@74: I guess they thought they’d covered the issue of the Ocampa in the chat between Janeway and the Caretaker, where Janeway talks about how species tend to overcome adversity.
I definitely disagree with the perception of Paris as a “bad boy”: B’Elanna’s the one who’s an ex-terrorist with anger management issues, Tom’s a sweetie and their romance was on that basis.
@56: Is “helping others” really a common goal of Star Trek series though? I mean, yes, you get the odd episode where they’re delivering medical supplies or whatever, but mostly it’s about some lofty idea of expanding human/Federation knowledge, and getting home with a load of information about the other side of the galaxy seems in keeping with that.
@CLB: Not taking it literally. I said several times I see the fictional relationships as metaphors. They should be commenting on real world relationships like all good fiction does. Here, the parameters are so badly set up that it becomes an inchoate mess. It is ill-conceived. What commentary is offered by setting up this relationship? Or is it pure fictional nonsense without worth, working in a void disconnected from the actual humans watching this?
The Doctor is not an apt comparison because he isn’t organic. He’s designed to materialize as a fully formed adult. Kes is not. Suggesting that it’s sexist simply because a hologram presents as male seems disingenuous also.
This bit: “It’s not uncommon in SF or fantasy to treat characters as romantically eligible if they’re physically mature, regardless of their chronological age.”
I know you often accept the “official story”, but it has also been “not uncommon” in world history for older men to marry child brides, younger than 16, sometimes as young as 12. It still happens today. Look up stories from Chechnya where warlords force such marriages for their lieutenants by intimidating families, sometimes at gunpoint.
The fact that something’s been done in the past doesn’t mean it can’t be interrogated. The fact that something was commonly practiced or accepted doesn’t mean it should necessarily continue.
@77/Sunspear: “Suggesting that it’s sexist simply because a hologram presents as male seems disingenuous also.”
The Doctor’s just one example. There are other very youthful male characters in SF/fantasy treated as sexually eligible adults, like Earth: Final Conflict‘s Liam Kincaid — the replacement male lead for the second season, who literally grew to adulthood in seconds after his birth in the season premiere, one of the stupidest ways I’ve ever seen to write in a new series lead. And it wasn’t long before he was having adult-style romance plots.
Besides, what does AI nature matter here? Surely the reason for objecting to an underage relationship is that the younger person lacks the maturity or experience to make good choices. That’s not about whether they’re made of meat or silicon, it’s about their life experience and judgment. So it should be an issue just as much for a young AI as for a young organic being.
“I know you often accept the “official story”, but it has also been “not uncommon” in world history for older men to marry child brides, younger than 16, sometimes as young as 12.”
We are not talking about that. We are not talking about real human beings in any way, shape, or form. We are talking about nonhuman fantasy characters.
@77 et al: Well, we seem to be straying from the point a lot here… Personally, I’m 40 years old, and I’m not planning to date any 20-year-olds any time soon, but if I did, I hope I wouldn’t have to deal with lynch mobs dubbing me a predator and comparing it to the forced marriage of child brides. As a quick rule of thumb, if two people are both considered adults by any reasonable criteria, then I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s up to them whether or not they pursue a relationship, and the “moral majority” should mind their own business. Kes, for the most part, seems emotionally mature, she definitely seems physically mature, and I never saw any power imbalance in her relationship with Neelix. It’s debatable whether Neelix could be definitely said to be more experienced than her: His romantic history on the show is relatively limited, if not entirely chaste.
I guess the problem we have here is that it’s another aspect of the show that wasn’t thought through. There’s really no narrative reason for the Ocampa to have short life spans, and as the show goes on it causes more problems than opportunities. So perhaps someone should have had another think and realised that it ran the risk of people taking it too literally and thinking that an Ocampa’s age is somehow comparable to a human of the same age. It’s not really a metaphor, it’s just a biological detail. That said, I don’t think people should take it too literally and should just accept that, culturally, emotionally and biologically, Kes is a young adult who doesn’t need anyone swooping to her defence.
@79/cap-mjb: “There’s really no narrative reason for the Ocampa to have short life spans”
You could say there’s no narrative reason for Vulcans to be logical or Trill to be symbiotic. Those things aren’t the result of story needs, they’re meant to be generators of stories. You come up with alien characters who have potentially interesting traits, then you come up with stories based on those traits.
There was a lot of story and character potential to the idea of a species that had a far shorter lifespan than ours. The effect that compressed life cycle and looming mortality have on the character’s personality. The desire to accumulate life experience while one can, or frustration at failing to do so with so little time left. The opportunity to explore a character’s entire life cycle from young adulthood to parenthood to natural death in the course of a 7-year series. There were a lot of ways they could have gotten stories out of Kes’s brief lifespan, but they mostly squandered her potential except in isolated episodes like “Before and After.”
Yessssss!!! Voyager Rewatch!!!! Woot woot! Look I know it’s not everyone’s favorite, but Voyager has some of the best episodes in all Trek, imho. Looking forward to this!
We’re going to be addressing Kes on a deeper level later on when we get to some of her episodes. I can’t say I was the biggest Neelix/Kes fan early on, but not because of any age discrepancies, but rather due to his possessiveness and jealousy towards Paris (which isn’t unwarranted; Paris can be a sleaze this early on, especially towards her).
Kes always came across as mature (an aspect I always felt Lien sold well), while Neelix suffers from a lot of insecurity early on. That, plus the fact that they’re both orphans in a sense – having lost their respective homeworlds – helps to establish at least some foundation.
And honestly, did I care that Kes was less than 2 years old when I first saw this? Not really. I didn’t even perceive their relation as icky or anything as such. This is Star Trek, a fictional universe, and we’re dealing with two distinct alien cultures that aren’t necessarily bound to the same cultural expectations as humans do regarding age of consent. If anyone is truly bothered by what looks like a mutual consensual adult relationship because of a simple number, they ought to reevaluate their own preconceptions.
And I’d also recommend they stay far, far, far away from Japanese animation. Neelix/Kes have nothing in common with the more outrageous examples of eastern culture.
Just a reminder: if the writers had felt that this was an issue, they likely wouldn’t have made Neelix Naomi’s godfather in the later seasons.
Returning to Chakotay’s vague/generic tribal origins:
The series-TV writing cycle is typically so very rushed that pretty much the only way to avoid stereotyping is to have at least one person in the writing pool who has both responsiblity for and access to some level of expertise in a given character’s socio/ethnic background. Ideally, the expertise is through lived experience, but if the character’s caretaker has access to a knowledgeable cultural advisor in the relevant niche, that can work if the advisor’s input is respected and applied.
Short of the particular couple of writers who created the “Walking Bear” character for the animated TOS-era episode “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, that expertise in Native American heritage was probably very hard to find in the internal 1990s Hollywood network in which VGR was developed (it might have been a bit easier in Vancouver BC, but I think the great TV production northward migration had barely begun at the time).
That said, two observations: first, a fictional tribe (or better, sub-tribal group) might in fact have been a workable solution if they’d settled from the first on a specific tribe/sub-group to use as a model. As I think I noted above, my frustrations with Chakotay’s background arose because the writers tended to pull Native folklore elements more or less at random from widely separated Native cultures and mix them together. Second, twels at #66 may have meant the specific comment satirically, but as a practical matter making Chakotay the product of a later, somewhat amalgamated Native population from an off-Earth colony would have been both a workable solution and a vehicle for conveying a broader picture of the Native experience in North America.
@CLB: “for one thing, Mulgrew was less than half Peter Falk’s age and would’ve been in her teens when we first heard Columbo mention his wife”
You seemed to know earlier that this didn’t add up.
“We are not talking about that. “
Shouting doesn’t help. Who’s “we”? You are narrowing down and defining your own subject (differently than I defined it) and avoiding the implications of any fictional representation for real life, real human viewers. As I said, if a depiction functions in a vacuum, it is completely useless as a reflection of human nature. If you entirely exclude such application, then it’s an empty exercise, void of meaning. It’s not art, it’s space cotton candy. It’s not a measure of society, just empty entertainment.
I personally don’t care about the “orthodoxy” of a show’s mythology, or ever been as deferential as some. The instances you cite are irrelevant to me. They are lazy shortcuts shows take to get a certain status quo. I always thought it was stupid when they did it (Angel’s son, for example). That they did it doesn’t validate anything.
If you separate art (not that Voyager is art) from life, you’re entirely missing the part that inspired the art.
I’d make Chakotay come from a reconstructed tribe. It was wiped out very early in the colonisation of North America, and 20th century people never knew about it. But 24th-century archaeologists discovered traces of it, including grave sites. They even found genetic markers present in modern humans, descendants of assimilated survivors. So some of them decide to recreate the culture, which is broadly similar to other Native Americans from say, Virginia. But none of the details have to match any real tribe.
One thing I noticed on a rewatch that I don’t think was mentioned in the article or the comments is that the shuttle craft Tom flew in on at DS9 had NCC-1701-D on it. Any ideas why an Enterprise D shuttle craft was being used? Maybe just an Easter egg?
@75/Christopher: “Neelix met Kes during her captivity with the Kazon-Ogla. He couldn’t have met her before then, since she was in the Ocampas’ inaccessible underground city before then.”
When I first watched the episode, I wondered whether he might have met her first, before the Kazon found her. They seemed so at home with each other. But it probably didn’t happen this way.
“As for Tom and B’Elanna, I’d say that by the time their romance started, he’d long since outgrown being a “bad boy” except in the most superficial ways. Heck, she was more “bad” than he was.”
I agree. I phrased that badly. What I mean is that the writers seem to consider him a more likely love interest than Kim, because daring, dashing, troubled past beats wide-eyed, idealistic, plays a musical instrument. Half of Voyager‘s small pool of female main characters has a relationship with him at some point! I find that a little bit annoying.
@76/cap-mjb: “I guess they thought they’d covered the issue of the Ocampa in the chat between Janeway and the Caretaker, where Janeway talks about how species tend to overcome adversity.”
That was a good chat, but of course the Kazon are objectively dangerous. Which is why Janeway destroys the array. I dunno, I guess if I were Janeway I would have wanted a talk with Kes, ask her how the Ocampa will likely react to the changed situation, make sure that they’ll be all right.
“B’Elanna’s the one who’s an ex-terrorist with anger management issues, Tom’s a sweetie and their romance was on that basis.”
They’re both ex-terrorists, but she’s the one with anger management issues, that’s true.
She was my favourite Voyager character twenty-five years ago. She reminded me so much of myself. I had anger management issues well into my thirties.
“Is “helping others” really a common goal of Star Trek series though? I mean, yes, you get the odd episode where they’re delivering medical supplies or whatever, but mostly it’s about some lofty idea of expanding human/Federation knowledge […].”
Perhaps not a goal, but it runs through the original series, at least. (That’s part of why I like it so much.) Healing the Horta, providing teachers and advisors for the Onlies, lending their bodies to Sargon and his people, giving a planet to the Kelvans, promising Kara that “we’ll help you for a while” after taking their Controller away, repairing Yonada’s trajectory,… I’m not sure if it’s as prevalent in TNG. I know I missed it sometimes, for example at the end of “Descent”. (But then, I missed it even more in “Wink of an Eye”. I later learned that the script contained a last scene where they take action to help the Scalosians, they just didn’t film it that way.)
This isn’t a refutation of your point. If I remember correctly, the Voyager crew helps quite a few people(s) on their way home, too, as far as their limited resources permit. So it’s perfectly in keeping with the Star Trek ideals.
@86/jcmnyu: The shuttlecraft number actually changed between shots. It was 71325 in the initial shot, then 1701-D in the next exterior shot, then back to 71325 (I think) in the third shot. So it was just a production error.
@87/Jana: According to Pathways, Kes was in the Ogla’s captivity for close to 2 months, meeting Neelix 5 weeks in (after having been aware of his arrival in the camp for some unspecified time before), instantly trusting him through her telepathic sense of his character, and spending 2 weeks growing close to him and plotting her escape, though of course the attempt failed, Neelix fled, and then “Caretaker” happened.
I imagine a relationship formed over 2 weeks in captivity or hardship can be as intense as one forged over months in normal circumstances.
“They’re both ex-terrorists…”
Not really. Tom tried joining the Maquis and was arrested on his first mission, IIRC. So he barely even qualifies.
“If I remember correctly, the Voyager crew helps quite a few people(s) on their way home, too, as far as their limited resources permit. So it’s perfectly in keeping with the Star Trek ideals.”
Still, I prefer a show where the characters choose to put themselves in harm’s way for a higher purpose to one where they’re just trying to run home and only incidentally help people along the way. I liked Stargate Atlantis because its characters made a voluntary choice to cut themselves off from home in the name of exploring a remote galaxy (also because they restored the link home after one season instead of dragging that thread out for seven years). Sure, Janeway made a selfless choice to stay at the end of “Caretaker,” but then the rest of the series undercut that by having her get more and more obsessed with getting home at all costs.
@88/CLB: Yes, it’s “selfish” in a sense that the crew of the Voyager make it such a point over the course of the series to get home rather than focus on exploring but to do so is very “human” and that sentiment seemed to carry over to the non-human members of the crew as well whether they be Vulcan,half-Klingon, etc. Sure, most of them signed up to be explorers but at a more reasonable distance from home. The idea of being thrown a distance where it would take a lifetime or more to get back to see everyone again you ever loved or what’s familiar is daunting and frightening. You just have to place yourself in their shoes. Like if I were Janeway I’d be focused on getting back to my boyfriend and maybe even more so, my dog. Come to think of which, I hope Janeway at least got her dog back at the end of the series!
@89/GarretH: Sure, in general, there’s nothing wrong with stories about trying to get home. But this is Star Trek. The core principle of all the other shows is seeking out the unknown, boldly going where no one has gone before. It’s about doing things for the greater good, for the enlightenment or protection of your whole society, for partnership and peace between different societies. I just couldn’t get as invested in a show whose crew was just trying to serve themselves.
And I wasn’t the only one. When the show was first announced, a lot of fans objected that ST should be about seeking out the new rather than running from it. The producers promised us that the show wouldn’t dwell perpetually on the Lost in Space stuff, that the bit about being stranded was just a catalyst and eventually the focus would shift more toward exploration. But they never kept that promise. They tried to for most of the third season, then broke it definitively and permanently when Janeway insanely risked her crew’s lives to make a deal with their worst enemy for the slim chance of getting a little bit closer to home.
Really, the whole premise of the show never really worked for me. The idea that they could get home in 70-odd years was contingent on maintaining a steady pace throughout at a fairly high warp factor, but they didn’t even come close to that; they were constantly stopping for supplies or getting delayed by fights or taking side trips for various reasons. If the writers — or the characters — had been honest, they would’ve admitted that getting home was the work of centuries, a fool’s mission to begin with. (The way they started throwing in shortcuts and huge jumps to get them 10 or 20,000 light years at a time always felt like cheating to me.) What I felt they should’ve done (and had them do in my alternate-timeline novel Myriad Universes: Places of Exile) was to accept that the Delta Quadrant was their home now, focus on building alliances and connections in that part of space and putting down new roots there, and focus on restoring communications with Starfleet. They could’ve built a whole new Federation annex out there, worked to bring stability to the chaotic and impoverished region where they arrived, which would’ve been a more interesting and meaningful premise for a series than just traveling in a straight line for a very long time.
@90/CLB: Your ideas are good and would have been interesting to see on-screen but unfortunately that was never going to happen with Berman/Paramount/UPN making a play-it-safe TNG clone featuring the sexy blond Borg babe. That’s why I’ll always think of Voyager as the series of missed opportunities and potential, while still being (usually) watchable and mindless fun.
@91/GarretH: Please don’t denigrate Seven of Nine like that. She was a rich, fascinating character played by a superb actress, and people who think they’re being clever by ignoring everything except her superficial appearance are merely betraying their own inability to look beneath the surface.
@87,”Jana, as I recall poor Kim had a peculiarly doomed romantic life, kind of like Xander on Buffy, every woman he got interested in turned out to be a threat to Voyager.
Voyager still explored the unknown. They simply did it from a different angle, something to do along the way home rather than away from it. With that, I appreciate the steps towards being an anti-TNG in the initial concept, with a smaller ship and with families on the other side of the galaxy instead of a few decks away, which is a good reason for wanting to get back in their lifetimes. Or at least make contact.
Pity though they didn’t go further with cutting out the comforts. I wanted to see a Starfleet ship really roughing it. Here’s hoping for Discovery season 3…
90. ChristopherLBennett – “They could’ve built a whole new Federation annex out there, worked to bring stability to the chaotic and impoverished region where they arrived, which would’ve been a more interesting and meaningful premise for a series than just traveling in a straight line for a very long time.”
Yeah, because that’s always worked out so well in the real world. Powerful interloper shows up and decides to show the poor, backwards natives what they’re doing wrong and that they should be doing things the right way. Which is to say, the Federation way.
Or, in the words of Kira Nerys –
Major Kira : This “wilderness”… is my home.
And
Major Kira : The Cardassians left behind a lot of injured people, Doctor. You can make yourself useful by bringing your Federation medicine to the natives. Oh, you’ll find them a friendly, simple folk.
As far as not getting home, that’s not what the crew signed up for. Should Starfleet crew their vessels and then, once they’re underway, inform the people on board that it’s a one way trip and that they won’t be returning home? Sure, it’ll work once or twice but eventually, people are going to stop signing up. Maybe Picard should have done the same thing at J-25 or at the center of the galaxy. Should Kirk have decided to hang out in the strange space that Larry Marvick sent them to?
@94/Trilby: I still think that if they wanted getting home to be a plausible possibility, they shouldn’t have sent it so far away and treated an idealized estimate with no stops or delays as a realistic time frame for getting back. As it was (and leaving aside the later huge jumps), I always felt it was kind of dishonest of the writers to pretend there was any realistic shot of getting home in any of the characters’ lifetimes, even Tuvok’s.
I mean, good grief, even with just a 70-year journey, that’s a generation ship. That would require having children and raising them to take over as the crew eventually. Yet UPN’s or Berman’s or whoever’s insistence on episodic storytelling meant that the crew’s relationships hardly developed and only one or two people had kids. The crew seemed to be stuck in denial, so fixated on the remote possibility of getting home in decades that they failed to live their lives in the present. The show never took full advantage of its premise, because it was focused on the wrong thing, the absurdly unlikely prospect of getting home rather than the more pragmatic and immediate goal of building a new life where they were.
@92/CLB: It wasn’t my intention to denigrate Seven of Nine nor the actress playing her. She was one of my favorite characters and actors on the show, and good use was made of her. The point I was making was that I saw her casting and costuming in skin tight catsuits as pretty obvious pandering to a certain demographic of viewers. If the show runners had decided on casting a male for the role I’m pretty dubious that that actor’s sex appeal would be emphasized.
@97: Like Deanna Troi before her, and T’pau after, I can’t help but think Seven would’ve looked a lot better in the actual Starfleet uniforms.
Thank goodness DS9 escaped from whomever was insisting at least one woman per series be dressed in something skintight.
Season 2’s Alliances does flirt with the idea of Janeway spearheading a Federation branch on the Delta Quadrant. It’s also one of the show’s weakest episodes (thanks in no small part to the appalling Kazon politics) and a misguided attempt at serialization which promptly convinced the show’s writers to abandon any long-term plotting notions thereby adopting the TNG episodic adventure concept full-time.
Only skimmed the comments, so maybe I missed someone else’s take on this, but the lack of mourning the dead crew never bothered me. The mission into the Badlands was Voyager’s first mission. The ship was commissioned that same year (2371). The crew didn’t know each other. At the time of the disaster they were little more than work proximity associates in a quasi-military institution. It was a job gone horribly wrong, and everyone one would have reasonably been emotionally affected, but to dwell on their loss over the duration of the show, or even the first season, would’ve made little sense. They were trained to deal with such things and had no reason to be emotionally attached (yet) to those lost. As a piece of writing or of television entertainment, to spend on-air time with a memorial for characters the viewer has no relationship with makes even less sense (presumably such a memorial did occur, just off screen). The reason the memorial for Airiam worked — and was important — in Discovery was because we the viewers care about the characters who cared about Airiam.
“@57/Thomas: “My guess is that with DS9 on the air, they just didn’t really want to do arcs on Voyager, and the lack of committment shows.”
It wasn’t because of DS9; it was because Voyager, unlike DS9, was on UPN. A network show is subject to an additional layer of oversight that a syndicated show isn’t, and in this case, UPN wanted an episodic show that would be accessible to casual viewers. I think maybe Rick Berman also preferred a more episodic approach, but Berman tended to leave DS9 in Ira Behr’s hands because he was busy on TNG, the movies, and VGR himself.”
@63/clb: Nah, as far as I understand it wasn’t studio directives here either, though I’m sure that played a role. Michael Pillar wanted to do more serialized stuff when he was showrunner, he wanted Voyager to be a grittier show and have consequences that mattered over time. That’s why the first couple seasons had more resource collection, and why they had ongoing “occasional visit” type storylines in the background like Seska, the spy on Voyager, the Kazon/Trabe stuff. Suder was supposed to be another one, but that fell through because of arguments in the writers room with other writers that wanted it to be more serialized; Berman’s pressure was part of that, but Jeri Taylor and others who agreed with her pushed for more focus on character-centric development over time rather than serialized plot-centric development, more in the vein of TNG. Thus once Michael Pillar left and Jeri Taylor took over as showrunner, Voyager abandoned those. (Quite literally; the ending of Basics was literally her clearing out all the loose ends set up by Pillar, she really disliked a lot of it.)
#96
Yes, without a doubt they could’ve done more with the concept, in many ways. I think they were trying hard to avoid repeating themselves at the time. If they’re boldly going into the unknown every week, they’re repeating TOS and TNG. If they hang around in one location and build a community, they’re repeating DS9. For whatever reason, returning home seemed to be on the minds of creators then. We already had Quantum Leap and I believe Sliders started a few months after Voyager.
#98
Seven got to wear the uniform once that I can recall, in “Relativity.” And yes, she looked great IMO.
Hmm, perhaps Voyager could have done arcs I would have liked – about ongoing shortages, making do, having children, perhaps adding more alien crewmembers along the way. It would still have been episodic because they visited different planets every week.
I’ve come to think that full serialisation killed the Star Trek I like, because for some reason story arcs are always about war, or fundamental political problems in the Federation, or both.
@96/Christopher: That’s a criticism I remember from the time when Voyager was new, that they should pair off and have children. I would have liked that. But I don’t think the crew ever took the seventy years seriously. They gambled that they would find a shortcut. In a galaxy this quirky and varied, is that such an unreasonable gamble?
You can forgive the crew for thinking that some space anomaly is going to whisk them back to Earth. All the other examples of that in Star Trek aside, that’s the way they got to the Delta Quadrant in the first place.
104. garethwilson – Exactly. There’s wormholes and spacial anomalies and advanced tech, just to name a few. The idea that they should simply accept where they are without even attempting to get back home is ludicrous.
If you want something like that, you’re upfront with the crew. “This will be a one way trip. There’s no coming back. Say your goodbyes now because you’ll never see your friends and family again.” You don’t just have the captain decide “Well, we’re explorers so I’m going to decide that everyone will spend the rest of their lives here.”
@97/GarretH: “If the show runners had decided on casting a male for the role I’m pretty dubious that that actor’s sex appeal would be emphasized.”
Tell that to William Shatner, who was constantly losing his shirt in TOS.
Here’s the opening from “Catsuits Are Irrelevant,” the Star Trek Magazine article I did about Seven of Nine in the March 2009 issue:
I agree that Seven’s costuming was poorly handled. But too many people over the decades have used it as an excuse to denigrate the character or dismiss the actress as nothing but a busty blonde, which is attacking her rather than defending her.
@102/Trilby: “If they hang around in one location and build a community, they’re repeating DS9.”
I wouldn’t say that. DS9 focused on one single planet that the characters were grooming for membership in the existing Federation, and the UFP was still there to support them. The format I’m suggesting for VGR would’ve been more like what Enterprise did — starting from scratch, a lone starship in a hostile part of the galaxy slowly building a reputation and alliances, bridging the divides between old enemies and forging new bonds, that sort of thing.
Of course, if VGR had done that, then it would’ve been repetitive when ENT did it.
“For whatever reason, returning home seemed to be on the minds of creators then. We already had Quantum Leap and I believe Sliders started a few months after Voyager.”
“Lost and trying to get home” narratives have been a standard theme in fiction since The Odyssey at least. Of Irwin Allen’s four ’60s-’70s TV series, the only one that wasn’t about lost people trying to get home was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (the others were Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants). See also Gilligan’s Island, Land of the Lost, The Fantastic Journey, Otherworld, etc.
But there’s another genre of shows where people are stranded in an alien environment and it’s established up front that they have no hope of getting home, that they just have to find a way to make a life where they are. The ’74 Planet of the Apes TV series dabbled with a “can we find a time warp back home” thread for about two episodes before decisively closing it off as a possibility. Battlestar Galactica destroyed the characters’ home completely and left them as refugees seeking a new home. Roddenberry’s Genesis II/Planet Earth pilots and their later reworking Andromeda all stranded Dylan Hunt in a post-apocalyptic future with no way back, just a goal of going forward and rebuilding civilization.
@88/CLB: “Still, I prefer a show where the characters choose to put themselves in harm’s way for a higher purpose to one where they’re just trying to run home and only incidentally help people along the way… Sure, Janeway made a selfless choice to stay at the end of “Caretaker,” but then the rest of the series undercut that by having her get more and more obsessed with getting home at all costs.”
Certainly, to a degree, getting home was their primary goal (as Janeway says at the end of the pilot) but never at the cost of innocent lives. They didn’t have Starfleet Command sending them on specific missions and they couldn’t call on an army of Federation experts to rebuild a planet after they’d sorted out the immediate problem, but if they could help they did, often at cost or potential cost to themselves. In “False Profits” for instance they could have got home in the first ten minutes but felt obligated to stop the Ferengi exploiting people. As late as the finale, Janeway prioritises destroying the Borg’s network over going home, although ultimately they work out a way to have their cake and eat it.
@107/cap-mjb: “As late as the finale, Janeway prioritises destroying the Borg’s network over going home, although ultimately they work out a way to have their cake and eat it.”
And you’ve homed in on exactly what I hated most about “Endgame.” The crew finally, finally learned the lesson they should’ve learned years earlier — and then the show cheated and hypocritically undermined that decision for a contrived “happy” ending that threw out all the logic and morality of the earlier hour’s worth of debates.
@107/cap-mjb: That’s how I remember it too, although I have forgotten most of the individual episodes.
@108/Christopher: Which lesson?
@106, CLB, I agree with you that Seven was a genuinely interesting and complex character. But she was also put in a distractingly tight costume which didn’t exactly enhance that perception. And high heels, don’t forget the heels.
@109/Jana: “Which lesson?”
That home is where you make it. That the crew’s home was the ship, their family each other, and that getting back to the Federation shouldn’t outweigh living their lives in the present and making the right choices. That accepting a permanent life change and moving forward is more mature than desperately running from it and pretending you can get back to the way things were. Aside from the Doctor, Seven, Paris and Torres, the whole main cast’s lives stagnated for seven years because they couldn’t let go of the past. That’s not healthy. I was so relieved when Harry finally said what I’d been waiting years for someone in the show to figure out — and then they just tossed it aside by coming up with an excuse for getting home anyway.
@110/roxana: I’m not disputing that the costume was oversexualized. That is a legitimate criticism. But too many people over the decades have used Seven’s costume as an excuse to attack and dismiss Seven or Jeri Ryan herself, to say that the character was nothing more than a Barbie doll or the actress was just a bimbo hired for looks alone, and that is wrong and unfair. Someone who says “I am incapable of recognizing a woman’s intelligence, talent, or worth if I am distracted by her sexuality” is merely confessing their own misogyny. Hell, I was constantly distracted by Seven’s sexy costume, but it never kept me from recognizing what a great character she was or what an amazing actress Jeri Ryan was.
@111/Christopher: Did it outweigh living their lives in the present, though? IIRC they had romances and hobbies and fun on the holodeck and did science and invented stuff while they travelled. I agree that there should have been more babies (and alien pets, perhaps?), but apart from that, they seemed quite good at making Voyager their home.
@112/Jana: But no more so than if they were on an ordinary Federation ship. And the point is that they didn’t grow. The producers kept their relationships stagnant in a way that just didn’t feel believable for people expecting to be alone together for the next several decades. It was like they were all in denial about the reality of their situation. For me, that’s a bigger credibility issue than whether they could build new shuttles or whatever.
@113/Christopher: I agree that they didn’t behave like people who expected to spend the next several decades together. But why would they? As I said in comment #103, I don’t find it unreasonable to hope for a shortcut. I don’t think it qualifies as denial. Presumably most of them were still in their twenties. What harm was there in hoping for a shortcut and living a kind of student life on Voyager for the first couple of years? If it turned out to be a vain hope, they could always have babies later.
@106/CLB:
Regarding the fan response differing between Spock and Seven, that can be conjectured because Spock was there from the beginning on his series whereas Seven was added midway through on her respective series tying back to my earlier cynical point about it being a blatant grab for the attention of the advertiser-important young male demographic; Spock’s costuming wasn’t emphasizing his build whereas Seven’s was; and then there could be the very possible resentment by some fans that Seven’s introduction led to Kes’s ouster.
Regarding William Shatner going shirtless so often on TOS, yes, that was definitely emphasizing his (a man’s) sex appeal but I get that because he’s the lead and star of the show and so of course his masculinity and manliness, in the era for which this series was produced, would want to be conveyed to the audience.
Again, it was not my intention to denigrate the character of Seven or the actress, both of which were awesome and so perhaps it was a poor choice of words to refer to the character as a “busty blonde Borg babe”. But the point I was making was that the directives of the casting of such character was sex appeal driven and that’s what I was rolling my eyes at. The cynic in mean knows that if they had hired a conventionally plain or even unattractive woman by Hollywood standards, or if a man was hired period to play Seven of Nine, there wouldn’t nearly have been all of the salivating attention by the media and/or fans.
I for one cannot wait for the reintroduction of Seven on Star Trek: Picard and it appears there’s no catsuits in sight!
@103/JanaJansen: Well, the season wide serialized arc on season two of Discovery was based around a scientific phenomenon and not war or political-based, unlike the first season of the series.
@114/Jana: The point is not whether what the writers did with the characters can be justified in-story. The point is that the writers could have found far more interesting things to do with the characters if they’d been willing to embrace the potential of the premise instead of minimizing it so they could do TNG-style stories.
“I don’t find it unreasonable to hope for a shortcut. I don’t think it qualifies as denial.”
Expecting a random, magical windfall to fix your problems seems rather juvenile to me. I would expect trained military officers to make more realistic contingency plans. The more likely scenario by a huge margin was that they would be in the Delta Quadrant for the rest of their lives. The reasonable Plan A would be to secure their position there, to establish a defensible home base, to form alliances, to prepare for the less-than-ideal scenario. Once they’d done that, then they could’ve looked into options for cosmic shortcuts as a Plan B or C. You don’t make the Hail Mary pass your entire playbook.
“Presumably most of them were still in their twenties.”
Of the main cast, only Harry, B’Elanna, Seven, and obviously Kes and the Doctor were under 30.
“What harm was there in hoping for a shortcut and living a kind of student life on Voyager for the first couple of years?”
I’m not talking about the first couple of years, I’m talking about the remaining five.
When I had a chance to pitch for Voyager during season 4, I tried my best to avoid coming up with Seven or Doctor pitches, because I assumed everyone would be pitching Seven and Doctor stories and I wanted to offer something they weren’t getting as much of. But in spite of myself, most of the plot ideas I came up with were Seven or Doctor stories. Because they were the characters who had the most potential for growth, for development, for conflict. The other characters had already resolved all their major character conflicts and arcs by that point. There wasn’t that much to say about them anymore. Aside from Tom and B’Elanna and their evolving relationship, the characters other than Seven and the Doctor were just kind of stuck in a rut.
“it never kept me from recognizing what a great character she was or what an amazing actress Jeri Ryan was”
I remember an episode where the Doctor had to take over Seven’s body and for most of that episode Ryan performed a wonderful rendition of Robert Picardo playing the Doctor.
@117/remremulo: Oh, yes, Ryan did an amazing Picardo impression. Body-swap episodes are scientifically ridiculous (though somewhat less so than usual in that case), but a fun opportunity for actors who’ve worked together for years to show off their impressions of each other. (Which is part of why “Turnabout Intruder” didn’t work — because it swapped Kirk with a one-shot guest star, and the actors didn’t know each other’s speech rhythms in order to mimic them effectively, nor was it as interesting to the audience when we only knew one of the characters involved.)
Jennifer Lien got her own shot at something similar in “Warlord” where an alien villain’s mind took over her body. Sure, we didn’t get the fun of seeing her impersonate a character we knew, but Lien did a great job playing completely against Kes’s usual persona. (Much better, I thought, than Alexander Siddig did in “The Passenger” playing the same scenario.)
““What harm was there in hoping for a shortcut and living a kind of student life on Voyager for the first couple of years?”
I’m not talking about the first couple of years, I’m talking about the remaining five.”
But they had already made some long jumps in the first few years. Should they suddenly decide that it’s not happening fast enough and start looking for a place to settle down?
Of course they’re going to be looking for shortcuts. It was a single shortcut that got them into the situation in the first place. Immediately jumping to the conclusion that there’s no way back would obviously be a mistake. It’s Star Trek. It’s chock full of spacial shortcuts.
And deciding to settle down someplace and hope that the solution comes to you is hoping for an even more magical, windfall solution. They only had 141 people. If they establish a base and also send the ship out for defense or exploration, they’re stretched out even thinner than they were. 141 isn’t enough for a viable colony without outside support.
I very much enjoyed Voyager for the exploration elements, trying to find some way to return home, whether it was studying a wormhole, building a new engine, or bargaining with more powerful aliens. It was also fun to watch it from the other end, when we follow Barclay and Starfleet working to establish contact with this lost ship. There’s a spirit of hope, innovation, communication, diplomacy that runs throughout the series. Created more from the basic need to survive, of course, than pure curiosity, but even an accidental Magellan is still a Magellan. So, say what you want about the up and down in quality from episode to episode, the series was still Star Trek to the bone.
@119/kkozoriz: That, and
@116/Christopher: Concerning the characters’ age, I’d expect the main cast to be older than the average crewmember, because all the senior officers are in the main cast.
On a different note, why couldn’t you write a story about a character unless that character hadn’t resolved their major character conflicts and arcs yet? Can’t a character simply meet interesting people and have an adventure? Which conflict or unresolved arc did Picard have in “Darmok” or Riker in “Frame of Mind”?
@108/CLB: “The crew finally, finally learned the lesson they should’ve learned years earlier — and then the show cheated and hypocritically undermined that decision for a contrived “happy” ending that threw out all the logic and morality of the earlier hour’s worth of debates.”
I’d say they learned that lesson at least as early as “Night”. There, the crew have a chance to take a short-cut home but it appears to mean allowing the Malons to go on ruining the environment of innocent aliens. Janeway refuses to have the crew suffer for her morals again, so works out a plan to stop the Malons, send everyone else closer to home and strand herself. The crew refuse to abandon her so they work out a way to get everyone closer to home and stop the Malons. Sometimes there is a solution to the Kobayashi Maru, you just need to look for it.
Early on, there was discussion of the possibility of Voyager becoming a generational starship. They were aware that it would have to happen if they really did spend 75+ years travelling without any back-up but in the end, they were only stranded seven years, not long enough for it to become an issue.
@121/Jana: It’s not that I “couldn’t,” it’s that it was far easier to find interesting stories to tell about Seven and the Doctor because there were so many more story hooks available, so much room for growth and conflict. That’s why those two were the breakout characters. The cynics assumed Seven was dominant because of the producers’ desire to pander and play up her sex appeal, but that’s another case where they were just revealing their own misogyny, their dismissal of the worth of any woman who happened to look good. As I discovered when I pitched to the show, she and the Doctor were the dominant characters because they were the ones that had the most stories worth telling.
@122/cap-mjb: Sure, of course you can pick out isolated instances where these issues were addressed. I’m talking about the overall thrust of the series, the creators’ choice of what to emphasize and what potentials to leave undeveloped. Voyager was always a series of missed opportunities and squandered potential. Ideas that should’ve been embraced on an ongoing basis only got touched on in the occasional standalone episode. Changes that should’ve continued over years were reset to normal by the end of an hour.
Again, the creators initially promised that the show would not become permanently obsessed with getting home, would not be Gilligan’s Island in space. They assured us it would move beyond that focus before it became tiresome. In season 3, belatedly, they really did try to move beyond it. The letter from Jeri Taylor in the season 3 packet sent to prospective pitchers like me made it clear that they felt the quest-for-home angle had run its course and wanted to refocus on discovery and exploration. But then, inexplicably, they made the quest for home a priority again in “Scorpion,” and it stayed that way for the rest of the series. I’ve never understood why they flipflopped on that.
Eventually I watched through the whole of it, but initially what drew me into watching Voyager was the plot line which introuced Seven. I assure you her looks at that time were not a factor…The “sexy” costume that she eventually got was unfortunate, that’s why this is being discussed. I personally don’t like the catsuits or whatever they are called so it didn’t colour my impression in that way.
The plot and the characters, notably Seven, obviously, were interesting and kept me watching to see how things developed in the following episodes. The Doctor and the Captain were the other especially interesting personas from this point onwards.
Benno: Show me the onscreen evidence that states that the crew a) was on its first mission and b) barely knew each other. We know it was Kim’s first mission out of the Academy, but there is absolutely nothing anywhere in this episode that makes it clear that this was Voyager‘s first mission.
And even if it was, what makes you think Janeway’s entire crew was made up of total strangers? Do you think she didn’t bring anybody over from a previous command? Especially a first officer and chief medical officer, two very important people on the ship?
And, finally, when Yar died, there was a memorial service and her death was shown to continue to affect the crew, and she’d been there less than a year. Why don’t Cavit and the rest get the same consideration?
Also, and this particularly bugged me, when the crew started getting messages from home, why didn’t anyone mention the letters for Stadi, for Cavit, for the chief engineer, etc.? Nobody in the Alpha Quadrant could possibly have known that they were killed….
Finally, we’re talking about sentient lives. They should never ever ever be dismissed as unimportant, and every time it happens in fiction, I will goddamn well call them out on it. Every character is somebody’s child, parents, best friend, favorite cousin, whatever, and deserves to fucking well be mourned.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: I very much take your point about Tasha Yar, I was thinking much the same thing myself. As I indicated in my first post, I didn’t see anything in this episode to suggest that the crew had only just met, but there is a strong implication in later episodes that that’s the case. Notably, “Relativity” opens with an admiral welcoming Janeway aboard Voyager, almost certainly for the first time, and her immediately blabbering about Tuvok being on Chakotay’s ship and going to the Badlands to look for him and wanting to recruit Tom Paris. Frankly, it’s a retcon that’s never sat right with me because Janeway does not act like this ship and crew are strangers to her in this episode (apart from Harry Kim) but sadly it is there and it’s canon.
Re letters from home. In “Message in a Bottle”, the Doctor visits the Alpha Quadrant and gives Starfleet a full debrief on Voyager’s mission so far, which prompts them to contact the families and tell them what’s happened, which prompts them to send the first batch of letters in the following episode. That would almost certainly mean them getting a full list of who’s still alive on board Voyager and who’s deceased, hence no letters for the likes of Cavit and Stadi (or indeed the likes of Durst and Darwin who died in the intervening years) but one for Chakotay, who didn’t join the crew until after the ship was lost.
@102, Trilby: Seven was also seen wearing uniform in “Human Error”. Of course, both of them were exceptional circumstances.
@118: There’s an episode of Sarah Jane Adventures where Sarah gets possessed by the villain of the week, and for some reason Elisabeth Sladen decided to convey it by talking in a silly voice that bore absolutely no resemblance to the voice, intonation and speech patterns (or even personality) of the person she was meant to be. It made me admire Jeri Ryan actually putting the effort in a lot more.
125. krad – You could say the same thing about Kirk. At the end of the Galileo 7, he’s informed that 5 are beamed aboard. Sure, he’s relieved bu there’s no indication that he’s concerned about the two that died. For all he knows at that point, it could have been Spock, McCoy or Scotty. He just assumes that the characters he’s concerned about most are among the survivors.
It happened often that he is unconcerned about the death of his crew, with the rare exception of a couple of seconds of looking sad. At least in Balance of Terror, we see mourning for a lost crew member but it’s just his fiancee. Where’s the rest of the crew? Where’s the memorial service?
@123/Christopher: Okay, I see. Personally, I was a bit unhappy about Seven after a while because it meant less stories for all the other characters I liked, and less stories about problems that weren’t personal. I guess stories like that were falling out of fashion when Voyager was new.
@128/kkozoriz: “You could say the same thing about Kirk.”
He did.
@75.ChristopherLBennet – entirely true (especially after being able to rematch the series), but Mr Shatner & Mr Pine between them radiate so much raw panache its difficult not to buy into the Pop Culture impression, at least on a subconscious level (must be the Gold tunic!) and that list of Captains was definitely compiled on a stream of consciousness level.
Having looked up the original version in my notebooks, it was actually:-
– Captain Archer: The Everyman
– Captain Kirk: The Superman
– Captain Picard: The Gentleman
– Captain Sisko: The Man
– Captain Janeway: The Boss.
I’m entirely satisfied with my description of Captains Archer, Picard & Janeway but must admit that Captains Kirk & Sisko are much more open to question; in fact all the characters above are more complex than this little epitome* can possibly convey and one suspects that other writers will already be scribbling out their own, doubtless rather better take on same.
(*Possibly inspired by a series of variant covers for a magazine showing the various James Bond with a sobriquet intended to convey something of the character, although it’s always tricky teasing out the roots of various mental exercises).
Out of curiosity Mr Bennett (and any other interested readers), may I please ask what sobriquet you might use to sum up the individual styles of the various STAR TREK captains were you asked to do so?
@130/ED: I’m not interested in reducing entire complex personalities to one-word labels. Labels are crude oversimplifications; at best they’re the barest beginning of understanding things, not the ultimate end goal of the process.
@130/ED: Interesting challenge! I think I’ll try my hand at a family analogy.
TOS Kirk: big brother (accessible, maintains close friendships, hugs people to comfort them, beats up bullies)
Picard: patriarch (wise, benevolent, sometimes aloof)
Janeway: mother (cares about everyone, settles disputes, keeps less distance than Picard, but more than Kirk)
Archer: teenage brother (awkward, builds his team out of personal friends, sometimes doesn’t react well to criticism)
Kelvin Kirk: black sheep of the family (in the first two films)
I’m having problems to sum up Sisko, mostly because he’s an actual father, and that makes it difficult to see him in any other role.
– Captain Archer: The guy at the party who stands by the food table talking to everyone and eating all the bean dip.
– Captain Kirk: The guy at the party who innocently drives a drunk girl home but everyone thinks he took advantage because, well they just do.
– Captain Picard: The guy at the party who sits in the big leather chair in the living room quietly discussing archaeology in esoteric terms yet somehow commands attention doing it.
– Captain Sisko: The guy at the party who everyone talks about behind his back because he intermittently talks loudly for no reason and smiles at the wrong times.
– Captain Janeway: The woman at the party who beats everyone at Pictionary because she’s had so much damn coffee.
Interesting party game:
Kirk: too sexy for his shirt
Janeway: coffee addict (which I totally identify with)
Picard: the Professor (with a thing for redheads)
Sisko: the coolest; pure jazz; hid his Hawk for too long
Archer: bland, kind of a drip (in the older slang sense; apparently the kids are using it as equivalent to “awesome” these days); but he loves his doggy, so he and Picard would have something in common
krad, you may be right. I must admit that I never watched Voyager until it had been off-air for almost a decade, so there were lots of details around the show’s story that affected my viewing. And I was just giving my explanation for why it never bothered me. As for whether it was Voyager’s first mission, that was my reading of it when I first watched it back in ’13 and I’ve never revisited the assumption. There are hints, but nothing conclusive. The most formative scene for me was the approach where Stadi is telling Tom about the ship. She’s talking about it with such pride, and detailing all of it’s new-ness, like the bio-neural circuitry. And earlier, Janeway tell him, “well, you’ve never seen a ship like Voyager.” And everybody seems so flummoxed by the EMH during the first season. If it wasn’t a new ship, wouldn’t drills have been conducted using the EMH? It’s clearly a new ship, a new class, but yeah, I assumed it was the first mission and it could just be a very early mission. But it *is* a very early mission. You gotta give me that. Still, undoubtedly some of the crew had served together, and there should be more grief evident. But I maintain that, for a first episode, it isn’t compelling storytelling for a pilot. The viewer has little (or no) feeling for those lost. I also will continue to maintain that there was a memorial on ship. We just didn’t see it.
@134/Sunspear: “Archer: […] he loves his doggy, so he and Picard would have something in common”
He and Picard and Kirk and Janeway. All starship captains seem to own a dog at some point.
@fullyfunctional
Nailed it.
@MeredithP 100% agree, it was racism pure and simple. Chakotay is the biggest missed opportunity in the Star Trek Universe. To have an Indigenous person who still practice traditional spirituality living ina science based society. What an opportunity to explore tension, conflict an overlap.
The fear of getting things wrong is not an excuse. Yes, sometimes you get things wrong, people from the same community don’t even all believe the same thing. Making Chakotay from one nation, and doing your best to represent that nation would have been a million times better. You could have even shown the tensions within the community when differing beliefs and interpretations come up.
Paris making similar jokes about any other race / group of people would have been an immediate “I am a bad guy douchebag” marker, even in the 90s.
This episode made me love the doctor. From the get-go, I think he was my favourite character.
@138/Tailspinner: I don’t think it was racism, just clumsiness in trying to be non-racist. Racism is deliberate malice or hate; this was just not knowing any better. As I mentioned before, it’s long been a common practice to use fictitious nations and the like to avoid giving offense to any specific real one. (Like how The West Wing had Qumar and Equatorial Kundu so they could tell stories about war or coups or strife without painting any real country in a bad light.) Or to allow giving an imaginary culture whatever traits or customs the story needed when a real culture might not fit. In general, it’s a perfectly valid practice, but the Voyager producers didn’t think through the implications of applying that practice to a population that’s historically been made invisible in fiction.
Don’t you think that Paris is deliberately portrayed as outrageous? His flirting attempt with Stadi fails, which is a sign that we’re supposed to side with her, not him. And Chakotay gives genuinely witty responses to all his clichéd jokes. To me this shows that the writers were aware that the jokes were in poor taste; it’s part of Paris’ likeable bad-boy image that he saves Chakotay’s life but spouts annoying remarks at the same time.
In later episodes Chakotay was written as a stereotypical Hollywood Indian, and viewers criticised that even then. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
@141/MaGnUs: “Not saying that that’s your case, but this sounded to me like “Oh, it never ocurred to me that Michael Jackson could actually be a child molester, because he was so childlike and his style was so quirky!”.”
Ugh, no, I didn’t mean that at all.
I think I classified both Kes and Neelix as some kind of space pixies (for lack of a better word). I don’t see my daughters, or even a very young woman, when I look at Kes, and I don’t see a guy who’s ten or twenty years older when I look at Neelix. I basically see them both as ageless. I’m not saying that’s how anyone should see them, only that it’s my instinctive interpretation.
“Did Paris really have a relationship with half of VOY’s females?”
No, he had a relationship with half of the female main characters, a group consisting of Janeway, Torres, Kes, and Seven of Nine.
“Relationship” usually refers to “romantic/sexual” relationships, moreso in the context of a character who initially was portrayed as a ladies man. He flirted with Kes, and had a serious relationship with B’elanna. He never showed any signs of attraction towards Janeway or Seven, that I recall.
@142/Jana: I agree — Kes was never played as childlike, despite her calendar age. She always came off as more mature than Neelix. Perhaps they did that deliberately so that it wouldn’t feel inappropriate.
“No, he had a relationship with half of the female main characters, a group consisting of Janeway, Torres, Kes, and Seven of Nine.”
Again, the only relationship Tom Paris ever had with Kes was in the alternate future in “Before and After.” He was attracted to her, but never acted on it out of consideration for Neelix (whose jealousy toward him was unfounded). Tom was starting to fall for B’Elanna as early as mid-season 3, and that was his only major relationship over the course of the series. He only ended up with Kes in the “Before and After” future because B’Elanna had died there and Kes helped him recover from his grief. So even that episode made it clear that B’Elanna was his One True Pairing, as the shippers call it.
(Okay, there was that time that Tom and Janeway mutated into amphibians and had amphibibabies together, but even the writers of that episode disowned it, so we can safely ignore it.)
@143/MaGnUs: He had a serious relationship with Kes, albeit only in one episode. I thought it was longer; I misremembered that. Later he had a serious relationship with B’Elanna. Two relationships, four female main characters, half of four is two.
I tried to complain about Paris getting two girlfriends, Kim getting none, and VOY having too few female main characters all in one sentence. Sorry if it got a bit cryptic.
@145/Jana: Again, though, “Before and After” explicitly said that Kes was Tom’s rebound relationship after losing B’Elanna. So it’s really, really twisting the facts to call that “two relationships.” It’s also downright ludicrous to argue that a single-episode alternate-reality relationship is in any way on a par with a relationship that spanned the entire last 2/3 of the series.
@146/Christopher: “So it’s really, really twisting the facts to call that “two relationships.””
Uh, how is it not two relationships?
“It’s also downright ludicrous to argue that a single-episode alternate-reality relationship is in any way on a par with a relationship that spanned the entire last 2/3 of the series.”
I don’t think I did that, but you know what? I didn’t even remember that it was only one episode until people told me. They had a whole life together, and that’s what stuck in my mind.
@147/Jana: “Uh, how is it not two relationships?”
Again: The only reason “Before and After” Tom ended up with Kes was because he ended up with B’Elanna first and she was his rebound girl after B’Elanna died. This was just a few episodes after the first hint of romance between him and B’Elanna, yet it was saying that in the future, Tom and B’Elanna would fall deeply in love — something that hadn’t even happened yet in the main timeline. So even though it nominally paired him with Kes, it was actually about laying the groundwork for the romance the writers had already decided to develop between Tom and B’Elanna. Thus, narratively speaking, it’s not a separate relationship, it’s a component of his one and only major relationship arc.
@148/Christopher: Okay, now I get where you’re coming from. Obviously this didn’t work for me, as the Paris/Kes relationship became much longer in my memory. No wonder – they were together for the rest of her life, they had a child and a grandchild, Kim even married their child. Of course I remember this as a major relationship.
I’ve never heard the term “rebound girl” before. It sounds a bit dismissive of Kes. Are there “rebound boys”, too?
Comment #141 seems to have disappeared.
@148 et al: I would definitely not characterise Kes as a “rebound girl”: A three years not out marriage is definitely not a “rebound”. There is an argument that she was his second choice, but I think that he was very much in love with her and that timeline showed there were strong feelings between them both on some level that could have blossomed if he hadn’t been with B’Elanna.
There were rumours of Paris and Seven getting together around the time she joined the show: I’m not sure if that was seriously considered by the writers or not but we possibly see a relic of it in “Day of Honour”. Hard to tell if “Muse” is taking the mickey out of fan speculation or writers throwing ideas about.
@151/cap-mjb: I’m not saying their relationship in “Before and After” wasn’t serious within the context of that single episode’s alternate history. Obviously it was. I’m saying that a relationship existing only in a single alternate-timeline episode is not narratively important to Tom’s overall characterization through the series as a whole, any more than Tuvok’s blindness in “Year of Hell” would be. And I’m saying that the narrative goal of the episode was in service to the developing Tom-B’Elanna romance arc rather than in opposition to it, because it established that Tom and B’Elanna were “destined” to be together as long as she didn’t die.
Quick question. I just started reading through these and noticed there’s no comment/quote about Chakotay or Paris or Kes.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Technobabble
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok
Half and half. Torres
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH
Forever an ensign. Kim
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The usual.
Leaving out Seska, I understand. But was there a particular reason you left those three out?
I have categories for the characters I think I will have fun things to say about. The TOS and TNG rewatches didn’t have categories for the captains, and Riker didn’t have one in TNG, either. Bashir and O’Brien didn’t have categories in the DS9 rewatch. Not everyone gets a category.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You know, I’ll say this much:
For all the many, many flaws of “Caretaker” and all the criticisms of the rest of the series, none of it touches or tarnishes Jerry Goldsmith’s opening theme.
Even as an admitted Deep Space Niner, it’s probably my favorite of the original trio of 24th Century themes (though, in a sense, it’s only really in conception with DS9’s intro since the TNG theme is really just an abridged rendition of the TMP theme).
It’s marvelous music and I never, get tired of re-listening to it.
I never skip the opening credits on Voyager, even though Netflix gives me the option.
It probably has the best overall credits of the Trek spinoffs. TNG‘s music is, as you say, a rehash, and the visuals are meh. DS9, honestly, I feel the same about, except what the music is riffing on is Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” only more boring, and the visuals are also lackluster. Enterprise has probably the best visuals of all of them, but the music is so awful. And I love the visuals of both Discovery and Picard, but the music is only okay.
Voyager, though, has a perfect storm of good music and great visuals.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@156 / KRAD:
Enterprise has probably the best visuals of all of them, but the music is so awful.
Yeah, I really wish they’d used Dennis McCarthy’s “Archer’s Theme” as the Main Title instead of relegating it to the End Credits.
It really works as the NX-01’s theme and the optimism of Earth’s first Warp 5 mission.
I dunno, I though the Enterprise theme song worked pretty well. The lyrics fit the show so well I initially thought the song was written for it. And I never understood the complaints about it. They all seemed to boil down to it being in a style that was no longer in fashion, which to me has nothing to do with actual quality. And if it was in an older style, that’s not so different from the TOS theme, which was a mix of swing and bossa nova during the height of the rock age.
But then, I also like the DS9 theme (at least its original arrangement) better than the Voyager theme. I mean, I usually love Goldsmith’s work, but I never considered his Voyager theme one of his best.
Christopher: My complaint about the Enterprise theme is that it’s a bad song. I thought that before they used it for the show, and I thought it after they used it for the show. It’s treacly and mediocre and boring and stupid and awful. So there. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I guess I just don’t follow pop music enough to know the difference.
Although what annoys me are the people who complain about ENT having a pop-song theme at all, insisting a Trek theme needs to be orchestral — overlooking that the TOS theme was very much in a popular song style and was actually performed by a vocalist in its later arrangement.
I’m not a huge fan of the DS9 opening sequence, though I sympathize with the people who had to come up with something. Not an easy task to make the station look exciting from different angles that look mostly the same. Maybe shots of the interiors and the community with all the different aliens could have broken up the monotony. Just an idea.
But I agree with you, Krad, that Voyager had overall the best opening. It’s mysterious and lyrical in ways Star Trek doesn’t often do, sadly. Not even Voyager itself did.
As for Enterprise, well, I like the montage.
@krad: “It’s treacly and mediocre and boring and stupid and awful.”
Total agreement with that. The song is monumental in it’s mediocrity. I’ve used the Salieri to Mozart analogy before. But perhaps a better contemporary example would be if someone tried to claim, in all earnestness, that Nickelback was the greatest rock band in the world. (The only people that make worse pop or rock songs than Canadians are the French. Listen to some French rock… quelle horreur!)
One reaction from a petition against use of the song as a theme: “We wish to express our unmitigated disgust with the theme song that has been selected for the new ‘Enterprise’ series, it is not fit to be scraped off the bottom of a Klingon’s boot.” –Faith_of_the_Heart
Supposedly, Simon Pegg claims he never watched the show because he couldn’t get past the title credits. Also, per the wiki, the premiere episode had an instrumental version playing over the end credits that was never used again. I don’t remember that one.
Nothing wrong with ENT’s visuals. In fact, they could have had a sophisticated song that bridged eras we saw in the montage with subtle variations in style. DIS and PIC do that a bit of that by incorporating older riffs as flourishes.
Speaking of opening themes, in the fourth season of Star Trek Enterprise, when we got the mirror universe theme for those few episodes, we all realized what we had been missing by getting that stupid song for the previous several years. Instrumental is better every time, when it’s Star Trek.
I wonder sometimes what the words would’ve been if Voyager had a monologue in its opening theme, a la TOS and TNG, something to explain to new viewers about Voyager, with its part Starfleet and part Maquis crew, former opponenets now having to work together to find the way home. Then again, as Keith points out several times, that’s not really what we got for a series … but I sure would’ve liked to have seen that.
Confession time. Who among us have inserted lyrics in the opening orchestral themes, maybe after a few drinks, maybe not? I have to admit I’ve done it with Voyager. “We… are… so-FAR-from hooommmeee…” :-D
@164 / JFWheeler:
LOL. Well played.
Actually, you reminded me of SF Debris’ own….shall we say unique musical reinterpretation of VOY as a whole.:
♫ Janeway, Captain Janeway ♫
♫ I’m the best captain in history!
♫ Stranding all my people ♫
♫ Their lives are filled with grief and misery! ♫
@165
Haha, nice!
I love the ENT song, and I love DS9’s the most.
@166:
Yeah, heh, don’t be surprised if I keep bringing up SF Debris and his recurring ‘Psycho Janeway’ jokes throughout the Voyager Rewatch. :)
Reading these posts over the past couple months has inspired me to actually rewatch the series myself. Just finished Caretaker a few minutes ago. So far, so good. I hadn’t rewatched it (except several viewings of Bride of Chaotica) because by the time it was over, there had been 2 episodes a week and 2 novels a month for so long that I was ready to move on.
krad: Why do you criticize McNeill’s acting for coming across as “skeevy”? Paris is an ex-convict and McNeill clearly intended to play him as unsavory, at least in the beginning. Ex-cons are exactly not known for their amazing moral fiber.
If you meant he came across as perverted, I do not agree. He does not say or do anything obscene or predatory in this episode. He comes across as immature and into casual sex, but this does not make him a bad person. He is more of a playboy than a predator.
His character reminds me of Tony DiNozzo from NCIS, who was played brilliantly by Michael Weatherly until a few years ago when he left the series for a leading role on “Bull”, another CBS drama.
rms81: I never liked DiNozzo, either, for many of the same reasons why I don’t like Paris, and have enjoyed NCIS much more since he left.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Ex-cons are exactly not known for their amazing moral fiber.”
Wow, generalizing much?
Voyager is probably my favorite Trek premise, that of being far from home and trying to get back. I liked the “exploration” premise of TOS and TNG, and ENT’s combination of exploration and learning how space works. I didn’t care for the premise of DS9. I haven’t seen any of the newer series yet.
As for calling all officers “sir:” I joined the Air Force in 1982, and even back then, female officers were called “ma’am” or addressed by their rank. I’m pretty certain all other branches of the service were doing the same, though I’d like to hear from someone in the Navy, since that’s the rank structure Trek follows. It always irritated me to hear female officers in the Trek universe being called “sir” or “Mister,” so I was gratified when Mulgrew’s Janeway insisted on “ma’am.” I just never understood why Trek’s writers hadn’t even kept up with the society in which they actually lived, much less had the foresight to imagine that things would have changed by the 24th century.
Poker Player: Yeah, the universalizing of “sir” always felt wrong to me, going all the way back to “Mr. Saavik” in 1982.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@174/krad: On the other hand, etymologically speaking, “sir” traces back to Latin senior, so it literally just means someone higher in a hierarchy. So it’s not intrinsically masculine, it just tends to be used that way because of the cultural tendency to treat men as the default.
Technically “mister” is the same, since it’s just a variant of “master,” which is from the same Latin root as magnus, “great.” However, since it does have a feminine variant in “mistress,” I don’t think we can say it’s non-gendered.
So while I don’t like the “Mister Saavik” usage, I don’t have any particular objection to “sir” as gender-neutral.
@/everyone who mentioned the Shuttle Crash™ cliche:
I love how 24th century shuttles seem to be incredibly flimsy and crash by the dozen. Yet 200+ years earlier, both shuttlepods in Enterprise lasted until the final season…
I’m commenting on a post you wrote in the, gasp, same year as you wrote it.
Excited to be, ahem, voyaging with you even if it’s my first run through of the series and it’s a rewatch for you. Having been through your previous rewatches of TOS, TAS, TNG, and DS9, I’m looking forward to how KRAD’s 2020 brain thinks of these episodes.
@176 – Thierafhal: Stuff from the first half of the 20th century always lasted more than new stuff. IE, appliances, cars, etc. Programmed obsolence.
Thanks, TA!
If you guys want a perspective on Star Trek from someone watching it for the first time ever, check out TA’s blog “To Boldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before.” She’s watched and written about the original and animated series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, and she just started Voyager. Her plan is to watch all the extant Trek by year’s end. (She’s also doing an average of two episodes a day, so she’ll pass me on Voyager pretty dang quick….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@178/MaGnUs
Yes I know. There’s actually a conversation I had about that with a few other commenters from “Coda”, comments 46-49.
https://www.tor.com/2020/08/10/star-trek-voyager-rewatch-coda/comment-page-1/#comment-879746
Haven’t gotten there yet, I’m a bit behind on the rewatches.
What makes you say a crew of 141 should have at least two MDs? When I was in the US Navy, I served aboard a ship with a crew of over 400. Our sickbay was staffed by just two corpsmen, one senior enlisted (a chief), and one more junior enlisted (a second-class petty officer). We had no doctors at all, and that was normal.
@182/Vandy Beth Glenn: I’m not sure krad was “of the opinion” or he had some other source for his comment of Voyager needing 2-3 doctors, but I can totally see it being a Starfleet requirement. Don’t forget that Voyager is basically a long range explorer. At the time, it was faster than anything in Starfleet sans presumably other ships of the class. Sure it could get farther, faster, but range from Starbase support would still be a factor considering the incomprehensible vastness of space compared to the ocean.
Although one problem with all I said is that Voyager was on a special mission when it got pulled into the Delta Quadrant. It was designed as a long range explorer, but it was also the only class of Federation Starship agile enough to traverse the Badlands. I don’t recall the episode, but I do recall it being mentioned that Voyager was only equipped for it’s short mission or something to that effect. In that vein, I can see it requiring only 1 MD at the time, contrary to what krad said.
Your ship was not all alone. Even without taking the trip to the Delta Quardant into account, a Starfleet ship could be weeks or month away from any sort of safe harbour, be it a friendly planet, a starbase or a ship with a doctor. It’s also unlikely that you ship was involved in as many combats as a Starfleet ship would be, not to mention all the brand new disease, various spacial anomalies, transporter accidents and the like.
Yeah, a ship in space needs to be way more autonomous than a ship at sea. At the very least, there should be two, preferably three physicians on board just so there’s backup, since nobody can work a 24-hour shift.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You include Brent Spiner among the list of actors who’ve played the same character on three ST series, but he was Data on only TNG and Picard. He was Dr. Soong on Enterprise, or am I missing something?
@186/bgsu98: Spiner reprised Data in voiceover in ENT: “These Are the Voyages.”
bgsu98: As Christopher said, Spiner appeared (albeit only in voice) as Data in the Enterprise finale.
At this point we’ve got:
Jonathan Frakes as Commander/Captain William T. Riker in TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, Picard, and Lower Decks
Marina Sirtis as Counselor Deanna Troi in TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, Picard, and Lower Decks
John deLancie as Q in TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Lower Decks
Michael Ansara as Captain/Dahar Master Kang in the original series, DS9, and Voyager
Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain/Admiral Jean-Luc Picard in TNG, DS9, and Picard
Brent Spiner as Lt. Commander Data in TNG, Enterprise, and Picard
Armin Shimerman as Quark in DS9, TNG, and Voyager
Richard Poe as Gul Evek in TNG, DS9, and Voyager
You can make a case for Frakes on DS9, though I prefer to think of Thomas Riker as a separate character…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@188/krad: What about Mark Lenard as Sarek in TOS, TAS, and TNG? Or are you counting TOS and TAS as the same series?
Come to think of it, that would also give us Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and George Takei. Plus William Shatner if you count Generations as part of TNG, but you said “three or more TV series.”
I’m counting TOS and TAS as the same series. They were both called Star Trek after all. :) And more seriously, the animated series was simply a continuation of the live-action series.
(I’m not counting movies. That way lies madness.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@190/krad: Yeah, I see your point. That’s how I personally see it, as someone who thought of ST in my childhood as a single show that was sometimes a cartoon and sometimes not. But even setting personal opinion aside and looking at it more objectively, it’s a show about the same characters in the same narrative premise and situation, presented as a direct continuation of the prior series, with most of the same cast and some of the same creators. So it’s not a narratively distinct series in the way that a show about different characters in a different time or setting would be.
With particular regard to this discussion, it’s a show where you’d expect to see the same characters, so it’s not as noteworthy as those characters turning up on a different series.
How about Majel Barrett Roddenberry as “computer voice” in TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT?
@192/BeeGee: I dunno, do all those different computers really count as a single character? For that matter, is a nonsentient mechanism a character at all?
That’s Sci-Fi for you, always playing on the boundaries.
Also, if one counts “Trials and Tribble-ations,” there’s James Doohan as Scotty on TOS, TNG and DS9.
@195/BeeGee: Reuse of archival footage does not qualify as the actor playing the character in a different series. It’s just a different series showing a clip of the actor playing the role in the original series.
Ha! That screengrab of Tom Paris does show the character looking pretty skeevy. I feel like by the third season though the character became much more likeable and I’d say probably more like Robert Duncan McNeill himself. Just listening to him on a regular basis on his podcast, I feel like he was interjecting his natural friendly persona into the character in those later seasons. And the actor himself referred to his romance with Rain Robinson in the “Future Perfect” two-parter in the third season as really going a long way to make him more likeable to the audience. But these first couple seasons, yeah, Paris does act like a poser.
It is also very odd that the pilot is about Paris’ redemption arc rather than focus on, ya know, the lead of the series with first billing? Could that have been due to the influence of the male co-creators/writers who thought that may have appealed more to the young male demographic than focusing on the older female captain? Perhaps an unconscious bias?
@197/garreth: Well, to be fair, it’s not like Picard goes through much of an arc in “Encounter at Farpoint.” He’s a pretty stalwart figure throughout, and the character arcs are more about the ensemble members getting to know each other or setting up their future relationships.
Besides, Paris’s redemption arc in “Caretaker” was Janeway’s story too in a way, because she was the one who took a chance on Paris and encouraged him to pursue redemption. She’s not supposed to be the character who goes through changes here, she’s supposed to be the one who demonstrates her leadership, strength, and values by inspiring the likes of Paris, Chakotay, and Torres to change their views and fall in line behind her as her crew. Sometimes a character is defined by their influence on others.
Mark Allen Shepherd also plays Morn on TNG (“Birthright, Part I”), VOY (“Caretaker”), and multiple episodes of DS9.
When Kate Mulgrew was announced as Captain Janeway, I recognized from a little-known ABC medical drama called Heartbeat. Plus guest appearances on numerous shows like Cheers and Murder, She Wrote.
I recognized Alicia Coppola (poor Lt. Stadi) from Another World, just like Jennifer Lien. I had read an interview with her before Voyager debuted where she mentioned that she would be playing the ship’s pilot. That had slipped my mind until I saw her appear in “Caretaker” and remembered the interview. I was surprised when Stadi died, but shouldn’t have been, since by that point, Voyager’s cast had been announced and she wasn’t part of it.
An interesting piece of trivia: Alicia Coppola had played Lorna on Another World. When she left, the role was recast with Robin Christopher, who had played O’Brien’s Bajoran assistant in “In the Hands of the Prophets,” the one who tried to assassinate Bareil. I always though it was cute that both Lornas had been on Star Trek.
Interesting, googling Coppola, she played a DA in the show Empire, never recognized her.
The reason Chakotay came across as some generic cliché is the Native American consultant they hired, Jamake Highwater, was a straight up FAKE named Jackie Marks.
Really, Paris’s off color jokes are far less offensive than the butcher job this production did on the development of Chakotay to begin with.
I’m certainly no expert, but even back when this premiered, Chakotay struck me as a collection of Hollywood clichés. Somebody at Paramount was asleep. Seriously embarrassing blunder.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamake_Highwater
Sorry, I should have said “Jamake Highwater” was a FAAAAAAAKE.
Trust me, Jackie Marks is discussed extensively throughout this Rewatch……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Voyager, my favorite of the Star Trek shows! I’m re-watching the show, and as I go I thought it might be interesting to do rankings and talk about potential changes that could have improved a TV show that was filmed almost 30 years ago. Just for fun. To set myself up, I wrote a few rules to make my suggestions more interesting. First, I cannot introduce any new main characters, or hasten the appearances of any supporting or guest characters- the leads are fixed (including from death) and the first aired appearance of a character must not change. Second, no new planets or species can be introduced, and my suggested changes cannot bring a planet or race into a story that did not already involve them. This means an episode already mentioning the Kazon can be changed to include them, etc.Third, I cannot suggest any technology or equipment that hasn’t been shown to be on the ship at the time, unless the show’s original implication is that it was retroactively on the ship all along. Finally, I am limiting myself to one new scene and one additional supporting character per episode, unless the plot genuinely necessitates more of either.
As a general note, most of these reviews have explored scientific inaccuracies, so I generally won’t comment on them unless it is relevant. Additionally, I’m not going to continuously repeat “the Maquis-Starfleet tension” or “the main characters vs supporting characters” as changes; it can be assumed that all of my episode changes would bill supporting cast alongside the leads in a more modern approach, and that the Maquis and Starfleet will butt heads on screen more often.
CARETAKER (5/10) is such an interesting pilot episode, but it completely fails in two areas as mentioned by many comments above; there is simply no reason for the dead crew to be forgotten so quickly after the ship becomes stranded, and the episode limps through the second hour to try and rationalize this scenario where Voyager is able to go home but ultimately sacrifices that chance to afford the Ocampa some protection. Already, I have a ton of questions. Why are we shown crew members who are clearly important to the operation of the ship, but they are given irrelevant dialogue and only sometimes named? How many medical officers does this ship have, as a single doctor is practically useless once two or more casualties arrive in sickbay? Is the EMH expected to fill in as the second doctor in these scenarios? Why is Voyager, a ship that seems to be more of a light cruiser, captained by a career scientist? Is the ship actually more science oriented than this episode lets on? (Yes, Starfleet is more of a Jack-of-all-Trades organization.) How did the Caretaker have the power necessary to destroy the Ocampa environment, and yet their terraforming technology is non-existent? Won’t the Kazon, knowing the Ocampa are now essentially trapped underground, just dig their way down to the Ocampa settlement? Assuming Voyager hadn’t been brought into the Delta Quadrant, what was the Caretaker’s plan, as he seemed to know he was dying? (I don’t remember if there was a self-destruct plan or not, oops!) And for that matter, why was the Caretaker only pulling ships from the Badlands, when clearly the range wasn’t an issue?
Most of my other issues with the episode have been addressed, so I’ll jump ahead to my idea for fixing the episode. First, we are adding one scene to the episode. Just before Janeway walks up to Paris in the New Zealand penal colony, we are shown a short exchange on the bridge of Voyager as the human doctor (who is addressed by name) talks to Cavit and Stadi about Things and History. Two of them, likely the two senior officers, are friends who have served together for a while, and they have brief banter, mentioning that the captain of the ship isn’t on board at the moment, before the doctor asks Cavit, “is she really bringing HIM on board?” to which Cavit gives a knowing smirk… cut to Janeway walking up to Paris. I think this has a few tricks in the 30 seconds it would take: we name the doctor, we now have a scene where three characters who die are allowed to speak without a surviving character present, the captain’s gender reveal party has more of a kick, and Paris is established to have a reputation already.
My next change applies to two specific characters, being Carey and the Vulcan nurse. Carey now appears in almost every Janeway scene post-accident, as we are setting him up to be the new chief engineer (remember, B’Elanna hasn’t actually been introduced to the Starfleet crew as a hot shot engineer at any point in the episode) and the Vulcan nurse should have a line or two of snark during one of the sickbay scenes, as well as being addressed by name. Something that most of the comments are touching on, but not outright saying, is that we actually have three crews coming together for this episode: The Maquis, the Federation billed stars, and the Federation background characters, many of whom die. Elevating Carey and the nurse allows for more blurring of the Federation characters (combined with the integrated billing of credits) so that we aren’t sure who lives and who dies.
My last suggestion for this episode would be to drop the entire water scarcity plot. The Kazon want to get into the Ocampa lair because… they just want to. The want to steal what the Ocampa have, as they clearly are being given generous amounts of resources by the Caretaker, and it makes the Kazon jealous. Voyager can just find Neelix and Kes, possibly being pursued by Kazon who just want to rob them, and continue the plot from there. Aside from a scene involving Neelix taking a bath (ooh ahh so kooooooky!!!!!….. sigh) the water scarcity amounts to all of nothing in terms of furthering the plot or fleshing out the world, and as many have said above it just makes no practical sense.
WELL this has been long winded. I’ll try and keep things shorter next episode. All in all, I think if they had focused on making the impending character deaths more of a surprise of who is getting offed, along with setting up Carey as the antagonist for B’Elanna before they ever meet, I would have given this episode a higher ranking. It also suffers from an excruciatingly long second half that amounts to a plot point scavenger hunt, and could have instead been either more action or more character building, but certainly this episode isn’t a total failure. Originally I had this episode as 4/10, but thinking it over it didn’t fail to be a coherent TV program, so I bumped it up to 5.
Thanks for reading this far, if you made it!!
@204/wes-summers: “Why is Voyager, a ship that seems to be more of a light cruiser, captained by a career scientist? Is the ship actually more science oriented than this episode lets on? (Yes, Starfleet is more of a Jack-of-all-Trades organization.)”
It is meant to be a science vessel, I believe. Starfleet is primarily a scientific organization, in theory.
“How did the Caretaker have the power necessary to destroy the Ocampa environment, and yet their terraforming technology is non-existent?”
It’s always much easier to destroy than to create. We humans have been doing a damned effective job destroying our environment without knowing how to repair it.
“Won’t the Kazon, knowing the Ocampa are now essentially trapped underground, just dig their way down to the Ocampa settlement?”
I don’t think the Kazon have powerful enough technology to dig that deep.
“Assuming Voyager hadn’t been brought into the Delta Quadrant, what was the Caretaker’s plan, as he seemed to know he was dying?”
The Caretaker had brought many ships to the DQ in search of someone with the right genetics to take his place before he died. His plan was the reason Voyager and the Maquis ship were brought in the first place, along with multiple other ships the writers failed to follow up on.
“And for that matter, why was the Caretaker only pulling ships from the Badlands, when clearly the range wasn’t an issue?”
He took ships from all over the galaxy. I assume the reason both ships were taken from the Badlands is because they were there so close together, while his apparatus was focused on that particular area.
@205/Chris: I think you’re correct about the ship being designed for science, but it didn’t get much of a mention in this pilot so I’ll keep an eye out moving forward. The tech levels of the Caretaker and Kazon are poorly explained, but later episodes (female Caretaker, the Trabe) will address these more clearly. All of this would have been better dialogue to include than anything Tom and Chakotay said to each other!
My question about the Caretaker’s plan is actually phrased poorly on my part. I don’t understand why Voyager is suddenly responsible for the Ocampa, other than because the Caretaker was moping and he decided to strand Voyager before he died. He says to Janeway that it doesn’t matter that he’s sealing the Ocampa in, because they’ll be forced to the surface anyway! So in the scenario where Voyager isn’t pulled into the Delta Quadrant, or they just fly off, his grand plan was to… self destruct the station after giving the Ocampa 5 years of safety? It’s just such a poorly thought out plan, and he’s had years to think about it, the whole thing is just foolish. For all we know, the Ocampa (who we never see again) had to come to the surface by the time Voyager got back to Earth. To add to that, a more literal interpretation of the PD would say that Janeway is actually within her rights to just send Voyager home and let the Kazon take the station, as that’s what would have happened anyway if Voyager hadn’t destroyed the station. So I guess my question is less of a real concern, and more of a “did the Caretaker have a single functioning brain cell?”
I understand that the writers probably weren’t expecting this to hold up to any serious in depth analysis, but it just feels so awkward, especially after we spent so much time walking around this 1900s Americana recreation that existed because… reasons.
Looking forward to this rewatch, partially because I don’t have as strong of a connection to this show as a I did DS9.
Paris’ conversation with Stadi (a Betazoid: were we meant to infer that his thoughts were even more “skeevy”?) was bad, but his initial conversation with Janeway wasn’t much better (even if not flirtatious), particularly in his tone/the way he delivered his lines (maybe excluding the “I’m the best pilot” near the end). I haven’t read Taylor’s backstory to know why he acted that way (and why RDM spoke in that manner), but I don’t think it really worked if it was meant to be his blase mask covering the person underneath who really cared and wanted redemption; “skeevy” was a good word to describe it, as he fell way more on that side of the line than charming for me, particularly those early first impression scenes.
I think the Airiam episode of Discovery worked because we knew the main cast by then (it was the end of Season 2), so I knew/cared about them and thus cared about someone that they knew/cared about even if I didn’t really know her as much more than a background character. By contrast, this would be having a memorial service (I’ll assume it’s the end of the episode, so the ticking clock of the Caretaker’s impending death explaining why they don’t do it before he dies/they’re stuck) by a main cast we don’t really know about a group of people (even limiting it to the First Officer, Stadi, and the Doctor, you couldn’t have told their stories the same way DISCO did with the lone Airiam) about whom we know even less (and two of them were kind of dicks**). Using the service as a way to meet/begin to care about the main cast was an option while ending the premiere with a poignant yet hopeful eulogy could nicely parallel Voyager’s mission to explore and return home, but I understand the concern that some people just wouldn’t care.
*I would have had a little more personal connection for the viewing audience so that the viewer would have somewhat of a direct connection with Airiam and a deeper indirect one through the main cast instead of just the latter, but I understand the decision.
**But still better than Laas. He sucked.