Greg_S_H

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Please explain.


Yeah, that was ill-advised. They were setting up the Doctor and Seven for a long time, and here that happens instead. Also, I thought they were setting up a Janeway/Chakotay thing. Suddenly, we get this major shift, and it ends up informing the ending, at least on the alternate timeline side.

Michael Reuben

There's already a lengthy thread, and this thread is now a part of it.

M.

"Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." -- Chinatown

"What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?" -- Roger Ebert

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Mikel_Cooperman

As Ron Moore one of the writers has said, they had no plan overall for the characters and they didnt want to do story arcs so pretty much everything was from episode to episode with the reset hit at the end of each one. This is what cheapned the whole overall effect of the show overall.

Why would we care about the Chakotay/Seven romance when it came out of nowhere?
I never really cared for the Paris/Torres pairing because I never got the sense that the two really cared for each other or belonged together.
Yet another example was the Nelix/Kess relationship. They knew that didnt work and instead of writing about how the releationship failed they just abandoned it.
These examples were typical of the lazy writers and why the show is basically an embarrassment to the franchise.

Regarding the Homecoming Books, I read both of them and they werent bad though I prefered the first part because it gave us a finish we didnt get with the actual show. The second book was more madman against the Federation and the Federation against the Voyager crew.
All and all much better than the writing of the show.

Rob Gardiner

On the supplements for Season 2, Jeri Taylor has confirmed what Mikel reports Ron Moore says above. To paraphrase, Ms. Taylor said "it's impossible to arc out a whole season, and determine ahead of time this is where we want the characters to be at the end of the season."

However, that is EXACTLY what the writing staff did on TNG, and later on DS9! The TNG Season 1 supplments stated that Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Maurice Hurley (and presumably Michael Piller, etc. on later seasons) would "arc out" an entire season at a time, and decide where they wanted Data, Wesley, etc. to be a year from now.

On DS9, despite the long-term storylines, the staff used a similar procedure: planning ahead one year's worth of character development. Of course, they had decided Odo's fate and Sisko's fate before the end of season 6, but in general they planned things one season at a time.

Ms. Taylor claims that it would be impossible to do such a thing on Voyager, but she gives no reason why. This is probably one reason why the show turned out to be so weak, compared to what came before.

I've been buying the Voyager season sets (used, at a discount) because Star Trek is like pizza: even bad pizza is pretty good. But 1/3 of the way into season 3, this is some really bland pizza. Like Rex and others have said before, it's not terrible, but it IS very mediocre. As if the writing staff decided to "aim low" so they could hit their mark every time. I have seen a handful of episodes I would consider "good", but not a single one that I would call "great". I understand SCORPION 1 & 2 is a fan favorite. But I hope there are some other great episodes before I get to that point.

Dan Rudolph

Voyager did have an annoying tendency to drop plotlines. Besides those mentioned above, there was Janeway's holo-novel.

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Mikel_Cooperman

I agree. Voyager had the potential to do so much and it failed. I dont even think they had a series bible for characters because none of them ever acted conistantly from week to week. They cou;dn't even do relationships right.
Nelix and Kess could have been a great love story but that was abandoned, Tom and B'lanna was a here and there relationship and I never got the feeling that they should have been together or had overcome any sort of interesting obstacles to get there and then we have Seven and Chakotay which materialized out of nowhere which made it hard to pull for them.
Weak!

Rob Gardiner

How does the Captain relax? By putting her hair in a more severe bun than normal and re-creating one of the most repressed and uptight societies in modern history.

Playing hard-boiled detective sounds fun. Playing baseball sounds like even more fun. But playing Victorian era governess to two spoiled brats?

Dave Scarpa

I've been renting and watching the Voyager Disks from Netflix and quite honestly the series isn't as bad I a remember, well at least the first 3 years. I do remember it got worst as it went on. I'm also still watching my DS9 disks presently on the 5th season and watching the Episode "The Ship" last night the difference in the quality of writing between the two series is pretty evident. The characters were fully realized in DS9 but they never get fleshed out beyond the caricture stage in Voyager, well beyond the HoloDoc or 7of9. In the Ep the Ship We meet who would could be a typical "Redshirt" by the name of Muniz. But enought time is spent developing the character that we ultimately care about what becomes of him. That never happened in Voyager to even the main characters. That's why I consider DS9 to be the best Trek series after the original, and that's why Voyager fails.

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TheLongshot

Hell, JMS had a five year arc for his series, and amazingly, he was able to stick to it for the most part, with minor changes.

It sounds like she's basically saying, "We can't plan crap, so we'll just put up what our writers write, and to hell with character development."



You'd be amazed what people do for fun. I usually spend a week of my summer dressed in renaisance garb and playing in another time.

Jason

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