this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Risa
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Idk what it was about Voyager, it never really popped as a series for me. Mulgrew was great.
She was also great as Red and Flemeth/Mythal (my money is on Mythal anyway).
The rest of the cast was rather blah. No on screen repor.
I will be forever mad about Voyager. Everything was set up to succeed: crew conflict! Unknown location! Some good actors! Voyager was a nice looking ship!
And then, famously, the actors playing humans were told to be blah and less dynamic to let the alien characters stand out more, and the series had to follow a more stagnant TNG style (they tried to serialize certain plot threads which I appreciate but were confined to episodes of the week a lot of the time).
Like, I can just imagine a mirror universe where the entirety of season 1 was the Starfleet and Maquis crews learning to work together, and conflict and drama as they're brought together by even more hostile external forces, and also the actors were allowed to actually act and stuff.
What you're saying is you wish Ira Steven Behr ran the show instead of Rick Berman. And really, don't we all wish that?
Voyager was the wrong direction to take Trek. They were trying to recapture the TNG spirit, but TNG had been running out of steam during its last season and it's formula was already dated. DS9 was daring and innovative, but Voyager basically ignored all that. It was looking backwards at a time when TV was moving forward. It could have worked if it was better written I guess, but the premise was flawed from the start.
Not saying I can't enjoy Voyager. It's the most mid of the 90's shows but it has its moments where it really shines and like the poster above said Kate Mulgrew is great! It was just the begining of the end for its era of Trek.
It's a show that did a lot right and a lot wrong. Like, holy shit, they actually had a child character I liked! But they made Neelix maximally annoying. He could have been a good character if they'd dialed down the obsequiousness and dropped the "Mr Vulcan" bit. There were some great episodes, like "Year of Hell", some terrible ones, like "Threshold".
The worst sin, though, was spelling out the premise very explicitly (down to the number of torpedoes on board!), and then completely ignoring most of it.
Voyager had to do everything from scratch, which is a strength and a curse. They had whole new enemies and quadrant dynamics and at times did build these into wider stories, but it often became a quick hit "monster of the week" situation that would gin something up and throw it away. The "always be going home" mcguffen added friction to the plot at points that TNG "we just exploring, yo" didn't have, which hurt the plot lines.
They also clamped down on some dynamics like romance between the crew, which made it feel wooden at times. Id also note the convenient "tom paris loves the 50-90s pop culture for some reason, so we can totally write about current day LA and old monster movies" to be painfully stale decades later.
Rapport is the traditional spelling of that word by the way.
In case you need to connect a written word with a spoken one
While my tastes are different, yours is an opinion I can respect, because you recognize Mulgrew’s awesomeness.