Travis Mayweather, what was the point of that character

[The Overlord]

Travis Mayweather was character on Enterprise who never seemed to do anything. Sometimes he would be lucky to get a line in an episode. What was the purpose of this character, if they never did anything with him?

 

[jespah]

He was kind of a forgotten character. The writers definitely concentrated on Tucker and T'Pol to the exclusion of others, particularly toward the end. There's a finite amount of time available and a finite number of lines, so someone's bound to get shafted. That person turned out to be Mayweather, although by the end Hoshi and Reed weren't doing so well in the lines department, either.

It's unfortunate. The idea was a decent one albeit not executed well at all. Why have someone with space experience if he's never consulted about it?

 

[Camren]

 

[R. Star]

He was kind of a forgotten character. The writers definitely concentrated on Tucker and T'Pol to the exclusion of others, particularly toward the end. There's a finite amount of time available and a finite number of lines, so someone's bound to get shafted. That person turned out to be Mayweather, although by the end Hoshi and Reed weren't doing so well in the lines department, either.

It's unfortunate. The idea was a decent one albeit not executed well at all. Why have someone with space experience if he's never consulted about it?

Yeah, kinda sad that T'Pol's breasts got more screen time than Mayweather, Reed and Hoshi combined.

As for -why- Mayweather was there and to what point? They needed a pilot. The writers sorta did make the character a self-parody even with limited screentime though. I swear at least a third of the few of his lines were related to "Hey, I've been in space before"

 

[Christopher]

If you look at the early first-season episodes, Travis was a much more prominent character than he later became. He represented the "space boomers," the early pioneers who'd grown up on low-warp ships and had developed their own subculture that was now endangered by the rise of warp-5 engines; that was meant to be a major recurring thread in the series. He was also an inveterate raconteur, constantly telling ghost stories and anecdotes of his childhood adventures -- really quite a colorful character.

But then came "Fortunate Son," where the climax of the episode involved Travis confronting a fellow boomer and eloquently, passionately talking him down from the deadly course he was on -- and Anthony Montgomery pretty much blew it. He could do the friendly, amiable charmer just fine, but when called upon to convey real intensity or depth of emotion, he couldn't quite bring it. And it was after that episode that Travis began to get marginalized. I don't know for a fact that his performance there was the reason he started to get shunted aside, but it seems a reasonable possibility.

 

[SchwEnt]

Yes, that's true. His acting (what little we saw of it) I found to be wanting. Maybe others saw this, too.

He couldn't act well, so they didn't give him much material. And he didn't get much material, so we didn't see him get to act very much.

But the character's idea and background were interesting. It would been great to see it put to use more than it was. Instead, Travis mostly served as the generic pilot where his experience and background didn't apply, his role could have been filled by a nameless extra.

I'll always remember one of the few times we saw him out from behind the helm and they showed him as an experienced mountain climber. This, from a fellow who was born and raised his whole life aboard cargo vessels. How and when did he learn to climb outdoors??

I just never got the point of the killer Bs (with VOY, too) of creating these interesting characters in the series and then never using them. It's their premise, their series. They're the showrunners. If they wanted more Travis or Sato or Kes or Kim, they had the power to use the characters more prominently--characters they created themselves.

I think ENT (as it ended up) perhaps should have taken the stand from the beginning to go the route of TOS. Have the three main characters as the stars up-front and the rest of the cast as supporting and at the end of the eps credits, as TOS did.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just because TNG and DS9 and VOY featured the cast of seven upfront as a whole ensemble, did they need to duplicate it again with ENT?

Take a stand, make a change... go with Big Three with ENT (or four or two or whatever) and then have the rest of the cast as supporting. Then we'd understand where the focus is and why we don't see a lot of Travis or this one or that one. It's fine, not every series needs to follow the exact format.

Or maybe the Bs were just hedging their bets with whatever seemed to work out.

 

[Christopher]

I'll always remember one of the few times we saw him out from behind the helm and they showed him as an experienced mountain climber. This, from a fellow who was born and raised his whole life aboard cargo vessels. How and when did he learn to climb outdoors??

He didn't spend literally his whole life, every single day, aboard ship. The Horizon visited various planets, including Earth, Draylax, Vega Colony, Trillius Prime, and the Teneebian moons. Apparently the Draylax-to-Vega run was a regular route for them. So they would've had opportunities to visit planet surfaces on occasion.

I just never got the point of the killer Bs (with VOY, too) of creating these interesting characters in the series and then never using them. It's their premise, their series. They're the showrunners. If they wanted more Travis or Sato or Kes or Kim, they had the power to use the characters more prominently--characters they created themselves.

It's not quite that simple. VGR and ENT were both on UPN, and that meant they were subject to more executive meddling than the syndicated TNG and DS9 were. For instance, Berman & Braga didn't want ENT to involve time travel, but the network was uneasy with doing a prequel insisted on having something that connected to Trek's future. And B&B didn't want the ship to have a transporter, but the network insisted that it needed one so that it would be more like the familiar Trek we all knew.

I think the first season of ENT actually does a pretty good job of being a smaller, character-driven show first and foremost, with the sci-fi or action content being fairly basic and serving mainly to put characters into interaction or conflict. But it seems that in season 2, they were pressured to emphasize action and high-concept stuff more (for instance, if "The Catwalk" had been a season 1 episode, it would've focused more on the crew tensions in that claustrophobic space, while instead it ended up being more about fighting space pirates). And then seasons 3 and 4 were huge action-packed stuff all the way. Maybe the network also pressured them to emphasize the more popular characters at the expense of the others?

Well, that's just speculation. But it's definitely wrong to assume that showrunners have absolute power. They have bosses they answer to as well.

I think ENT (as it ended up) perhaps should have taken the stand from the beginning to go the route of TOS. Have the three main characters as the stars up-front and the rest of the cast as supporting and at the end of the eps credits, as TOS did.

Like I said, I think the first season did a relatively good job at being an ensemble-driven show. It was just later on that it started to feel more dominated by a few central characters.

 

[bluedana]

Anthony Montgomery's contemporary style of acting didn't mesh well with Trek's more formal dialogue. If you listen closely to dialogue, no matter who writes the script, you won't hear informal slang terms. Characters say "going to" rather than "gonna," for example (unless they're Trip). Montgomery ended up sounding wooden using that kind of stilted speech, far more often than the other actors did. If you watch him in more contemporary pieces, like I'm Through With White Girls, which I recommend highly, he's much more natural and enjoyable.

I think on a broader level, thought, show runners over the past 10-15 years have obsessively taken the temperature of the their audiences, and they react to what they fans think they want to see. Who has the most hits on their pages? Who get the longest lines ad ComicCon or other conventions? What are the fans saying online? IMO, that's how you end up with odd and random pair ups of characters -- if enough fans "'ship" X and Y, the writers will oblige. When ENT was on, Trek fans were already very vocal about what they did and didn't like (mostly didn't like) and the writers responded (less Mayweather, more TripandT'Pol).

I think it's true that if Anthony Montgomery's name had been in the end credits as supporting case (the way Nichelle Nichols' was in TOS), there would be little or no complaint about him.

 

[JiNX-01]

I think Anthony would have been better used as security chief. He certainly was built for it.

I always thought it was ridiculous that Reed was tactical officer and security chief. There were occasions when the ship was under attack by ships and boarding parties. He couldn't be in two places, so what was the point of giving him two jobs?

And based on Anthony's role, TPTB could have hired a couple of secondary characters to pilot the ship (they could alternate day and night shift and be credited at the end of the episode).

 

[Christopher]

^Well, as I said, Travis's role wasn't that small in the first half of season 1. It changed and became smaller later on. He was actually given quite a lot to do in the first dozen episodes -- not in a central role, but as a significant supporting character, part of the ensemble they were building at the time (before the focus later began to narrow more around the core cast). There's no way they could've known in their initial planning that the helmsman's role would eventually end up being diminished for whatever reason.

And I'm not aware of any canonical precedent in Trek for the security chief and tactical officer being two different characters. All the regular starship security chiefs we've seen -- Chekov, Yar, Worf, Tuvok -- were tactical officers as well. Why do it differently here?

 

[C.E. Evans]

Anthony Montgomery's contemporary style of acting didn't mesh well with Trek's more formal dialogue. If you listen closely to dialogue, no matter who writes the script, you won't hear informal slang terms. Characters say "going to" rather than "gonna," for example (unless they're Trip). Montgomery ended up sounding wooden using that kind of stilted speech, far more often than the other actors did. If you watch him in more contemporary pieces, like I'm Through With White Girls, which I recommend highly, he's much more natural and enjoyable.

Definitely. He was in VH1's primetime soap Single Ladies last year and he was a total scene-stealer. Just fun to watch. He was just wasted on ENT as little more than an extra.

IMO, the Mayweather character was far more interesting as it was originally designed--a slightly older lieutenant with more space experience and first alien contact skills than anyone on the ship, was best friends with Spike (later renamed as Trip), and liked to have a good time when off-duty.

 

[MacLeod]

^The problem with slang term use of it/over use of it can date a show. Slang terms might also not translate well into other languages. Slang meanings can vary slighlty from country to country.

 

[Skywalker]

One big problem for Mayweather was T'Pol and the Vulcan star charts. Both of those pretty much undercut Travis' usefulness as a Boomer with more experience in deep space than any other human on the ship.

 

[C.E. Evans]

^The problem with slang term use of it/over use of it can date a show. Slang terms might also not translate well into other languages. Slang meanings can vary slighlty from country to country.

I think it's more of a case of slang in regards to how a character speaks in general. McCoy, Scotty, and Trip had a less formal style of speech than Spock, Data, and Picard.

 

[JiNX-01]

And I'm not aware of any canonical precedent in Trek for the security chief and tactical officer being two different characters. All the regular starship security chiefs we've seen -- Chekov, Yar, Worf, Tuvok -- were tactical officers as well. Why do it differently here?

Well how about this?

The NX-01 is humanity's first deep-space exploration ship. The crew were going out to make first contacts and not all of those would be friendly.

By the time the NCC-1701 was launched, the Federation had been around for a century and they had a fleet of starships. And despite the "where no man has gone before" speech, the NCC-1701 rarely actually left Federation space.

By the era of TNG, the Federation had vastly expanded its reach, had acquired many allies and had further enlarged the fleet. In addition technology had also advanced substantially. AND, per the speech referenced above, the NCC-1701-D also rarely left Federation space.

 

[Christopher]

The NX-01 is humanity's first deep-space exploration ship. The crew were going out to make first contacts and not all of those would be friendly.

Well, yeah, but NX-01 was also explicitly not a military ship. It didn't even have a full complement of weapons installed when it set out, and it was stated in dialogue that the planners and crew didn't expect the ship to encounter nearly as many combat situations as it actually did. If they were unprepared in the weapons department, why would they have been overprepared in the personnel department?

Not to mention that they only had 85 people aboard. It's not surprising that some of them had to double up on jobs. And combining security and tactical doesn't seem any more problematical than having the first officer also be the science officer, or the chief helmsman also being the chief shuttle pilot, or the communications officer also being the ship's linguist and protocol officer (a job title ascribed to Hoshi in "Bound").

 

[horatio83]

If you look at the early first-season episodes, Travis was a much more prominent character than he later became. He represented the "space boomers," the early pioneers who'd grown up on low-warp ships and had developed their own subculture that was now endangered by the rise of warp-5 engines; that was meant to be a major recurring thread in the series. He was also an inveterate raconteur, constantly telling ghost stories and anecdotes of his childhood adventures -- really quite a colorful character.

But then came "Fortunate Son," where the climax of the episode involved Travis confronting a fellow boomer and eloquently, passionately talking him down from the deadly course he was on -- and Anthony Montgomery pretty much blew it. He could do the friendly, amiable charmer just fine, but when called upon to convey real intensity or depth of emotion, he couldn't quite bring it. And it was after that episode that Travis began to get marginalized. I don't know for a fact that his performance there was the reason he started to get shunted aside, but it seems a reasonable possibility.

Perfect analysis. He simply acted himself "down" on the ladder. Other Trek actors like Picardo acted themselves "up".

 

[JiNX-01]

The NX-01 is humanity's first deep-space exploration ship. The crew were going out to make first contacts and not all of those would be friendly.

Well, yeah, but NX-01 was also explicitly not a military ship. It didn't even have a full complement of weapons installed when it set out, and it was stated in dialogue that the planners and crew didn't expect the ship to encounter nearly as many combat situations as it actually did. If they were unprepared in the weapons department, why would they have been overprepared in the personnel department?

The only reason they didn't have a full complement of weapons installed was because they didn't have time to install them.

Not to mention that they only had 85 people aboard. It's not surprising that some of them had to double up on jobs. And combining security and tactical doesn't seem any more problematical than having the first officer also be the science officer, or the chief helmsman also being the chief shuttle pilot, or the communications officer also being the ship's linguist and protocol officer (a job title ascribed to Hoshi in "Bound").

As for Hoshi's role as communications officer and linguist makes sense. Yet, even she had a backup. In Vanishing Point a crew member named Baird takes over when Hoshi fails to translate the language of aliens who are holding Trip and Travis hostage on the planet they're orbiting (of course it was all in her imagination, but it demonstrates that even the communications officer had someone who could step in if needed).

 

[Christopher]

^Yes, and Malcolm had other security personnel working under him. Memory Alpha has a list of several background security/tactical characters starting here: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Unn...onnel#Relief_tactical_officer_.282151.2F52.29

 

[MacLeod]

^The problem with slang term use of it/over use of it can date a show. Slang terms might also not translate well into other languages. Slang meanings can vary slighlty from country to country.

I think it's more of a case of slang in regards to how a character speaks in general. McCoy, Scotty, and Trip had a less formal style of speech than Spock, Data, and Picard.

Less formal does not mean use of slang.