Voyager Hate

[MacLeod]

I'm going to echo some of the sentiments above, hate is perhaps too strong a word. I think a fair people were dissapointed with some thinking great premise but poor execution.

As others have said even by ST standards it had poor continuity, now perhaps it's just me but if you categorically state you can't do something i.e. replace torpedeos or have a back up for the EMH and then a few episodes later have one or seemingly endless supply of torpedeos you are basically using the trope viewers are morons. At least drop a line or two to explain why what you said earlier no longer applies, it probably won't matter o the casual viewer but it might appeal to the more base. Now was "Living Witness" a bad episode, no it was a fairly good one

Other factors to consider for some VOY might have been their introduction to the world of ST for others their 2nd, 3rd ST show remember one of VOY nicknames was TNG-lite basically saying the same as TNG but not as good. VOY simply played it safe trying to use the same old tried (or should I say tired ) and tested formula. The formula was shifting to more of a serialised nature during the mid-ninties.

But in some respects the producers were in a damned if they do damned if they didn't. i.e.

DSN - They've changed it now it sucks
VOY - It's the same now it sucks

 

[T'Girl]

Transwarp salamanders, anyone?

That was right up there with twelve year old Keiko wantin' some loving from Miles in Rascals.

Bad Star Trek ... bad.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Transwarp salamanders is now my band name.

 

[MacLeod]

I'm only going to say this once, it never happened.

 

[Relayer1]

Voyager was/is flawed, yes. It started a premise, a lone ship struggling to survive, and somehow the struggle became a lot less pretty fast.
The intensity of Starfleet and Maquis working together was gone in a few episodes. One big happy crew allright.
Continuity was a disaster. I mean, Star Trek had that before, and I don't really care about it that much, I can look beyond it. But it's things like..... The torpedoes. Clearly stated early on, no way to replace them, only 38 left at the beginning of season one. At the end of show, I think Voyager was seen firing over a 100 torpedoes or something. No one seemed to remember anything about limited torpedoes.
This ship is supposed to ration its energy, and they were quite watchfull of that in the beginning, with Neelix cooking real food, replicators on ration. But it wasn't long, or it seemed that holodecks were in use full time, replicators were used for whatever. I mean, for a ship with very, very limited resources, they actually managed to build a state of the art shuttlecraft from scratch. I mean, they can't make new torpedoes, but they can make a shuttle with a warpcore, replicators, phasers and (go figure) micro torpedoes...

Oh, all this and more !

Probably because it replaced the Trek series most of them fell in love with, TNG. And also that it never lived up to the premise of two feuding crews on a ship that was lost in space.

It followed my beloved DS9, the darkest and most adult take on Trek. And yes, it chickened out of the main dramatic device - the two crews.

Transwarp salamanders, anyone?

Yeah, Spock's Brain standard bad. Without 'The 60's' as an excuse.

It also had the worst cast. With the other shows I warmed to everyone eventually. To this day I can't get on with Kate Mulgrew and Tim Russ. I'm not that keen on Robert Beltran, Jennifer Lien, Garrett Wang and Roxann Dawson either, though Ethan Phillips did a good job with a poor character.

I don't hate Voyager, it just was not very good. It had its moments, but overall it was lacking. I wasn't very fond of seasons one to three of Enterprise either, but I'd take season four over all of Voyager.

 

[Commishsleer]

I may be wrong here but I'm going to put this idea forward.
I think a fair amount of people didn't like Janeway as captain. A woman in charge. I just don't think people were ready for it.
And the fact that she was a little school-marmish at first and not a hot 20-something that had mysteriously wangled her way to captaincy didn't attract the required section of male viewers.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Transwarp salamanders, anyone?

That was right up there with twelve year old Keiko wantin' some loving from Miles in Rascals.

Bad Star Trek ... bad.

I thought the situation with Keiko made sense. From her perspective, she was married to Miles and was pretty desperately in need of comfort and emotional support right then, given what was happening. From his (and the viewers') perspective, it was just awkward as heck - and that was actually the point.

Transwarp salamanders is now my band name.

A woman in charge. I just don't think people were ready for it.

I don't think they were ready for THAT woman in charge. A woman that gets all irrationally emotional and needs reassurance from her first officer to carry on. They were ready for a strong, disciplined woman to command. Someone who would give Jim Kirk a run for his money, not someone that Kirk would defeat by bedding or causing to have a weeping breakdown. A nuBSG Starbuck. A Samantha Carter (Stargate). Heck, even a Captain Margaret Alexander (U.S.S. Saratoga, Star Trek IV), who seemed like a competent officer even with her ship disabled by the whale probe.

 

[Sparkle Fabulosa]

to learn that it's considered to be the most hated of the Star Trek series.

Who told you that?

I was looking up info about the show and came across an article about why Voyager (and Janeway) sucks. I also looked it up on IMDB and it's forum was full of negative threads such as "Janeway: Proof that anyone can be a Starfleet Captain" and something along the lines of "Voyager: a show written by mentally incapacitated people"

 

[Shaka Zulu]

Probably because it replaced the Trek series most of them fell in love with, TNG. And also that it never lived up to the premise of two feuding crews on a ship that was lost in space.

To be frank, that would have gotten tiresome after a few episodes, and fans/critics would have insisted that both Starfleet and Maquis crews start to get along to work to get back home quicker. As well, I don't think that the kind of characterization seen on the new Battlestar Galactica would work either.

 

[Amaris]

It was the writing and some of the characters that ranks it the lowest among my favorite Trek series.

 

[The Wormhole]

In all honesty, I was never bothered by the lack of conflict with the Maquis portion of the crew simply because there wasn't really much more they could have done anyway. The only Maquis characters who really had the spotlight were Chakotay and B'Elanna. Chakotay being the highest ranking Maquis and Voyager's XO would set the example and try to work with the Starfleet crew, and B'Elanna continued to butt heads with anyone who annoyed her throughout the series anyway, Starfleet, Maquis, liberated Borg, whoever. I suppose more could have been done with those misfits Tuvok had to train in Learning Curve, but then it wouldn't have been a bad idea to have had some more recurring "lower decks" type characters, regardless if they were Starfleet or Maquis.

 

[JeffinOakland]

• I’m rewatching Voyager after already rewatching The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Star Trek has a history of being ahead of the curve on race relations but behind the curve on how women are represented. Every show has at least one woman who is obviously just meant to be t & a. Almost all of the female characters throughout Star Trek are written to be either useless and/or incompetent and/or unlikable.
• This comes to a crescendo of sorts in Voyager. The series starts with three main female characters. All three have problems. In fact, the whole series has problems. It is the least of all the series.
  1. Katherine Janeway: She’s the first female Star Trek Captain and that’s great. What isn’t great is how uneven her character is and how awful her decision making often is and how many times she unnecessarily puts the crew in harm’s way and how often she talks herself out of getting home faster.
  2. B’Elanna Torres: She was supposed to be tough and prickly. Voyager’s Major Kira. We can understand Kira being angry because she had a horrible life up until her time on DS9. Torres’ reason for being angry is she’s never accepted being mixed species. Cue the violins. When she isn’t being curt, prickly and disagreeable, she’s dull and, toward Janeway, obsequious.
  3. Kes: A terrible character. Completely unworkable. She supposed to be the show’s cutie but she’s presented as only 1 year old and not yet having reached sexual maturity. Creepy. She’s completely wide-eyed and helpless. She has no useful role aboard the ship except as the Dr’s conversation partner and Neelix’s girlfriend. Girlfriend?! She’s 1 year old. Gross. And Tom chases after her, too. WTF? Eventually, she was killed off and replaced by Jeri Ryan, a hot blonde in a tight catsuit.
  The male characters aren’t much better.
  1. Chakotay: An American Indian character. An incredibly lazily written and portrayed American Indian character. His tribe is never clearly identified and the extent of his racial awareness extends to him mumbling stuff about spirit animals that neither Beltran nor the writers have the faintest idea what he’s talking about.
  2. Harry Kim: Boring character poorly acted. Garrett Wang was so unprofessional, he nearly got fired.
  3. Tuvok: Another Vulcan? Really? We haven’t explored this dry, humorless, smart, peaceful and basically decent species enough? Why not another new or, at least unexplored, species instead?
  4. Tom Paris: He’s supposed to be the show’s badboy but is actually nice and likable and actually has a well-rounded, if a bit uncomplicated, personality.
  5. Neelix: Generally acknowledged as one of the two or three worst characters in all Star Trek. A condescending smarmy, twerp, bore, bully with poor emotional control and a crippling insecurity. A jealous and emotionally abusive boyfriend. He serves no necessary function aboard the ship. It makes no sense that the show’s hardasses (Janeway, Chatokay, Tuvok) tolerate his selfish and interfering nonsense. It makes no sense that he was even allowed to stay aboard after lying to, using and endangering the crew to rescue Kes.
  6. The Dr: Arrogant at 1st but develops into a well-rounded, emotionally complex character.
  Bad idea characters: Neelix, Kes, Tuvok, Torres
  Poorly handled characters: Janeway (well played by Mulgrew but poorly written), Chakotay, Kim
  Eventually, by about season 5, the writers basically gave up on the crew and focused almost solely on 7 of 9, The Dr. and Janeway.

 

[Lance]

I'm going to put this idea forward.
I think a fair amount of people didn't like Janeway as captain. A woman in charge. I just don't think people were ready for it.
And the fact that she was a little school-marmish at first and not a hot 20-something that had mysteriously wangled her way to captaincy didn't attract the required section of male viewers.

I don't think they were ready for THAT woman in charge. A woman that gets all irrationally emotional and needs reassurance from her first officer to carry on. They were ready for a strong, disciplined woman to command. Someone who would give Jim Kirk a run for his money, not someone that Kirk would defeat by bedding or causing to have a weeping breakdown. A nuBSG Starbuck. A Samantha Carter (Stargate). Heck, even a Captain Margaret Alexander (U.S.S. Saratoga, Star Trek IV), who seemed like a competent officer even with her ship disabled by the whale probe.

I'm not going to sit here and agree with the statement that the viewers weren't ready for "a woman in charge". But I sure don't think the show-runners were.

It seems to me like they weren't quite sure how to approach the character in regards to her gender. They didn't want to make her butch. They didn't want to make her soft, either. They didn't want her to be considered as being bitchy, but they didn't want her to be a huggable mommy type either. So what we got instead was an unfortunate mixture of all of the above, depending on the writer. Which of course led to an inconsistent character. It's like they were so afraid of their first female lead captain being perceived incorrectly that they were ultra-careful in trying not to make her do this or do that, but all they really achieved was a poor overall characterization. They needed to have a clear idea for who Janeway was and how she deals with situations, and then stick with it. For better or worse they got closest to this under Jeri Taylor in the first few seasons, when at least they had all her background notes and things like 'Mosaic' to fall back on. But under Brannon Braga's leadership in the second half of the show, it all went to dirt.

I think the fanbase would've been more than ready to accept a female lead (many of us did in fact accept her, despite what I said above). But the writing team just didn't have a clue.

 

[Alex1939]

It's a series I did not like and have no desire to return to outside of a handful of episodes that I truly enjoyed.

Why?

It didn't follow it's premise and became ToS/TNG but less interesting. The concept of a lost ship with a split crew could've made for an interesting dynamic. Should've been more focus on survival AND on a differing crew that doesn't act just like Star Fleet since they were not all Star Fleet crew. This is quickly abandoned or dismissed and it gave the series of feel of no true consequences where nothing happens matter. Too much reliance on last second technobabble to save the day, yes that happens in every series but it stood out too much in Voyager.

The next biggest problem on that same theme was characterization. There was very little overall character growth. As an example, Harry Kim was not really any different than the same naive ensign for 7 seasons. Janeway always came across as irrational. The series began to focus on the Doctor and Seven, which were good interesting characters, but really caused a neglect of the other side characters.

What we are really left with is a show that was more 1 hour mini-movies than an arcing story. There were a few great episodes, a few real clunkers, and a lot of below mediocre episodes. That doesn't make for a strong series that I can fondly speak about to others.


TOS/TNG/DS9 >> Enterprise >>> Voyager.

 

[Lance]

It didn't follow it's premise and became ToS/TNG but less interesting. The concept of a lost ship with a split crew could've made for an interesting dynamic. Should've been more focus on survival AND on a differing crew that doesn't act just like Star Fleet since they were not all Star Fleet crew. This is quickly abandoned or dismissed and it gave the series of feel of no true consequences where nothing happens matter. Too much reliance on last second technobabble to save the day, yes that happens in every series but it stood out too much in Voyager.

The fundamental flaw in the premise is that they basically had two options: either elect to stay in the Delta Quadrant and explore for a bit, or else "set a course for home". While it might seem like the latter still affords a little opportunity for the former, the reality is that Voyager could never have done meaningful story-arcs in the way that DS9 or even TNG frequently did, because unlike both of those shows, Voyager was constantly moving on from the latest situation. The format by its very nature abhored the idea of recurring guest planets. And as for the Maquis, for all its good intentions in allowing for character conflict in the show's format, in practical terms it would have just been another dead-end: how long could they have really had these two crews at each others throats before it would have become implausible for them to stay together, anyway? Having them gell together was inevitable (although perhaps in a perfect world they could have explored some of the conflict a little bit more before actually coming to the point where they finally all cohere as a single crew).

 

[Commishsleer]

A woman in charge. I just don't think people were ready for it.

I don't think they were ready for THAT woman in charge. A woman that gets all irrationally emotional and needs reassurance from her first officer to carry on. They were ready for a strong, disciplined woman to command. Someone who would give Jim Kirk a run for his money, not someone that Kirk would defeat by bedding or causing to have a weeping breakdown. A nuBSG Starbuck. A Samantha Carter (Stargate). Heck, even a Captain Margaret Alexander (U.S.S. Saratoga, Star Trek IV), who seemed like a competent officer even with her ship disabled by the whale probe.

If Janeway acted like a Jim Kirk then she'd be called a slut for bedding and seducing her way across the galaxy.

The other examples you mention weren't Captains except for the Saratoga lady we saw for 30 seconds on screen. Captains are a whole different kettle of fish and there aren't too many examples out there in the science fiction world.

 

[Delta1]

When I first started reading up on Voyager, I was shocked to learn that it's considered to be the most hated of the Star Trek series. Can someone shed some light as to why?

Off the top of my head ...

1. It followed an excellent Trek series, and coexisted with another one, and paled in comparison to both.

2. It betrayed its premise almost instantly, and became a sort of untethered TNG, drifting through high-concept space.

3. It missed the memo that all the cool new series were going for story arcs and continuity, and it remained ploddingly episodic, with pretty poor continuity.

4. The characters were dull, dull, dull. A few started out as merely grating, I will give them that, but even they became dull over time.

5. Too much technobabble, and what little plausible (or at least interesting) concepts they had, they misused at almost every opportunity.

6. Gilligan's Island stories in which you spend 60 minutes waiting to see how they're going to screw up another chance to go home. (I watched it on TV with commercials.)

7. Silly villains. Klingon clones with even worse hair, polluting aliens ripped from Captain Planet, and an even simpler version of the Borg Queen than what we got in First Contact.

Not reasons that people hated Voyager ...

1. Because Janeway was a woman. I have never seen anyone complain about this. I have seen people complain about the inconsistency of her writing, and her delivery, and the reasoning of the character's choices and morality of her actions, but never the fact that she is a woman. By the time Voyager came around, women had been in supervisory/command roles in the workforce for a very long time; they had starring roles in TV series; they had been protagonists in genre fiction; they had even been captains in Starfleet. (In addition to the one mentioned above, Captain Scott, Captain Garret, Admiral Nechayev, and Admiral Satie in TNG.)

2. Because of franchise fatigue. This might be a reason for people not to get into it, but does not explain why so many people who did watch it didn't like it. Read some of the contemporary reviews--they put a lot of time, effort, and thought into a show they ultimately disliked, or gave up on (e.g. Tim Lynch). You don't do that if you're not devoted to a franchise. (The writers may have been suffering from franchise fatigue, though. Maybe they hated Voyager?)

 

[Alex1939]

It didn't follow it's premise and became ToS/TNG but less interesting. The concept of a lost ship with a split crew could've made for an interesting dynamic. Should've been more focus on survival AND on a differing crew that doesn't act just like Star Fleet since they were not all Star Fleet crew. This is quickly abandoned or dismissed and it gave the series of feel of no true consequences where nothing happens matter. Too much reliance on last second technobabble to save the day, yes that happens in every series but it stood out too much in Voyager.

The fundamental flaw in the premise is that they basically had two options: either elect to stay in the Delta Quadrant and explore for a bit, or else "set a course for home". While it might seem like the latter still affords a little opportunity for the former, the reality is that Voyager could never have done meaningful story-arcs in the way that DS9 or even TNG frequently did, because unlike both of those shows, Voyager was constantly moving on from the latest situation. The format by its very nature abhored the idea of recurring guest planets. And as for the Maquis, for all it's good intentions in allowing for character conflict, it's just another dead-end: how long could they have really had these two crews at each others throats before it would become implausible, anyway?

So have you seen the nuBSG by Ron Moore from 10 years ago? Cause they did all of that.

Deciding to head towards the alpha contract didn't kill the show. Having characters that don't properly develop or change does. Ignoring the survival aspects to crew and ship does.

The two crews don't have to constantly be at each others throats. But the crew could develop and function differently and distinctly from other star fleet crews like we had previously seen on TNG and ToS.


The show would've been a lot more acceptable if they were just a deep space exploration vessel that at least had access to Star Bases from time to time and just dropped the entire maquis plot from the beginning. I mean they basically did do that but it's kind of hard to ignore based on the setup of the series.

 

[Commishsleer]

Not reasons that people hated Voyager ...

1. Because Janeway was a woman. I have never seen anyone complain about this.

No of course not. Then they'd be sexist...

 

[TOSalltheway]

Voyager is the only series I do not own nor will I ever own.

Voyager should have followed ( or lead as it had not yet been made) the remake of Battlestar Galactia. It should have shown a failing ship with shortage of supplies, poor morale, struggling to keep discipline.

Instead they brought in 7 of 9, great eye candy but so blatantly just an excuse to show a sexy lady in tight clothes for ratings.