Guest Trek Blogging #5

Voyager.

What happened here? I'll tell you what happened. Berman & company lost their balls. So, DS9's ratings were lower than Next Generation's. Oh, woe is me. C'mon, if there's anything they should have learned it's that STAR TREK IS NOT ABOUT RATINGS. They wanted a show to replace Next Generation when it went off the air. That was the wrong mindset from the very start. Nothing will ever replace TNG. You can stick the Borg into as many Voyager or Enterprise episodes as you want, but the Borg are linked to Picard, both figuratively and literally. What the folks at Paramount have never understood is that the Borg are not great villains. Khan is a great villain. Q is a great villain. Dukat is a great villain. Hell, Harry Mudd is a pretty good villain. But the Borg are not great villains, because you have to have a personality to be a great villain. The Borg resonate with us because of what they did to Picard, and we care about Picard. To this day, Paramount is pushing the Borg on us. Voyager had more Borg episodes than Next Gen. Enterprise had them on a show, 200 years before humans were supposed to have met them. And now the Las Vegas ride is featuring them. Paramount execs think that First Contact was a big hit because it was about the Borg. Bullshit. First Contact was not about the Borg. Sure, they were an important part of the story, but it wasn't about them. It was about Picard. It was about Data, it was about the difference between heroes and flesh & blood people. We learned more about our characters through the Borg, but the movie was not about the Borg.Anyway, um…Like I said, I'll get to the movies later. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Voyager. Sorry I lost my train of thought, but can you blame me? On the grand scale of things Trek, Voyager is pretty damn easy -and sometimes preferable - to forget.Say what you may about Voyager, there were some really good things about the show. Kathryn Janeway was a great character, and Kate Mulgrew played her to the hilt. The holographic doctor was a brilliant creation. B'elanna Torres---a conflicted human/Klingon half-breed right up there in the Kira Nerys/Ro Laren tortured Trek chick vein. And Seven of Nine saved the show. More about her in a minute.Voyager had some really good characters, and some really good episodes, some really cool entries in the mystique that is Trek lore. But let's face facts: When looked at as a whole package, Voyager is ultimately a disappointment - a show that failed to live up to the promise of its challenging concept, and that failed to live up to the lofty standard set by its predecessors- namely, the previous Trek shows.It had a spectacular pilot episode. Spectacular, I tell you. What a fantastic idea. It drew upon established Trek lore, giving us a Maquis crew and a Starfleet crew, and forcing them to work together, braving dangers that, since we were thousands of light years from home, we had never seen before. Ooh, it sounded so exciting. Almost makes you weep.With a frustratingly few amount of exceptions, Voyager was essentially a half-baked retread of TNG. And that's a shame. TNG did plenty of TNG. Voyager should have done more Voyager. Voyager should have done what DS9 did, taken its concept and pushed it as far as it would go. Chakotay should have been in conflict with the captain, like, a lot? It's terrible how quickly he relinquished his position to her….there could have been lots of stories there. They were friends too quickly. Come to think of it, everyone was friends too quickly. My favorite example of this is the potentially ambitious and interesting second season story arc in which Tom Paris was butting heads with many of the characters, and seemed on the verge of leaving the ship. Now here was someone interesting. Turns out though, that he was faking it all, in order to expose a double agent. And after they caught this bad guy, who we didn't really know or care that much about, Tom went right back to being the good Starfleet officer. The writers may have patted themselves on the back for fooling the audience into thinking Tom was back to being a screw-up, but did it ever occur to them that the character was more interesting as a screw-up? They effectively castrated this guy in terms of his complexity by telling us all this conflict we thought he'd been going through had been bogus. Voyager also had the annoying habit of giving us episodes which involved time travel or alternate timelines, which while on the surface were sometimes decent stories, would end with the crew setting the regular timeline back on course and thereby forgetting everything that had happened to them in the story. See, guys, a neat subplot about Tuvok and Seven of Nine bonding during a hellish year on the ship has no resonance with us if at the end of the episode the characters erase that year from existence, go on their merry way and don't remember that it happened.And why didn't they get home earlier? OK, the final shot of the show, with the ship being escorted back to earth is effective, but when you think of all the lackluster, run-of-the-mill stories that were told in the last few seasons of Voyager, it just makes you want to puke. If they'd gotten home, say, at the end of the fifth season, or the sixth, or even halfway through the seventh season, we could have seen them trying to readjust to life on earth. Now that would have been uncharted territory as far as Trek stories go. Again, it's another example of Voyager's missed opportunities.One thing though. The addition of Jeri Ryan in the fourth season was a masterstroke. The show was going down, baby, you know it and I know it. And when Seven of Nine stepped out of her alcove and started making life on the ship interesting, suddenly people were watching again. Admit it. She was Spock. She was Data, she was Odo. She was the outsider who commented on the human condition through her inability to understand it. She was a compelling character and she brought some juice back into the show, for awhile at least. And lay off the crap about her outfits, OK? Hey, is it against the law to be a sexy babe? We saw as much Nichelle Nichols thigh and Marina Sirtis cleavage as we saw Jeri Ryan T & A. And she looked hot as hell in that catsuit, so shut up about it, and remember why you saw Batman Returns. Hint: It wasn't to leer at Danny Devito.