Mama Robotnik
This Voyager rant is worth saving:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=19384328&postcount;=135
My contribution:
Voyager wasn't just bad, it was offensive.
They had generous funding, the Star Trek brand name which guaranteed at least four seasons, a fanbase that didn't need to be earned, and a decent cast. They writers inherited a rich source of backstory and conflict with The Marquee, and a universe of ideas/species that they could use or disregard at whim.
The series could have been a journey of wonder, exploring the more exotic, imaginative possibilites of space and the unknown. It could have been a character tour-de-force, with the two crews of enemies forced to slowly overcome their mutual distrust, and work together to survive against a hostile universe.
The series could have truly differentiated itself, with an increasingly worn-down ship, held together by new alien technologies welded to its battle-damaged hull, as the crew improvise new ways of survival.
The series concept had the potential to be... well, anything! Imaginitive sci-fi wonder! Complex character-show! Survival adventure! A mix of all these!
And instead.... we were given the biggest waste of seven seasons, and god knows how much money, in producing the safest, dullest, unimaginative, derivative, quiet, badly-written, boring, unambitious, repetitive, nonsensical, poorly-acted, unplanned, misguided, flawed, badly-paced, gimmicky, uninspired, insulting, unchallenging and unintelligent series in Science Fiction.
Ronald D Moore got it right - the series is insulting the audience by breaking logic in its own established context. The lone ship never runs out of shuttles and photon-topredos, the carpets are all perfect and clean, the injuries are always healed, the replicators always work (despite some episode-specifc "replicator rations" which make no sense given the Holodecks were on every fucking day), and the crew live in extreme comfort.
The crew are a family, that all get along because that's what the writers want, and there will be done. Consider: The Marquee had their worlds traded by the Federation to the Cardassians with no input, and this betrayal is explored with Eddington in DS9. ("You're worse than the BORG." he spits at Sisko). Yet in Voyager, how long does it take to put this betrayal aisde forever.
Episode fucking two. First ten minutes.
Even as a show of stand alone episodes, the insults to the audience's intelligence continued. You have to shut off your brain to believe some of the reset buttons this series pulls. Evil timeship that destroys a thousand civilisations and reduces Voyager to a wreck? Crash into it in Part 2, resets everything for the next episode!
Janway and Paris mutated into Salamanders, with their entire brain size and shape altered to be unlike anything human, undoubtedly causing massive brain damage and loss of personality and memory due to the shrinking? Doctor injects them with something invented OFF SCREEN and they're back to normal in the last two minutes of the episode.
Janeway gets assimilated. The trauma and horror, the mutilation and deep wounds that took Picard (PICARD!) ten years to work through. She is restrored to normal by Part 2, and even jokes about it.
If Voyager was just an offensive, insulting sidenote in Trek's history, one that could be conveniently ignored, I'd probably not be as frustrated. But it had to not only burn the field, but salt the ground aswell.
It took two of the most important species in Trek, and utterly destroyed them.
The Borg - now reduced to the slaves of the Borq Queen supervillain and her evil plans, get blown up regularly by Voyager, and proved to be as dumb as fuck. They've gone from investigating, analysing and understanding (Q-Who?) to "not being able to understand something unless they assimilate it". And, oh yeah, they NEVER come after you again if you blow up one of their ships (which would take then, oh, ten minutes at Transwarp?).
The Q - the bookends of TNG, the god-race who sense the potential of humanity, who guide and challenge so that potential can be reached. Q himself, the taunting God, helping humanity (prep time for the Borg; All Good Things, making Picard a better person in Tapestry) but hiding his motives as behind barbs and adversarial illusions.
And Voyager turned him into a married man with a kid, who repeadly came to "Aunty Kathy" for advice, and oh yeah, wanted to sex her.
Sigh. I could go on for pages about this. About the crew, who have less character development and growth than one of my sneezes. About the aliens, who were all without-fail the bumpy-forehead variety (yeah, the other series did this too, but with advances in CGI and whatever, Voyager was best suited to buck the trend). I could even mention the various dozen or so ways that Voyager could have made it home (Barzan wormhole, timed charges on Caretaker's array, Threshold Warp 10 followed by Doctor's anti-Salamander cure, ASKING Q after saving his fucking arse) but didn't because the writers just ignored the logic of their own fucking stories.
Instead I'll just say the following: ToS, TNG, DS9 (!!!!!) were better.
(01-20-2010, 09:21 PM EST)