Yeah, I think this is the real standout. Like, Voyager could have been much better if they focused on this kind of thing IMO, like any good Castaway Story is half about the adventure and half about fraying nerves and new facets of relationships etc. But they seemed to want to do Gilligan’s Island In Space, But Serious, and it just doesn’t work that well in retrospect.
But as a kid I was all in on Voyager, I fucking loved that show.
I feel like children are more willing to forgive flawed execution of a good concept, because they know they can fix it with fanfiction.
As someone watching through Voyager for the first time atm, I do feel it messes up relationship stuff pretty fantastically. Tom and B’elanna is super dry and adds little to the show. I feel like Tuvok is the only one with an interesting relationship dynamic and his wife/family isn’t even there.
It’s a shame how good the Voyager cast woulda been if they had let 'em bounce off each other a little more. It’s a very well cast show full of talented actors. There’s such a rich setup for character dynamics: a maquis leader and an the undercover agent who betrayed him, a hotshot pilot out of prison, alien hitchhikers, a federation crew stranded on the other side of the galaxy with half their coworkers killed in action
all these tensions resulting in 90% like sitcom style foibles for every character but seven is wild
I keep thinking of Picard going “oh fuck Guinan is calling me on the bridge” and then having to sit in his ready room, tense, frustrated and bedraggled by other events, with the fact that he trusts her word implicitly even though what she’s insisting makes no sense to him or any of his crew is like, a more compelling plot than most of what Voyager touches on, and that’s in a single episode (spoilers in wiki!) where timeline shenanigans mean none of it ever actually happened in our timeline. What the fuck!
EDIT: oh somehow this makes it even better:
Jonathan Frakes admitted, " To this day I do not understand ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’. I do not know what the fuck happened in that episode. I’m still trying to understand it – but I liked the look. " ( Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 192)
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m pretty sure the main reason I tolerated crap as a kid is because I literally didn’t know media could be bad. I just assumed if I didn’t like something it was because I didn’t understand it and it was for grownups or whatever.
To be honest I still sort of feel this way, but I guess I’m more discerning
I used to think Babylon 5 was extremely boring as a young kid (my mum watched it before some show I wanted to see). Never seen it since but I’d probably have a more critically productive time with it now even if I didn’t like it very much.
Nearly every idea on paper for voyager is great. They’re on their own, they have to make tough choices, the crew is made of two groups who don’t like each other, one was a spy for the cardassians, they’ve got a whole new slice of galaxy to explore an a new alien species to meet every season.
And then it becomes a sitcom that randomly 180s into some kind of horror series out of the blue three times a season.
What a weird show.
Two things Jonathan Frakes doesn’t understand:
TNG S03E15
How to sit in chairs
I thought B5 was extremely good as a jaded teen too cool for star trek and then as years have rolled on I have realized that is a show that is basically designed to make nerds feel smart without actually being as smart as it wants you to think it is. “What if BOTH SIDES were bad!” is kind of the beginning and end of it’s depth?
Londo and J’kar are a non-stop delight, however.
I’ve probably posted this exact thought in this thread before, but I still can’t get over how, from literally the first episode, Voyager ruined its extremely straightforward and good premise by making the thing that transports them across the universe into yet another mysterious inscrutable God-Alien instead of being just a normal wormhole or whatever. It perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the series.
banjo-man loves to fling starships into other quadrants, i don’t think there’s any problem with that. he’s like q with a banjo and a folksy attitude what’s not to love
people are free to disagree but i really, really hate Q
Q lives or dies on whether you can deal with him being an absolute horrible shit, and I can absolutely respect that some people cannot
The depowered Q episode in TNG is pretty neat since it challenges the usual dynamics of the God-alien episodes that Star Trek falls back on from time to time.
Q as Eldritch God entity out to poke holes in Humanity’s hypocrisy? Like it.
Q as the holodeck but with more racist and creepy jokes? Hate it.
Q getting punched out so hard by Ben Sisko he leaves the series for good? Love it.
My headcannon is that there’s actually several entities that all look the same and call themselves Q but they’re not the same being at all. It makes Q weirder and explains how his motivations and rules shift every episode.
I’ll go to the grave saying Babylon 5’s better than any Trek series, but it’s definitely got a rough first season and some corny acting on a lot of guest star appearances.
As a kid I was wowed enough by the CG that all the stuff in-between was tolerable, but yeah, wasn’t exactly comprehending or interested in most of the show’s politics back then. Did not put two and two together on Earth falling into fascism, for example, which seems wild now due to how blatant it was.
I’m sorry, but I think he understands how to sit in chairs better than the rest of us tbqhimo.
