{"id":34121,"date":"2021-12-26T03:05:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-26T03:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedoctorwhocompanion.com\/?p=34121"},"modified":"2021-12-20T19:56:20","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T19:56:20","slug":"a-doctor-who-fan-looks-at-star-trek-voyager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedoctorwhocompanion.com\/2021\/12\/26\/a-doctor-who-fan-looks-at-star-trek-voyager\/","title":{"rendered":"A Doctor Who Fan Looks at Star Trek: Voyager"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Voyager<\/em> is, perhaps, the least loved of all the different versions of Star Trek<\/em>. I watched most of it when it was first on, though as a fairly casual viewer: I followed it for a couple of years and then drifted in and out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extraordinarily, it\u2019s now 20 years since Voyager<\/em> finished; it ran from 1995 to 2001. It was a major source of methadone for Doctor Who<\/em> fans during Who<\/em>\u2019s wilderness years. It wasn\u2019t my favourite Doctor Who<\/em> substitute: I preferred Buffy<\/em> and Babylon 5<\/em>: the former was better written and the latter more imaginative (at least, it was until its woeful final season).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not really a Trek<\/em> fan as such. I like it, but I don\u2019t have the same emotional attachment to it as I do to Doctor Who<\/em>. They\u2019re very different, of course; as an over-generalisation, Trek<\/em> is bound by a \u201crealism\u201d and a strict \u2013 maybe constricting \u2013 adherence to its vision of the future and strict series bible; Doctor Who<\/em> cheerfully ignores its own continuity and any other constraints that might get in the way of telling a good story \u2013 or, at least, it does so when it\u2019s at its best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, Trek<\/em> can be very good. Of all its incarnations, I prefer the original series and the films with the original cast, though I\u2019ve enjoyed the other series. (Most of them, anyway. With the exception of the Captain Pike episodes, I find Discovery<\/em> dreary, formulaic, and preachy. Didn\u2019t like Picard<\/em>, either.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic has driven many of us back to our screens and I\u2019ve probably been watching far too much television. This has included watching all 172 episodes of Voyager<\/em>; indeed, in one slobby couch potato week, I got through 43 of them. Beat that<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, I offer to you, dear reader, an appraisal of the adventures of Captain Janeway and her crew. This is in the humble hope that my deathless prose might entertain, and inspire you to see if you fancy having a gander at the series for yourself. There are worse ways to pass an otherwise dull evening and it beats sitting through yet another episode of Pointless<\/em>. Permit me, then, to drone on about what I made of Voyager<\/em>, 20 years and more after I first saw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well: I enjoyed it. Voyager<\/em> is much better than I remember it being: it\u2019s not without its faults, but it\u2019s considerably better than its reputation might lead you to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its real problem is that it takes a long time to get going. A very long time. This is a problem that seems to be endemic to Trek<\/em>; both The Next Generation<\/em> and Enterprise<\/em> didn\u2019t really take off in their first couple of years; their later episodes were much better than the early ones. By Season 3, both TNG and Enterprise<\/em> had got into their stride. But the problem with not hitting the ground running is that you lose a lot of your audience; they\u2019re not always going to stick around if you don\u2019t deliver from the outset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Voyager<\/em> suffers from this syndrome in spades. Enterprise<\/em> and perhaps TNG took off in their third seasons; Voyager<\/em> doesn\u2019t really get going until its fourth. Once it does find its voice, it really does get good \u2013 but it did so far too late. I suspect a lot of its comparatively poor reception is based on its first three seasons. The responsibility for this has to be laid at the door of the showrunners, who floundered around for too long and hoped that the TNG audience would transfer their loyalty, uncritically, to the new show. There are some good individual episodes in Voyager<\/em>\u2019s first three years but they\u2019re fairly rare: for every two \u201cmeh\u201d ones, you get a good one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(If you\u2019re considering watching it again, this is actually a strong argument for watching it out of order. It\u2019s a good idea to start with Season 4, work through to Season 7, and then go back and watch the first three. Actually, there\u2019s a two parter which bridges Seasons 3 and 4, so maybe start with Scorpion<\/em> Part One at the end of Season 3.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before it found its voice, Voyager<\/em> also suffered too much from being \u201cTrek<\/em> by numbers\u201d. It came across, at least at first, as a pale imitation of TNG: similar, but not as good. The attempts by the showrunners to differentiate it from its predecessor were worthy but not always well realised. So, it would have a female captain \u2013 but one who lacked the charisma of Picard. It would be set in the Delta Quadrant rather than the Alpha Quadrant of the Milky Way \u2013 but that deprived the writers of old favourites like the Klingons, the Romulans, the Ferengi, et al.<\/em>, and the substitutes just weren\u2019t as compelling. The ship would not be crewed just by Starfleet personnel but by mixture of Starfleet and Maquis (freedom fighters against the Cardassians). It was felt this would introduce conflict among the characters \u2013 but this quickly became subdued and the Maquis soon fitted in snugly, contentedly, and rather unrealistically among their Starfleet peers. They occasionally grumbled, but they happily wore Starfleet uniforms and their leader Chakotay learned obediently to follow his Captain\u2019s orders and be a good little first officer. One of the crew was originally a criminal \u2013 but Tom Paris, too, soon learnt to conform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Losing the Klingons and the Romulans and their ilk would have worked if decent new aliens had been found. But the Kazon, the primary threat in the early years, are bland, lucklustre substitutes: it\u2019s as though the writers looked at the Klingons, renamed them, changed their appearance a bit by giving them daft Bride of Frankenstein<\/em> haircuts, and got rid of all the characteristics that made the Klingons interesting. The Kazon are dull. So, too, are the Vidiians, a race decimated by plague and who are rather over-enthusiastic in their advocacy of the virtues of organ donation. (They nick your organs, you see. They have no need of anaesthetic to do so because your boredom with them has led you to doze off long before they can get you.) Voyager<\/em> could, in its early years, be seen as the bland story of a bland ship having bland encounters with bland aliens in a bland region of space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Maybe that\u2019s a bit harsh. Seasons 1 to 3 aren\u2019t total failures. As I said, there are some good episodes. But the cast generally manage only a fairly low energy level; some of them try to compensate and to up the energy level — as a result, they often just end up over-acting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voyager<\/em> coasted on its journey for the first three years, pootling along on impulse. Then it went fully into warp with Season 4, and Seasons 4 to 7 are absolute belters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m getting ahead of myself here. Back to the origins. And then on to the characters. (I\u2019m going to concentrate mainly on them rather than other aspects of the series; if I commented on everything, this piece would become impossibly long. After all, if you watched every episode of Voyager<\/em> for 10 hours a day, it\u2019d still take you nearly two weeks to get through them all. So there\u2019s a lot more that could be said. You gotta start \u2013 and stop \u2013 somewhere.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep Space Nine<\/em> overlapped with TNG, then TNG finished, and a new series, set on a starship rather than a space station, was deemed to be required. The lead would be female \u2013 this was 22 years before Jodie Whittaker was cast as Doctor Who; Trek<\/em> got there first, by a long margin. The producers were adamant that the approach to Elizabeth Janeway would not be tokenistic or stereotyped in any way. She wasn\u2019t the lady Captain: she was the Captain. She wouldn\u2019t be romantically involved with any of the crew; she had a fianc\u00e9 back on Earth. She certainly wouldn\u2019t bed them; still less, unlike James T Kirk, would she react to any alien she met by either snogging them or smashing them in the face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The character\u2019s given name was changed when the part was cast. Captain Nicole Janeway was to be played by Genevi\u00e8ve Bujold, a highly regarded French-Canadian actress, known primarily for her work in film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh dear. Bujold managed two days of filming before she left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The studio and the director had reservations about the casting from the outset. Some studio suits still hankered after a male lead. Others were concerned that Bujold hadn\u2019t really anticipated the sheer amount of work the part would involve: gruelling days of 14 hours or more for months, and then for years. It seems the actor, too, was deeply worried about the workload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there was her performance. In general terms in acting, less is more, but Bujold\u2019s characterisation was so understated that it seemed to vanish entirely. Exhortations from director Winrich Kolbe to give it some welly fell on deaf ears. Nicole Janeway appeared to combine the personality of a mildly frosty librarian with a rabbit caught in car headlights. And she even found it hard to learn her lines. It took 15 takes before her first entrance onto the bridge was in the can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn\u2019t work, the studio realised it didn\u2019t work, and Bujold, hesitant about taking the role in the first place, handed in her resignation. Shooting on the pilot continued for a week, for scenes which didn\u2019t involve the Captain. Kolbe then admitted defeat and production shut down for a week, until the Captain could be re-cast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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