What's your favourite Star Trek series, films and characters?

I agree with SO much in that point, I'd like it twice if I could.

Man, I have to watch some Star Trek again...

 

Odo does have his fair share of criminal investigations indeed.
And I think TNG had also more than one episode... I'll have to dig through my memories...

 

Let's see. Not in order, but the ones i like, for a reason or another

Series:
Deep Space Nine
Enterprise

Movies:
Wrath of Khan
The Voyage Home
First Contact
Star Trek 2009
Into Darkness

 

One season into Voyager and it's a fine show with an excellent cast of characters.

Indeed.

I like Deep Space Nine better but that's because I like political stories more than exploration.

I did look over some fan analysis of Star Trek Discovery. They recently released some behind the scenes. Basically all the creative team was only marginally aware of Star Trek before and not big fans. There were a lot of Rian Johnson type quotes about subverting expectations.

Different camera angles: Dynamic cinematography might actually be an improvement
New uniforms: okay, I don't see the harm
Dark lighting: okay, I'll overlook it
Less cohesion and discipline in Starfleet: okay, I'll overlook it
Want to make it more woke: Fine, it's current year, that's par for all media now.
Want to move it from an ensemble cast to a single character arc driven story: You are on thin ice....

They took the canon that Klingons have redundant organs (two hearts, four lungs) and extrapolated that Klingons have established that Klingons have double sets of genitalia now (males anyway, females are not explained). As far as I'm concerned that has killed Discovery. Not even Doctor Who would give an alien two penises. That's so crude I feel bad typing it on Lustria-Online, but I'm using the term in a purely medical sense.

That is not enough to kill the franchise, but I will never watch an episode of Discovery now. This wasn't an accident. Combined with show staff using variations of the phrase "This will bother the Trekkies but I think it will improve things for casual fans" too often.

It's one thing to make a mistake but I think the creative team for Discovery has contempt for the Star Trek source material.


Anyway, back to Voyager.

One thing I like is they subverted the trope that TNG and DS9 does all the time.

Captain: "How long will it take"
Engineer: "Eight Hours"
Captain: "You have three."

In Voyager the engineer "Look if I say it takes four hours I mean four hours"

Does anyone know how they justify composing most away missions from senior command level officers all the freaking time?


Janeway seems fickle to me, though from an outsiders view I can see she is fickle when the plot requires. Whenever the crew of Voyager fails to solve a problem by a narrow margin, I figure two episodes will help them completely solve the problem but they never stick around. If they cannot do it in less three days, they move on.

Episode 1, she violates the prime directive and refuses an opportunity to send the crew home to help a group of people by keeping super tech out of their enemies hand, but they don't bother to tell them "Oh by the way, your god is dead, and you are going to run out of supplies in five years. Better learn to be self-sufficent. Here's let me give you some Federation tech!"

Episode 14, they come really close to restoring a dead person from a war disaster with the implied possibility that the procedure could save thousands. They failed because they didn't have enough power. Instead of sticking around to try to boost the power or help the talaxians recreate the technology they flew away.

 

I think it was a bit of "back to the roots". Kirk and his guys did that all the time.


And without spoiling too much:
Janeway is.... sigh. Not a bad idea but she is a bit hit and miss over the seasons.
My main problem with her is that more and more episodes are about her and she does everything, while Chakotay basically becomes a minor character.
Also sometimes she is a bit.. torn between the Kirk-like badass action hero behaviour and the "mother of the ship" emotional women stereotype.

IMO some stuff gets better over time.
Some stuff however...changes. not always for the better.

 

Disagree with the thought about Picard there. IMO they showed a lot of facets of the character.
I am pretty sure Janeway's behaviour had out of universe reasons (different writers and ideas) but I guess you could just say in universe that she went insane by being so far away from home.

 

Oh don't get me wrong, I do like some character traits of Janeway.
I just think they never decided on what to do with her. If there was a transition from one personality to the other I'd probably like it more, but the way they switch around makes it weird.

Spoiler: VOYAGER SPOILER

As for the Voyager: Same problem like Janeway, in a way:
The cool thing about the Voyager during the first two seasons or so (compared to the Enterprise) is:
If Picard's diplomacy fails he has the firepower of a battleship and the whole Starfleet behind him. The Voyager lacks the resources, the weapons, and the fleet. The only thing it can do well is run away and hide.
I liked that. It enforced better diplomacy and sometimes cutting a few corners.

But in the later seasons the action series characteristics begin to dominate Voyager. That's when Janeway makes her transition and so does the Voyager. Suddenly it felt like half the episode consisted of the Yoyager blowing up enemies left and right, and Janeway has one badass moment after the other. Only to suddenly snap back to the old "mother" role. To me it just felt a bit like schizophrenic and also arrogant sometimes.

I certainly don't hate the character, but to me that's where a lot of the Star Trek TNG spirit in Voyager got lost.
Although I admit that some of my favourite episodes are late ones. Just... I'd have loved to see more of Chakotay (for example) and less of Janeway in many of them.

 

I re-found the video that gave the most measured criticism of STD I ever found.




Unrelated edit. One thing DS9 and Voyager have that the predecessors didn't (Whoopi Goldberg doesn't really count, sorry) was a mostly friendly outsider working with Federation periodically providing direct commentary or an indirect foil against Starfleet.

DS9 had Quark and Garok.
Voyager had Kess and Neelix

They were very important support characters that elevated their whole shows in my opinion.

 

The abbreviation says it all.

Ok that was mean, in fact I haven't seen a single episode. But I haven't heard a lot of good things about it either.

 

Did you know JK Rowling has an extremely in depth backstory to Dean Thomas. His father was a pureblood wizard who married a Muggle. The Death Eaters wanted to recruit him, so his father left his pregnant wife to keep the Death Eaters away from his family. Dean isn't actually a Muggle born.

Here's the thing though. If it is never mentioned on screen, it didn't happen! This ties in to my main problem with Voyager. That is the Continuity is a fickle monster.


One of the reasons I really Deep Space Nine is that things are changing all the time. Sometimes the Klingons are vicious enemies, sometimes they are trusted allies, sometimes they are uneasy allies, sometimes they are mercenary minded third wheels, sometimes they are red herrings, sometimes they are comic relief.

Yesterday's enemies are often tommorrow's allies. Stuff changes all the time. Characters come and go all the time. Voyager suffers from limitations of Continuity. First and foremost, much like Gilligan's Island, if they ever make it home, then the show is basically over. Second, it's very hard to introduce or remove characters. Unlike every other version of Star Trek where you can have recurring characters enter and leave all the time by getting on a space ship and flying away and back.

I actually started compiling a list but I guess it's not really up to me to review every episode of a nineties TV show (though if I spaced it out I could raise my post count AND fish for likes). Voyager's writers really twist things in knots to keep the cast constant.

At least one in three episodes, someone on Voyager befriends an alien that really has no reason not to join the Voyager crew.

1) Janeway is a very compassionate captain and this attitude trickles down to her crew. They should pick up lots of new people for humanitarian reasons.
2) Since Janeway and Tuvok considered using Voyager babies to replace fallen crew members on their decades long voyage, recruiting new adults make sense. They should pick up lots of new people for purely practical reasons.

Every time it looks like we are getting a new character, either they die at the last minute or a deus ex machina removes their reason for wanting to leave their planet at the last minute or one of the characters just suddenly acts wildly out of character. Without listing every single instance in season one and two, I think season two, episode one is the most glaring example.

Spoiler: In Case you haven't seen "The 37s" yet

The crew discovers that aliens abducted humans directly from Earth in 1937 to enslave them. The humans rebelled and now created a new society in the Delta Quandrant. Hundreds of thousands of humans. Then they unfreeze some 1937 humans from cryogenic stasis including Amelia Ehrhardt. Zero members of the Voyager crew asked to stay on the human colony. Zero members of the human colony, including Amelia Ehrhardt who lives for exploration chose to board on the Voyager.

Not only does it strike me as unrealistic that none of the 37s wanted to try to get back to Earth and none of the Voyager crew stuck space opted to find a home on a paradise planet with happy humans. But it would have been really cool to make stories about training new recruits, and adapting alien technology.

At the same time, Voyager also spits in the face of continuity. Season 2, episode 7 the crew's supply of food is so low that they risk hunting food on a dangerous planet nicknamed Planet Hell. They have an exciting story with great characterization, but they don't find any food. In episode 8, 9, 10, and 11 they have plenty of food and no explanation for the change of circumstances. They only seem to have supply problems when they writers need them to have supply problems because they ran out of more exciting plots.

It is famous in almost all Star Trek episodes that Starfleet captains are inconsistent on following the Prime Directive, but Janeway is more fickle than Picard and Sisko, though Kirk probably has her beat there.

What kind of bugs me is how Janeway and crew balance between exploration, trying to get home, and pursuing humanitarian interests. I feel like getting the crew home is not given enough priority. The rules change when you are off the edge of the map.

 

My heart knew that Ben Sisko was the greatest Starfleet captain ever. My brain couldn't figure out why...until now.



Unrelated note. I find Dr. Bashir, the Holographic doctor on Voyager, and Dr. McCoy far more interesting characters than Dr. Crusher, but if I was sick, I would want Dr. Crusher to treat me. She is the only Star Trek doctor that has a reasonable bedside manner.

 

Me too!