After Next Gen ended, I did not get into the other two Star Trek series of the '90s, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. It wasn't quite the same without the original cast, and as I had never really watched the original series (frankly, I think it's easy to forget it existed when you talk about '90s Trek - no disrespect intended) I did not feel a greater attachment to the overall Trek universe. In other words, we drifted apart. I discovered Star Wars, which would be my Sci-Fi obsession for the next several years (even if Star Wars is really more fantasy than Sci-Fi, though I'll get to that in a later post) and I kind of wrote Trek off until last year.
However, my interest in television has grown a lot, beginning with exposure to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my freshman year of college. One thing that I enjoy is the ability for a show to tell very long, serialized stories, and so friends recommended that I take a look at Deep Space Nine. When a friend of mine who was also a Trek nerd moved into my apartment, it was the golden opportunity to engage with this king of nerdy American TV shows (obviously they'll have to duke it out with Doctor Who for nerdiest overall.)
So I watched through all of DS9 while the apartment as a whole has been very slowly working our way through Next Gen. While Next Gen does raise some very nice philosophical questions and explores them, DS9 earnestly examines the difficulties in being diplomatic peacekeepers in a very volatile Galaxy and what peacekeepers are forced to do when war breaks out. It also questions a lot of the utopian premises that the Federation is built on. It's still probably not as good as Next Gen, though I admit some of that might be nostalgia clouding my judgment. Also, that holographic lounge singer in the later seasons was infuriatingly annoying. Still, I respected the makers of the show for creating a very different kind of setting for a Star Trek show (even if they used the Defiant or the Runabouts to cheat and have a couple of planet-hopping adventures.) Given that Voyager overlapped DS9 by most of both shows' runs, I was curious to see what they had done with that premise.
Now, I had also heard the warnings. Voyager actually has a pretty interesting premise, in that we get to see what it's like for the Federation when they're not just a few days at warp speed from a starbase. Not only are they desperate and running low on supplies in a hostile and uncharted part of space, but nearly half their crew are members of the Maquis, a splinter group from the Federation who weren't willing to give up their homes to the Cardassians in the name of a treaty.
All of this potential could make for a much darker and grittier Star Trek, but from my season-and-a-half of experience and from what I've heard, it never really goes to that place. The replicators are rationed, but Neelix's kitchen seems to always be stocked just fine. The Maquis are insubordinate at times, but they soon learn their lessons and start towing the line. In the episode Alliances, we're teased with the idea that Janeway might have to compromise her principles in order to survive, yet the conclusion she reaches after attempting to befriend various Kazon factions or the Trabe (the too-nice-to-not-secretly-be-evil-guys) is that, screw it, she's going to just keep doing things the way she's doing, and somehow we're not going to be losing a crew member to various attacks every week.
Now, I'm still enjoying the show (and I'm looking forward to the Borg, even if, as I understand, they get somewhat wimpified after a while,) so I do plan to continue watching, but I also see why producer/writer Ronald D. Moore was inspired to create his re-make of Battlestar Galactica. In a lot of ways (and interviews with Moore confirm this) BSG was the show Voyager could have been. Desperate people, fighting a desperate fight to survive. In DS9, there's a fantastic episode ("In the Pale Moonlight") where Sisko makes a confessional video log about his role in the assassination of a Romulan ambassador that ultimately leads to the Romulans joining the fight against the Dominion. In the end, Sisko reveals that, in the grand scheme of things, even though it would seem to compromise all of his ethics and principles, he's decided that in this case, the ends justified the means. Star Trek doesn't tend to get that dark, and I think BSG was Moore's way of letting him explore those thornier ethical questions without the mandate that the Federation is always the good guys and always does the right thing.
For now, Voyager does remind us of their status on a regular basis - it's not as if things are going super-smoothly - but it does still have the sort of "return to the status quo at the end of the episode" quality than a show about a stranded star ship seems it ought to have. In Next Gen, the Enterprise is often stopping in for repairs and re-fits, and you would think that, for example, after a Kazon craft crash-lands through the hull and into Voyager's shuttle bay (a move remarkably similar to an event in BSG,) they would have a seriously tough time fixing that hole.
Part of me wonders what a new Star Trek show would be like. Obviously, there was Enterprise (though my Trekkie friends insist that that series does not exist,) but it would be interesting to see a series set in the Trek universe that took into account the modern tastes for television. I don't know how likely it is we'll see another Star Trek show, given that Enterprise was cancelled early and the current incarnation of the franchise is JJ Abram's alternate-timeline version. 2009's Star Trek was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but it was more of an action-adventure film than what you tend to look for in Star Trek, which I think of as being a little closer to pure Sci-Fi - where you have to take the time to really think about what you're doing instead of simply firing all your weapons at once.
But we're talking about Voyager here, so let me try to get back on track.
First of all, I think it was a clever, and logical (sigh) choice that the two non-human crew-members brought along to the Delta Quadrant are the two most iconic aliens of the franchise: a Vulcan and a Klingon - well, half-Klingon - B'ellana ironically seems to have none of Worf's issues of identity crisis. She seems pretty happy to just be an extra-feisty human with a somewhat bumpy forehead. So far I think they've done less interesting things with Tuvok, who embodies everything we know about Vulcans, and has little of Spock's deadpan snark. It's still relatively early in the series, and Tim Russ seems to do fine with what he's given, but I wouldn't mind seeing a little more specificity to his character.
I know Kes is only in the first few seasons, though I think she's reasonably interesting. In the pilot, we're introduced to the Kazon and the Ocampa, but these do not play the kind of central roles that, say, the Cardassians and Bajorans play on DS9. Neelix, I think, has a lot of potential, and the episodes where we've seen more of his background, such as when he encounters essentially his people's enemy's version of Oppenheimer, we see his goofy, friendly shell crack and find out that he's a very damaged and angry man on the inside. I hope that the writers don't forget this fact when doing future Neelix-centric episodes.
Harry Kim, more than any Trek character I can think of, is the audience character. Sure, he's a gifted graduate, and a hard worker, but more than anyone else, he's a blank slate, with very little baggage to bring on his journey. Tom Paris (who I understand a lot of people disliked, though I have not gotten sick of him yet) on the other hand is all about baggage. In a way, I think he has the clearest arc planned out for him - redeeming himself by turning his screw-up life around and becoming a hero. For the most part he's made that change by the end of the pilot, though we see his old problems pop up now and again.
So then there's Chakotay. I actually like Robert Beltran's performance in this role, and when he's not the focus of an episode, I like his position as the Maquis leader who ought to be the most defiant, but actually is the most willing to act like Starfleet again. The problem is that whenever we see an episode about him, we get some very hokey Magical Native American stuff. We don't see Harry defined by his Chinese ancestry, nor Paris and Janeway defined by their White American heritage. While I think it's great that there's a Native American cast member on a Star Trek show (think about how revolutionary Nichelle Nichols was - playing a black, female officer on a starship in an era where the Civil Rights Movement was still struggling to change the country,) I also think that Native Americans suffer from an oversimplification of their societies and cultures (note: plural.) I'm much happier when episodes focus on Chakotay the man instead of Chakotay the Native American.
Then there's the Captain herself. Janeway's got some interesting things going on. Of course, she's the first female Star Trek captain, though frankly, I think the less of a big deal of that they make, the better (and in fairness, it's not like it comes up once an episode.) While she does have a friendship with Tuvok, she is certainly isolated from the rest of the crew, and given the ship's isolation, I could imagine that taking its toll over time. So far, she's stubbornly principled, which is fine for now, but I'd like to see more dire consequences result from that (destroying the Caretaker Array in the pilot was, of course, the biggest one.) One thing that I find kind of fascinating is that the Holo-Novel she likes to relax with has her playing the part of a governess (in a weird period horror story - perhaps it's supposed to be Turn of the Screw?) She's a Starfleet Captain (which means pretty damn kick-ass) but her fantasy has her put into a subservient position. Is this problematic from a feminist perspective, or merely interesting? Unlike Picard, Janeway is too young to be a parent to her crew, so what I think would be interesting would be to see how she struggles to maintain control over the ship while people get increasingly panicked about getting home.
A lot of my critiques so far boil down to: let's have some character development. The issue, of course, is that at the time this show was made, there was a much stronger push for episodic plots. Star Trek shows of this era were made directly for syndication, meaning that whatever local channels bought the shows would be able to control the order in which they were shown. Thus, there was an incentive to keep the status quo from changing too much. In the past decade, however, television has become a far more serialized medium, and one of the huge advantages of this change is that you can make big, sweeping changes without worrying the audience will become lost.
Hell, the way we watch TV has changed significantly since the 90s. I watch a ton of TV, but none of it is through regular broadcasts. Instead, I watch on Hulu (or some other sites) and Netflix, or if not there, I'll purchase whole seasons on DVD. In this era, where you are far less likely to miss an episode (if it's on Netflix, you can't miss one) there's really no problem with letting the show move along in very different ways.
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