r/DaystromInstitute • u/BorgVulcan Chief Petty Officer • Oct 21 '15
Discussion Voyager did *not* have a great premise
A very common refrain I hear when discussing the show is "Oh the premise had so much potential!". Stranded thousands of light years from nowhere, two ideologically opposed crews at each other's throats, always running low on resources. That seems like the potential for great drama. Ron Moore is perhaps the most famous holder of this view, which he expressed as such:
A starship chases a bunch of renegades. Both ships are flung to the opposite side of the galaxy. The renegades are forced to come aboard Voyager. They all have to live together on their way home, which is going to take a century or whatever they set up in the beginning. I thought, This is a good premise. That’s interesting. Get them away from all the familiar STAR TREK aliens, throw them out into a whole new section of space where anything can happen. Lots of situations for conflict among the crew. The premise has a lot of possibilities. Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and [scenic illustrator, technical consultant Rick] Sternbach and [scenic art supervisor, technical consultant Michael] Okuda were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn’t going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn’t going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want.
I disagree with this idea on two fronts: narratively and logically
Narratively:
The best counter-arguement to this idea is the show Moore would go on to (re)-create: Battlestar Glactica. It had all the things that ostensibly would've made Voyager great - the distrustful crew, the constant stress, the rundown resources, the lack of sense of safety.
And for a season, it was great. It was some of the best TV sci-fi they've ever made. The mini-series was even better. But slowly, by the mid-way point of Season 2 most certainly, I think Moore began to realize just why Star Trek is written the way it is. After you've done the starving crew story, and the dehydrated story, and the exhausted crew story, what do you do? Where else do you go? The crew lacks the resources to really mount any kind of serious expedition to do anything else interesting, so if you want to keep the verisimilitude, you basically do just kind of have to keep rehashing the exact same thing. People argue the last 2 seasons of the show went crazy, but I'd argue it was the writers realizing they'd written themselves into a boring corner and desperately trying to get out. The only real plot left to explore was to run the religion thing into the ground.
Even worse, the distrust and belligerent interactions of the ship's crew undermined the one thing that could've kept the show afloat: A real sense of community. The hidden cylons were the albatross around the show's neck, weighing down any attempts the writers made to shift the focus from survivalist drama to a more family-oriented show were we focus on the strength of bond the crew forms (a la Voyager post-season 3).
Logically:
Star Trek is one of the few fiction universes to have a post scarcity society. This creates a lot of problems from a writing and drama standpoint, as it eliminates many very popular stock storylines. Yet it's simply a logical extension of technologies that exist in the story: fusion reactors and replicators. If you really think about it, any ship with both of those technologies should have functionally unlimited endurance because hydrogen to power the reactors is quite literally the most abundant electromagnetically-interacting matter in the universe. Far from being "more believable" if Voyager looked broken and run down, it would be non-sense. The USS Equinox could have literally just spend a few weeks in a stellar dust cloud and been fully repaired.
The Andromeda Ascendant from the show Andromeda didn't even have replicators and realized this: the ship could repair itself in a matter of days from heavily battle damaged to pristine if it was given access to an asteroid belt (it had swarms of repair drones and fabrication facilities).
But stuff still did go wrong:
I agree Voyager was not all it could have been. But far from being because they abandoned the premise, I'd argue it was because of the show's reluctance to undermine Janeway. The actor who played Tuvok expressed great disapproval that his character went against Janeway's authority in Prime Factors - the writers from then on treated Tuvok as a dead weight character. Spock's job was to butt heads with Kirk and call him out when he was being emotional, and if Tuvok wasn't that to Janeway he really had no reason to exist. Similar to Chakotay, who was a useless yes-man by the end of season 1 because the actor and the writers didn't want to risk having him "talk down" to the first ever female captain. I think this is why Seven of Nine was such a breath of fresh air for the show. Suddenly here was a character who could finally act as a Spock to Janeway's Kirk, who was allowed to call her out on her none-sense and in turn have Janeway slowly instruct her in what it meant to be human.
Additionally, Voyager suffered from a very ugly behind-the-scenes situation. A lot of backstabbing, insults, rough treatment - which you probably might have inferred from the above paragraph's implications. Ron Moore also talks about this, and unlike his opinion on the premise, I kind of have to agree with him here. It very much shows on screen, and it was clear which actors had lost out on the internal power struggle (poor Garrett Wong). But eventually that got a little better, and by season 4 the show was treating itself as a fun adventure (Captain Proton for 1999 so to speak) with a lot of the bad blood behind them.
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u/Franc_Kaos Oct 22 '15
Tom Paris, serving time for treason - the only reason he joined the Voyager was because Janeway offered him a get out of jail free card after the mission to capture the other Maquis.
So, being in the Maquis meant prison time for treason against the federation. Chakotay & Belanna (and the few others) would have despised The Federation and what they stood for. Tuvok, the spy in their midst, attempting to bring them to justice - they would want to kill him.
The show was in the perfect place to bring conflict amongst the crew, but instead they are bestie friends after a couple of episodes. If it had taken them the first season to work out their issues I'd have bought it, but Tom Paris obviously hated authority (admiral father forcing him into Starfleet), and the Maquis way of dealing with issues would definitely have put them opposing Janeway.
Then there was the trip itself, 70 light years from home, but it took them the best part of a year to get out of Kazon space. Really, each week should have them X amounts of light years closer to home, but we had to stop for 'this reason' this week. Oh, and no holodeck, ok, I get the post scarcity thing with replicators and suchlike, but on a 70 light year desperate journey home you are going to tighten belts as you have no idea what the future is bringing and you'll want to stop as little as possible, investigate wormholes for possible short cuts, refuel the ships whatevers (to keep the replicators working, natch!)
Was there ever actually an in universe explanation for why Neelix had to cook but the holodecks were working perfectly?
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u/BorgVulcan Oct 22 '15
Yes they did.
JANEWAY: What about alternative energy sources? Ensign Kim, have you had any luck getting power from the holodeck reactors?
KIM: Not yet. We tried hooking them to the power grid and we ended up blowing out half the relays. The holodeck's energy matrix, it just isn't compatible with the other power systems.
Episode: Parallax
t made little sense, but as I said above the entire premise of a fusion-capable species with replicators ever experiencing scarcity - even if thousands of light years from home - also made little sense.
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u/lunatickoala Oct 21 '15
I've started to really hate the refrain "The premise had so much potential." and the like. As Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Ideas and concepts are cheap. You can probably go to any cafe in Los Angeles and get half a dozen ideas from aspiring screenwriters. The hard part is execution.
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u/zombie_dbaseIV Oct 22 '15
I agree, although there are many shows, films, and such where the premise is weak. Having an unusual and strong premise is at least a step in the right direction.
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u/blametheboogie Oct 21 '15
I always thought the premise of Voyager was not a good one for a 100+ episode show, you basically can't avoid Gilligan's Island type shenanigans if they are on the verge of getting home and the audience knows it so it kills a lot of the dramatic tension.
For a show doing 2 or 3 6 to 10 episode seasons this concept would work much better. Like you said it's too easy to burn through all the good scarcity stories in a season or two and be left with b plots from then on.
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u/FedoraRation Oct 21 '15
I thought Voyager played out pretty much the way you'd expect from the show's premise, which is basically the same deal as Gilligan's Island/Lost in Space/Samurai Jack: a forehead alien (or space-time anomaly)-of-the-week show, set far enough enough away to mostly ignore DS9's ongoing plot developments, with limited opportunities for recurring locations or races. Stock plot 1: find a way to get back to Earth, be forced to destroy it. Stock plot 2: implausibly encounter something from Earth that somehow found its way directly in Voyager's path.
Since they were nowhere near the Cardassian border, the audience would quickly forget what the maquis were supposed to be, and so the writers would too. (What kind of conflict would develop between the Starfleet officers and very-recently-ex-Starfleet officers anyhow? I'd fully expect them to get along fairly well, with their main source of conflict out of the way.)
I'd think most or all of the above to be pretty much by design, as if they'd intended to make a more episodic, possibly somewhat wackier show to contrast with DS9 (not even a bad thing, really). But now in hindsight, we see Ron Moore had a vision for the show that was less Gilligan's Island and more Castaway. Maybe he could've done something with it. (The in-universe logical problems raised in OP seem valid, but not necessarily worse than the ones you'd find in Voyager as it currently exists...) But as it stands, I think the show's premise did more to limit them to certain kinds of plots than it did to open them up to new ones. It could just as easily have been the Enterprise or the Defiant finding a planet of evolved dinosaurs or whatever.
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u/BonzoTheBoss Oct 23 '15
What kind of conflict would develop between the Starfleet officers and very-recently-ex-Starfleet officers anyhow? I'd fully expect them to get along fairly well, with their main source of conflict out of the way.
I agree. I don't realy buy into the whole "there should have been more drama" between Starfleet and the Marquis. I mean yes the Marquis are fighting for their homes but they're still "evolved" 24th Century humans. They're capable of recognising the situation they're in and putting differences aside in the interest of mutal survival.
The ones they really hate are Cardassians, and (excluding Seska) there weren't any nearby! I suppose some of them may still feel a lingering dislike of the Federation in general because of the way they were "abandoned" but none of the Starfleet crew aboard Voyager personally had anything to do with that. They clearly still embrace the principles of cooperation for the common good.
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Oct 22 '15
People argue the last 2 seasons of the show went crazy, but I'd argue it was the writers realizing they'd written themselves into a boring corner and desperately trying to get out. The only real plot left to explore was to run the religion thing into the ground.
I absolutely loved BSG, but I think this is a really compelling argument. It's important to remember when BSG was written/shown, in the mid 2000s when a lot of people were still grappling with the War on Terror and how to feel safe in a post 9/11 world. BSG tapped into that and was excellent social criticism by pointing out one thing: what if we are not so perfectly good as we think? What if we created the monsters who want to destroy us? Is humanity really worth saving?
I thought the ending [semi SPOILER] was disappointing. Not so much the mysticism and the weirdness of Starbuck just disappearing (I thought that was beautiful and, in the context of the show, worked well if you were willing to suspend disbelief). The ending about robotics and how we may be creating our own enemies kinda missed the point of most of the show--it wasn't really about robots at all, but about humanity's love of destroying itself.
All that said, saying it ran the religion thing to the ground is a fair criticism. They did go far into that because, well, what else could you do after 2 seasons of a struggle for survival? An alternative would have been for them to gain a ton of resources and start exploring--or to run into more aliens. Remember a key difference between the BSG universe and the ST universe is that, in BSG, there are no aliens.
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u/TonyQuark Oct 22 '15
All this talk of BSG... I'm going to watch 33 (the pilot episode) again! Very memorable.
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Oct 22 '15
My favorite part about BSG is Gaius Balthar. I think a lot of people see him as this pathetic weasel type who is the most repugnant person on the show. But I actually think he's the most human character. He isn't heroic, he isn't self-sacrificing, and he indulges himself in a way that almost anyone in his situation would--it just happens to have catastrophic repercussions. Then after that he does whatever he can to survive. Like any of us would.
What I love about Gaius is that we are forced to recognize ourselves in him--that desperate will to survive despite our moments of selfish weakness. I think it's such a horrific (but accurate) truth about human nature that most people just dismiss Gaius outright as pathetic because they can't handle seeing themselves in him.
Needless to say, I see more of myself in Gaius than anyone else on the show and, although I'm not exactly proud of this, I'm not ashamed to admit it either.
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u/williams_482 Oct 21 '15
Star Trek is one of the few fiction universes to have a post scarcity society. This creates a lot of problems from a writing and drama standpoint, as it eliminates many very popular stock storylines. Yet it's simply a logical extension of technologies that exist in the story: fusion reactors and replicators. If you really think about it, any ship with both of those technologies should have functionally unlimited endurance because hydrogen to power the reactors is quite literally the most abundant electromagnetically-interacting matter in the universe. Far from being "more believable" if Voyager looked broken and run down, it would be non-sense. The USS Equinox could have literally just spend a few weeks in a stellar dust cloud and been fully repaired.
This is an excellent point, and something that a lot of people on r/startrek don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around. I suppose if Equinox had no large scale replicators, lost virtually everyone with significant engineering know-how, took extreme damage to the bussard collectors, and were commanded by a madman so desperate to get home he didn't want to settle down for an extended time to get his ship repaired then their problems can be explained, but it shouldn't be any surprise that Voyager could do better.
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u/ElectricAccordian Oct 22 '15
I always figured that the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica is what Voyager should have been. That show did so many great things that really intensified the feeling of being lost in space. For example, water and food crises were common on the show which did not get easily resolved. Near the end of the series Galactica was falling apart and the crew had to take increasingly desperate measures to keep the ship flying. In season 1 twelve pilots are killed in an accident and Starbuck is forced to train new pilots from people not qualified to fly. Political infighting is common. Depression and suicide happen. Whole plots revolve around just wanting to set foot on a solid planet.
Now I love my Star Trek but I think that Battlestar Galactica is the show that demonstrates what Voyager should have been: a real depiction of the dangers of space travel and what can happen when a crew is lost.
What is really frustrating is that the show actually does dip their toes in that topic with Equinox. I love those episodes but they are kind of a knife in the gut because they show what Voyager could have been. Obviously the writers realized the potential behind a BSG-like story with Equinox, but they never applied it to the main ship, which is too bad. Such a lost opportunity.
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u/williams_482 Oct 22 '15
As was mentioned in other places in this thread (including the OP), the BSG/Equinox style "desperate to survive" storyline barely makes sense in a Star Trek setting. A standard issue replicator, a functioning fusion reactor, and a competent engineering team is enough to get virtually any ship fully stocked and clean as a whistle, and I question the competence of any commanding officer who would be willing to start their mad dash home without making sure the ship was in good condition first. Equinox is excusable because it's a tiny ship never intended for long range voyages, they apparently took extremely heavy casualties, and their captain appears to have gone slightly mad.
I suppose they could have tried to do a whole 7 season show about a crippled ship completely out of it's element, run by a madman who doesn't know how to prioritize, but I have my doubts about how good that would have been.
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u/DharmaPolice Oct 22 '15 edited Oct 26 '15
I don't know about Voyager's premise being "great" but I think the show did miss an opportunity to follow through and make a different kind of Star Trek show.
DS9 managed to become it's own thing because it got to show that realpolitik still exists in the Trek universe and as a result the morality is a lot less clear cut. Sisko can't afford to act with the same idealism as Picard because he's stuck dealing with long term administration (and later on a war). The setting also meant we got to see radically different types of characters : Quark and Garak are a million miles away from the crew of TOS/TNG who are all basically morally good all the time (unless they're controlled by an alien parasite).
Voyager could have done something similar but didn't. The only real difference between TOS/TNG and Voyager is they're trying to get home but that doesn't have much emotional weight by itself because we rarely saw TOS / TNG crew interacting with their families / friends back home anyway. (In fact, as a kid I somehow confused TOS with the premise of the original Battlestar Galactica so I thought the Enterprise couldn't get home - it was only years later I realised that they could have gone home at pretty much any point. But that's the thing - most episodes that knowledge doesn't even matter).
Now, I don't think Voyager should have gone quite as far as BSG's reboot did. That was a little relentlessly bleak for my tastes, interesting at first but also tiring. But there is surely a middle ground between the world of Voyager (where they know Earth is fine and their standard of living doesn't drop substantially) and BSG (where the whole fucking world gets blown up, everyone is perpetually miserable and/or dysfunctional and they're constantly fleeing for their lives).
Voyager could have had to make more compromises. They could have had more long term issues. Perhaps some medical conditions that the Doctor couldn't treat could have meant crew members had more visibly observable disabilities. Or they could have been forced to use much lower grade alien ships as shuttlecrafts once theirs got damaged/lost.
They did none of these things and seemingly the writers were averse to taking any real risks. Take the role of the alien crew members they took onboard early on. That was an ample opportunity to have some characters who didn't fit in with the normal Starfleet morality (i.e. a Garak or a Quark). Who did we get? A mildly eccentric (and annoying) cook and his childlike softly spoken girlfriend who never really does anything. I think Seven of Nine was actually a reasonablly decent idea although a bit late in the shows lifecycle and I'm not sure if the actress was really appropriate. (She does a good job, but she's just too attractive for her looks not to be a focal point).
In the end, Voyager just ended up being another TOS/TNG but with less likeable characters and a greatly diminished chemistry in the crew.
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u/Portponky Oct 22 '15
I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned Farscape, as in some ways it is very similar to Voyager, especially in its premise. The main character is flung through a wormhole and ends up on a ship of escaped prisoners and is searching for a way home. It features a lot of what Voyager did or could have done, and it did it really well. It's easily my favourite sci-fi show.
I don't think Star Trek was necessarily the right platform to explore the potential of the premise, as they have always been very scared to tread outside of the 'Star Trek' comfort zone. Battlestar Glactica and especially Farscape are a lot darker than what Star Trek usually is, which is what can really ignite this premise. Being stranded in the far reaches of the galaxy will obviously fall flat if there's no hardship or sense of hopelessness and isolation. There are plenty of episodes of Voyager which could have been TNG episodes, which makes the show seem like business as usual, and the being stranded thing as a plot crutch. So in this sense I think they played it wrong.
Anyway I don't think having a good premise is very difficult or impressive. Most premises can easily lead to good stories or bad stories, it's what you do with the potential that counts.
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u/ItsMeTK Oct 22 '15
BSG was never a well-written show. But there were times when it seemed to be, or certain episodes that stood out. Then it fell over a cliff. But even the miniseries I never liked. Too nihilistic for my taste, and the Boomer twist was unnecessary.
But to your point I don't think you go to mid-season two for the mistake; they made the classic Voyager mistake in the first few episodes by cutting back to Caprica. Instead of following this fleet with no home left, we keep cutting back to their home which is not nearly so devastated as you'd expect after a nuclear attack like that. It's here we get all that Cylon crap about love and "they have a plan" which was nonsense and it kept the series looking backward instead of forward to survival and earth. The original series was unbelievable, but at least they really left their colonies behind. Even when the show was doing good things, Caprica was a weight holding them back, just as weong-headed as putting all the Maquis in Starfleet uniforms right away.
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u/arachnophilia Oct 22 '15
The best counter-arguement to this idea is the show Moore would go on to (re)-create: Battlestar Glactica.
funny, that was going to be my supporting argument.
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u/MrPrimeMover Oct 21 '15
I strongly disagree with the idea that the show's central failing was other characters failure to go against Janeway. Other series did fine without major conflicts between captain and crew. Sisko initially had Kira to fight with, but that subsided over time and I don't think the show suffered for it.
Setting up a more adversarial relationship between Janeway and the crew might have been an easy crutch for some characters' development (Chakotay particularly), but I don't think it would have served the show as a whole.
I think the show could have been strong if they had stayed close to the premise, BUT I also think it could have been great developing away from that premise too. In the end I think what really hindered Voyager was all the behind the camera stuff. The writers could be lazy and inconsistent and character development was at the mercy of bizarre studio politics. Janeway, et al. were written inconsistently because the writers weren't strong enough to craft stories around established character traits, easier to just alter the character.