Should Star Trek Voyager been a Star Trek: New Federation type show?

[Deledrius]

It's the classic problem that Voyager WANTS to be like TOS and TNG that doesn't demand you need to watch every episode... but the thing is, this is the kind of show that SHOULD have continuity. The last bits I remember mattering by season seven... was Tom being demoted for defying Janeway.

Indeed. The premise demands that it can't NOT have continuity from week-to-week without turning into a farce along the lines of Gilligan's Island.

[stryke]

This could have been a really neat show and I do support the Cardassian captain with two ships actually being on board with the concept twist.

In a similar vein I've written a ton in the past in various places about how i wish they'd used Seska differently. This is one really smart Cardassian... and she throws in her lot with the fricking Kazon? Specifically the incredibly patriarchal with bells on Kazon? Nah, I don't buy it. She wants to get home and so her obvious best option is to keep her head down, trust in the significantly better tech level of the Federation over a bunch of Tescue Value Klingons, and use the relative safety of Voyager to keep an eye out for anything she can advantage of like she did with the aliens who really liked stories.

My change to the show would have been to State of Flux. Have Carey decide that getting home is such a long shot that it is basically suicide so why not stay in the Delta Quadrant and live like a king instead. Sure it's not very enlightened humanity of him, but thanks to Strange New World we know it's a route been taken before.

He's an engineer so can help give the Kazon a real edge, and he's a he so has no worries about being forced to be a babyfactory like Seska had to endure. Sure he may claim to be a family man but we will see with his interraction with a time travelling Seven that he is quite the sleeze for a starfleet officer. He runs to the Kazon after trying to frame Seska, and will be a reoccuring thorn until his death in the revamped version Basics. Maybe Torres throttles him to death with a chain Leia style. That could be fun.

Meanwhile Seska due to the investigation gets outted as a Cardassian to Janeway and Chakotay. She's innocent, she's not that different to Tuvok when you get down to it, and matter of factly tells them that if she is known to be a spoonhead on a ship full of marquis then they might as well push her out the airlock and be done with it. Janeway hates Cardassians thanks to her personal history in the war, yes I read Taylor's book, and oh man did it suck royally. Chakotay obviously is a marquis so has no love for them either, and yet I can't see either of them wanting to put a target on her back purely due to hating the xeno-scum and so they reluctantly agree to keep her secret.

So now you have a really interesting x factor on the show. You have a ticking timebomb that could cause genuine actual division between the Starfleet and Marquis, imagine that! Martha Hackett gets to stay in bajoran makeup so is much easier to use regularly. She could have been Seven of Nine ready to go in season one. An outsider with an alien point of view, and one whose agenda is very much her own who is willing to call Janeway on her shit. She doesn't even need to be in every episode and could also easily have been the show's Garak where sure she's probably on your side, has seemingly good advice, but who knows what they're really up to.

Hell, you could even shack her up with Harry Kim as she joked about that one time. That could be fun, even more so as eventually you're totally going to want to explode that timebomb to watch the fallout and that would be a great new way to torture poor dumb Harry.

[Nobody700]

This could have been a really neat show and I do support the Cardassian captain with two ships actually being on board with the concept twist.

In a similar vein I've written a ton in the past in various places about how i wish they'd used Seska differently. This is one really smart Cardassian... and she throws in her lot with the fricking Kazon? Specifically the incredibly patriarchal with bells on Kazon? Nah, I don't buy it. She wants to get home and so her obvious best option is to keep her head down, trust in the significantly better tech level of the Federation over a bunch of Tescue Value Klingons, and use the relative safety of Voyager to keep an eye out for anything she can advantage of like she did with the aliens who really liked stories.

My change to the show would have been to State of Flux. Have Carey decide that getting home is such a long shot that it is basically suicide so why not stay in the Delta Quadrant and live like a king instead. Sure it's not very enlightened humanity of him, but thanks to Strange New World we know it's a route been taken before.

He's an engineer so can help give the Kazon a real edge, and he's a he so has no worries about being forced to be a babyfactory like Seska had to endure. Sure he may claim to be a family man but we will see with his interraction with a time travelling Seven that he is quite the sleeze for a starfleet officer. He runs to the Kazon after trying to frame Seska, and will be a reoccuring thorn until his death in the revamped version Basics. Maybe Torres throttles him to death with a chain Leia style. That could be fun.

Meanwhile Seska due to the investigation gets outted as a Cardassian to Janeway and Chakotay. She's innocent, she's not that different to Tuvok when you get down to it, and matter of factly tells them that if she is known to be a spoonhead on a ship full of marquis then they might as well push her out the airlock and be done with it. Janeway hates Cardassians thanks to her personal history in the war, yes I read Taylor's book, and oh man did it suck royally. Chakotay obviously is a marquis so has no love for them either, and yet I can't see either of them wanting to put a target on her back purely due to hating the xeno-scum and so they reluctantly agree to keep her secret.

So now you have a really interesting x factor on the show. You have a ticking timebomb that could cause genuine actual division between the Starfleet and Marquis, imagine that! Martha Hackett gets to stay in bajoran makeup so is much easier to use regularly. She could have been Seven of Nine ready to go in season one. An outsider with an alien point of view, and one whose agenda is very much her own who is willing to call Janeway on her shit. She doesn't even need to be in every episode and could also easily have been the show's Garak where sure she's probably on your side, has seemingly good advice, but who knows what they're really up to.

Hell, you could even shack her up with Harry Kim as she joked about that one time. That could be fun, even more so as eventually you're totally going to want to explode that timebomb to watch the fallout and that would be a great new way to torture poor dumb Harry.

You see, Seska was trained wrong, as a joke.

For real much of why I did bring in the Cardassians, beyond the obvious X-Factor and humanizing an 'enemy race', was also Seska would have her reveal she's a Cardassian that puts her and the Cardassians MORE in trouble with the Maquis. Especially if the captains KNEW she was Cardassian. All this time, Seska would act like the Maquis have to trust the Cardassians, and bring up she's Bajoran so her word matters pretty well at that and after half a season, they do begin to trust them more... only for her to be outed and boom, not only is the trust lost, it's even WORSE than before. Janeway herself on Chakotay's side but knows without the Cardassians to aid them, the alliance is dead. Voyager is still in a state of repair even after half a season, and the Maquis freighter ship while useful for its size and transportation, is horribly weak. Only the Cardassians can bring in the firepower needed to protect the Ocampa against anything stronger than the Kazon. Such a thing can have Janeway question how PRACTICAL they can be, if the Cardassians can just so easily do whatever and potentially show they're the ones REALLY in charge, instead of an agreement between all three.

This doesn't even get into the personal drama, if Chakotay and Seska had a relationship and he feels violated while Seska tells Chakotay she never dated him for being a spy, she did so because she did love him. Course, how can he trust her, and she herself is debating if the Cardassians should just abandon the alliance to prevent being attacked. This doesn't even bring IN of course, the actual traitor, Carey, who was a starfleet cadet who can't handle the pressure so he goes to the Kazon... and becomes a WARLORD thanks to turning a garbage ship into a functional 4th tier federation ship, but is like a super weapon compared to most Kazon. This can bring further into the idea of the Kazon having to change if a SINGLE Starfleet engineering cadet could, with just a few weeks, change their entire political landscape with ONE ship. This is all stuff that just comes up when you have a huge plan and can just sit down and do it, and not worry about if the network has decided to change the shows premise whenever they want.

[stryke]

You see, Seska was trained wrong, as a joke.

Given she was Cardassian military intelligence and not actually Obsidian Order i.e. the actual intelligence agency, that's basically already canon.

Would be funny for Lower Decks to have Romulan intelligence officer who isn't Tal Shiar and make the joke that they really, really aren't Tal Shiar, but no one believes them cause a) they're romulan and we all know what roms are like, and b) that's just what a Tal Shiar would say.

[Nobody700]

You see, Seska was trained wrong, as a joke.

Given she was Cardassian military intelligence and not actually Obsidian Order i.e. the actual intelligence agency, that's basically already canon.

Would be funny for Lower Decks to have Romulan intelligence officer who isn't Tal Shiar and make the joke that they really, really aren't Tal Shiar, but no one believes them cause a) they're romulan and we all know what roms are like, and b) that's just what a Tal Shiar would say.

Instead they were trained by these idiots who's master plan to defeat AI is to blow up Romolus. Nah, even Lower Decks would realize that is the stupidest idea for a parody.

[McAvoy]

After going through a marathon of sorts of listening to most of Chuck's reviews of Voyager in the past two weeks while I drive to work, I came up with a conclusion. Voyager would have been better if they had someone dedicated to script polishing or script doctor. Someone who could go through each script, preliminary or near final drafts and find story issues, internal story conflicts etc. Maybe not continuity issues.

Like for example in Friendship One the planet is mentioned to have 6000 isorems. Chuck mentions iso is used alot but if you take away iso you get rems. 6000 rems by itself is extremely high. 500 rems will kill a person.

A simple change from isorems to millirems would have fixed this for example.

This will not have fixed bad stories or series long inconsistencies with characters or lack of development but it could have at least made stories tighter and more consistent at least within the episodes individually.

[hammerofglass]

Voyager had a bad habit of just using Sciency sounding words without anyone looking up what they meantor if their made up term was a real word. Like how a couple times they treated Deuterium like a rare and precious substance instead of the second most common molecule in the universe.

[McAvoy]

Voyager had a bad habit of just using Sciency sounding words without anyone looking up what they meantor if their made up term was a real word. Like how a couple times they treated Deuterium like a rare and precious substance instead of the second most common molecule in the universe.

That is my point. I think it was Demon where they were low on it and had to land on the planet (as opposed to landing a second shuttle) to get it.

I think it having a dedicated script doctor would have worked before B&B got too entrenched. I think after a certain point they held too much power and got lazy. I say this because with Voyager there are some things within the episode that would contradict what happened else in the same episode. Like did anyone else read the script or did anyone notice this sort of thing? Or worse they know of it and they ignored it?

Long ago I got the opinion that by the time Voyager got around Season 5, that everyone got lazy. Write a script. Don't care if it makes sense. Just do it. That is what I got oiht of Voyager when it went through its original programming.

[Nobody700]

Voyager had a bad habit of just using Sciency sounding words without anyone looking up what they meantor if their made up term was a real word. Like how a couple times they treated Deuterium like a rare and precious substance instead of the second most common molecule in the universe.

The Void is super funny when Tom says Deuterium is SUPER abundunt and is confused why aliens stole it from them.

Like the writer realized what a mistake they made and wanted a whole episode reminding people of the premise that the show NEVER DID.

[Madner Kami]

Both cases are pretty darn dumb in their own way. Yes, Deuterium or, more specifically, Hydrogen is super-abundant and literally the most common element in existence. However, only a part of naturally occuring Hydrogen is Deuterium and even though that still means it's incredibly common, it doesn't mean it's all nicely clumped up in one place, when it comes to space. Space is for all intents and purposes a vacuum. Empty. Void of anything. There may be uncountable amounts of hydrogen floating about everywhere, but it's so thinly distributed that filling even a standard drinking glas with (liquified) hydrogen means you'd have to suck up the contents of multiple cubic lightyears to get enough and even that would mean it's unusually clumped up.

It's estimated, that there's, on average, ONE atom per cubic meter in interstellar space and that includes everything that is not hydrogen... Your average nebula still only clocks in at 10 MILLION atoms per cubic meter. That may seem like a lot, until you realize that standard air here on Terra, measured at sea level, contains about 10 TRILLION TRILLION atoms per cubic meter and yes, trillion is intentionally written twice there, because nobody can fathom what 10 Septillions really are.

Anyone remember that water-planet? That wasn't an artificial biome for some wierd alien species. It was a gas-station enabling interstellar traffic. Maybe that is what the Nacene actually had in mind with the Ocampa planet, but fucked it up when some green faction realized there's intelligent life on that planet and threw a spanner in the works. Come to think of it... Does anyone remember that the Kazon considered water to be an extremely valuable commodity? Implying that this area of space was largely void of it and, by consequence, of hydrogen? Hm, I wonder where all that water went...