Endgame (VOY)

[Dînadan]

Ooh, yeah, the conference room would definitely be at the top of my list for places to stick it. The only issue there is that it's not a public area of the ship. I'm not sure whether that interferes with the purpose of a memorial or not, but I have an inkling that they'd want to put it in a public space. Looking at the technical manual, maybe in VIP quarters?

I suppose that is the problem with a memorial wall, it needs to be in a public space to serve its purpose in universe, but at the same time to have a subconscious effect on the audience it also has to be somewhere that's on screen often enough for them to see it filling up without frequent scenes in a dedicated memorial garden that would potentially make the show too morbid. Although that said, if the show as a whole had been more competently handled and possibly if they'd gone for a darker tone (and let's face it, being stranded years from home with little to no resources and hostile factions really deserves a darker tone than what they went with; at the very least it should have been as dark as DS9, possibly juxtaposed with the hope that Trek humanity's hat of alliance builders and mediators would generate with their impact on the Delta Quadrant), then a memorial garden that featured prominently could possibly work.

But something that should also be considered - budget. To save money and justify its inclusion to the suits, it probably needs to be in one of the main sets, or at a push on the back of one of the modular corridor set's walls that can be flipped around as needed (although again, if it had been planned as darker from the getgo then the extra set could probably have been justified, especially if the French pool hall or the Janeway Austin subplot and its associated set had been jettisoned in favour of it). So really it needs to be in Janeway's Ready Room, the Bridge, the Magic Meeting Room, the Mess Hall, or Sickbay. And of those I think Sickbay is probably the worst - last thing you want when being treated is a list of everyone the Doctor failed to save on the wall next to your bed

I think part of the problem with this is let's face it the writers/producers/etc really just wanted to do TNG with new characters and the situation really didn't fit that.

[StrangeDevice]

I suppose that is the problem with a memorial wall, it needs to be in a public space to serve its purpose in universe, but at the same time to have a subconscious effect on the audience it also has to be somewhere that's on screen often enough for them to see it filling up without frequent scenes in a dedicated memorial garden that would potentially make the show too morbid. Although that said, if the show as a whole had been more competently handled and possibly if they'd gone for a darker tone (and let's face it, being stranded years from home with little to no resources and hostile factions really deserves a darker tone than what they went with; at the very least it should have been as dark as DS9, possibly juxtaposed with the hope that Trek humanity's hat of alliance builders and mediators would generate with their impact on the Delta Quadrant), then a memorial garden that featured prominently could possibly work.

But something that should also be considered - budget. To save money and justify its inclusion to the suits, it probably needs to be in one of the main sets, or at a push on the back of one of the modular corridor set's walls that can be flipped around as needed (although again, if it had been planned as darker from the getgo then the extra set could probably have been justified, especially if the French pool hall or the Janeway Austin subplot and its associated set had been jettisoned in favour of it). So really it needs to be in Janeway's Ready Room, the Bridge, the Magic Meeting Room, the Mess Hall, or Sickbay. And of those I think Sickbay is probably the worst - last thing you want when being treated is a list of everyone the Doctor failed to save on the wall next to your bed

I think part of the problem with this is let's face it the writers/producers/etc really just wanted to do TNG with new characters and the situation really didn't fit that.

The curious thing there is that Voyager could easily have been a very nice counterpoint to Deep Space Nine's penchant for exposing the dystopia of the Roddenbery utopian ideal. Rather than dwelling on the uglier aspects that would naturally come out of such a society, VOY could have shown why there needed to be a Federation in the first place. How lost people could get without something pulling them together. "The Void" is more or less what I would have loved to see from the show -- a burgeoning caravan of ships who all had a vested interest in getting to the Alpha Quadrant (or stopping off along the way). Some of them being lost ships carelessly discarded by the Caretaker or another such cataclysm, others in it for the opportunities contact with another part of the galaxy would bring (i.e. wealth, knowledge, power, etc.).

"Don't worry ensign, I haven't failed today. Now, stop sweating, it's bad for your blood pressure." What I never got was if they needed the ship to be pristine after every story, why not have an episode where the Anomaly of the Week bonds with the ship's systems and exists in a symbiotic state doing just that? Everything gets mended right up and you have an in-story reason why there's a reset, like the auto-repair systems on the Liberator from Blake's 7. They could have pinched "Emergence" from TNG for it.

Yeah. It's a shame that none of them were fans of the original series because that frontier feeling really suits what the show was initially trying to do with its premise. We are vulnerable, we are at the mercy of whatever higher or stronger power comes our way. We're alone out here, we have nothing to fall back on, nothing to intimidate people with, nada. They could have gone with the noticeably more fatalistic tone of TOS's third season. It's grim, without being particularly bleak. DS9 was all about war at the end, but VOY could have still been about the spirit of adventure.

[Dînadan]

Agreed. It would have been nice if they'd spent the first season struggling to survive with the crew slowly coming together (ideally I'd say keep the Marquis in their civilian/guerilla clothes for season one with them slowly adopting Starfleet uniforms over the season to show how they're integrating rather than havin them all put the uniform on and be assimilated into the Janeway Collective) and then have season two about them forging alliances and maybe forming a proto-Federation with those allies (and possibly have some of those races appearing on Voyager itself as ambassadors to the Federation/exchange officers and becoming part of the crew), then moving on in season three to carry on to Earth. And those alliances could have helped explain why the ship kept in good condition - they take damage in one episode but were able to put into port of one of their new allies' Star ports for repairs as they cross their territory. But overall, yeah I agree it would have been nice if they'd kept damage and had some patch ups be alien tech they've found/bought/etc rather than have it repaired off screen between episodes.

And speaking of not repairing off screen, I can't believe I'm saying this, but this was something Enterprise handled right, remember the episode after Minefield with the auto-repair station they put in to? That would have worked well as a Voyager episode. Especially if they'd followed up on it by discovering who built it and why. Thinking about it, it may even have worked as the first step in introducing the Borg - just imagine if it was Borg tech some aliens had salvaged or whatever and used to build a repair station/shipyard but something went wrong, and the reason it was taking crew from the ships that it repaired was due to some base code in the Borg tech which drove it towards building a collective, but the reason it wasn't assimilating ships wholesale was because of the conflicting programming by the aliens that built the station to help ships.

[StrangeDevice]

Personally, I'd rather they'd highlight how dangerous the Delta Quadrant was by having the ship in a de facto state of disrepair. Everything important worked, it was just Voyager got hit so often that there was eventually no point in cleaning up debris and repainting the walls. Repairing vital systems would have been really easy from a writer's room perspective and offered an analogue to the "searching for dilithium" crutch that popped up in TOS.

"Alright, we've beaten the crap out of our ship for this episode, when's the next shoreline story?"
"Oh, that'd be 'Fair Trade'."
"Pop it in before then and go over the introduction, give them the repair job as part of the reason why they're sticking around."

Boom. Done. Easy to do and it doesn't really interfere with the standalone nature of the stories. It's kind of like how you can stick in "Blink of an Eye" almost immediately after the "Year of Hell" two-parter and have it almost be a coda. One flows into the other and it's a nice nod for those who have been watching for a while, yet the connection isn't a requirement for understanding the episode.

It's a good idea and funny you should say that, watching Season 3 of Enterprise essentially struck me as them redoing Voyager a couple years later but with very nearly everything that was missing from their earlier attempt. The ship was damaged quite a bit, tough choices often had to be made by the captain, there was development amongst crewmen, a strong set of morally diverse villains (such a shame that the Krenim/Voth never turned up again and they neutered the Hirogen/Species 8472). It still had its flaws, but things were definitely on the right track round about then. It feels almost like a spiritual successor in its own way and could easily have been Season 8 of the show. We're back home and something truly unpleasant -- the Xindi -- has followed in our footsteps.

[crankyconner]

And speaking of not repairing off screen, I can't believe I'm saying this, but this was something Enterprise handled right, remember the episode after Minefield with the auto-repair station they put in to? That would have worked well as a Voyager episode. Especially if they'd followed up on it by discovering who built it and why. Thinking about it, it may even have worked as the first step in introducing the Borg - just imagine if it was Borg tech some aliens had salvaged or whatever and used to build a repair station/shipyard but something went wrong, and the reason it was taking crew from the ships that it repaired was due to some base code in the Borg tech which drove it towards building a collective, but the reason it wasn't assimilating ships wholesale was because of the conflicting programming by the aliens that built the station to help ships.

I seem to remember years ago when Enterprise was still in production there was an article on startrek.com about "Dead Stop" that suggested the space station was an origin for the Borg.

And then Enterprise went and had a Borg episode.

[Admiral X]

To be fair, I think such an origin wouldn't make much sense either, since it would be within what would later become Federation territory anyway.

[StrangeDevice]

Actually, there's a missed opportunity. How old do drones live to be? What if in "Unity", the EMH had uncovered one of the earliest known iterations of the Borg still in existence?

[SuccubusYuri]

Eh they probably wouldn't have lasted THAT long. The Vaadwaur knew of the Borg so that puts their origins probably somewhere around 1300-1400, or perhaps longer if their militant expansion is a new thing. I'm sure the Borg have incredible longevity for their organic components, but 1,000 years seems like it might be more effort than its worth, depending on how they go about it. The Borg have always seemed more into the technological aspects of perfection over the biological, otherwise they'd automatically assimilate anything that was brand new (like the Hansens).

[StrangeDevice]

It depends on whether or not they began assimilating humans or even bipedal species from the get-go. They may have started off with something that is a great deal more cumbersome by comparison with a much longer lifespan before switching across. I wonder what the first Borg actually looked like?

[Dînadan]

It depends on whether or not they began assimilating humans or even bipedal species from the get-go. They may have started off with something that is a great deal more cumbersome by comparison with a much longer lifespan before switching across. I wonder what the first Borg actually looked like?

One thing I've heard somewhere (no idea if it was from one of the books or was fanon/fanfic/fan theory) was that the Queen was the first (or one of the first) Borg; thinknit might even have been something like the she was ill and the doctors came up with a treatment but it got out of hand and started assimilating others with her as the central mind.

No idea where I heard it from though, or even what book/fanfic/whatever it comes from. Would be kinda anticlimactic (for lack of a better word) if that was the case; would make more sense if they were originally insectoid or arachnoid or whatever and over time assimilated the more prevelant bipedial races to the point the original drones had either died off or were so dispersed as to be negligible. Or another interesting origin could be to have them have started out as a machine race.