So basically this is my idea of how I would have done the show had I been in charge of it, or since it probably would have been impossible because of UPN nixing most of it, how I’d write it if I ever give Voyager the Foundations treatment (my version of Enterprise for those who don’t know).
Star Trek: Voyager
Premise
Exactly the same as we were first told Voyager's premise would be when they first announced the series, and before UPN execs decided to toss it out the window.
Okay, so this means you all know that the ship is going to get pulled into the Delta Quadrant, but since I like to play with things, the timing and the reasons are not the same.
All, most, or possibly more than season 1 will be spent in the Alpha Quadrant, hunting down and combating the Maquis on the Federation side of the border. Naturally, there's going to be some exploration on the subject of the Maquis, which is to say that the Maquis are actually right and the Federation was wrong to make this latest treaty with Cardassia. Because lolbertarian – sue me. :p
There will be a Federation spy who infiltrates the Chakotay's cell, but it won't be Tuvok, it'll be someone from Starfleet Intelligence. Oh yeah, and Seska won't be a Cardie spy.
I'm not entirely sure what reason I'd come up with for Voyager to end up in the Delta Quadrant, but it won’t be because of the Ocampa. There might not even be a "caretaker" per say. All I know for sure is that a lot of characters are going to die in the journey there, and that they won't necessarily be the original characters I come up with to fill certain positions.
Once there, it won't be the standard alien of the week stories, and the episodes would form overlapping arcs. Trapped together, the Maquis and Starfleet crews will form an uneasy alliance, but they won't become friends so quickly. There will be conflict, there will be drama, and there won't be Maquis wearing Starfleet uniforms unless they actually earn the right to wear it. I’ll actually probably have the Maquis ship survive for a lot longer than it did in the actual show.
The mores of the Federation will be severely tested, and the crew isn't going to be able to uphold all the rules and ideals they've become used to, at least not the Starfleet crew. This will provide some of the tension between Starfleet and Maquis, because there will be definite disagreement over how to handle things.
And just to complicate things, I may even bring in a Cardassian ship that the Federation task force was working jointly with.
Characters
Commander Ju'Val Daleen: CO. An Andorian woman and a moderately experienced command officer. Voyager is her first command, but she's served previously as the first officer on a similarly-sized ship. She believes in the treaty with Cardassia and wishes the Maquis would just move rather than continue what she sees as pointless fighting. She sees the conflict as being perpetuated by local colonists who can't give up on the old war-time prejudices because that is what the evidence available supports. She is a serious officer, but she does get along well with her crew, most of whom draw strength from the confidence she displays in everything she does. She doesn't die when the ship is first brought to the Delta Quadrant, but soon afterwards due to hostile action. Her loss greatly affects the crew, leaving them without the strong unit cohesion they had under her command. And in case you were wondering, I made her a woman on purpose, because while the other series saw two men or a man and a woman in the CO/XO roles, there never was a case of two women in these positions, not even on the other guest ships that showed up occasionally.
Lieutenant Commander Samantha Janeway: XO. A young, promising officer who only recently decided to take on the command path. She's been a science officer for most of her career, but after going to Starfleet's version of war college, she decided to be a command officer. She has previous experience with leadership, but only through the science department on her previous assignments, as Voyager is her first shot at showing she has the chops for command. When the series starts, Janeway is shown as a competent officer who makes a fully-capable first officer. However, after the captain's death, Janeway loses a lot of the confidence she had in her ability to command due to the circumstances, and much of the crew loses their confidence in her. For a while after she assumes command, many of her decisions are questioned, at times getting bad enough that it seems like the crew will mutiny. Yeah, I changed her first name so she’s now named after a friend of mine. Honestly I’m kind of tempted to change her last name, too, but, eh.
Lieutenant Tuvok: TAC, 3IC. Not nearly as old as VOY made him out to be, but has served on all but one of Janeway's previous assignments. They have a strong friendship similar to the one Kirk and Spock had, though being a security officer has made him less friendly than Spock ever was to most people. In fact, aside from Janeway, no one else really cares for the guy. However, he is respected as an officer, and he is one of the few reasons that the crew never all-out mutinies. Because of this, some view him as Janeway's guard dog.
Lieutenant Unnamed: OPS, 4IC. I'm thinking a human male. I have no ideas as to a bio for this guy, other than that he's the original senior Operations officer. I won’t even hide the fact that this guy buys it when they get taken to the Delta Quadrant.
Lieutenant Joseph Carey: ChEng, 5IC. He is the ship's chief engineer when the show starts. He's a hard worker, good at what he does, and generally well liked, though he can be a dick when the pressure is on. B'Elanna is going to replace him in that position eventually, but I won't say when or why, mostly because I don't know myself yet. But he won't just disappear, either.
Doctor (Lieutenant Commander) Laurence Patterson: CMO. Again, not much of a bio in mind for this guy, other than that he should be a fairly likable guy in order to contrast the EMH's arrogant personality. He never went to command college and is not in the ship’s command structure, so he is actually at the highest rank he can achieve because of this. So he’ll probably be an older guy who’s kind of coasting until he feels like retiring, but he isn’t planning on doing that for a good long while. Probably a friend of Commander Daleen. He is going to buy it, but not in the initial journey to the Delta Quadrant. Regardless of how I off him, the crew will miss him, especially in light of the fact they're now stuck with the EMH and whatever is left of the medical staff.
Emergency Medical Hologram: Designed as a holographic aide to the ship's medical staff, he was never meant to operate for more than a few hours at a time, and he won't at first. Unfortunately for the crew, the engineer who designed the EMH based his creation's personality on his own and somehow managed to get Starfleet Medical to accept the program anyway, at least as an experiment. This particular model has been placed on Voyager as part of the experiment's second phase – field testing. After the ship's human CMO is killed, he'll be tested beyond his designed limits, and finds that he has the potential to be more than what he was programmed to be. Naturally this will bring up some artificial intelligence issues. So basically he’ll be the same as what was on the actual show.
Ensign Harry Kim: He's a freshly minted ensign when the show starts, and is assigned to the ship as a junior operations officer. He gets a lot more than he bargained for when the ship's original senior ops officer is killed, and will be promoted appropriately. He'll also be one of Tom Paris's few friends.
Ensign Vorik: He's the ship's assistant chief engineer, and the twin brother to Taurik. This is rare among Vulcans, and it has lead to friction between his 30 seconds older brother and himself. He'll be pretty much the same as what we saw on the actual show, though he'll get more screen time that won't simply be limited to getting pon farr and trying to get it on with B'Elanna. I know the real reason he was on the show basically amounts to nepotism, but I kind of like the idea of the character and actually doing something with him, hence the reference to the character the same actor played on TNG.
Ensign Ione Stadi: The alpha shift conn. officer of Voyager, who will survive getting pulled into the Delta Quadrant. She's a full-blood Betazoid, so that might have some interesting potential. And while she and Paris might start to have a thing for each other, both of them being highly competitive pilots, rest assured that she'll die tragically in some fashion, so Paris/Torres fans can rest easy.
Māui Hunapo (mau̇-ē hu-NAH-po): Māori. You can probably guess who this character is supposed to take the place of. You can also probably guess that his tattoos will be more extensive and have some actual meaning. Anyway, as to the actual bio, he's a Starfleet officer who resigned in protest over the treaty with Cardassia in 2370, and joined the Maquis. Rather like Cal Hudson if you know who that is. He was a Lieutenant Commander at the time. In any case, most Starfleeters consider people like him to be traitors, mostly because of a lack of understanding as to what the Maquis are all about. Of course it doesn't help that in the past he's carried out attacks against Starfleet targets using the knowledge he gained as a Starfleet officer. I should also probably mention that he was a tactical officer, which is what makes him such a skilled fighter. I was kind of tempted for a while to make him Lakota, but I recognize I might end up with a Gary Stu because of that.
B'Elanna Torres: A half-human/half-Klingon. She's a skilled engineer, and like Hunapo, she was a Starfleet officer who went over to the Maquis cause. The difference is, she actually went AWOL and made off with a runabout that the Maquis end up using in some of their raids. She was a full-grade Lieutenant at the time. She wasn't ever really satisfied with Starfleet anyway, and fighting for a cause she felt was just gave her something to focus her anger on, though that anger owes more to a screwed up childhood and family life than anything else. On Hunapo's ship, she basically did double-duty as the chief engineer and the first officer. Once on Voyager, she'll end up being put on Carey's engineering team, and the two will have a lot of friction, to put it mildly. Eventually she'll take his place as the ship's chief engineer, owing to her skill and probably some other circumstances (that don’t involve just punching him in the face).
Hernando Ayala: He was once a police officer on a Federation colony, but when said colony ended up on the wrong side of the Cardassian border, things changed. Before joining, he had actually been assigned to investigate a local cell of the Maquis that was getting its start on his colony, and ended up joining them. On Hunapo's ship, he was basically the equivalent of the tactical officer. On Voyager, he'll become a member of the security team.
Seska Nula: A Bajoran, she grew up on a Bajoran colony similar to the one Ro Laren grew up on. As such, she grew up in poverty, and often found herself under the boot of Cardassian rule. She eventually ended up joining the Maquis. Though not formally trained in combat or engineering, she is nonetheless an excellent fighter (owing somewhat to training from Hunapo) and is very mechanically inclined. Not an engineer, but very intelligent and able to figure things out, and she's very good with her hands. And yes, this has a double meaning, because she and Hunapo have a mutual itch they like to scratch with each other. I'm sure this will disappoint some 'shippers out there, but as I have no plans for Seska to betray Voyager, that means his heart (or at least his pecker) is already spoken for, unless I go and kill her of course, which means he'll need someone's shoulder to cry on.
Chell: A Bolian and a former Starfleet cadet, he won't be the wuss that he was basically made out to be on the show (or at least the Elite Force game). He grew up on a Federation colony, and went off to the Academy when he was old enough so he could get the hell away from it. Ironically, when his former home ends up in Cardassian hands thanks to the treaty, he's so disenfranchised and so pissed that he quits the Academy only a few months from graduation. He was training to be a science officer with a specialty in computers, so he comes in handy on Hunapo's ship for his hacking and electronic warfare skills. He's no pro, but he does a pretty good job. These skills will also come in handy in the Delta Quadrant.
Tom Paris/Nicholas Locarno: In my take on this show, they are one and the same person. Dishonorably discharged from Starfleet as a senior cadet, he was disowned by his father, a Starfleet admiral. He changed his name to put that past and the dishonor associated with it behind him, caught a transport to the outer colonies, and never looked back. He drifted for a few years, doing odd jobs that mostly revolved around running cargo and passengers between the colonies and to nearby stations. When the opportunity to join the Maquis arrived, he took it as fate and eagerly joined, offering his skills as an ace pilot. He ended up working for Hunapo, and will later become a helmsman for Voyager. As for why he and B'Elanna don't hook up while on Chakotay's ship, I'm thinking that they could've started out actually really not liking each other, even if he kind of had a crush on her. Or he found her too intimidating to approach. Or something. Anyway, eventually the crew will learn of his true identity, so that should be interesting.
Lon Suder: He'll stay the creepy psycho killer in my version, with no redemption from Tuvok or anyone else. His past is a total mystery when he joins the Maquis, but they don't much care because he's really good at killing Cardassians, and at getting information out of them before-hand, owing to his Betazoid heritage. Though he is a telepath, for the most part he remains in a kind of autistic mode (referencing the Ghost in the Shell use of this term), because he doesn't like mental contact with others. When he does initiate contact, though, his warped mind tends to frak people up. He will be the one who kills Stadi. He'll be around for a while, though, and while he ends up doing some dirty work for Voyager on occasion, he is never redeemed the way he was on the original show.
Neelix: Not. Comedy. Relief. I’m tempted to change his name, too, just to distance him from that. A Talaxian and native to the Delta Quadrant, he's more like an Indian guide than the putz he was on the show. He used to serve in the Talaxian military, but his homeworld was overrun by the Haakonian Order and what few Talaxians still exist are scattered throughout the Delta Quadrant. Since his world was conquered and most of his people killed, he has become a mercenary and turned his small ship into a cargo hauler since he prefers that kind of work to combat (think of Firefly). A few weeks before fate brings him to Voyager, his ship has been impounded and most of his crew is in jail. He actually has a warrant out for his arrest, but is hiding out at a station Voyager stops at to resupply. He offers his services to Janeway as a guide as well as his other skills and is taken up on his offer.
Kes: A young, attractive and shy woman, Kes is Neelix's wife. He traded a rather unsavory group of aliens for her, essentially rescuing her from a life of prostitution. As such, he's very protective of her. Because she's so quiet, it isn't learned for a while that she also has extensive knowledge of the Delta Quadrant, beyond that of even Neelix's. She also has a strange ability to heal minor injuries using simply a touch of her hand. Very little is known of her species beyond its name, which she gives as Ocampa (tentatively). The origin of this species is unknown, and few have ever been encountered. They definitely aren't the young and rapidly aging species we saw on VOY, which to be honest was kind of frakked up if you really think about Tom and Neelix both pining over a 7 year old, and in one universe Harry being Tom's son-in-law because he married Tom's daughter with Kes. :puke: Anyway, she's basically a mysterious Sacagawea figure.
The Ship
Voyager is an Intrepid-class ship, which was developed around the third season of TNG. Though it was originally developed as a mid-sized science vessel, after the Borg incursion of 2366 further emphasis was placed on offensive and defensive capabilities, making her something more along the lines of a destroyer or a light cruiser than the surveyor she was originally intended to be. Development of the Intrepid-class was completed by 2369, and the USS Voyager was the second ship of this class, launched in 2370 under the command of Commander Ju'Val Daleen.
My version of the Intrepid-class will be different than what was depicted on the show, though it will be about the same size. I know some people liked it, but I never got over what I saw as a visually unbalanced design.
