Star Trek: All Good Threads...

[Mindwalker]

1 hour ago, john said:

Is Chakotay considered particularly hard done by out of all the underrepresented voyager crew?

Not by me. Sadly, they had little character development for anyone besides The Doctor and Seven. Plus, Chuckles was a poorly conceived, but also poorly acted character. (One of his fando nicknames is Planky... And that's not all due to the writing.)

Btw., I think that Kira was well developed. Granted, she took more of a backseat atter Worf's arrival, but she still didn't get "left behind".

[Derfel Cadarn]

2 hours ago, john said:

Is Chakotay considered particularly hard done by out of all the underrepresented voyager crew? The first officers always seem to get duff storylines, Riker and his evil twin, Kira and Odo (or any of her boyfriends). At least Chakotay got the Maquis thing, which was (potentially at least) one of the best plot lines trek have done, imo.

For the whole 5 minutes the Maquis thing lasted

[williamjm]

4 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Btw., I think that Kira was well developed. Granted, she took more of a backseat atter Worf's arrival, but she still didn't get "left behind".

I agree she seemed much more central to DS9 than Chakotay was to Voyager. I think the first time I watched it she wasn't one of my favourite characters in the show but I found I appreciated her plotline a lot more when I rewatched a few years ago.

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, williamjm said:

I agree she seemed much more central to DS9 than Chakotay was to Voyager. I think the first time I watched it she wasn't one of my favourite characters in the show but I found I appreciated her plotline a lot more when I rewatched a few years ago.

I liked the wnergy when Kira and Sisko teamed up to make Quark shite himself

[Werthead]

13 hours ago, john said:

I think B’elanna is a better character than Kira Nerys. And Tim Paris is better than Bashir. Problem is they were written totally inconsistently in Voyager so it’s not a fair comparison.

Both B'Elanna and Tom started well, and could have been as well-developed as Kira and Bashir, but both of them ceased all character development at all somewhere early in Season 2 and effectively neither of them did anything else until the end of the series, aside from Tom spending 5 minutes making a badass shuttle for no particular reason (one of approximately 20 storylines that Voyager half-arsed and then BSG did ten times better) and wasting resources on a 1950s holodeck adventure.

Both Kira and Bashir started one-note, but they started developing and having more layers added almost immediately (Kira tearing strips off Bashir in the pilot for him treating her devastated homeworld as an exotic frontier adventure is one of the best scenes in it) and over the course of the show built up a colossal amount of depth as characters. The Bashir-O'Brien friendship is probably the greatest, purest friendship in the entire franchise (maybe challenged on a good day by Data/LaForge), and light-years beyond Tom/Harry. The Kira-Odo relationship was a bad idea, granted, but the actors sold the hell out of it for all that.

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Personally, I wish the DS9 writers had had a similar attitude to the Ferengi and their hilarious all women are naked but we’re definitely better than humans ethos.

They do, repeatedly, tear this idea down though and the show ends with a mass revolution that brings all the dodgy Ferengi "har sexism" stuff crumbling to the ground. That's something I want to see in Lower Decks and Picard actually, female Ferengi ship captains and merchants out in the galaxy doing stuff well.

[Lightning Lord]

7 hours ago, williamjm said:

I agree she seemed much more central to DS9 than Chakotay was to Voyager. I think the first time I watched it she wasn't one of my favourite characters in the show but I found I appreciated her plotline a lot more when I rewatched a few years ago.

Agree. Kira was abrasive and confrontational early on. She was an excellent challenge to the Starfleet arrogant self-satisfaction. It wasn't always easy to like her early on but she had a ton of growth and some truly exceptional episodes (I'm looking at you, "Duet"). The Odo thing didn't make a ton of sense, and tbh the writers focused more on her love life than I would have wanted, but also didn't diminish the multiple seasons of character work.

[john]

There’s no argument that the DS9 writers aren’t better than the Voyager writers, a lot of that has to do with them paying attention to what has happened and building on it, so yes, the characters get better development. But I do think conceptually there are some ideas and characters in Voyager that are better than DS9.

One of the problems with Kira, imo, is that her character is based a lot on her back story. When we see episodes coming out of her being a child of war, that’s interesting, but her ongoing storylines suffer and often consist of her getting over antagonisms to different people, or her being sexy and/or desired by various men. Plus because of DS9s different structure we don’t see as much of her command role. At least Chakotay is always around, giving orders or arguing with Janeway, even if he didn’t have many of his own arcs.

14 hours ago, Werthead said:

They do, repeatedly, tear this idea down though and the show ends with a mass revolution that brings all the dodgy Ferengi "har sexism" stuff crumbling to the ground. That's something I want to see in Lower Decks and Picard actually, female Ferengi ship captains and merchants out in the galaxy doing stuff well.

It’s true, they do attack those sexist ideas but they also, several times, gives credence to the idea that the Ferengi are better than humans because they don’t have wars or build nuclear weapons, which I am not buying. Yeah, you don’t have wars because your society is oppressive and you only care about selling stuff. I dunno, some people find the Ferengi hilarious, I do not.  

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, john said:

One of the problems with Kira, imo, is that her character is based a lot on her back story. When we see episodes coming out of her being a child of war, that’s interesting, but her ongoing storylines suffer and often consist of her getting over antagonisms to different people, or her being sexy and/or desired by various men. Plus because of DS9s different structure we don’t see as much of her command role. At least Chakotay is always around, giving orders or arguing with Janeway, even if he didn’t have many of his own arcs.

Kira has plenty of command role storylines. We see her commanding rebels in the Season 2 opening arc, we see her dealing as commander of the Bajoran forces on the station and becoming something of a reluctant collaborator during the Dominion occupation, we see her taking command of the station after Sisko's departure and staring down the Romulans and we see her helping take command of the Cardassian rebels and having to deal with Rusot in Season 7. We also see a story arc about her religious faith and how her acceptance of her faith effectively helps break Kai Winn's self-belief, when she realises her faith is a shallow cover for her own hunger for power (twice, actually, when Kira shows a willingness to die for the Prophets in the battle with the Pah-Wraith-possessed Jake and then when she tries to convince Winn to step down from being Kai).

[SpaceChampion]

Any indication why the name Ni'Var was chosen for the reunified Vulcan-Romulan planet/people?  Watching the Enterprise episode The Shadows of P'Jem, there is a Vulcan ship called the Ni'Var.

[RumHam]

11 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Any indication why the name Ni'Var was chosen for the reunified Vulcan-Romulan planet/people?  Watching the Enterprise episode The Shadows of P'Jem, there is a Vulcan ship called the Ni'Var.

from Memory Alpha:

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Ni var was a term coined circa 1967 by linguist Dorothy Jones, who wrote the Dorothy and Myfanwy series of Star Trek stories for the fanzine T-Negative in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It literally means "two form" and was an art form practiced on Vulcan in which a subject was examined from two different viewpoints, or in terms of its having two different aspects or natures. Ni var poetry and art were printed in Spockanalia and various other fanzines, and the term, actually part of a sophisticated Vulcan language invented by Ms. Jones, caught on like wildfire in the Star Trek fan community.

"Ni Var" was also the name of a novella originally entitled The Thousandth Man by Claire Gabriel, which was cut down to short-story length for publication in the 1976 anthology The New Voyages (edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath; the original novella by Gabriel was the final chapter of a six-part book which is now available for reading at Jacqueline Lichtenberg's website). In the story, it was "a Vulcan term referring to the duality of things: two who are one, two diversities that are a unity, two halves that come together to make a whole" (from Leonard Nimoy's introduction to the short story, which did not credit Ms. Jones as the originator of the term). It seemed likely that the ship of that name seen in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Shadows of P'Jem" was named after this story and that the writers were unaware of the origins of the term, as Ms. Jones' Star Trek stories were never professionally published and have been largely forgotten. According to episode co-writer Mike Sussman, the starship Ni'Var was indeed an homage to the short story published in The New Voyages. The Star Trek Encyclopedia (4th ed., vol. 2, p. 81) corroborated Sussman's account.

 

I could spend hours on there reading stuff like this. and I have!

[DaveSumm]

On 5/5/2021 at 6:49 AM, Lightning Lord said:

I just finished the series run of Voyager.

@Werthead I can’t remember if you posted it here, or on Twitter, or if it was even you to be honest ... but there was a piece about a random crew-member observing all the weird shit that went on aboard Voyager ... “You arrive on day one and the shuttlebay is full of shuttles”, that kind of thing. Can’t find it now, but thought it’d be a funny read if you’ve just finished the series.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

@Werthead I can’t remember if you posted it here, or on Twitter, or if it was even you to be honest ... but there was a piece about a random crew-member observing all the weird shit that went on aboard Voyager ... “You arrive on day one and the shuttlebay is full of shuttles”, that kind of thing. Can’t find it now, but thought it’d be a funny read if you’ve just finished the series.

This one? I think it's called Star Trek: Voyager Gothic.

[DaveSumm]

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This one? I think it's called Star Trek: Voyager Gothic.

That’s it, thank you!

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• The ship has an encounter with some Kazon, but manages to get away. Their ships are primitive and slow and you shouldn’t run into them again. 
• Two weeks later, you meet the same Kazon, now somehow in front of you.

[Lightning Lord]

4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

That’s it, thank you!

Delightful read

And brings up something important: Voyager was going pell-mell in a single direction. Straight shot, right to the Earth-baby maker. Their ship was incredibly fast and they had godlike help from time to time. Yet they kept running into the same aliens again and again. At least the Borg were like "Yar, we be using trans-warp conduits and can be anywhere, yar! And this trans-warp thing be thousands of lightyears from our space but Yar!" The Hirogen, the Kazon, the phage-people... they were everywhere.

I need to go look for a map of the Delta Quadrant.

[RumHam]

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• You’ve now travelled almost 40,000 light years towards home. You check the star charts; somehow, you’re still in the Delta Quadrant. You begin to wonder if the Beta Quadrant even exists.

 

I remember reading that some of the writers were pushing to establish that they'd crossed into the beta quadrant. They were overruled because someone thought it would be too confusing to viewers. Which....what the fuck? 

[felice]

3 hours ago, Lightning Lord said:

And brings up something important: Voyager was going pell-mell in a single direction. Straight shot, right to the Earth-baby maker. Their ship was incredibly fast and they had godlike help from time to time. Yet they kept running into the same aliens again and again.

Indeed. Voyager would really have benefited from the Enterprise season 4 approach, with lots of multi-episode arcs - when they encounter a new species, take the time to get the most out of them, because they'll be left far behind afterwards. Or maybe give them some godlike hindrance and send them back to Ocampa for "cheating", giving them the opportunity to run into old friends again and deal with the consequences of their past actions.

[RumHam]

41 minutes ago, felice said:

Indeed. Voyager would really have benefited from the Enterprise season 4 approach

Agreed, they really should have cancelled it then.

[Toth]

4 hours ago, Lightning Lord said:

The Hirogen, the Kazon, the phage-people... they were everywhere.

To be fair, the Hirogen were spread out all over the place up to the northern edge of the Beta Quadrant and were able to spread the technology Voyager gave them using a huge ancient communication array. So that made sense, even though there is absolutely no excuse for the later Kazon episodes.

And aside the memes, I never felt particularly concerned about shuttles and torpedoes (it's actually the fault of the show to mention it as a concern in the first episode). Voyager has industrial replicators aboard, of course they can easily print themselves new Shuttles, torpedoes and other spare parts for Voyager as long as they've got the resources. In fact, that should have been their main concern, tracking down nebulae and asteroids or trading for the elements they needed and while some episodes mentioned it, it wasn't treated as dire as it could have been for the sake of drama. In fact, Voyager being a long-range exploration vessel in the first place, it may have been far too well specialized for the premise of the show...

[Derfel Cadarn]

2 hours ago, Toth said:

To be fair, the Hirogen were spread out all over the place up to the northern edge of the Beta Quadrant and were able to spread the technology Voyager gave them using a huge ancient communication array. So that made sense, even though there is absolutely no excuse for the later Kazon episodes.

And aside the memes, I never felt particularly concerned about shuttles and torpedoes (it's actually the fault of the show to mention it as a concern in the first episode). Voyager has industrial replicators aboard, of course they can easily print themselves new Shuttles, torpedoes and other spare parts for Voyager as long as they've got the resources. In fact, that should have been their main concern, tracking down nebulae and asteroids or trading for the elements they needed and while some episodes mentioned it, it wasn't treated as dire as it could have been for the sake of drama. In fact, Voyager being a long-range exploration vessel in the first place, it may have been far too well specialized for the premise of the show...

The first episode does mention it, at least that they’ve a finite number of torpedoes (about 35?) that they can’t replace.

Re shuttles, if you’re having to ration food replication and holodeck time, fabricating an entire spaceship (with thrusters, warp drive, dilithium) several times a year is a bit unviable.

[Mindwalker]

Oh, and Neelix, whom they picked up in the very first episode, found some of his own people in season 7, that's like what, 40.000 ly from his home planet?