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As I continue to celebrate Star Trek’s 50th anniversary and the release of the new
film, we come now to Star Trek: Voyager. This is the series where most hardcore
Trek fans consider the franchise to have stumbled, citing Voyager and Enterprise,
along with the last 2 TNG films, as the collapse of the franchise in its final
years before the reboot.
Personally I can’t say I agree with that.
Certainly, the two final films of the TNG series are awful
but having gone through all of Voyager
and Enterprise they are not bad Star
Trek, in fact I’d rank them well above Next
Generation and, most pertinent to this conversation, I’d actually say Voyager is my favorite Star Trek show of
the entire franchise. Not
necessarily the best, that’s probably still reserved for Deep Space 9 or the original series, but definitely the one I liked
the most, the one I tend to revisit most often, and the big reason for that is,
bizarrely, that everyone on the ship seems like horrible people.
If you’ve never heard of Voyager before, here’s the deal:
the show revolves around a state of the art ship called the USS Voyager tasked
to hunt down a group of human terrorists in a disputed part of space. While engaging the terrorists, the
Voyager and their opposing force get sucked through space to the other side of
the galaxy, into the Delta Quadrant.
After a brief adventure where the star fleet and terrorist crews are
forced to team-up, these are the type of terrorists who don’t commit a lot of
terror attacks and have sympathetic motivations, the device that brought the
crew to the Delta Quadrant is destroyed along with the terrorist ship. Now forced to collaborate as one crew,
the Voyager must traverse the vast unknown space and all its perils in an
attempt to make the 75-year voyager home.
That’s a pretty solid set-up for a Star Trek show, dropping
the characters in a totally new area with no chance of outside help. What’s more, the structure of having
the Voyager be the ONLY ship in the quadrant nicely subverts the well-worn
trope of being “the only ship in range.”
Additionally, the clash of crews was a clever basis for character drama,
emphasizing the difficulties of integrating two groups of people committed to
defeating each other now bound in common cause. Add in the Voyager’s slow degradation and the necessity of
collecting alien technology and crewmembers and, on paper, that’s a solid Star
Trek premise.
However, the ultimate show we got was anything but
solid. The clash of cultures
between the two crews is downplayed to the point of non-existence, the strange
new races of the Delta Quadrant are barely developed, and the wear and tear of
the ship almost never pops up in any meaningful way.
We got the occasional glance at those larger elements of the
show, like the two-parter ‘Year of Hell’ in which the Voyager spent a year
fighting a time travel based civilization only to have the encounter wiped from
history, but that was the exception not the rule. No, instead the show fell much more into a TNG style
structure with a lot of one-off episodes cycling through various crewmen of
focus and their unique foibles and interests with very little continuity.
Now that might sound like I’m being hard on the show, but
the weird thing is that said formulaic structure actually turned out to be the
show’s greatest strength. This all
comes down to an ill-advised mix and match of structural elements that result
in a very unflattering vision of these characters that ends up shockingly funny
and kind of endearing.
Even though
the show wants to structure itself like Next
Generation it still tries to use things like the isolated setting and
amoral nature of the crew to its advantage. The result is that all of the characters are made out to be
really terrible people, a fact that the show ends up playing completely for
laughs, often by accident.
See, without an element of continuity, remembering the
events of past episodes, every trauma and atrocity committed by the crew just
becomes a kind of passing quirk about them. So, when ship’s pilot Tom Paris tries to give his fiancé
brain damage so he can put the AI of a ship in her body because he loves the
AI- no one ever mentions this again, it’s a thing he does.
The show is littered with stuff like
this, like the time the holographic doctor had to euthanize his holo-daughter,
when they gave the first officer brain damage to make him crazy so he could
communicate with a race that spoke madness as a language, or the time security
officer absorbed the personality of a serial killer and tried to murder
everyone.
Eventually, all these little instances form a titanic
avalanche of repressed awfulness that seems to indicate the crew is in some
deep, deep denial. Watching the
show as a binge, remembering all the terrible things done and coupling that
with the nonplussed nature of the characters, basically turns the experience
into It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
but in space.
That’s a big part of why I like Voyager so much, the
relationship I formed with the show while binging and the plot holes I ended up
filling in myself during that time.
That’s admittedly a very personal approach to media but at the same time
this is the fan-fic era of nerdom, we’re all about adding our own flourishes,
theories, and head canons to the material we ingest. Also, if I can back to that first sentence, the relationship
you form with the material is the more important thing than the stories you
make up about the episodes to form said relationship.
As I was watching Voyager I’d often tweet about the
constant lack of continuity with itself or even Star Trek as a whole and the
various other failures of the show but, as I went a long, I realized
complaining about those failures had become a kind of joy in its own
right. I had developed a
relationship with the show, reveling in its flaws and seeking to correct them
in my own way.
That’s not to say the only reason I liked the show was the
conclusions I brought to it, as, at some point, the show seems to have had the
same realization that I did about how terrible the crew and their situation
really are. A great example of the
show realizing how much its characters are in denial is the character of
Neelix.
He’s a goofy alien the
show picked up in the pilot that acted as ship’s cook and morale officer but
what I love about Neelix is that his life is awful but he never let’s that get
him down. I mean, the dude has his
lungs stolen in the 2nd episode and still gets up every day to make
stupid puns and smile like his life isn’t a never-ending cycle of
disappointment.
When you start looking at the characters with that kind of
realization it actually makes a lot of their quirks and ticks seem a lot more
believable. For instance, both the
ship’s holographic Doctor, named the Doctor, and the former Borg science
officer 7 of 9 are defined by their ego and confidence, but when you take into
account all the horrors they’ve suffered those traits go from simple quirks to
a pretty clear defense mechanism, much like Neelix’ cheerfulness.
That blend of awfulness through implication and assumption
ends up affording Voyager the other
major reason I love it so much: it acts as a bizarre kind of self-critique of
the Star Trek mythos overall. Much
in the same way Deep Space 9 was
about forcing average members of Star Fleet to deal with an extraordinary
situation, Voyager is all about what
happens when you take the Federation out of the equation for Star Fleet’s
Z-listers.
This goes right back to
the premise of the show, I mean the Federation is a utopia- who do you get in a
utopic society to go hunt down terrorists save for your worst citizens? Hell, the ship’s pilot Tom Paris was
actually in prison when Captain Janeway recruited him in the pilot.
That same contradiction of terms extends to the Voyager
itself; it’s presented as the cutting edge ship with all new tech but, as we
see in the series, the new tech is universally awful. For instance, the ship’s computer now runs on bio-tech gel
packs to simulate human neurons.
It sounds like a good idea but the gel packs need to be constantly
refilled and can actually get sick with things like the common cold. The whole ship is like that; seemingly
great innovations that just make things worse, it’s basically a huge boondoggle
that Star Fleet just wanted out of the way.
The best example of what I mean, though, would have to
ship’s engineer B’Elanna Torres.
Torres is actually my all time favorite Star Trek character, which is
probably a little strange because she is by far the worst engineer in any Star
Trek show. She’s one of the
terrorist characters who actually flunked out of Star Fleet before joining them
and her main role on the show is not really being able to solve most of the
engineering problems that come her way.
Here’s the thing though- that failure is exactly why she’s such a great
character.
Look, Star Trek has
offered us a lot of character types but in every other show the engineers are
always amazing. From Scotty in TOS literally writing the tech manual, to
Geordi on TNG reversing the laws of physics, to O’Brien on DS9 fighting a whole
war, and even Trip Tucker on Enterprise pioneering new technology- they’re all
amazing. Torres isn’t like that,
she can’t fix a warp core with string and chewing gum or invent a new engine
overnight, she can honestly barely hold the ship together, that’s her secret-
that she’s not very good at engineering.
What makes her stand out, though, is that even though she’s
not very good at engineering she still does it. Even though the entire world has told her “no!” from day one
she’s still an engineer on a star ship because doing engineering, even if she’s
bad at it, is better than not doing what she loves. And, in a strange kind of way, that’s Voyager’s outlook as well- sure, it
could be a different show, maybe even a better one, but it’d rather do what it
loves poorly than force its way into something different, and I find that kind
of beautiful.
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