basically. this show needed Ira Steven Behr. and co.
IIRC they had Behr for like a few months after Ds9 ended, but he got there, found that the head of the writers' room (I forget who it was. Piller? Moore?) hated him for vague, mostly unexplained reasons and froze him out of group work (I distinctly remember him finding out that they had moved the actual physical writers' room from a room on the Paramount lot to said head writer's house and Behr was explicitly not invited to that guy's house.) and basically pushed him into a little work bubble where he had to do what was given to him with no freedom. So as soon as his contract was up, he understandably bailed.
There was also strife between the writers that were there longer. I remember one writer made a bunch of early-season recurring characters like Suder and Carey and the guy who actually was selling them out to the Kazon, and Samantha Wildman and when Jeri Taylor took over, she was the head of the USS Reset Button contingent, so she systematically set about killing off all of those minor people so that there weren't dangling ongoing plot threads. Allegedly only Wildman escaped because they thought it was simply too cruel to leave Naomi an orphan (though in hindsight that might've been a good thing because it would've potentially pushed her into Neelix's care and given him something to do, fretting about having to be a parent to an alien girl he knows almost nothing about and potentially being reminded constantly of the little sister he doted on who died from that superweapon that was talked about in the one episode with the scientist/war criminal guy Neelix hated.)
Pretty much the whole writing process on Voyager sounds like the biggest, most petty pointless cluster**** you can possibly imagine.
2: that alien who was a re-animated corpse of a Former crew member? She should have been front and centre for the first two-three seasons, killed off, then that episode would have had more meaning.
Yep. They also should've had that other ensign who died in
Latent Image pop up a few times before she died. Not enough to make her seem really super important, because part of the point of that episode is that the Doctor grapples with the belief that he only saved Harry because he considered himself close to Harry and didn't really know Ensign MacGuffin, but enough that having the doctor let her die feels like a serious thing for us as an audience. Hell, it would've been really good if it was one of those aforementioned recurring characters like Carey or someone. Maybe one of those ones who was a jerk because then you add the potential wrinkle of the Doctor also believing that his letting the not-Harry patient die was not only because Harry was his friend, but perhaps because he personally disliked the other one. Hell, maybe they could've combined the episode concepts. Ensign Ballard appears on the show in the prominent background role a la Leslie or Kyle or even Yeoman Rand from TOS for 2 or 3 years, then she dies in season 4ish in the Latent Image plot where the Doctor can't save both of them and has his Sophie's Choice moment and chooses not to save her over Harry. Then a little while later, the reanimated necro-alien version of her shows up and we get the triple whammy of the ramifications of her wanting to consider joining her old life again, Harry and the potential of his feelings for her (which would've added layers to Latent Image if Harry had to angst over to the Doctor's decision to save him instead of his would-be girlfriend and he had survivor's guilt because of it and the weirdness of seeing her alive again as an alien), and the Doctor being confronted with a an actual walking, talking symbol of the failure he couldn't get past without it breaking his holo psyche.
3: Kes should have died on the show from Natural causes being only 9 flipping years old (i also have to say. the Occampa thing never made sense. like. they are born, and we saw them at a normal "child" looking age. but how old are they? Kes was an adult (like can have sex and give birth herself) at 3 years old. but we've seen a "12 year old" looking Kess. interesting idea. dumb execution.
I can sort of understand the biology of the quick aging if we sort of assume that each human year sees the Ocampan go through about 7-12 years of growth and development. So 1-year-old Kes looks like she's a pre-teen, 2 year-old Kes is a late teenager, 3-year old Kes at the start of the series is somewhere in her mid 20s. The issue here of course would be that by the time we get to season 4 or 5 around when she left, she should've looked like she was in her 50s, but she just looked like a pretty, young late 20s/early 30s (because of course that's what Jennifer Lien was)
The bigger Ocampan issue was that apparently the women go through a mating/pregnancy cycle exactly once in their lives, and from what we see in Kes' life-in-rewind episode, have the same reproductive setup as humans and other humanoid species we see: She has 1 kid, and her daughter has 1 kid and she was an only child and it comes across like having a single kid per pregnancy is normal. But if that's the case, the Ocampan population growth should be negative. Each pair of parents has exactly 1 child, so each generation should be like half the size of the previous. Even if we were to accept some handwavey nonsense about the gender ratio being skewed waaaay female and that they have polygamous family units with 1 male to any large # of females (which there are zero pieces of evidence for in what we get to see of her species), you still produce less children than there are parents.
we all know that Paris was actually supposed to be Nicolas Locarno - but they didn't want to pay the rights, and they watered the guy down (also note how almost everyone in starfleet are children of admirals? how many admirals are there?).
There are
a lot of Admirals. A quick scan of Memory Alpha shows like 50+ people of the specific rank of Admiral, mostly culled from names on computer displays throughout the show and named for production staff members. Plus a ton more if you include the other flag ranks (Fleet Admiral, Vice Admiral, Commodore, etc).
i think a constant reminder that they are alone, instead of the Magic Reset Button would have helped this show so much more (even if they wanted to keep it true to Roddenberry Ideals).
I did think Janeway not doing the Delta/Federation thing was dumb. you kinda thought that was always "there" because they had help sometimes, but then she'd be so insistent about not giving out tech (which is the whole point of the federation. share ideas). it was sort of like she only wanted to be Federation to a point (ie: prime directives (which should be a debate topic on its own). and not sharing tech) - but then when she needed something - cue the surprise that omg we can't get what we want).
all the potential. this show should have blown DS9 out of the water.
Yeah. The dumb thing was the adherence to not sharing tech made no sense when they were dealing with warp-capable species. It's not like she was handing nuclear bombs to cavemen.
) Braga also apparently didn't like "threading other writers' plotlines" and that was impetus to chuck out the serialization approach and go with reset-button, self-contained plots. Which is funny because he was also one of the guys that wanted to make the show a lot more like Year of Hell, which would've required serialization.
