Here's the two things that keep me from liking Voyager as much as I like BSG: 1. Voyager goes through hull breeches, and it looks beautiful on the outside, even though they have no shuttle-type repair machines for fixing breeches outside and I've never heard of a starship having a replicator big enough to create replacement HULL PARTS. 2. The characters were always perfectly sane. In one episode, Kim and Paris get trapped in a prison and beaten, starved, driven insane by an implant in their heads, they end up trying to kill each other. In another episode, fear manifests itself as a clown and they see people die, nearly die themselves, relive childhood horrors, etc. They get attacked every which way they go, they don't think they'll ever make it home within their lifetimes - AND THEY'RE SMILING AND HAPPY, CARE-FREE, IN THE NEXT FUCKING EPISODE!!! It's like... okay, Voyager gets hurt so... magical recovery! Janeway is tortured? No problem, she's alright by tomorrow! THAT. IS. NOT. REAL. NOT. REAL. BSG at least has the guts to show the Admiral's son in disarray. Kudos to them. Voyager can go back to being its own little inferior utopia. Sure, I always watch it, but BSG ruined it for me.
TOS did the exact same thing. TNG did so, but to a lesser extent. DS9 was revolutionary in that past episodes affected characters later on. I think B5 did the same thing. Few other TV series at the time were doing that (except for soap operas). DS9 was made 10 years too early. I couldn't sleep after watching that episode as a kid, it gave me nightmares. And to think the guy who played Fear was a comedian.
Well, the Doc always had magic pharmacuticals, nanites, and frinkyfrat rays that could restructure neurons, and erase trauma. That's the trouble when you have the tech that high.
Good point. What if they just had some sort of magical hypospray that made everything better? That would work perfectly. But... what about the ship's damage? In season 1 or 2, they get beat up so badly they lost about 80% of their antimatter and the ship was truly in shambles. And they're fine by the next episode.
They find a coffee nebula or two. But seriously, it's not like all of the Delta Quadrant was as uncivilized as the Kazon. We didn't see them stopping for supplies at every spaceport from here to the Alpha Quadrant because there's usually not much excitement at spaceports. They had replicators. In the first three seasons of Voyager, no other species had that kind of technology. Janeway had a huge bargaining chip. "You want water, give us your antimatter."
Year of Hell was what the series should have been. They reset it at the end and didn't listen to fan reaction. Sad.
So they stopped at peaceful space ports, despite their reputation for screwing up half the planets they visited? IIRC, they had terrible reputation in most places because people just wanted to be mean to them. But I suppose they must have found a nice port willing to fix them up for replicated food, water and medicine.
I'm psyched cuz I just finished my DS9 DVD collection. Got the last two seasons for 25 bucks each. I already have all the good TOS episodes and all the good movies so my Trek collection is done. Maybe one day I'll pick up TNG sets but I can live without it. The show will be playing on reruns for a while.
Mewa, exactly WHAT episodes of Voyager are you watching? Because I remember the first few of the first season actually being quite good, and then the show taking a major nosedive in quality after they added Borgtits. Sure, there is one every once in awhile I turn on that surprises me, but the majority of them are barely watchable.
My opinion? With the exception of a very few episodes, TNG and VOY have aged horribly. (VOY wasn't that great to begin with.) Most of DS9 still stands up.
YoH was a good 2-parter, a missed opportunity and a depressing slap of the reset button. S4 could've been stunning with annorax pursuing them across an episode arc, the crew eventually being scattered, the ship destroyed and then you bring the dauntless into the mix and lead up to a re-unified crew, a brand new ship in 'hope and fear' as have it as a cliffhanger. that could've given DS9 a run for its money.
I always wondered about the replicator rationing. I mean, all they needed for the damn thing was power and they had loads of that.
Big difference. TOS nor TNG ever really tried to do 'arcs'. Whereas starting with DS9 and then VOY arcs were becoming more and more popular (at least as far as Trek goes B5 was the first show I started noticing an arc). So during the time of VOY, people were starting to expect to see some ramifications from previous episodes. In TOS and TNG, no one expected that, because outside of the 2-parters, the shows were completely episodic without any sort of all-emcompassing arc.
The TNG episodes in Fan Collective: Time Travel, Fan Collective: Borg, and The Jean-Luc Picard Collection pretty much comprise all the very best TNG episodes IMHO. Well, except "Relics", but whatyagonnado?
I understand the intent of what YOH was suppose to convey (i.e. a lot like NuBSG), but there wasn't any real "punch" to it. I can't explain it other than that - it might be the fact that the people who were working on the show didn't really have the ability to raise it to the next level. Just for comparision, I believe that if the DS9 writing staff had a crack at YOH, it would've been a hell of a lot better. And of course the icing on the cake after the general lethargic feeling I had throughout most of the episode is that - in true Voyager fashion the is pressed.
You know, I have absolutely no problem with the reset button on an ep that is entirely about fucking with the time stream. If there was ever a plotline that allowed for the reset button intrinsically, it was YoH. What pissed me off was the sloppy execution of Endgame, and the huge deus ex machinae involved there. How about this - let the heroes of the show actually get their ass home without a time traveller from the future meddling and breaking ever law of the Federation along the way.
The series didn't take a nosedive the moment Tits McGee became part of the crew. It happened about a season and a half after she came on. 1/3 of the episodes started being about her, 1/3 of the episodes started being about the Borg and inevitably involved Tits McGee (I thought they passed Borg space at the beginning of season 4), and the last 1/3 had the Doctor or Janeway being awesome, while Tits McGee tagged along.
Instead of listing almost every episode of TOS, I'll tell you which ones didn't involve big reset buttons. The episodes with Mudd, some of the Klingon episodes, and The Enterprise Incident. It doesn't matter whether or not they "tried" to do them. And there's a difference between arcs and ramifications of past episodes. Even TNG had ramifications from past episodes. TNG even had a semi-arc involving the Borg and the Klingons. VOY had an arc that started with episode one and ended with the last episode. Or do you think getting back to the Alpha Quadrant didn't motivate their actions or drive the plot in every single fucking episode? (Well, except for "Drive") Not even DS9 can claim to have that sort of series-wide arc.
There are two types of reset buttons. There's the kind where something tragic happens to the ship or characters, but by the next episode, everything is peachy again. And then there's this kind: [?=BAM!][/?] I'm OK with the latter, but the former sometimes pisses me off. VOY and TOS did it a lot. TNG did it occasionally. And DS9 only did it in the first couple of seasons.
The "button" stood out for me in YOH, kind of like shoving what Voyager could've been in my face, and then just snapping it away.
That was an overall point of VOY, not an arc. TNG had no arcs, at all, except for two-parters. There was only one real ramification, which was when they found out warp drive was tearing up space and instituted the warp-5 limit. There just was no story arcs in TNG and TOS, like DS9's war arc. Where every episode pretty much lead into the next, except for 'fun' episodes. Therefore when Voy comes along and they're trying to get back home through unfriendly territory, along the way taking no recurring damage and losing 10 shuttles an episode, it's pretty ridiculous. No, it didn't start with an arc, that was the show's theme. Voy was terrible that way. At the beginning of each show, it was like a new beginning. Again, though, people didn't expect this during TNG nor TOS times, because it was pretty much unheard of. B5 and later DS9, brought in the concept of arcs and one episode pretty much leaning into the other one. Which is exactly why people were pretty disappointed with Voyager with it's brand new paint job and restocked shuttles/photon/quantum torpedos every single episode. Doesn't seem like they needed to try too hard to get home, if everything just self-replicated every episode.
