Which Show Sucked More: ST:VOY or ST:Enterprise?

I thought quantum slipstream was a manipulation of the main deflector/shield generators.

You had a habit of continually asking questions that were already answered. How was I to know exactly when it had finally sunk in for you?

Which in the Voyager universe, can whip up anything from a compressed tachyon stream, to a stack of warm cheeseburgers.

I think the way it works is that after you eat the stack of warm cheeseburgers you emit a compressed tachyon stream that dilates time for everyone else in the room.

While Voyager was bad, it was watchable around half of the time. I can only remember a couple of episodes of Enterprise that didn't piss me off entirely.

Enterprise, excluding In a Mirror, Darkly, which makes things ambiguous. It's best was not as good as Voyager's best, and it's worst was worse than Voyager's worst.

^ Ah, but here's the kicker - Voyager had SEVEN FULL SEASONS of sucktitude. Enterprise only had 4. So in terms of having your eyes shoved open and forced to watch, Enterprise would suck less.

It's like being asked which is worse, eating dog shit or horse shit. The horse shit might be a little bit more consistent in that it is really only grass, but there is a whole lot more that needs to go down your gullet.

The question is "Which sucked more?", not "Which would you rather watch all the way through less?" and I contend that they are not equivalent, as the answers are, obviously, not the same.

And I'd watch "Spirit Folk" twice before watching "A Night In Sickbay" once.

Nothing was worse than Voyager's worst, but you've probably blocked that out.

There is nothing in the universe worse than a non-denominational 18th century Irish holodeck village that the crew uses as fucktoys and to which the crew gets so emotionally attached that they can't cut off the fucking switch when it's necessary to save lives.

And where holographic bullets shoot out the holographic safeties.

Nothing in the history of history, much less, television, much less Trek, is worse than that from a narrative viewpoint.

Unless you're planning on throwing tomatoes at the screen, that makes no sense.

As bad as ENT was (and much of it was really bad), I at least found myself liking some of the characters (badly written as they were).


I didn't give two shits for anybody on VOY with the possible exception of Tom Paris. From what little I've seen of those "Captain Proton" or whatever episodes, it sounds like he needed to be airlocked along with the rest of the mongoloids on that ship.

I consider "Spirit Folk" to be an exploration of the psychosis which sets in after long periods of isolation from the rest of humanity. "A Night in Sickbay" was the destruction of the Captain as protagonist, as a sympathetic character, even as a reasonable human being, for no good reason, under no mind control. I can't abide that.

I wonder how things would have turned out if instead of giving us cookie cutter Starfleet officers they had given us the something like:

Tom Paris who is our version of Han Solo: a man in and out of trouble with the law, a man who really marched to the sound of his own drum, but a shit hot pilot. The guy who listens to Janeway when he really feels like it, but is so great at piloting his ship that he can't be spared when he does fuck up.

Neelix is the Indian Guide. He knows this area of space like the back of his hand. He doesn't quit get the crew's culture, and doesn't really care either. A frontiersman with his own way of doing things.

Janeway is really a scientist and not a command officer, despite having taken a class on running a ship. Her ship Voyager is a sicence vessel, not a warship, not a long range explorer, and she's in over her head, so she relies on her XO:

Chakotay, a Starfleet officer who resigned and joined the Maquis when his home was simply signed over to the Cardassians. He;s disillusioned with Starfleet and the Federation, and while he'll run the day to day operations of the ship, he sees value in kicking the Starfleet rulebook to the curb because he knows there's another way. He's not institutionalized like:

Lt. Tuvok, the Vulcan security chief, a Vulcan who is hidebound about rules and regulations and who refuses to even consider a solution that isn't in the rulebook. Suddenly he's on a ship half filled with rebels, rouges, mercenaries, and StarFleet crewmen willing to look the other way if it means they can get home a little earlier.


What if Mayweather has been the guy who had actually been around space a bit as a trader. He'd been to Rigel XII, he's seen the moons of Nibia, he's been with the triple breasted whore of Eroticon six. And he is constantly going head to head with:

Captain Archer: a man who is eager to prove himself. He's captain because he's the guy who designed the Warp 5 drive. He's an engineer by trade and training, not a scientist, not a diplomat, not a warrior and he has to learn to be all those things in a hurry. But he's got a drive to be great and is willing to leap before he looks at time which plays right into the stereotype of reckless humans held by his first officer

And of course ENT gave us an episode where a crew member's rape and subsequent pregnancy were played for laughs...

Did you see the way Trip was dressed? He was asking for it.

Add in a loathing and a desire to stab each other in the back between Paris and Chakotay...

Totally disagree with your comments about Tim Russ as Tuvok. He's a fine actor but wasn't given many good stories to work with. His Vulcan character was superior to T'Pol IMHO, although neither were completely memorable.
And Mulgrew was far better than Bakula, who was completely awful. I don't remember him being so poor an actor in his Quantum Leap days but on ENT I thought he was terrible.

Should be moar like Seven vs. T'Pol...

I happen to think that the first 5 seasons of VOY ranged from agonizingly poor episodes to some that will actually be viewed as some of the best of Trek. Season 6 is unwatchable, IMHO and the abortion that was the VOY finale makes me wish I hadn't bothered at all.

By the time Season 4 of Enterprise rolled around, I had stopped watching it altogether, so I really can't comment. Other than that, I think I could count the number of decent ENT episodes on one hand.

ENT was worse.

Eh, they were still pretty wooden.

Trouble was, they were playing average Vulcans, and average Vulcans um...sucked.

It was pretty well established, even as early as TOS, that Spock was the superhero of Vulcan.
Big act to follow.

I think they just should've had Vulcans be c-string characters, like that doctor that popped up on TNG a couple times.

..(continuing the thought)

Yeah, I think that's it, Nimoy, by creating Spock, essentially got to create the Vulcans.
But, he also, by setting up the rules, got to, and knew when to, break his own rules.

The NuVulcans, Tuvok, and T'Pol, were kind of stuck having to follow the rules.

And the writers were definitely no help.

Whereas Picardo, and Billingsley had way more elbow room to play with their characters.

Now, Michael Dorn was smart, he just plain didn't give a fuck what had been established for Klingons, he made up the Worf character at the audition, and ended up being the Nimoy of Klingons.

Yep, they need to make up new races, and/or get actors who don't give a shit about rules.

Otherwise, they get boxed in by continuity.

Spock is certainly a superhero of the Star Trek franchise. And Leonard Nimoy deserves credit for helping bring the first Vulcan character to life, creating an iconic character from scratch.

Tuvoc (Tim Russ) has a much better handle on his emotions, and probably is a more typical Vulcan. Yet Vulcan characters and Vulcan-like characters have been around for a while and at this point have lost their shine. Every incarnation of Trek includes a stoic character, a pseudo Spock, who is puzzled by human behavior.

Jolene Blalock (T'Pol) is easy on the eyes.

Keep in mind every Vulcan's discipline fails at regular intervals and their emotions run amok.

Of course the c-string route has potential as well...



"If I don’t survive, tell my wife ‘Hello’."

Yeah I TRULY don't understand this. How I can love Sam Beckett so much and hate Captain Archer so much more is mind boggling.

I really can't blame B&B for that one. Who wouldn't think casting Scott Backula would be a great idea?

If they hadn't written him like shit, he might not have looked so bad.

Or rather, if they had cast him in a role that suited him, which I think rules out captain of the NX-01. Archer should've been an unruly cowboy, blundering around fucking things up and proving the Vulcans right at just about every turn. Not the meek boy scout trying once in awhile to inexplicably act badass.

I watched another episode of Voyager a few nights ago. This one was about a void in space, and how they couldn't get out.

It was apparent on the show that they had too many "logical" characters. It was fine with Tuvok, but then they also had 7 of 9. Seven easily gave the stowaway they found on one of the derelict ships her portion of rations, and Insaneway Janeway commented on how it wasn't the logical thing to do. In my opinion, that whole scene should've been between Tuvok and Janeway.

They wrote Seven all wrong on that show, IMO. She became the show's second Vulcan, and ended up taking screen time from the original Vulcan. Coming from the Borg, and assimilated at a young age, she should've been all about conformity and trying to get everyone to come to a consensus on just about everything. Her character should've been written like Data (with emotion chip), but with a few too many "conflict resolution" subroutines. This could've played to hilarious results, but also show how everyone marching in lock step was sometimes not a good thing. She would be all about making sure all ship systems, computers, and departments all worked as one and that everyone was in agreement with each other. And she should've been fucking everyone and their dog, because she misses all those voices in her head, and became a super extrovert. She should've also had problem controlling her emotions and her feelings of loneliness, because she was now an individual.

It's also becoming apparent after being exposed to Voyager lately that Janeway is my least favorite and most inconsistently written character. It wouldn't be so bad if she was a ship engineer or lesser part of the crew, but to have her as captain is a show killer, and a boneheaded decision by tptb. With Scott Bakula, I can at least understand it - he's carried a successful show for that target demographic before. They essentially got a soap star to be the lead for a show targeting the young adult male demographic. Add the shitty writing, and this show was doomed from the start.

Archer was just badly thought out - having a character to express the wonders of what they're seeing is a great idea, just don't make that character the captain.

After all, if you're getting fired on, the very last thing you need is someone pointing at the incoming torpedoes and cooing about the pretty lights.

The captain needs to be a source of confidence and strength, especially if you're zipping around the galaxy with just a few feet of alloy between you and the grim reapers backyard.

If they wanted someone to gawp at the wonders of the universe, they needed a Rain Man character who offered an ability on the ship, but a childlike persona.

Yup. When they wrote her well, it was with a cold, Borg, pragmatism.

The writers rarely differentiated between logic and harsh pragmatism, when there is a chasm between the two.

Imagine, for example, an empire that had refused them passage through it's space being attacked by an enemy.

Tuvok would see the logic in providing that empire with help and aid against the enemy, Seven would see allowing them to fall as the removal of an obstacle.

Seven should always have suggested the unthinkable, and at times got her way so they could've finished the ep on one of those po-faced 'we did bad' scenes.

The wonderstruck captain idea only really worked for Picard, and no one else. Them trying to recreate it for Archer failed because you can't have that type of captain in hostile territory.

Even then, Picard always seemed to have the protection and support of the whole Federation behind him. When he spoke, you not only got a sense it was a man speaking, but an ideal - i.e. the unofficial voice of the Federation. I really don't know what it is about Picard that makes TNG work as a whole, but it just does. Can you imagine having any other captain, including the Sisko, in some of the diplomacy scenes from TNG? Picard was a captain, but his voice resonated like one of an admiral, or a top diplomat.

I think TNG really just was lucky enough to catch lighting in a bottle and run with it. You couldn't re-create the show today and make it work.