Twenty years later, I put a few things together

[starlady]

My roommates have been making their way through the middle three Star Trek series (they're not watching ENT like sensible people and I can't convince them to watch TOS, like highly illogical people), and the penny has finally dropped for me that DS9 is in many ways (particularly in the first three seasons) playing off B5, while VOY is playing off Farscape. Or rather, both VOY and Farscape are dealing with very similar setups and issues, but Farscape explicitly goes about dealing with masculinity in a way that VOY just…doesn't, in the initial seasons. Masculinity and its fragility are consistent problems on Voyager, and Janeway and Torres (and to a lesser extent Kes and even Seska) are consistently forced to deal with the problems they cause, but VOY doesn't really do anything about them the way Farscape does; the Star Trek show treats the symptoms rather than the root causes.

In so many ways I'm glad they made DS9 when they did, because they could never make it now, but for VOY it's just the opposite, and I really wish it had been made in this era rather than 20 years ago.

ETA: And of course Stargate: Atlantis is the unification of both these strands of sci-fi: space station + we've been flung to the far side of the [$very large unit of space]. Note, of course, that neither SGA nor VOY could maintain that isolation forever.

Comments

[zeborah]

I've been working my way through all the post-TOS series. (Rewatches for TNG through several seasons of Voyager; watching the last couple of seasons and Enterprise for the first time.) And I'm only a half dozen episodes into Enterprise, but so far I'm enjoying it more than Voyager.

The problem with Voyager from my perspective as viewer was it was all potential and no execution. Both on the macro scale (of the Starfleet vs Maquis conflict) and on the per-episode scale: they'd set up this scenario full of potential for drama, and then they'd reach the climax and... throw handwavium at it and cue credits.

And the ultimate cause of this, as described in an interview with one of the writers, was that no-one on the show cared about it in the slightest. This writer had come from DS9 where people were passionate about it, to a place where he'd say "So in episode 3 you say X but in episode 8 you say Y, what's actually going on?" and he'd be told "Who cares, just make something up." I don't think the era it was told in makes much difference - but if it had been written/acted by people who cared it could have been awesome.

[starlady]

I couldn't get past the first episode of ENT, tbh, or whichever one it was where they had to smear goo on each other naked. And from what I've read, the writers' room there had the opposite problem: no one there gave a shit about Star Trek as a thing, and the actors and other people who did care couldn't really do much about it.

I think the Voyager cast cared, or at least most of them. They are a pretty good group, and I do think the writing improved somewhat in the later seasons when they started doing the long Borg arc and imposed more continuity. But the sexism of the writers' room never really went away; viz the "false rape accusations are bad" episode and the endless use of "penetrate" as a verb in every possible context. And that problem got even worse in ENT.

[sovay]

I couldn't get past the first episode of ENT, tbh, or whichever one it was where they had to smear goo on each other naked.

This was my experience of Star Trek: Enterprise and I still regret nothing.